Entering the Active Phase of Language Use

The hardest part of developing language skills is starting to use the language for yourself. There's a lot you can learn from study materials and a lot you can soak up from content in the language. But how do you find your own voice for the language you're learning?

You don't. Not exactly, anyway. While each of us is a unique person with unique personality traits, etc, we're also the product of our environment. When I'm going through the sales process with a prospective customer, in everything from my phrasing to my pauses to my steering of the conversation, I can hear my father talking on the phone in his home office when I was growing up. When I grouse about bad customer service or wonder at the beauty of the mountain, there's my maternal grandfather ruminating on the porch. If you listen to yourself talk for a day or two, you will find family, old friends, the teachers you looked up to and the television stars you thought were cool when you were, say, ten or twelve. The way you bring them all together makes you you, but in many ways you're a composite of them. It's the same with a foreign language.

I wouldn't say that I'm a completely different person when I speak French. But the emphases shift. I am who I am, but I learned how to express that in different contexts, from different people, so it comes out a little differently. Because I lack a lifetime of experience in French, my humor isn't as subtle as it is in English, where I sometimes get into trouble because people mistake my deadpan sarcasm for being what I actually think. But it's definitely understated and ironical, rather than effusive, after the fashion of some people who seemed to share my sense of humor when I lived there. The same goes with most other moods and manners. We learn both language and how to live by imitation, and while we are unique, the way we express the unique combinations of thought and personality that make us who we are is largely by selecting from the various presentations of humanity that we have seen before. You can see this in those who are less sure of who they are by their frequent quotations and imitations of favorite movie characters.

How does this tie into language learning? The other day, I noted that if you find a language program or materials that make you feel that you're living the language, not just studying it, you've struck gold. When you're ready to use a language actively, then, it's time to go prospecting. It's easy, when you're studying, to get hung up on understanding the language and making sure you've learned all the components -grammar, vocabulary and syntax - that went into making the phrase come out the way it did. But for active use, what you need to focus on is, Would I say this? How? It may be that the sentence before you is "The car is blue" or "The duck is yellow," in which case you're probably not overly excited about being able to offer it up when talking to a stranger for the first time. But if there's a chance, even a chance, that you'll need this sentence, bring it alive! Picture your kindergarten teacher patiently pointing to the picture and saying the phrase when you were learning colors. If you're looking at the "Problems with your car" section of the phrasebook, furrow your brow and earnestly explain your plight to the mechanic the same way you would if it were actually happening.

While you're bringing the language alive, it's worth looking for and at materials in a new light. It may be that the grammar explanations are poor, or the ordering of the book is nonsensical. But if, in the dialogs, you see people saying the kinds of things that people you know would say, grab it. Don't use it for study, of course, but do read those dialogs out loud, and imagine yourself recounting a conversation you overheard or had with a friend. In short, in your mind you should try to build yourself a world to live in where you get the same kind of exposure to language that you got growing up, instead of just looking for language information.

Right now, I'm learning Breton, as visitors to this site will know. Among my Breton materials I have Colloquial Breton, the Assimil initiation, the two tome Assimil course and kervarker.org. I still need more background to appreciate the full Assimil course, but in it there are a series of dialogs - a man and his wife discussing the weather, old friends talking about the one friend's time living in the city, etc - that so sound like people I have known that it's like I'm in the room listening in. Likewise, at kervarker.org, there are a few dialogs - especially in chapter 3, that are hardly exceptional but which seem so transparently real that they stick. This is what you're looking for. So if that textbook you've got explains the grammar well, and has a great presentation of grammar, great. But if the materials you're using aren't filled with the kind of language that you can hear being said by you or by people you know, look for something to supplement it. You'll be surprised by the difference it makes when you go from learning the language to hanging out with folks who are speaking it.

This post metastasized from a comment at Josh's Language Geek, where Josh was wondering how to get more out of the active phase with Assimil. Have a look for some of his thoughts on passive vs. active learning.