The Humpty-Dumpty Effect

Josh has taken a look at some "traditional language learning methods" and is finding them helpful at the moment. He notes:

If you were to believe many modern, trendy language programs, why, all you’d have to do is listen to recordings and repeat after them, and in a matter of 3 hours, you’d be fluent! ... I’d much rather study grammar tables and “cram” isolated words into my vocabulary than spend who knows how many hours listening to the same stuff over and over, wondering, “What’s with the words changing so much?”

This is my problem with not confronting grammar: You can wind up spending way too much time constructing a faulty picture of how a language works in your own mind when 20 minutes with a table would give a much better, clearer idea what's going on. Still, grammar has one problem, neatly expressed by Ken Carrol:

Grammar offers a set of abstractions to be used, theoretically, in a deductive way to generate accurate sentences. In reality, however, it suffers from the humpty-dumpty effect: good for breaking language down, but not for putting it back together again.

Where do you go with this? We all know that to "pick up" a language, you need comprehensible input. We also know that it takes a small child years to piece things together to a point where they can handle the kind of comprehensible input on offer in kindergarten. Learning grammar and vocabulary explicitly won't give you language per se, but it will increase the amount of input that is comprehensible in a relatively shorter period of time. It's common to notice a word you've never known used a half dozen times in the week after you learn it. Learning vocabulary and figuring out how to identify grammatical structures will give you this effect, magnified, as long as you go find yourself some input once you've learned the information in a more abstract or artificial context.

I've been flipping through the Speak in a Week books (mentioned here). A lot of it is pretty simple, but then again I've never furnished a house in Spanish, for example, so I'd never committed to memory the word for draperies. Come to think of it, I still haven't. But there are other words that I've heard in restaurants, in stores or on the street, in many cases many times. Lacking sufficient context, I've put them in my mental list of Spanish words I should know but don't. But having seen them on the list, when I hear them the memory is jogged and after that I've got them. Neither the book, nor real life would have done the trick. But the two together... that's what was needed.

Should you try to learn a language purely by the old grammar-translation approach? Certainly not. We've better tools. But should you try to learn it solely through immersion? Not unless you've got a lot of time on your hands. I've said many times that you'll need multiple courses and methods, as well as real-life exposure, if you're really planning to learn a language. That can include traditional approaches like using grammar to break the language down. Just be forewarned: You'll have to put it back together on your own!