Focus on form

General discussion about learning languages
Daniel N.
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Daniel N. » Wed Jun 20, 2018 10:03 am

There's another thing I have to address. Imagine you want to learn a language which is actually (as all languages really are) just a collection of related dialects.

Which dialect should you learn? Should you learn the most common dialect? The standard one, as used on TV (which could be different from the most common one)? The one with most resources (i.e. movies, songs)? The one you're personally connected to (your family comes from an area, or you intend to move to a specific region)?

In some languages, this is not a real issue. In some languages, it is a major issue. For example, some 'dialects of Croatian' -- this includes the standard one -- have rising and falling tones. In fact, they are famous for it, and there are extremely complex rules how they behave (e.g. they shift or change tone according to case in some nouns, but not in others etc etc).

Now the important point: tones are normally NOT taught to foreigners. Croaticum, a Croatian language school organized by Zagreb University, doesn't teach tones. Only the place of stress. Teach Yourself series doesn't. And so on. Tones are simply too complex, and most people in Zagreb (the capital) -- and some other cities -- don't have tones in their speech at all (myself included). Only the textbooks by Ronelle Alexander and FSI teach tones. So, you will not learn tones, but you will likely use the standard vocabulary and place of stress (these things vary a lot in Croatia, but normally only standard ones are taught).

You will never sound like ANY native with this approach. Never ever. Unless you really stick to one particular dialect and immerse in it, listen to it all the time or move to that area.

But is it really important? It's not. You will -- eventually, after 3-5 years of intensive study -- be able to communicate, read and write. And that's important. It's simply not important to pay attention to all small details in such a 'language'. You pronounced one word like someone from Zagreb, and another like someone from Split, and the third one like nobody from Croatia. So what? You were understood.
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kulaputra
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Re: Focus on form

Postby kulaputra » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:44 pm

Daniel N. wrote:I was also skeptical, because I have believed all people have the same 'competence' since I started getting interested in linguistics, some 20 years ago. However, some researchers have shown it's not so:

The grammatical structure here is moderately complicated, but any generative grammarian would unquestionably agree that it is a well-formed example of English. Indeed, the grammar is less tangled than plenty of prose which is in everyday use in written English. But Dąbrowska found that native speakers’ ability to understand examples like this varied fairly dramatically.

When she asked participants in her experiment to answer simple comprehension questions … she found that university lecturers performed better than undergraduates, who, in turn, performed better than cleaners and porters, most of whom completely failed to answer the questions correctly. (Chipere 2003: 2)


I sincerely doubt any of the utterances used in the study were common or natural utterances. Formal writing is full of sentences which simply don't constitute natural language and would never be uttered in normal speech. The single example he gives:

The doctor knows that the fact that taking care of himself is necessary surprises Tom.


Sorry but no one speaks like that.

Daniel N. wrote:source: https://www.grsampson.net/ALac.html


I was very perplexed by parts of this article (though I agree with other parts). For example, they reference Latin's relatively free word order as somehow being indicative of extra complexity. The first error they commit here is using poetry as an example. But never mind that the Romans didn't speak as they wrote poetry; the even bigger issue is that what seems complex to them (relatively free word order) doesn't strike me as strange at all, since I speak a highly agglutinative language with at least as many cases as Latin (I think more, but I'm not certain). Nothing about that strikes me as strange in the slightest.

The article then goes on to cite Sapir, but Sapir's ideas have been almost entirely discredited except in some very minor variations. Why does the author do this? Either they are ignorant of any research done in the last 5 decades on this topic or they are being deliberately dishonest.

The author gets very defensive about the way his book was received but instead of offering concrete evidence he impugnes and maligns suspected motives of his critics. That is, he attributes to his critics various political motives rather than actually addressing their arguments This is a deeply fallacious line of reasoning that amounts to little more then an ad hominem.

In any case: most of this essay has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. It is a comparison of complexity between languages, not at all a study of whether native speakers could ever be incompetent at their own language.

Daniel N. wrote:In retrospective, dictionaries, even dictionaries that claim to be dictionaries of my native language contain many words I don't use and many I don't even know the meaning of. Granted, they are mostly dictionaries of the standard language really, but my dialect uses standard language terms in most fields away from the everyday life; e.g. we don't have our words for 'democracy' or 'archeology', but have for 'tomato'. I simply don't know many words a doctor or mechanic will use in their specialized areas. A dancer, athlete or singer really doesn't need to know terms used in neurosurgery, it's better to use the brain for other tasks.

I mean, even when I occasionally read -- or my wife -- some technical manuals, specialized texts, we often struggle to decipher meaning of some long, convoluted sentences which sometimes span whole paragraphs (writing in Croatian in some fields tends to produce very long sentences). I don't doubt someone who reads such texts all the time is much better at parsing them. This is why I always prefer short sentences when writing.


But what does any of this have to do with language competency? You don't know neuroscience terms because you're not a neuroscientist, not because you are incompetent at your language. This has been covered already by others in this thread. If you were a neuroscientist or a physicist or a linguist etc. you would know the specialized vocabulary of each of those fields. That entirely is a reflection of your educational and career decisions, not your linguistic abilities.

Daniel N. wrote:Somehow, if you think of it, not everyone is good at public speech or even telling stories. It takes practice. It seems that some people get more practice at parsing convoluted sentences because of their work.


Neither public speaking nor story telling is language. The former is a fairly modern invention dependent on writing (again, covered earlier). The latter is a specialized (social) skill. Compare Casanova with some shmuck who can't flirt. Is Casanova better at his language because he flirts well? No. Like flirting, story telling is a specific social skill which uses language but isn't itself language.

Daniel N. wrote:edit:

Regarding correctness, one purpose of language is communication. If you tell something that the listener will understand as you intended to, it's OK. So you can code-switch and even invent your own words on the fly (like when we convert English technical terms to Croatian by adding suffixes when there's no Croatian word for the term, or we simply cannot recall a suitable word) since you know the other side knows what they mean. Prescriptivists will cringe, but ordinary people want to speak to work and have fun.

But of course, not all people speak the same. I can barely understand people who live 50 km from me, but they can switch to something they know I will understand, which is again not standard. They also likely know some English and German. But they are maybe not very good at parsing complex sentences found in technical works. If anything, their overall communication abilities are better than mine (my German is extremely poor, and I barely understand their dialect).


Which highlights an important point: every group of people on the planet have developed exactly the language they need. People living in the 1700s didn't have words for astrophysics not because they sucked at language but because they didn't have astrophysics. Likewise, your specific lack of technical vocabulary only shows that you don't need that technical vocabulary in your day to day life.
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Cainntear
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Re: Focus on form

Postby Cainntear » Wed Jun 20, 2018 7:34 pm

Daniel N. wrote:
kulaputra wrote:"All native language speakers, barring certain pathologies, are equally competent in their native language" is in fact an analytic claim, the claim that I originally made.

This was shown to be false, and actually depending on education and even social status. More educated speakers are better at parsing complex constructions, maybe because they read more and such constructions are more common in writing.

No.

There is an unresolved dispute over what constitutes language skill, and what skills are external or additional to language.

If you disagree with the idea that speech-making, textbook writing etc are part of language (as I do), then no such thing has been shown.

Besides, even if you agree with it, there's still a lot of other variables that haven't been accounted for. What is a "good" feature? Efficiency of communication? Speed of processing? Syntactic complexity? Managing long-range dependencies? Precision? Resolving ambiguity?

We still don't have a "better".
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