The chunking express: another approach to foreign-language learning | Hacker News Reader

The chunking express: another approach to foreign-language learning

economist.com

40 pointsnopinsight7 comments

This is a great approach -- don't just learn words (and string them together in sequences taken from your native language... not likely to be right!); learn common chunks that you can re-use everywhere.

There are still verb tenses that I haven't properly learned in French, but I use them because I learned some chunks that use them. I'm not at ease with using the tenses involved in "I should have ___ but I ___" -- but I know the chunks for that particular phrase without thinking about it (e.g., J'aurais dû lui dire mais j'avais complètement oublié) -- that's technically conditional past then pluperfect.. which I had to look up just now; I don't really know them! There are oddities with imperative form that I only really know through chunks -- but "don't be afraid" (n'aies pas peur) is easy even though it's irregular, just because I know that one.

And now they're less alien-feeling, so -- being comfortable with the chunked versions -- I now have mental hooks that let me recognize similar conjugations used on other verbs when I run into them.

Idiomatic expressions (like "come in handy") have to be learned as complete pieces, because they're, well, idiomatic -- they can't be predicted from simple rules. I remember studying Spanish idiomatic expressions in Spanish classes I took years ago. Chunks, as described in this article, seem to be perhaps somehow more general than idioms; evidently, chunks seem to span across different languages and capture a broader range of constructs. However, most of the examples given could be considered examples of idioms. Thus it's not clear to me exactly how the two concepts differ in practice.

The article says McWhorter keeps a list of essential chunks. I did a Google search but came up empty handed.

Anyone know where it is?

It's actually not necessary to have such a list. Just buy a book with the kind of language that you want to use (comic book are great because they are full of dialog, but you could easily pick up a script for a play, for instance). It will contain the essential chunks. How do I know? Because they are essential ;-)

I used to worry about "getting the basics", but there is a hypothesis called the "natural order hypothesis" which states that you will naturally acquire grammar in a specific order, no matter how it is presented: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/natural-order

Lists are OK, but in order to create fluency you need to acquire the ability to produce the idiomatically correct chunks without undue thinking. This requires you to be exposed to the opportunities to use the language.

For example, you can easily just harvest example sentences from grammar text books (and if you need to pass tests, this is the technique I would suggest), but while you will be able to produce and understand that grammar, you will still need to be exposed to a large volume of realistic usage of that language to be able to select the idiomatically correct grammar in various situations.

The following has worked incredibly well for me (and for the students I was teaching English to):

- Buy a book you are interested in reading.

- Work out the meaning of any sentence you can't understand (with a grammar dictionary, or some people simply buy the book translated into their native language).

- Memorise the sentence meanings using flashcards (or better: spaced repetition software -- anki is good, but for some reason they have a self signed certificate on their site, which I haven't checked out yet, so I won't link to it). Always drill from your native language to the foreign language. Theory suggests that production is not that important for learning, but it is very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you "know" a grammar point, when you can only recognize it. Production is the test to show that you actually know it.

- If you are a very basic beginner (say less than 2-3000 words of vocabulary), memorize basic vocabulary. After you get 3000 words or so, this becomes less necessary.

- Converse every chance you get. Read with all the free time that you have. Watch TV (with subtitles until you can understand the language) when you are tired of reading. This is essential because memorizing chunks will only leave you with memorized chunks. You need to exercise your ability to comprehend the application of those chunks.

- You will also need to practice the physical skills of speaking. I have found that singing pop songs works very well (I don't know if it would be beneficial for languages with a lot of tones). You can also often find websites with both spoken and written language. You can read along with the speaker to get rhythm and facility with speaking. An audio book will also work well if the language you are learning has audio books (some cultures do not seem to be interested in them).

The main thing is being realistic about the speed that you can acquire language. The average adult who has gone to university has well over 20,000 words of vocabulary (and probably 3,500 grammar points). The average child acquires about 1000 words of vocabulary a year. The average child takes 15-20 years to acquire adult level proficiency (duh ;-) ). You can do it faster, but there seems to be a limit to the speed you can do it. Expect to take at least 10 years for your first foreign language. Memorization and acquisition are different. I seem to be able to memorize 1000 words of vocabulary per month with spaced repetition software without strain. But it takes a considerable amount of time for that vocabulary to settle in my brain. I have found that alternating periods of hard study and fun application (say one month each) is ideal for me. I have not had a chance to test it on other people, so YMMV.

> anki is good, but for some reason they have a self signed certificate on their site, which I haven't checked out yet, so I won't link to it

It's not self signed, it's the wrong domain (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain) HTTPS requests to ankisrs.net get a certificate for *.ankiweb.net, which is the domain the app uses for the sync web service.

That sounds like a very pragmatic approach.

> The main thing is being realistic about the speed that you can acquire language.... Expect to take at least 10 years for your first foreign language.

Nobody ever seems to mention this explicitly about language, nor the fact that you need to apply yourself consistently to the task over that time.

I think that's because it's off-putting to hear you won't achieve high level language for a very long time.

The point is though, you can get yourself to a level of mutual understanding within fairly short time (a few month to a year.) The rest of the time is spent increasing vocabulary, improving grammatical understanding and learning the myriad of unwritten grammatical (and often ungrammatical!) constructs and idiomatic use that people actually use to communicate.

There are some very unfortunate beliefs around language acquisition which torpedoes people's attempts to learn language, I think.

One of the most damaging and prevalent beliefs is that memorizing 2-3000 words of vocabulary will make you "fluent". When I taught English, my co-workers would even tell their students this outright. But 2-3000 words gets you to the level of a 3 year old child. Even 10,000 words will bring you up to the level of a 8-10 year old only. If you further dilute your vocabulary with useless words like "unemployment" and "discrimination" like they often do in schools, you will have the working vocabulary of a 5 year old -- i.e., you can talk at length about Pokemon (as long as you watch it over and over again), but not much else.

"Communication" is such a tenuous concept. You don't need any formal language to communicate in a convenience store, for instance. Hand gestures will do nicely. I had a friend who learned Japanese primarily by chatting up girls at the train station. At first he communicated any way that he could and slowly made progress. He supplemented that by reading science fiction novels in Japanese. It's a crazy way to study, but was very effective (I should mention that his success rate with the girls was absolutely dreadful).

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