The first is the way a child approaches language, through massive amounts of input paired with nonverbal indicators. Language is "acquired" through a process of pattern matching and inference.
The second way happens to most of us after about 10. This is incidentally when certain cognitive skills begin to develop, such as enhanced ability to reason. The popular idea is that this development inhibits natural methods like the ones children use.
I agree that reason inhibits intuition. But as with all ideas, it pays to read between the lines and question all assumptions. Here the assumption is that a person can no longer voluntarily turn off this analytical function once they have it.
The arts have long proven that to be false, in my opinion. This idea just hasn't been carried across to popular language learning mentality.
Most of us have the idea that we can't use that part of our brain anymore, at least not for language. I think my experience with French proves this idea wrong.
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I have always wanted to learn a second language. In high school, I studied Korean for 5 years. I was lucky enough to go to Korea in my senior year, a huge eye opening experience for me in many ways. However I quickly learned that I could barely speak the language. And now, my Korean is barely on par with your average tourist.
Like most people I had assumed I was at fault. I told myself I wasn't good at learning languages. But a part of me also realized that I could learn better if I lived in a country where they used it. I wanted to test my idea and see how good I could get. And so I quickly narrowed down a list of languages I'd like to learn and settled on one: French.
I moved to France in the Summer of 2007. Before arriving I had started a crash course of 60 hours of traditional instruction which I felt gave me some basics. Only when I got there to realize I didn't understand a word that anyone was saying.
I was lucky to be put in a homestay with a French lady who taught French literature in high schools. She was very passionate about the language and also constantly talking, which gave me a lot of language practice.
Her rules were to use French and French only in the house, and to make it to dinners as often as possible. This is where she observed most people actually picked up the most language, and as her 50th student, I was inclined to trust her judgement.
I had signed up for a one month intensive at the alliance française. We covered a few tenses and the like. It was very formulaic, but it seemed helpful at the time. The problem was that I couldn't transfer it into real use of French.
French just like any language has a lot of shortcuts in common spoken form. it seems to be a universal feature of humanity that no one speaks their language like textbooks say they ought to.
It took me almost 2 months to realize the most common way of saying "I do not know" is said something like "Shay pa" instead of the oft learned "Je ne sais pas". I certainly didn't learn it in class, and this is the equivalent of not teaching "Dunno" in beginners English, which is actually one of the first things I teach students.
So at the end of the month, I had totaled up 100 hours of language study, plus the 60 I had done in Australia. However I started feeling I was learning more at home than I was in class, so I stopped going to class.
At home I was spending at least an hour or two helping in the kitchen with my homestay mother, listening to her chatter on about I-have-no-clue. I was also watching up to 2 hours of talk shows and dramas on TV, and I was reading at least 1 news article per day (with a French-English dictionary at hand).
For a long time I could barely feel I was getting better. I was learning some more words and understanding common phrases but I couldn't understand anything out of the ordinary and my responses were very wooden. Then a very strange thing happened.
It was 6 months of headaches, confusion and tiredness (paying that much attention is more draining than you might think). I recall watching a TV talk show called "C'est dans l'air", and all of a sudden I felt like I could understand almost everything they were saying. Furthermore, it suddenly took very little effort to listen. The language sounded as easy to the ear as English.
Although I didn't understand it at first, I learned that this stage is common in acquisition methods and is sometimes referred to as emergence.
The theory as I understand it is that a foundation of linked experiences connecting sounds to concepts need to be created first. When this process has reached a sufficient level, it becomes reliable enough to determine what is "normal" for the language, and what is not, in terms of meaning, grammar, and sound. In ALG, these are called mental image flashes, or MIFs.
So without knowing what was going on, I had crossed a threshold from having insufficient experience to judge new French input into having a basic intuitive feel for the language.
And from that point on, my ability in the language bloomed. I felt I had got over a major hurdle and I could use that energy to focus on what I needed more of, vocabulary.
I took focus away from learning grammar, as what I was saying just started to sound "right" or "wrong". Vocabulary was easy to pick up in the context of a conversation now, so "studying" consisted of watching and reading things I would want to in any language anyway. I would talk about politics, economics and local culture.
I left France in November 2008. After a period of 15 months in the country, I had become fully conversant in a number of domains in French. I knew that if i stayed I would be able to refine my French further and become more eloquent in the language, but I had other plans.
I'm not saying my French is perfect. But even after 2.5 years of not using the language, I can still walk up to any French person confident in my ability to talk to them. I have barely lost any ability in the language despite not using it, and after a day or two of using the language, I'm right back where I was when I was living there.
What mistakes I do have are inconsequential and generally do not impede meaning. And improving grammar and spelling in French is much the same as for in English. I just need to read more in the language and I'll "pick it up".
Even with my mistakes, most French people don't believe I got to where I was after only 15 months living in country and 160 hours of language lessons. After many French people exclaiming they wish their English could be as good as my French, those people came to the conclusion that they "weren't good at languages".
My point is not to say how good I am at learning language. I believe I'm average. What's different is the method I used. "Adult" language learning methods do not ever give these results. You will never learn how to share emotions on a deep level by learning in a classroom. You will never learn how to pick up on a persons accent, background, and personality just from standard language lessons.
The only way these can be achieved is through real life interaction with natives of the language. Short of moving to another country, concepts like ALG provide this kind of environment for the students. In addition to not putting the cart before the horse, providing this kind of environment is its strength. For that reason "acquiring" languages has a great deal to offer the language learning world, especially for those people who have convinced themselves they are "not good at languages".
