It may not be suitable as a reference for learning French because I learned it by building upon another language. However, it is a feasible and comfortable way for me. I am writing this in case of any possible usefulness.
Before my actual engagement in French learning, I worried a lot. I would meet obstacles never faced as a guy who knew only English and Chinese. I needed to tell different properties between féminin and masculin. The complexity of numbers would also be a big problem. Placing my tongue at odd positions was another great challenge that frightened me. However, these anxieties appeared only before my actual involvement in practice. Once practicing, all the unrelated emotions went away.
The lesson is the same as I learned in writing. Once you make up your mind to do something or have inclinations to carry out a project planned long long long ago. The first thing we should do is to get rid of hesitations as soon as possible. By what? Just do it. If a method is needed to ensure your success, it must be setting a deadline. As great litterateur Lu Xun[鲁迅] said, DDL is the primarily productive force.
When it comes to language learning, we ought to know what a language is. It is not a target, an achievement, a milestone in life, or a way of self-proving. Language is the apprehension about the world from a group of people. Originated from ancient times, the language is developing all the time with the ones using it. The language is not a dead thing or just a still mixture of letters or symbols, but rather it lives a vivid life in intimate connections with the outer world. If made a metaphor, the language is like a human. It is you, and it is me.
If so, grammar isn’t that important in the learning circle. As a native Chinese speaker, I didn’t even realize the existence of Chinese grammar before being told by my teacher in primary school. Of course, there must be some rules, customs, and conventions, we can feel them while speaking the language. But is grammar the actual basic structure of a language as the steel structure of an architecture?
I don’t think so, though I can not give spotless evidence for this assertion.
Grammar is the regularity people summarized from the usage of the language. It is supposed to be authoritative when citations are needed. But unexpected scattered incidents make this cognition doubtful, which reminds us the grammar is not the language itself. Grammar is one of the many bridges between us and the languages. To be a language expert, there exist many other ways. Language is a way of understanding the world and ourselves. It is not a structure or a framework of something, but a biological creature can grow and decay away, would be strong and become weak, might die and vanish from the face of the earth as many languages did before.
Then how can we develop a closer relationship with this gorgeous being?
Time or times is not the necessity for familiarity. Some good learners show quicker understandability with limited practice. However, it has nothing to do with wisdom or genes, but results of excellent interactions between themselves and things they speak out. They can connect things newly learned with information that already existed in their knowledge system. This kind of learning is their default mode. Most of us, however, getting confused and lost while facing unknown situations. We spend too much time calculating the risk, therefore lose the instant opportunity which is hard to grasp even when we are staring at it.
The second key point comes out as letting the unknown horrors alone there scratching or screaming, we noticed, yet still do the right things – connect that new guy with our old pals, as if horrors around us were our companions.
Aren’t they?
The traditional learning method stresses the mastery of grammar and vocabulary. It believes the development from abstraction to concretization, of course, is logical in logic. However, language lives a vivid life in the same world as we are in, but logic can not explain our luxuriant life. Our current logic may be right somehow, but it has its limits.
Because of this cognition, unknown new words or sentences perform as giant obstacles on our way of learning. Each time we encounter them, we try desperately to look up the meanings behind them without thinking of why or how it appears here. Language performs like an index of libraries, it should not be like this.
Desperation occurs when people are in panic and losing their confidence in solving problems all by themselves. Dictionary is the last straw learners can grasp. It’s not the redemption nevertheless. Next time facing the same question, learners would again get stuck there, throw all their creativities away and hold their heads wondering why they can not convert to a dictionary or textbook.
As mentioned, language is a way of apprehending the world and ourselves. It is the interaction with everything around us. Thus the invention of grammar is to make every step of the interaction traceable and predictable. Once being accustomed to this mechanism, people lost the creativity which they used to have in childhood. What’s worse, they lose courage if facing the unknown. Sure some people start from a “lookuper” and make an excellent speaker in the end. That’s because, in the late period of their learning, the methods changed, they accumulated a solid enough basis before feeling safe to do the exploration. In the great adventure, they become more and more familiar with this progression, which produces a snowball effect.
Since it seems to be a practical way, why not try it at the beginning?
The only reason that makes this method unattractive is horror, or rather people’s response to facing the unknown. The horror drives people away from the beginning, it keeps creating fear and panic in the meantime if people dared to start. Supposing someone wanted to try this method, he should not look up words or grammar strange to him. Let’s think about what a baby does in language learning. The baby didn’t know grammar and had little Knowledge in vocabulary, but they will become fluent speakers inevitably. They are curious and have no fear of facing any challenge, failures never stop them, cause they treat failures as the start of the next step[and also because they are too young to know failures]. An adult might hesitate sometimes, but babies, they march forward courageously, they can begin at any time.
In this way of learning, the language is alive as we are. We use language to interact with our surroundings, make it a tool to apprehend the world, accept our ignorance, observe our failures, be familiar with what is behind them, and make language our friend. Don’t retreat. Whatever pushes on you, you need to pull back. The most important: accept your stupidness and still be open to anything that hurt you and help you.
To summerise what I have said:
- Do the things you want to do whatever stop you NOW
- Do it rightly by accepting failures and sucess[It will help you evaluate in comprehensive perspetive]
- Be familiar with the thing, interact with it, accompanied with it, treat it the way you want to be treated [It needs high-quality observation and ability to connect the new one with the ones you have already]
- Understand its way of thinking and how it gets along with its surroundings, what, why, when, where, who, how
- Observing yourself, be affected by the thing, and affect back
- Repeat the loop