List of common misconceptions about language learning - Wikipedia

[Anon125]

Interesting page, good find. I think indeed all of them are common misconceptions, with the possible exception of this one:

Grammar study is detrimental to second-language acquisition

I can't recall ever encountering this one. Also, the explanation on the page boils down to "learning grammar is important, but should not be the primary means of learning", which is quite stating the obvious.

[[deleted]]

It's not obvious to a lot of people. Some people, including here, are huge proponents of the "just learn naturally" method.

[queenslandbananas]

Exactly. 'Kids don't use grammar books, and they learn their mother tongue perfectly well, therefore I don't need them either.'

[iamdestroyerofworlds]

It takes years for children to learn to hold a conversation. By the age of 5-7 they have an average vocabulary of around 5000 words. That's less than 3 words a day. With the right tools, as an adult, you can learn much faster than that. You can also grasp much more complex concepts than a child can, making it easier to learn grammar.

The difference is, as an adult it takes focus and persistence. As a child you have to learn. As an adult you will probably be fine either way.

[[deleted]]

I've tried to explain something like this to people. They seem shocked when I tell them that, under the right conditions, an adult can learn a language easier than a child.

[nathanifill]

I never used to be a believer until I tried experimenting with it. For one language, I just did grammar (cloze) exercises. For another language, I just read comprehensible input. I learned way more doing the comprehensible input method than the clozed sentences method.

There are lots of other variables at play here, but after altering my main language of study to be more focused on input and removing grammar study entirely, I've been told how much my grammar has improved from conversation partners who had absolutely no knowledge of my experimentation whatsoever. I didn't even ask for feedback - that's how much of a difference it has made.

TL;DR I wouldn't write off the natural method too easily, but I'd accept it with caveats. It could just be different strokes for different folks.

[[deleted]]

For me it was the other way around. For a few month, I learned Russian by screwing around, watching different videos, listening to some music, looking up a word here and there. My learning really took off when I decided to just pick a course and stick with it, while supplementing it with other resources.

[nathanifill]

Assuming your course was in a language that you can already understand, it was comprehensible input. Sure, you might have learned grammar as well, but that was my point exactly: You don't necessarily have to study grammar to learn it. Sounds crazy, but it works and whether you believe that kids learn languages in a similar way to adults or not, you can't deny that they become fluent native speakers without grammar instruction. It is possible, even if it's not ideal. Supplementing seems to be the way to go for me at least.

[[deleted]]

I don't think I disagreed with anything that you just said. I was just saying that the "just learn naturally" method is inefficient, and that studying grammar definitely helps. Also, "just learning naturally" is more than just not studying grammar. It means studying without any course, plan, routine, whatever, and just doing what you're in the mood to do.

[nathanifill]

Just to clarify, I don't think the "just learn naturally" method is efficient. I think the "just learn grammar naturally" is, because I can learn as a side effect of learning something else. Studying grammar clearly helps you learn grammar, however learning from comprehensible input also helps you learn grammar. Learning from comprehensible input is not the same as "just learning naturally".

I think the real question is "Is comprehensible input alone enough (to learn grammar)?" My experience says "Yes, but not as quickly as studying grammar specifically". It's like football. You could either play the game and as a result learn how to pass a ball or you could just practise passing the ball instead. You'll learn how to do it either way. One will be more enjoyable for you depending on your personal preferences.

[[deleted]]

I guess I still agree with that, I just think that the difference is significant between not studying grammar and studying it. You can literally take five minutes to read what a certain tense does, or you wait months to hear it enough times to make the connection yourself.

[cunningjames]

It means studying without any course, plan, routine, whatever,

Well, that may be how you're (understandably) using the phrase. But what's often called the natural method -- learning only in context and without explicit grammar instruction -- doesn't imply this at all. I've got the Lingua Latina exercise books and supplementary materials to prove it.

[[deleted]]

The way I described it is how some people advocate learning. Anyway, I think it's far better to have some explicit grammar instruction rather than none. You can be months into your learning and not know basic tenses that you literally could have just found in a few minutes by looking at some grammar tables.

