I have come to language learning in a manner that I first acquired when studying Classical Greek in college. It was the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, a pristine thing whose grammar and declinations were paramount. After that, I took up Latin for a time, and then Hebrew. All these were languages in a similar vein, meaning all dead, all literary, and all read not spoken primary. I never became so diligent in any of these to have a fluency with reading or writing, but I did learn a lot of paradigms and a whole lot about grammar, and could at least parse a sentence into all its parts and particles and diagram the whole thing.

From there I have moved on to play with a host of other languages with varying interest and success, all of which I have approached with the same methodology of buckling down with a grammar reference and a dictionary, and destructing and constructing sentences of the written language with these aids.

And here in lies the problem: for the first time I have been placed in a situation where I have to listen to and speak a language that I have studied. Yet to my great dismay I find I cannot interact verbally with most people at all. The first problem, and the hardest, is the lack of an ear for the language. Having come from primarily the written form, I had thought that the spoken form would be just a slightly faster exercise in the equivalent of reading a sentence. This, it turns out, was woefully underestimating the practice it take to train one’s ear to hear the sounds at a natural speeking speed. Seeing a language at a glace is a very different skill. I could parse a sentence with a rapidity of which I was quite proud, but even a few simple words strung in series when spoken will completely loose me.

Thus the art of hearing is something which I now know needs a practice all its own. It is something which also is the most laborsome to me. I love trying to figure out how to parse a sentence of a Thai Wikipedia page, but to listen repeatedly to the same sentences till I can make discreet all the contained words is the most boring use of my time I can think of…yet it turns out, also the most practically useful.

Sentence construction is the art of the grammatical made manifest ad hoc in speech. I find that I still do this with a set of rules and a set of written words which I manipulate till I have the desired utterance in my head, and then I do what is the equivalent of reading it back to my interlocutor from what I visualize as a written sentence. This also is a bad habit which I am discovering I employ all to frequently. These study patterns work well for dead languages, and languages that will be used for literature only. Yet to communicate in the quotidian world of the market and the street, this methodology prove very, very inadequate. So, what then is the answer?

It would seem now that mirroring the learning habits of young children is probably the most effective way to start a new tongue. There is two pieces to this, one intake, the other the output.

For intake, I find that a simple spoken dialog with a transcript repeated on loop till the words become clear is the best way to approach listening. At first, I think it is less a matter of even discerning the set of words, but more of just accustoming oneself to the set of sounds in the language. At first, the foreign set of phonemes blend together or slide past undistinguished in my mind in a way that takes practice just to differentiate. It is only after one has heard sounds enough to think about them as units, can one then begin to think about the words which lie behind them.

Now comes the process of learning the words. This should be done with a transcript of the spoken conversation and a translation of each word. There of course should also be a sentence level translation, but this should not include more than the most cursory level of grammatical dissection (more on this later). Now comes the process of just placing the dialog on repeat, and trying to match the sounds with the words which the transcript dictates is there.

Considering the transcript poses a question as to what orthography. I still am not sure where I would like to devote the time to learning a new orthography, or how long I should be content with a transliteration. I feel as though there is a necessary bridge which should can be built between the spoken and the written word, one supporting the other. Also the mastery of the proper pronunciation of a set of symbols not ones own will remind oneself to cease trying to pigeonhole the set of phonemes into ones native range.

As to grammar, I am coming to the option that it is the least necessary thing to focus on is the beginning, but instead, a simple memorization of the phrase is enough with which to begin. The examples gives through the dialogs discussed above, and a simple phrase book should prove adequate to the beginner, more complex constructions too far advanced for use profitably anyway. One will not be discussing finer points of easter views of soteriology till a date a which one no longer struggles with sound and word discernment, so it is useless at this stage.

It is somewhat disheartening to discover that the methodology which I find most interesting and most rewarding turns out to also be the least effective for getting by in a country not one’s own. There will still be a battle in my head between the battle of the efficient and the interesting is language learning, one being not necessarily antithetical to the other, but given a limited amount of time by which to spend in study, it may become a zero sum decision.