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Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language

Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language acquisition that Chomsky made: it's the notion that the mechanism for language acquisition is the same in children as it is in adults. What's weird about this is that I have always been under the impression that Chomsky's opinion was that language acquisition was not a lock step uncovering of universal grammar, but that universal grammar was simply the best way to represent language. Indeed, the work that has been done showing that Krashen's natural order hypothesis is correct (that people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented) give some credence to that notion. It doesn't necessarily follow that the brain actually holds a representation of universal grammar. I came away from this article being confused as to whether I need to re-read Chomsky's work, or whether the author needs to do so.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
4ad 10y ago
> people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented I didn't know about this. It sure makes sense. Do you know of any institute, course, or individual that makes use of this fact in order to optimize for learning a new language? I need to learn German, and let's just say that I find the traditional learning methods almost impossible. And I have been living in a German-speaking country for over 5 years now.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  How much time every day do you spend on learning German?
  - 4ad 10y ago
    Like read books or have someone tutor me? Right now I spend zero time doing this. I just gave up. I tried but nothing stuck, and it was so difficult for me on an intellectual level that quite literally after one hour of study I was so mentally worn out that I could not do my job. I had to sleep through the rest of the day and I literally felt like I was going crazy. I don't get it, I can learn (and remember) a new programming language and have some practical level of competency in hours (even with Haskell, actually, Haskell was one of the easier languages), but with real languages I am totally inapt. In school I studied 8 years of French, two or three classes per week, and it was a real course, nothing leisurely, lots of homework. But I can't speak a single word of French. Believe me, I worked really hard those 8 years just to get a passing grade, and if I weren't exceptional at Physics (won 1st prize at the National Physics Olympiad, and many other national contests), I'm pretty sure my teacher would have failed me. I spoke my first word while being 3 months old, and at 6 months I was using coherent sentences and engaging in conversation with people. I guess I used up all my language acquisition skills in that stage of development. What is going on?
    - panglott 10y ago
      Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying—these are methods that adults can use to make use of the metalinguistic knowledge acquired from their native language. There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Language-ebook/dp/B014S61O7E/ https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Lan... People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so. How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.
      - 4ad 10y ago
        > Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying [...] People acquire languages, they don't study them. I know. Absolutely agree. > There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). Thanks, I will check it out. > Is your main problem comprehension or production? I think my main problem is production. > If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. You might be right, I know a lot of words. When it comes to cooking stuff, sometimes I know words my german-speaking friends don't know (I like to cook and buy lots of less-than-usual ingredients). But I can't create meaningful sentences.
      - 10y ago
andreasvc 10y ago
The article does end with three references to books.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

4ad 10y ago

> people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented I didn't know about this. It sure makes sense. Do you know of any institute, course, or individual that makes use of this fact in order to optimize for learning a new language? I need to learn German, and let's just say that I find the traditional learning methods almost impossible. And I have been living in a German-speaking country for over 5 years now.

ktRolster 10y ago
How much time every day do you spend on learning German?
- 4ad 10y ago
  Like read books or have someone tutor me? Right now I spend zero time doing this. I just gave up. I tried but nothing stuck, and it was so difficult for me on an intellectual level that quite literally after one hour of study I was so mentally worn out that I could not do my job. I had to sleep through the rest of the day and I literally felt like I was going crazy. I don't get it, I can learn (and remember) a new programming language and have some practical level of competency in hours (even with Haskell, actually, Haskell was one of the easier languages), but with real languages I am totally inapt. In school I studied 8 years of French, two or three classes per week, and it was a real course, nothing leisurely, lots of homework. But I can't speak a single word of French. Believe me, I worked really hard those 8 years just to get a passing grade, and if I weren't exceptional at Physics (won 1st prize at the National Physics Olympiad, and many other national contests), I'm pretty sure my teacher would have failed me. I spoke my first word while being 3 months old, and at 6 months I was using coherent sentences and engaging in conversation with people. I guess I used up all my language acquisition skills in that stage of development. What is going on?
  - panglott 10y ago
    Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying—these are methods that adults can use to make use of the metalinguistic knowledge acquired from their native language. There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Language-ebook/dp/B014S61O7E/ https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Lan... People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so. How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.
    - 4ad 10y ago
      > Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying [...] People acquire languages, they don't study them. I know. Absolutely agree. > There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). Thanks, I will check it out. > Is your main problem comprehension or production? I think my main problem is production. > If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. You might be right, I know a lot of words. When it comes to cooking stuff, sometimes I know words my german-speaking friends don't know (I like to cook and buy lots of less-than-usual ingredients). But I can't create meaningful sentences.
    - 10y ago

andreasvc 10y ago

The article does end with three references to books.