Four language concepts to accept
Make your language learning journey easier by making these rules second nature
One of my pet peeves is when somebody tells me that I am just “naturally good at languages”. For anyone that has learnt a craft, this is an annoying statement because talent is only a small percentage of the whole picture. The truth is, like any skill, once you’ve mastered the basics of one, you can transfer that knowledge to others. For example, if someone excels at playing the piano, they are probably going to take to playing the guitar easily compared to somebody starting a musical instrument completely from scratch.
With language learning, it is the same. The first foreign language that I mastered was Spanish and there were so many new concepts that I had to learn. Since learning Spanish, it has made learning other languages more manageable because I have already overcome the hurdles of understanding those concepts which I have broken down into four. There are many more but starting with small bites is always the best way to begin.
Yes, the washing machine has a gender
From a linguistic point of view, gender simply means “genre” or category. It’s hard for a native English speaker to fully comprehend this in the beginning because we are so focused on “how can the washing machine be feminine?”, but it is astonishing how many languages catagorise their words and not always into two. In German, for example, there is masculine, feminine, and neuter. Accepting the concept that a word belongs to a category is fundamental to progressing in that language because of much of it is dictated by its gender; the article (the/a) used, the adjective, even the verb. If you’re still stuck at the “how can a book be masculine when it’s an inanimate object?” hurdle and refuse to accept it, you’ll stay at that first hurdle.
Because <language>
Every language has exceptions to their own rules. English is riddled with exceptions. Very often when I was teaching Spanish, my students would ask me “why does this happen?” and if the answer was an exception, my answer would often be “because Spanish”. This is an important concept to master because very often in language learning, there are things that don’t make sense to our minds and we have to just accept them as they are. To the more scientifically minded, this is not the easiest answer to accept because everything has to have an answer but sometimes the answer is, well, it just is.
Word for word
This isn’t about “untranslatable” words, this is about translating word for word. Simply put, you cannot rely on it. There is so much to consider when translating such as word order, gender, context. This isn’t to overwhelm you but instead to guide you in translation that it is about the entire sentence and the concept that it’s trying to say rather than what each word means. Translation is a careful balance of the two. When I was at school, we were taught that in French “je m’appelle” means “my name is”, but the actual French translation of that should be “mon nom est”. So why do they teach us that? They both convey the same message but “je m’appelle” is far more common than “mon nom est”, and “my name is” is far more common than “I call myself”. Yes, knowing every individual word is excellent for learning vocabulary, but using that vocabulary means straying from those individual meanings.
On a quick side note, I did teach at a school where we did word for word translation and although it brought up many questions, it did work in helping to memorise concepts. They would read a story with the Spanish on one side and the English on the other with the English as a direct translation - “I have eleven years”/”my dad drives a car red”/”you me it gave”. This is an excellent tool for getting used to the language but as your level gets higher and the grammar becomes more complex, this method is not as easy to do.
Your language has limits
Your native language will always be your point of reference until suddenly, you come across a grammar rule or a word that doesn’t exist. This is where having an open mind is absolutely crucial. Once upon a time, I was learning Finnish - my first non-Indo-European language! This is interesting because it is not linguistically related to most languages, it has its own language tree. The point with this is that there are no articles in Finnish and it turns out that this is also the same as Russian. So for a native Finnish speaker, one of the first concepts to accept is having to learn that it is “a chair” or “the chair” and not just simply “chair”. Of course, they can still be understood without this but for accuracy, it is something to learn. On the othe side, the first time that I was introduced to the subjunctive in Spanish, my mind was blown. This is an entirely new tense - or to be more specific mood - to me that it was essential to not only just accept it as “because Spanish” but also to keep an open mind of learning something out of the realm of my comfort zone which was English. At this point, you really have to just trust yourself in your language which is a big leap of faith.
So there you have it. Four concepts in language learning which are crucial to accept to move forward. There are definitely more but so to overwhelm you, let’s leave it there for now.
