Postby Le Baron » Mon Sep 26, 2022 7:21 pm
The great error is in interpreting 'formal study' as being some attempt to just learn dry, isolated 'rules' and then go through some enormous effort to transform these into real-time performance. As though any mention of looking at structure means the promotion of a method whereby you learn something by piling rule on top of rule until you know all the rules and then you do the thing.
There's really nothing worse than evangelism because all criticism and limits seem to go out of the window. I think back to my father talking about how tailoring knowledge was passed on (and indeed how I picked it up from him). It wasn't just that I went and got exposure to how the processes work. I did do that, but it required commentary and demonstration along the way. There were old copies of the Tailor & Cutter periodical and some well-known texts offering 'golden tips'. These things really were golden. The point is that he was 'taught' just as much as he 'learned'. It's a hybrid thing, where you see, then understand...sort of; sometimes get an explanation and understand more, or ask for an explanation and understand it even better. Those explanations are not superfluous, they are like little eureka moments as look again and understand more.
I can't speak for everyone here, but I think that almost everyone agrees that the greatest amount of learning will be large-scale input of listening and reading in order to be exposed to examples and become accustomed to shapes and patterns and sounds. Yet this is not foolproof and neither is it equal to how you learned your native language. You're an adult learner, there is massive interference.
8 x
Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
- Jonathan Swift