Babel
The last few weeks I've been trying to learn Spanish.
I downloaded Duolingo on my phone and have been pretty consistent about building a habit of practicing a few minutes every day. The app itself is well done - a nice mix of pure memorization, verbal recitation and deciphering context clues, all built on a cutesy gamified interface.
The pace of learning has been decent. I even impress myself sometimes with the complexity of the sentences I can read (I want two beers to drink with Jose!), but speaking off the cuff or following all the rules of grammar are sorely lacking.
More interesting has been thinking about language learning from a meta level. What tools and techniques are effective? What are the different strategies? How does mine own journey of learning Spanish in a few minutes here and there compare to my kids, who are learning English as their primary language?
Noam Chomsky has the theory that all people are hardcoded with a blueprint for language in our biology - we just fill it with a specific syntax when we learn our first language. It's a theory with merits, and it feels mostly correct from my vantage, even if it isn't really provable.
Communicating with my youngest son (who is 18 months and only speaks a few words) mimics a lot of the techniques from Duolingo. Picking up a ball, I'll show it to him and say ball, hoping he'll mimic me. Then we toss it around, building into more complex sentences. "Toss me the ball." "Let’s roll it." "What color is the ball? It's a blue ball. Can you throw it?"
There's pure vocabulary, then utilizing the word in various contexts and tenses. Questions and answers. Decorating it with adjectives. Making it the subject and the object.
Of course, teaching my son, I'm not mapping out all the parts of speech and conjugating tenses. Language isn't learned that way, and it always struck me as wrong the amount of time that was spent doing that kind of thing in early language classes (I took German). Even in English, the rules of grammar are learned intuitively, naturally (through reading and hearing what "feels" right), before the rules are laid out in lawyerly syntax. Duolingo does a pretty good job of matching this approach.
Another fascinating linguistic theory is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, where the unique structure of language actually influences the pattern of thought. I can already see this happening with various construct Espanol, like the word Vamonos! It's a single word that has a subject, verb and tense meaning “We go!”. The ordering of words in common phrases also changes the thought process of parsing a sentence: "fin de semana" is "weekend", literally "end of the week".
The best part of learning a new language is the continual feeling of improvement, even with baby steps. Hopefully once I get through the basic Duolingo lessons I'll be ready to graduate to Children's Book Espanol.
El Gato Ensombrerado, here I come!