4 ms·

It's sounds to me like a problem lots of people have when learning foreign languages. The author said so himself in the article. If you asked a Finnish person w

It's sounds to me like a problem lots of people have when learning foreign languages. The author said so himself in the article. If you asked a Finnish person why a particular word is spelled/inflected/conjugated the way it is, they wouldn't be able to tell you. They just memorize the final forms and know when to use it. This is how a child learns a language. It's difficult for people learning the language because they know why—they learn the rules. And they can't help but try to run through all the rules in their head when forming a sentence. A similar problem occurs when learning French. If you take at face value that 75 is "soixante-quinze" instead of deconstructing it as "sixty-fifteen", counting is a non-issue. But you can't, because you learned that counting is "weird" after 70 and you remember that when you try to speak it.

sampo 12y ago
> They just memorize the final forms I don't think it is possible to memorize all the gazillions of final forms in an agglutinative language. I am sure native speakers also learned the rules and then apply them, but it's all on a subconscious level.
nodata 12y ago
You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without rules, you'd never get anything else done.
- colanderman 12y ago
  I think you missed jinushaun's point: you can learn 70-99 in French without rules, just like you learn 0-19 without rules in English.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  Describing how children learn language as "memorization" is probably not accurate. Native speakers do "learn" rules, they just do it more or less unconsciously because our young, developing brains are wired for language acquisition.
  - a_c_s 12y ago
    I think this has far more to do with the difference in how children and adults are taught languages than structural differences in the brain. After all, 2 year olds aren't sat down with pages of conjugation tables to memorize, rather they pick things up from speaking and being corrected.
chousuke 12y ago
As a foreign language learner, the "rules" you learn form a framework on which to build understanding when you're learning. It's been my experience that after you get past a certain point, the rules stop mattering quite as much and are replaced by "intuition" similar (but not necessarily quite as strong) to what a native speaker has. When I write or speak English or Japanese, I do not think in terms of rules; I simply say what I think means what I want to communicate. Sometimes I don't know how to say something, but that's not because I've forgotten the "rules"; it's because I haven't built a strong enough intuition to express myself how I want to, using the words I have memorised. Studying grammar and etymology can give insight into how a native speaker of a language sees the world. Ultimately, memorization of rules and vocabulary is the easy part of learning a language, though it is often very time consuming.

sampo 12y ago

> They just memorize the final forms I don't think it is possible to memorize all the gazillions of final forms in an agglutinative language. I am sure native speakers also learned the rules and then apply them, but it's all on a subconscious level.

nodata 12y ago

You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without rules, you'd never get anything else done.

colanderman 12y ago
I think you missed jinushaun's point: you can learn 70-99 in French without rules, just like you learn 0-19 without rules in English.
twoodfin 12y ago
Describing how children learn language as "memorization" is probably not accurate. Native speakers do "learn" rules, they just do it more or less unconsciously because our young, developing brains are wired for language acquisition.
- a_c_s 12y ago
  I think this has far more to do with the difference in how children and adults are taught languages than structural differences in the brain. After all, 2 year olds aren't sat down with pages of conjugation tables to memorize, rather they pick things up from speaking and being corrected.

chousuke 12y ago

As a foreign language learner, the "rules" you learn form a framework on which to build understanding when you're learning. It's been my experience that after you get past a certain point, the rules stop mattering quite as much and are replaced by "intuition" similar (but not necessarily quite as strong) to what a native speaker has. When I write or speak English or Japanese, I do not think in terms of rules; I simply say what I think means what I want to communicate. Sometimes I don't know how to say something, but that's not because I've forgotten the "rules"; it's because I haven't built a strong enough intuition to express myself how I want to, using the words I have memorised. Studying grammar and etymology can give insight into how a native speaker of a language sees the world. Ultimately, memorization of rules and vocabulary is the easy part of learning a language, though it is often very time consuming.