What Are the Basics in Language Learning (And Do They Matter)?

Hi, there's Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna talk again about

basics and explain why we didn't bother trying to master the basics

of the language we're learning.

I talked a bit about the basics last time, or in a previous video.

I explained that there is sort of a, a theory which I, uh, basically,

uh, subscribe to, and that is that different aspects of the language,

we're gonna learn them in a certain.

to some extent it depends on what our native language is.

It depends on the language we're learning.

It depends on what kind of content we're exposing ourselves

to, but we can't force it.

Things will fall into place when they fall into place.

So don't worry about the basics, don't worry about, you know, when you're

quite well along in the language and there's still certain basic terms or

basic structures that you get wrong.

Uh, don't try to, you know, force the pace by learning the basics up front.

I, I think it's a futile exercise.

And so I want to get into more detail on this.

First of all, what are the basics?

If I Google, uh, you know, the basics.

The basics of Spanish, the basics of French, the basics of

Russian, of Chinese, of Japanese.

There's all kinds of pages on the internet, which will give you various

versions of what the basics are.

They could be basic vocabulary and some will say, you know, you gotta learn

the numbers and you gotta learn the colors and the names of the months.

And all of these things are very, or names of different, you know, food products.

All of these things are very difficult to remember.

I find that numbers and colors take a long time before they sink in and,

and studying a list of numbers or days of the month, uh, or excuse me,

of months, et cetera, names of the months is, is not gonna help you.

You have to kind of learn them gradually as you're exposing

yourself to more and more input.

Some people say the basics are, you know, hello, how are you?

My name is...

Those kinds of phrases, greetings and so forth.

But a lot of these things you're gonna learn fairly soon in the process anyway.

One of the reasons why we designed our mini stories at LingQ with

high frequency verbs is because we need verbs and high frequency verbs

are quite important for speaking.

Those are the ones we're going to use when we start to speak.

And in the mini stories, there's a lot of repetition uh, in each

story of high frequency verbs and a across the story, there's a lot of

repetition of high frequency verbs.

I, I even went to a ChatGPT I asked, what are the basics in Spanish?

They gave me a list of 10 things, uh, one of which was wrong.

You know, it says, okay, word order in Spanish is subject-verb-object.

Again, we're gonna very quickly discover the verb object.

We can look at it ahead of time as part of an overview of the language, but

very soon, if we're exposing ourselves to content, and I, as you know, I

recommend our mini stories at LingQ.

You're gonna come across that it's gonna seem natural to you that that's

how they do things in that language.

Over time, it'll become the dominant pattern.

Gender, Spanish nouns have a gender, masculine or feminine.

Yeah, you learn that pretty quickly.

That doesn't mean you know which nouns are which gender.

Uh, five, of course, Ser and the estar, uh, is, is this aspect, basic, call

it basic in Spanish, that the verb to be can either temporary status

or a permanent status, but there's a fair amount of subjectivity there.

And the interesting thing about Ser and estar is you can get it wrong

and it doesn't hinder communication.

So to what extent is that basic to comprehension or communication?

I don't think it's that important.

I think we gradually get more and more used.

Uh, ChatGPT also told me that personal subject pronouns, Spanish has personal

subject pronouns such as ...which must be used in conjunction with verbs.

That, of course, is not true because in Spain, in Spanish, the verbs conjugate.

The endings change.

So very often you can tell which person that is without having

to use the personal pronoun.

But that's ChatGPT.

That's not necessarily an authoritative source.

Um, but then you can go to, I went to another source and here are the basic,

you know, topics of grammar for French.

And it has terms in here, like aspects, habitual perfective,

imperfection, mood indicative, imperative, conditional subjunctive.

Uh, you know, if you try to learn that upfront, uh, you know, conjunctions,

coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions.

I just think it would be very difficult to learn that upfront.

So I don't think you can learn basic vocabulary upfront.

I don't think you can learn the basic structures upfront.

I think, as I've said many times, language learning comes down to the

three keys that, again, I can't remember her name, but the lady who ran the,

uh, San Diego State, uh, Language Department said it's all about your

attitude, the time you spend with the language and your ability to notice.

And so attitude is very important.

Of course, we want to improve.

Uh, I'm not suggesting we should ignore, uh, correct, correct usage.

I mean, this depends as well, but obviously we have a model of

the language that we would like to get as close as possible to.

So we want to be constantly improving, constantly getting close

to this model of the language.

Now it could be Brazilian usage in Portuguese or usage in Portugal.

It could be usage in Quebec for French or usage in France.

It could be, um, usage in Taiwan for Chinese or usage in Beijing.

We have a model of the language which we like, and, and the more we like it,

the more we're likely to imitate it.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

We want to get closer to that usage, and so we start to notice more things.

The more we listen, the more things we notice.

Things that we don't notice at first, we will notice them later on.

The idea and, and so I think there was a sort of pushback from some people saying,

you know, how can you ignore the basics?

Uh uh, we have to have the basics, or we can't speak correctly.

That's not true.

I have tried mastering tables, you know, declension tables in German

and so forth, and it didn't work.

It was only when I got into more and more listening and reading, exposed my,

exposing myself to the language that some of these things started to slot in.

So we have to have an attitude of wanting to improve.

If we don't want to improve, we won't notice.

So even in those three keys, obviously attitude affects the other two.

If you like the language, you're gonna spend time with the language.

If you like the language and you want to notice things in the language,

you'll notice more things in the language, whether that be pronunciation

or usage or whatever it may be.

Something like the subjunctive, I don't think we notice it at first, but in

time, if we're motivated, if we like the language, if we're hearing someone

speak the language in a way that we like and we want to imitate, we're going to

imitate the subjunctive, but not using the subjunctive doesn't hinder communication.

So it's not a basic, in the sense that it prevents communication.

It is a basic in the sense that we would like to get as close as possible

to this model of usage that we have.

Uh, so I, I just wanted to sort of follow up on my previous video.

I didn't wanna suggest that we don't want to speak, you know, correctly,

or we don't want to, you know, imitate certain standard patterns of usage.

I think every serious language learner wants to do that, but achieving that

will depend on having an attitude that I like the language, I enjoy

the language, I enjoy learning.

I want to get better.

I want to get closer to that standard of usage.

I'm willing to put in the time.

There are no shortcuts.

It's not as if we can learn a formula.

This is how the language works, now we're going to be able to

learn the language more quickly.

I don't believe that we can have an overview if we want, where it tells us

that this language is subject-verb-object or subjec-object-verb, sort of

an abstract of the language.

I'm not sure that helps very much.

Either we don't understand what that overview actually is saying or we

will in any case, as with so many of these sort of basic vocabulary

items, basic structures, we will eventually get those through a program

of sustained listening and reading.

So, uh, because there was a certain amount of pushback on this

idea of, of avoiding the basics

uh, I thought I would follow up with another video on the subject.

By the way, with reference to ChatGPT I am looking at it.

I don't know yet where that fits into my language learning routine or possibly

with, with LingQ, I'm going to be doing a video, uh, uh, interview with Luca

Lampariello, and I think we may even discuss that subject a little bit.

So thank you for listening.

Bye for now.