I decided that as I work through writing out this zine, I'll post the first draft of each section, in the style of mini-essay posts (starting with a bit of a backlog). I want to sell the zine for some pocket cash, but more than that, I want to encourage multilingualism and help people recover from poor schooling (often the result of outdated standards forced on teachers and testing pressure).
So, to start off with:
Intro
About Me
Hey! My name is [red-lez], and for some personal context, I'm a white trans lesbian in her mid-20s at the writing of this zine. I'm a programmer by trade, mainly working on games, but on the side I've been getting into language learning for awhile now. I've always been interested in languages, dabbling in a few and learning some more deeply. The first language I got to a relatively high level was Spanish, and while I haven't maintained it, I'm still able to understand most of what I hear. Like most people though, I got my Spanish through high school (with a little outside experience), and I never really got decent at real-world communication. In the time since, I've lightly dabbled in languages like German, Mandarin, and Japanese, but never got them to quite stick. Recently, I've been involved in an Indigenous language program for a few years while also learning Irish (Gaelic) on the side, teaching myself some basic linguistics and language acquisition principles, applying them to my own studies.
About This Zine
Last year, I put what I've learned together into a presentation that I gave and shared around, and this zine is a refinement of that- with some extra material thrown in, especially on where grammar fits in, and on endangered languages / languages without many resources. Some of it is a condensation of research, some of it is personal experience, some of it is untested proposals. I'm not an expert researcher here- if I were, this would be in a scientific journal, not a zine. What I want to get across is an accessible and practical look at how to actually go acquiring languages, really internalizing them and getting to that position of fluency, even when you can't find good resources. What I want to do is bridge the gap between theory and practice, and help whoever I can with this.
Part 1 - Language Acquisition
Second Language Acquisition Principles
To start off with, some terms: Language acquisition is the internalization of a language, such that understanding and producing it become natural, the same way you learned your first language growing up. This is opposed to the idea of "skill building", where you explicitly memorize and practice vocabulary and grammar, the idea being that eventually this leads to (conversational) fluency.
This distinction was really refined and popularized by a linguist named Stephen Krashen, who many practicing polyglots reference when referring to their own learning methodologies. There are a few main things he and his fellow researchers have worked out about language acquisition (framed as hypotheses):
- The difference between acquisition and "learning" (skill building) mentioned above
- The idea that conscious learning can only work when you're actively monitoring yourself (like when writing)- and the barriers to being effective with it are high
- The Big One- The Input Hypothesis, the idea that you acquire language, you internalize it, when you understand what it means and make the necessary connections (also called "Comprehensible Input"). This is framed as being iterative, building on itself steadily
- The idea of a mental filter that prevents acquisition when you are stressed while getting input, since it distracts from getting the meaning
- The idea that people generally acquire parts of a language in a given order, especially when it comes to grammar
So, we've got some research-backed core ideas here, and they work together to lead to some practical principles to follow.
You need comprehensible input that you get the gist of, and it should be interesting to distract you from any stress in the process. Each underlined bit there could be expanded on.
- Comprehensible: you need to understand the actual meaning of what you take in as a whole
- Input: you need to be getting input to get the language into you, rather than practicing output as the main way to get fluency (besides, what use is output if you can't understand what someone else replies with?)
- You: ideally, your input is something that clicks with you, which means you'll have to pick it out or make it individualized a bit
- The Gist: you don't need to know every single word and grammatical structure for input to be beneficial, it's like a fuzzy picture slowly coming into focus, you can tell what the big picture is without needing all the details. Also, you aren't learning if you already understand everything
- Interesting: keeping your interest keeps your stress levels down, it distracts from the distractions, and it lets you really take in the full meaning of what you're getting
The first and last points deserve a bit of special attention for their implications, especially when taken together. Input can be comprehensible but not interesting, e.g. something way below your level about something you don't care much about. Input can also oddly be compelling but not comprehensible, e.g. a play in a language you don't understand that doesn't have a logical thread you could grab onto even if you could, but somehow it still hits all your emotional soft spots. Input can be neither comprehensible nor compelling, like a dry technical paper filled with a lot of jargon in a field you aren't familiar with. But for language acquisition, you want input that is both comprehensible and compelling- it should be fun, and you should understand basically what is happening.
This generally means going to input that has some sort of logical thread to latch onto, a flow and direction you can track to help you get back on course when you hit a patch of language you don't quite know. For some people this might be a sci-fi fantasy novel. For others, it may be a telling of a historical period. For a rare few, it might be a really good mathematical proof of a solution for a hard problem. The point is that it's something that draws you in, you can see more or less where it's heading, you get the gist of the words you see or hear, and it's so interesting that it makes you resistant to distraction.
A lot of the time, this is going to be something that has an emotional component, and is ideally multimedia in some way (really a multi-sensory experience). The more connections between the language processing part of your brain and all the other parts you can make, the better for learning. If you watch shows, listen to audiobooks while reading the text, read a visual novel, or have regular conversations with someone in your language, you will have more connections with more parts of your brain that can be leveraged later.
Of course input isn't everything- it's just a big portion, usually the biggest portion. You do still need to practice speaking and writing to get better at speaking and writing. Input gets you the comprehension of vocabulary and grammar, which you need in order to have them in the first place, but it does not get you fluent in language production. You don't have to write or speak immediately when you start learning your language of choice (you can if you want), but you do have to output eventually if you want to be fluent in either.
And all of this will take time. A lot of time. The good news is that progress is very, very fast at first- you can get to a workable level in a language very quickly. The intermediate plateau, on the other hand, will be a slog- but it will be worth it. And you won't mind how long it takes if you enjoy the process.
Edit: You can read the next section here.