How do we recognize faces?
Not by analyzing them, certainly not. We don't make an Excel file of proportions, coloring, distances that we ponder over in our free time, trying to memorize the data.
Instead, we form a gestalt of the overall pattern without being conscious of how we do that.
Humans learn complex things-- faces, chess, dance, sports and so forth--using pattern recognition.
And language falls into this camp too.
When you break a language up into its basics to study them one by one, you destroy any relationship between its elements. You destroy the pattern.
So acquire language in large lumps.
In a book I'm reading, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (a novel about Dracula, loaned to me by Mario):
Until then my forays into written French had been purely utilitarian, the completion of almost mathematical exercises. When I comprehended a new phrase it was merely a bridge to the next exercise.
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.
And from the same book further on . . .
He pointed to a page of beautiful Arabic, and I thought for the hundredth time how terrible it was that human languages and even alphabets were separated from one another by this frustrating Babel of differences, so that when I glanced at a page of Ottoman printing, my comprehension was immediately caught in a bramble of symbols as impenetrable to me as a hedge of magic briars.
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