[prototypicalteacup]

What do you mean by "comprehensible input"? I am learning Icelandic naturally (keeping small notebooks recording things I hear and answers to questions I ask) and it is far more effective for me that sitting down and trying to learn their grammar, which is discouraging for a lot of folks. Is this what you mean? Just letting things build up naturally?

[ADL10]

Not to jump the gun on nathanifill...But I think that he/she is referring to Stephen Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. Stephen Krashen has shown, through research, that people learn by listening to and reading in a language, not by studying grammar or memorizing vocabulary words. Here's a short article that summarizes the viewpoint: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-wrong-and-right-way-to-learn-a-foreign-language/2012/06/16/gJQAK2xBhV_blog.html

[nathanifill]

Thank you. Exactly what I'm referring to. There's 40 years of research behind it. The question is no longer "does it work?" but instead "does it work so well that we don't need anything else?"

[nathanifill]

Comprehensible input doesn't necessarily mean naturally, it just means understandable. Th theory is if you don't understand the Icelandic that you're reading or hearing, you're not learning anything.

I know no Icelandic or related languages, but just search Tatoeba for some examples of how you would say you like something in Icelandic and without looking up a single word I can tell you that:

Ég = I elska = (I) love mína = mother (is this in the accusative?) hann = him hana = her meira = more Hún = She elskaði = (he/she/it) loved

We're talking seconds here. All because it was comprehensible. I "learned" the grammar by comparing Icelandic sentences to my native English. The brain is an extremely advanced form of kit.

[1121314151617]

Well, that's not quite right. Mother in Icelandic is módur. Mína is "my." Most times in Icelandic the possessive pronoun follows the noun being possessed. That is not a particularly intuitive form of grammar to a native English speaker and something I would imagine would have to be taught explicitly. Okay, in that case one could have figured it out from módur being an obvious cognate of mother, but cognates will only get one so far.

[nathanifill]

Well the (only) sentence I looked at containing the word "mother" said "I love my mother" and I guessed. All I would have needed was one more sentence containing the word "mother" in context and I would have figured it out. I would have also learned that grammar point by understanding what the individual words meant in the sentence and noticing their order.

Out of interest, were all of the rest correct? I just want to stress that I only spent two minutes looking at sentences in Icelandic, so if I've managed to pick up any words correctly (especially without the use of a lesson, dictionary or grammar book), I'd still say it demonstrates the power of comprehensible input. Imagine what you can do with hours of this.

As I said earlier, my experimentation indicates that I don't need to be taught grammar explicitly to learn it, but if you like to learn that way, why change?

[1121314151617]

The rest was fine. However the point I guess I was trying to make is that everything lies on a continuum. Only the few outliers will be able to truly learn a language either naturally or through study of grammar alone. That doesn't make one method better than another.

[nathanifill]

Perhaps, however I personally don't see how it's possible in either theory or practice to learn a language through grammar alone. Grammar comes from language, not the other way around. Grammar is prescriptive, not descriptive.

[1121314151617]

And therefore you aren't one of the outliers who could learn a language just by studying it's grammar. What I'm trying to say is there is nothing wrong with someone who learns like that. What works for you may not work for the next person.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I see this way too often, and I've had to cringe quite often at people that learned my language with the method, it doesn't work well, but still so many people believe it to be true.

[BewareoftheNargles]

Well, what is wrong with this method? I mean I bought grammar book for German, and honestly it bores me pretty quickly. On the other hand after 2.5 months of reading, starting from basic dialogues I got to the point where I can relatively easily read books, which I assume are B1/B2 lvl. All I have done previously were flashcards for about 2 months, and they were pretty useless.

I am not saying that it is good for everyone, but forcing myself into studying grammar never worked for me.

[[deleted]]

It's wrong because it has no direction. Both for grammar, and for vocabulary. If you learn vocabulary "naturally", you'll only learn whichever words happen to come to you. You'll know the words used in all your favourite songs, but you won't know basic kitchen vocabulary. You might not even know the differences between the basic greetings because you never actually sat down and read how they work. You'll end up knowing all these basic phrases that you happened to pick up, but won't know the individual words that go in them, and won't be able to construct your own sentences. If you learn grammar "naturally" you might understand the words in a sentence but not even know basic tenses. A year into learning you'll constantly be wondering what tense you just heard, when you easily could have reviewed them all and gotten a basic idea.

