Language Learning: Should You Study the Basics?

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here again, and today, I'm going to talk about, you know, learning the basics in a language. Uh, remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, uh, click on the bell to get notifications. And by all means, join me at LingQ, which is where I learn languages. So the reason I want to talk about the basics is because in my previous video, I talked about learning a language from scratch.

And as I did so it struck me that, you know, in a language, you know, it's a bit like getting into a swimming pool. I mean, the water is equally wet everywhere, so you just have to get in and start swimming. And there often people talk about sort of mastering the basics and mastering the core vocabulary and mastering certain core concepts.

And, and I've never found that to be a very useful, uh, concept and, and I'll explain why. Before that I should mention a few things. People are commenting that I look tired that I'd have red eyes and stuff. Okay, how tired I look in the video may depend on what time of the day I do the video, morning or evening.

Second of all, I'm in Palm Springs, Indio, California, to be exact right now. And if I go swimming in the pool, my eyes get a bit red. And furthermore, I look into a sort of a halo light. But it also seems to give me a bit of a red eye look. So all of those things might explain my appearance. I'm going to be here till May 28th.

Um, yeah, we decided, my wife and I, to leave Vancouver for a few weeks. We snuck out. The government, Canadian government, discourages people from traveling, but, uh, actually the incidence of COVID is much less now in the States, certainly in California than it is in British Columbia. We were also able to get our second Pfizer shot down here.

So. We're hopeful that by the time we go back home, they won't make it too difficult for us. Uh, we don't mind quarantining. Hopefully we don't have to stay in a hotel if we can cross the border at some point, other than at the airport, we we'll see what happens anyway, getting back to the basics. So I don't really, and I've said this before.

Oh, and another thing too, I'm trying to figure out the best place to look into my camera here, and there's various squares and circles. So I hope I'm doing it, you know, uh, in a way that is the least distracting to people. Now getting back to the subject. So when I did my learning Indonesian from scratch, I didn't start from lesson one.

I started from lesson two and I said, you could just as easily start from lesson five or lesson 10 and go back to one or three or eight. And it really doesn't matter. And the reason is the following, that obviously some stories, some content, it is easier and some stories are easier than others and they are easier because they have a lot of high frequency, vocabulary or vocabulary that, you know, that's familiar to you.

That's how we designed the Mini Stories. Vocabulary repeats five times in a story. Uh, and we've tried to design the Mini Stories so that, you know, in these 60 Mini Stories, we have a lot of high frequency verbs, useful verbs: give, go, come, take, need, want, et cetera. So if you get a lot of repetition, that's going to make them easier.

However, the trouble with frequency, as I've said before, is that it declines very, very quickly. So the high frequency vocabulary is going to show up. You needn't worry about learning it, it will show up if you expose yourself to enough content, that's not a concern that most common structures in the language will show up patterns like subject + verb + object.

All of these things will appear fairly soon, even if they are explained to you, it doesn't mean that you will get it. Uh, so to me, you know, trying to nail down the basics is somewhat futile and probably unnecessary. Certain things are basic for example. And the other thing too, is that in a language, you know, it's not like in math, if you don't have sort of basic skills, basic mathematical skills, you can't do the next level of skill.

Uh, I talked about swimming. If you don't have a basic swimming stroke, you know, the ability to float, then you can build on that to develop more advanced swimming strokes, or swimming skills. But language is not like that. Language is just words. It's not obvious that the present tense is easier than the past tense.

It depends on the language. It depends how complex these conjugations are. It's just words. And the more you hear the words, the more the brain gets used to the words, the more the brain gets used to different structures. The sooner it's going to be able to operate in the language and all of this is achieved.

As you know, I repeat this all the time through massive input, listening and reading. And I tried to show you in the last video, how even in a language that I don't know, just by exposing myself to enough of the content, and the language start to, the language will start to seep into me. And of course, the things that repeat the most often, which are going to be the high frequency, uh, verbs or high frequency words, they will be the things that I start to learn.

Someone said, but what about languages that use a completely different script? Like Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet. It makes it more difficult and you still have to work on learning that script. But even there, if you learn the script, so theoretically you have been exposed to what this symbol represents, if it's, uh, an alphabet like the Persian or the Arabic alphabet, uh, that doesn't mean that you're comfortable reading in that alphabet or with the Cyrillic alphabet or the Greek alphabet or Hanguk in Korean, it doesn't mean you're comfortable. You still have to put so much effort into reading, so much that the brain starts to get used to. Something that in a way is basic. Like the script. If you can't read the script, you're not going to be able to read.

So gaining some familiarity with the script, if it's different from say the Latin alphabet in a way is basic. There's a situation where you do have something that's basic where you have a skill that's required in order to go forward. Whereas vocabulary, it's more a matter of, of what you, you know, come across and you're listening and reading and inevitably the most frequent 70% of words are going to show up and you're going to get to know them fairly soon.

So I think this, this, uh, this obsession with the basics and building on the basics, basics in language learning is misplaced. It's not like you have to learn the basics of math before you can even get into engineering before you can build a bridge. And there's a lot of sort of knowledge that builds on prior knowledge in language.

If you were totally dedicated to say learning the terms for cooking in Persian, because you are only interested in Persian food, then you would learn all of the terms, uh, that are connected to the cuisine. And those would be vocabulary items that maybe for someone else would be very difficult because they wouldn't see them that often.

But if you were constantly dealing with recipes on how to make them, different dishes in Persian food or French food or Chinese food, then those would be your high frequency words that you would learn so that there are really no basics. You gradually become familiar. Now at some part, you develop a curiosity.

Why does the language work this way versus that way? And at that point you can look up explanations. But if you try to master the explanations upfront, because these are the basic structures of a language, or this is the basic vocabulary. And so I'm going to, you know, and get the most, you know, the highest frequency, 500 words on learn them.

In fact, your brain won't get used to them just by the fact that you study these lists. You still have to go through the process of listening and reading and allowing your brain to get used to the language. So I think I've said this before, but it's a theme that, that has kind of come back to me now because of the fact that I did that video, but learning from scratch.

And I reminded myself of the fact that. Yeah. In fact, I was having a conversation with someone I think in Turkish or Persian. And my tutor said, you know, you only ever talk about, uh, you know, economics, the social problems and politics. Uh, what about things from daily life? In fact, my vocabulary, uh, surrounding, uh, you know, uh, things in daily life and food and clothing and stuff was nowhere near as well-developed as this other

vocabulary, because that's what I was interested in. That's what I was learning. That's what I was coming across. So are political terms, basic and carrot, banana strawberry less basic?. I don't know. It all depends on what you're interested in. You just have to expose yourself to the language and gradually allow the brain to get used to it.

And don't try to nail down the basics. I think it's a bit of a futile exercise. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.