Let's say that you are the grandson of Pele, the famous football player, and that you wish to follow in his footsteps and become a professional player. In fact, you feel some pressure on you to succeed.
And so you enroll at the best football school in town, even though it's on the other side of town. And you make sure never to piss a day. Everyday you walk there, or even run so as to get there on time, whatever the weather.
You work your butt off at that school. You study the theory, you do the drills, you complete your homework, and you ace all of your exams.
But all that book study doesn't help you to become a champion. You become a pretty good club player, but that is all. Did you just not have the talent? Couldn't you have tried just a little harder?
Sadly, the fault is not yours. The fault is in the schooling system. You see, you weren't studying football there. You were learning about football, and that's not the same thing as learning football itself.
In fact, the only reason you became a reasonably competent player was that you'd kick a stone along as you hurried to reach school before the bell.
You want another language. Okay. But then immediately you think to yourself, "In that case, what do I need to do?"
Right away, you are heading off-track.
Obviously you need to do something. I don't deny that. But it's more along the lines of allowing something to be done to you. It's arranging the condition and setting up systems and habits, after which you allow the process to happen to you.
You're not to put words into your head. You are not the one who must learn rules and apply them. You are not the one who must push through the nervousness barrier and force yourself to speak.
No, no no . . . None of that!
You're not the doer, you're the do-ee.
You're not responsible for the results, either. And that's good to realize, because this removes any pressure of possible failure.
You're not to measure your achievements either. You aren't achieving in the sense that you've been trained to expect. It won't go neatly and tidily.
You'll get better imperfectly, messily, sloppily, randomly, magically, and unfathomably. You'll learn the language without knowing how you did it!
Don't put pressure on yourself to remember vocabulary, to spell correctly, to pronounce correctly, to understand the rule, to comprehend, to treat language learning as a serious business, or to study in any way.
Put yourself in the right environment, and get your brain into the right state. That's all that's required of you. The rest will happen automatically.
Don't consciously try to learn a language. You can't. No one can. The most that you'll achieve is to learn a few things about it.
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.
Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that the way to learn another language is to study its grammar, and then to practice applying those rules, translating from one language into the other. That's the 'Grammar Translation Method'.
It is derived from the 'traditional' or 'classical' way of teaching Greek and Latin. Well, you know how useful that was for your schoolboy Latin!
Intuitively, grammar translation seems to be the way you'd go about learning another language. Trouble is, it doesn't work. Or rather, it does work (because every method will eventually get you there) but slowly, painfully, boringly, and tediously.
The Grammar Translation Method has been deemed ineffective by the authorities themselves.
We don't even get taught the grammar of our own language at school anymore for that very reason.
How can I get across that point most succinctly and forcefully?
How about this: no one out of all the billions of people in the world ever ,earned their own language through studying its grammar. Not one. And yet 99% of people could use their mother tongue within a year or two of birth!
The grammar of a language is NOT the language itself. They are two totally different subjects. No one confuses Physics with Physical Education.
I've nothing against school.
I've even worked in them.
Nevertheless, I've come to the conclusion that languages don't belong at school. The teachers may be OK, and even inspirational, but the methods suck.
Also, no one can teach you a language, so the whole rationale for language learning is up the creek.
I used to say that only you can teach yourself another language, but now I disbelieve even that. But at least you need to take charge.
You don't learn a language at school. You learn it in your head--or, more precisely, you get used to it in your head.
You don't learn a language; you acquire it.