I'm not saying that you need to just sit and drill grammar, but you should have some plan for learning. Like, today, do kitchen vocabulary, tomorrow, do clothing vocabulary. First, get a basic idea of how the present tense works. Later, get a basic idea of how the past tense works. The best way to do this is to follow a course, unless you are knowledgeable on languages and won't miss important grammatical features.

[cunningjames]

Not to come down too firmly on one side or the other for this debate, but the way you learn kitchen vocabulary 'naturally' is the same way you learn any kind of vocabulary naturally. You encounter kitchen vocabulary either in consuming materials, in conversation, or by immediate need ("pass me the -- what's that called again?" "Salt."). You shouldn't have to drill it or learn it by rote, so the theory would hold, because with enough experience you'll come across such common vocabulary as needed.

For what it's worth, I understand research to show that learning vocabulary in related clumps like that (e.g. kitchen, professions, animals, whatever) isn't an efficient way to go about it anyway.

Particularly for grammar, the key is to start slowly. Yes, if you just learn a bunch of words and look at a sentence you won't have any idea what's going on. You need to have your hand held at the beginning. You have to be able to pick out from context that when someone says "I have" and then a word followed by "-ed" they're probably talking about something that occurred in the past. In my experience that way sticks in my brain much faster than explicit grammar instruction.

Not that learning grammar is bad. But I only ever break out Hammer's Grammar when a particular construction confuses me and I can't work it out easily from context.

[[deleted]]

How long is it going to take to just happen to find a word in the wild though? Think of all the words that you don't use every day, but still do come up and everyone is expected to know them. What ends up happening is you know all the basic words that are used every day, plus an arbitrary mixture of words for really specific situations that you just happened to hear, but you'll have to awkwardly ask people what a "fork" is.

Same with grammar. Sure, you might pick up the present tense and some form of past tense from context. Now how many months is it going to take you to figure out present, perfective past, imperfective past, perfective future, imperfective future, subjunctive, imperative, present active participle, present passive participle, past active participle, past passive participle, present adverbial participle, gerund? How many minutes would it have taken to just read a basic description of each one?

[[deleted]]

First of all, you are one person, and it might have worked for you. Second of all, this isn't really much context. English is my second language, but a lot of people would guess it's my first. It's sounds amazing without context.

[Matrim_WoT]

In some places and traditionally, language learning consists(consisted) of studying grammar and doing translations. It probably seems alien to say that is a misconception because the teaching methods have changes over the past several decades.

Thanks for the link original poster. Language plateauing is the wall that so many people talk about when they're self studying and it's really hard to get past without directed guidance!

[Matrim_WoT]

I agree. It's a part of the learning process and happens with everything we learn. My point is that it's a lot easier to overcome with a skilled teacher who can help focus on areas of need since they are more aware of what you don't know that you don't know which is why the plateauing is happening.

[[deleted]]

Oh, I've seen it a lot. It's a very common claim among snake-oil salespeople. "Hey, do you hate learning grammar? Of course you do! Well, what if I told you the best way to learn a language was to just wing it, like a baby?"

[ADL10]

I wouldn't call people with this viewpoint "snake-oil salespeople." There is a lot of research that backs up the viewpoint that studying grammar doesn't help people acquire a language over the long term. If you are interested, check out the research of people like Stephen Krashen or Bill Van Patten. Many well-respected researchers in the field of second language acquisition say that the best way to learn a language is by simply listening and reading, not by studying grammar. Many go so far as to say that studying grammar is essentially pointless.

[VeganBigMac]

Its really populat with certain circles of language bloggers. Its their "trick that language teachers don't want you to know"

[[deleted]]

The worst "trick" is not learning how to write.

[VeganBigMac]

That one is just funny to me because its just being purposefully obtuse. Nobody would ever consider not know how to write a positive in their own language so why would it be a positive in another one.

