Intact language if you please

There's this obsession to break knowledge into facts and rules. We're fascinated with getting down to its building blocks.

That has its place, I'll admit.

But to learn a language, certainly if you want to use it, deal with intact text.

Songs. Poems. Stories. Articles. Books. Movies. Comics.

And so a word is better than a bunch of letters. Words in groups as phrases or sentences include a sense of how they are put together. Paragraphs develop a sentence. And an entire chapter, story or book enable you to get into the language in the realest sense of all.

Connect words, connect the dots . . .

Words are not enough. Just knowing the words won’t make you able to use another language. And besides, going about the business of learning a language one word at a time is almost completely useless.

Witness Japanese where I know hundreds of words but cannot connect the dots. I may every separate part of a sentence but have no idea what the whole is about.

You see, there is a hell of a lot that you need to know about words in order to fit them together. And a single dictionary meaning doesn’t give you that. Therefore, from the word go, work with more than one word at a time.

Go for pairs of words, phrases, whole sentences at a gulp. Don’t always, or even usually, break them down into their components. That way you get a lot of extra associated input: grammar patterns, word co-locations, concordance, general usage etc.

Sit sentences from two languages side by side. Do it the way that Heinrich Schliemann did.

 

Collect 'Chunks'

What is a chunk?

It's a chunk of language. That is, it's a group of words that is in itself useful to use in real life. 

You learn it as a block of text. It cannot easily be broken down, and so it shouldn't be.

A chunk is a a collocation of words. It may be an idiom, a formulaic expression, an archaic form that remains in current use, an idiom, a saying or even a phrasal verb.

In short, chunks are canned language. Prefabricated elements.

They are fun to use. They make you look like an expert.

If you come across them on the road - kill them!

If you come across them in a book - scribble them down in the margin.

(See also i+1 sentences.)