Thinking about thinking

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.
Alexander Pope

Jack of all trades, master of none / Though oft-times better than master of one.
Unknown

So, which is it? Should you learn everything? Or should you "focus like a laser beam" on one thing? In a truly rational and reasonable world, it might make sense to pick one subject and systematically work through it. In this topsy-turvy world we live in, however, it's turtles all the way down: Every time we approach the final, or foundational answers, we discover there's a whole world beneath. The physical world had the atomic world beneath. But the atom turned out to be divisible after all, and so the quantum world was discovered. In fifty years, I imagine, there will be much rolling of eyes at those who had thought that strings would prove to be the ultimate root of reality.

The Enlightenment project supposed that with careful application of the emerging scientific method, the light of reason would show all. Some time later, with the Romantics, we got Tennyson's Ulysses, who planned "To follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought." It's one of my favorite quotes, and it's of a piece with electron microscopes that let us see things we can't, and of a piece with the Large Hadron Collider that will let us envision the creation of universes and try to get a better sense of how it works. The thing is, there's a limit to how "meta" we can get. Ultimately, even if we move beyond what our eyes can see and our ears can hear, we can still only conceive what we can actually conceive - everything we know has to eventually reduce to analogies comprehensible to our real-life experience.

In language learning, we're making great strides in understanding how the brain learns, how it organizes information, and how it works with the body, including operating the speech organs and interpreting sound. They may even be getting a handle on how and where memories are stored. But for us language learners in the real world, we cannot reach in, tweak a few neurons and learn French better. Because humans are highly variable, we're probably always going to learn languages in highly variable ways. Our pedagogical research, then, won't truly take off until we move from finding the best way to teach in the aggregate to thinking about how to more efficiently identify learning styles and adapt methods to individuals. This is of a piece with the old-line mass manufacturers falling behind while mass-customization and the tailored retail experience brought by the likes of Amazon.com become the new order. This is going to go further.

Today, when you visit a good size bookstore, you'll find a variety of language learning materials. And there's some degree of specialization: The Michel Thomas Method differs from the Pimsleur differs from the In Your Car series differs from Berlitz Rush Hour and other novelty offerings. Throw in Anki, Before You Know it and LingQ and we're moving toward a world where you don't have to just love double rep cassettes if you want to learn to speak a new language. New programs like iSpeak are also coming along, though they seem to have been designed around the interface and adapted to new learning approaches, rather than the other way around. (But you could say the same of the old "read along with this dialog and listen to the record" approach of the first audio courses.) And so we're reaching a strange point: 15 years ago, there weren't enough resources. Now there are too many to know which way to turn.

What to do? Vary your learning. Probably the best analog to our learning today is the internet: the more links, the more traffic, the more popular a site becomes. The more you know, the more you can learn, because we learn by analogy and the more analogies we have about something, the more ways we can explain it to ourselves as we learn, cement the knowledge and retrieve it.

It's true that a little learning is a dangerous thing - if your intent is to be learned. But in the world of language, which goes across all areas of life, it's best to be a jack of all trades - if you know a little bit about everything, you'll have that much more to go on as you learn a little bit more.

Practical application: Go to the bookstore and find one of those phrasebooks for Western Europe or South Asia or whatever. Start thumbing through it and learn a few key phrases. You'll find that a little Arabic gives you a little Persian, a little Turkish, even a little Indonesian and a little Swahili. And they're all from totally different language families! Look at a pidgin from your own language (like Tok Pisin, if you're an English speaker) and see if you aren't more comfortable with foreign grammatical constructions once you've started thinking of using your own familiar vocabulary in totally different ways. If you're learning Italian, look at Spanish phrases. Yes, you'll jumble things and confuse the two, perhaps, but in the end you'll remember the similarities and differences between Buenas noches and Buona notte and because you've got two Romance equivalents of Good night in mind (and one of them is plural, can you believe that?!) you'll have a stronger memory of both. So read, read, read, learn, learn, learn. But do this with everything and all things. In time you'll find that you know more and learn more easily about the things you're focused on and your knowledge will organize itself so that random facts become a network of linked and self-reinforcing knowledge. And even better, you've got an excuse to skip your German for one night (but not more than two!) if that's what you were going to do anyway.