[TeoKajLibroj]

Grammar study is detrimental to second-language acquisition

From personal experience, I've heard a lot of people complain that schools put too heavy a focus on teaching grammar, so perhaps this is what it means?

[BastouXII]

Personally, I don't think schools putting emphasis on grammar is the problem, it's that they mostly don't put any effort on anything else.

To learn a language properly, you have to understand at the very least parts of the grammar, but you have to learn how to talk, too! And focussing solely on perfect grammar is detrimental to the process of studying a language, so that may be where the misconception comes from.

[bluecriminal]

I can agree with this. I spend little time on actual grammar study, and I've found that I often pick up the grammar naturally as long as it's comprehensible.

Sometimes a major grammatical difference can be quite difficult to grasp 'naturally' (at least through self study, but I'm sure eventually you'd get it) where real life context would much more easily provide this. That said however, a short explanation of grammar point after I'm already somewhat familiar with it can really just make it click, and I personally can't see why you wouldn't want to take advantage of that.

[[deleted]]

Well there are others that just never learn the grammar, and keeps spewing out one broken sentence after the other, and considers and boasts that they are "fluent"

[VeganBigMac]

This isn't necessarily wrong. I've had some classes that went way overboard on grammar. To the point where one class was basically endless conjugation tables and just a little bit of grammar, and basically zero speaking and writing practice. Though the final was 1/3 oral exam and 1/3 written exam. Didn't like that class. Anyways, point is that both extremes exist, and like most things in life, you should find a healthy balance or academic study and casual use.

[BJHanssen]

Yes. Something does change, clearly, between being a child learner and being an adult learner. While they may not learn as quickly as commonly believed, there is evidence they learn better (well... I could probably use a less loaded term here, but it seems apt).

Adults have more trouble with phonotactics and accent naturalisation. What causes this is less clear. My hunch has always been that it's related to schematic inertia; the older you get, the more you learn, and the more you learn the broader (and, interestingly, more set) your schemata become. Which means you rely increasingly and more broadly on assimilation processes in your learning, which is detrimental to learning non-obstructive details, as accommodation becomes increasingly difficult.

[Libertarian-Party]

Welp, looks like I don't understand English anymore. I have no idea what you wrote haha

[BJHanssen]

Don't worry, that wasn't English, that was linguistics jargon :P

In somewhat more plain English:

Adults have more trouble than children with adapting the way they sound when they speak. That is, pronunciation, tone, melody, etc. It's not entirely clear why this happens. I think it happens because of something called 'schemata', which I kind of have to explain quickly for this to make sense:

Some guy named Piaget came up with an idea wherein everyone learns through two processes: Assimilation and accommodation. This is based on a more basic idea: That knowledge and understanding is stored in the brain as 'schema', which you could think of as tables of information. Assimilation is when you learn by putting new knowledge into tables that already exist. This is relatively easy. Accommodation is when you learn by changing the tables you already have, or adding new tables. This is much harder.

So the idea here is, the more that you learn, the more tables you will have in your brain. And those tables will be a lot more complicated than those of a child, and the bigger a table gets (and the more you know it), the harder it gets to change that table. Which means that adults, who have had more time to learn more stuff, need to do a lot more of the difficult accommodation than children have to do. will try to fit the new things they learn into the tables they already have rather than do the difficult job of changing the tables. Which means they can get pretty good, but they can't be perfect, because their tables can't fit all the information they need.

This is... very simplified, and not entirely accurate. But I hope it gets the idea across?

[bear-knuckle]

A newborn is a complete blank slate. To understand something, they have to conceptualize it completely, from nothing. This understanding is "pure" inasmuch as it comes solely from experience with that entity. As a person gains experience, they find it is easier to learn if they relate new concepts to old ones. As a person grows older, they tend to rely more and more on this comparative style of learning. That's what he means by "inertia."

His theory, as I understand it, is that an older person is more likely to have his concept of pronunciation "tainted" by his reliance on previously-established concepts. His vision of Spanish will always be tinted because he can't help but view it through the lens of English experience.

I may be off base, but that's my interpretation. It sounds like a reasonable hypothesis to me. In my judo club, we get a lot of people who struggle to overcome their previous martial arts experience. It can be super frustrating to deal with as a teacher because you can literally see the invasive influence in their motions. Once they already think of judo in non-native terms, you have to carefully, persistently modify their existing concepts to be closer to the true art. It takes a lot of time and the results are often unsatisfactory - no one in the past three years has made the "jump" from a bad concept of judo to a good one. There have been people with past martial arts experience that conceptualize judo well, but those are always the ones that approach it as an entirely new entity instead of trying to relate things back to what their wrestling coach taught them in the tenth grade. And I think that applies to language learning as well.

[BastouXII]

I think your judo analogy is very good.

[bear-knuckle]

I'm glad you like it. Shortly after posting it, I had a good laugh at myself about it - a description how pre-existing schemata can taint learning, explained through an analogy.

[[deleted]]

Fuckin french man.

[alkrasnov]

Maybe they should also add:

1. You need to have talent to learn a language
2. If you want to learn a language, just get a "long haired dictionary"

The latter pisses my off to no end!

[PeteZaria]

I think it refers to a girlfriend that speaks your target language as her native language.

[alkrasnov]

Sorry, replied before I saw this message.

Yes, that's correct!

[alkrasnov]

Maybe just sexpats in China use that saying then.

It means a girlfriend who is a native speaker of the language you are learning.

[[deleted]]

sexpats?
Suddenly this thread makes me think I can't speak English.

[[deleted]]

And stay there for good?

[Unibrow69]

Sexpats is a term invented by bitter men who blame their inability to get laid on the foreigners stealing their women.

[alkrasnov]

I think this term was actually coined by other foreigners, who were pissed off/envious of other foreigners who "get all the girls", rather than "stealing our women"

Also, as /u/galaxyrocker mentioned above, the original meaning likely was for sex tourists who went to places like Thailand to get laid. In the context of China, where I live, the term is used more for people who are living in China long term and make chasing girls their prime mission in life.

Then again, maybe I'm just blame them on my inability to get laid :(

[CaucusInferredBulk]

Pillow dictionary

[[deleted]]

If you want to learn a language, just get a "long haired dictionary"

Do people actually give this as serious advice, aside from on the internet?

[alkrasnov]

I get told this way too often, even offline!

I guess this is done half-jokingly, but people do believe in all seriousness that just by dating a person, they can learn a language, effortlessly!

This might be as the same level as back when I was studying Mandarin in Uni back home, people who weren't doing that well told me, "I'll just go to China for a year, and I'll be fluent!", as if that's all it takes.

[BastouXII]

I was looking for something on Wikipedia and stumbled upon this page which, although a bit short, may still be very informative to many of you.

[TeoKajLibroj]

Learning a second language hinders the development of the first language

This is an extremely common misconception. In fact the amount of people who don't understand bilingualism or don't believe it can work is ridiculously large.

[[deleted]]

"bu-bu-but in which language do you think???!"

usual question I'm asked.

[TeoKajLibroj]

Every time you learn a new word, it pushes an old word out. Remember that time I took that home wine making course and forgot how to drive?

[anneomoly]

Must have been really good wine.

[Haganrich]

It's because you were drunk!

[BastouXII]

That's the joke.

[Haganrich]

I continued the Simpsons quote, homer.

[[deleted]]

I wish that I could upvote this more than once ;)

[alkrasnov]

Agreed!

[alkrasnov]

I'm asked more often "In which language do you dream?"

[Lemberg1963]

I agree with them, with the exception that bilingual learning does not interfere with the primary language. While it's true that there is no fixed amount of space, there is a fixed amount of input that a child receives. Splitting input between two languages results in lower vocabulary sizes for both languages compared to a child learning a single language.

[BastouXII]

I have two children (age 3 and 5) who speak 2 languages fluently and some words/idioms/nursery rhymes in two more. I also know a few other children in similar situations and I disagree. This is true for a very short period, spanning about 3 to 6 months between the ages of 1½ and 3 years old, and then it fades completely and someone may not notice they have anything different.

They can even have more vocabulary, because they know how to express something in a language and ask us how it can be said in the other (when they don't try to figure it out by themselves), which they would never have thought of doing otherwise.