Hi there.
Today I wanna talk again about starting from scratch.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke a bit about the theory of
starting a language from scratch.
The importance of creating a base of things that we can use as reference to
infer how the language performs, to make it easier for us to understand, to learn.
But today, I'm not gonna do theory.
I'm gonna show you practically how I start a new language.
Language learning is a process of moving from the unfamiliar
to the familiar.
Now, if you are learning a somewhat related language, related to a
language, you already know, things are already a little familiar.
If I go from one Slavic language to another, or one romance language to
another, or one Asian language that I know to another, there's a an element
of things there that are familiar.
But today I'm gonna talk about Punjabi.
I'm gonna talk about language that is
extremely unfamiliar to me.
The writing system is unfamiliar.
There are some loan words from Persian, some words that relate
to other Indo-European languages.
For example, in so far as Persian is concerned, punj Punjabi
Punj is five, five Rivers.
So that relates to Punjabi or to relates Persian to Punjabi, but
predominantly it's unfamiliar.
So what do we do?
Stephen Krashen has put forward his theory of language acquisition, which I basically
agree with, and it says that we learn from meaningful and hopefully compelling
and comprehensible content, messages that are important and comprehensible to us.
So what do you do when nothing is comprehensible?
For me, Punjabi is incomprehensible input.
I'm gonna show you how I deal with that, and I often get this question.
You know, you talk about comprehensible input.
So how do you get started when you know nothing?
We can overcome the obstacle of everything being incomprehensible.
I have done it many times.
I've done it with Persian, with Arabic, with Korean, with other languages,
and the process is a gradual one.
And following on Stephen Krashen, and it should be low-anxiety.
We should take advantage of the fact that we can absorb a lot through
listening and eventually through reading.
Stephen Krashen talks about
learning through meaning, meaning over form, meaning rather than
grammatical rules and explanations.
But I'm gonna say start with sound before meaning.
This is what I did with Chinese before we had the characters,
which are not phonetic.
Essentially, I had a lot of exposure to audio material with the
phonetic pinyin writing system.
Now in the case of Punjabi, in the case of Persian and Arabic.
I prefer to sort of learn their phonetic script rather than relying
on some romanized phonetic script.
But I still have to get used to the sounds of the language before
I can start to learn the script before I can get into meaning.
So the progression to me is sound before meaning, meaning before form.
But let's get back to Punjabi.
Punjabi is very unfamiliar.
Here are the sounds of Punjabi and the examples of letters of their alphabet.
Obviously this is overwhelmingly incomprehensible to me.
So if I look at a page of Punjabi text in a lesson on LingQ, this is what it
looks like, it's incomprehensible.
How can I ever make sense of this language with all those strange
sounds, with all those strange letters?
I don't even know within a word, what's a letter?
What isn't a letter?
I can go back to this
page that I found online and there's lots of resources online, but I
can't absorb all this information.
I can refer to it occasionally, but I first have to build up these sort
of points of reference and that I achieve through lots of listening,
and I will show you how I do it.
One further comment before I get into that, and that is that the
process, obviously you don't learn Punjabi in three months.
You have to buy into the idea that it's a long-term process.
So, uh, there's a very famous Chinese parable that goes back to, I think, the
fourth century BC about the foolish old man who moved mountains. He and his son
were gonna dig until the mountain
disappeared.
But of course, as he said, when I'm finished digging, my sons will
dig and my sons after me, but the mountain will not get bigger.
And Mao used the same parable in one of his famous essays.
So it's a gradual process.
It's a bit like when I'm cleaning up the kitchen after
we've had guests over and I see this mountain of dishes.
The mountain of mess is not gonna get bigger.
as I slowly put things into the dishwasher, put things away and clean
things up, the mess is getting smaller.
We just have to keep doing it, and eventually things become
manageable.
So why Punjabi?
Well, first of all, Punjabi is spoken by 150 million people in the world.
The largest group of Punjabi speakers is actually in Pakistan, but they
write it with the Arabic script.
And apparently, although I don't know much about the language
yet, the Punjabi in Pakistan is
slightly different, may have more Persian or Arabic loanwords.
I don't know.
Punjabi is a widely spoken language in Vancouver. So 150 million people,
lots of Punjabi speakers in Vancouver, and so we decided we would have
Punjabi at LingQ because someone translated the mini stories for us.
And so those are our conditions for introducing new languages.
By the way, there is another new language, surprise new language
coming at us here at LingQ mid-March, and you'll hear about that later on.
But for the time being, it's Punjabi.
Punjabi has a different writing system.
Punjabi has very few
cognates with languages that I know.
It's very, very unfamiliar, very different.
How do I deal with it?
Obviously, if I were to attempt to do other unfamiliar languages like Indonesian
or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Finnish that had the Latin script, that would
be easier if I attempted, say Georgian, which we have, Georgian or Armenian,
which are I believe Georgian's, no, maybe Georgian isn't an Indo-European
language, but I think Armenian is.
But in any case, they have their own writing system.
But again, the writing system looks like it's kind of in some way, similar in
some way parallel to the Greek alphabet, so that it would be less difficult.
But the Punjabi writing system is one of the many or several
writing systems in India.
It looks very daunting.
So let's see how I go at it.
So I look at my lesson page, my library here at LingQ, and of
course, it's pretty daunting.
I did take a stab at lesson one, so I have saved some words.
Not that I know or remember any of them, but let's start in the lesson two.
There it is.
As I say, pretty daunting.
I'm just gonna listen through this once.
It's of course meaningless to me, but I do get a sense of the dividing line between
words, and I'm getting used to hearing the intonation, the cadence of the language.
So all of this is gonna help me as I go forward.
So I've decided to switch to sentence view and to go and look up these words
that, as I say are meaningless to me.
That first little word here that's white is must be lesson two.
So it's a word that the system tells me I know, and in fact I
don't know it, but that's okay.
There you go.
Kahani is, must be lesson.
Notice the word Faruk, for whatever reason, the system, again, because
I didn't save it or didn't look it up, it assumes I know it.
In fact, I do know Faruk.
I couldn't spell it, but when I hear it, I know it's referring to Faruk.
This he shows up at the end of a lot of these sentences.
Notice I haven't looked up the sentence translation 'cause I'm not so concerned
about the sentence translation.
I know these stories from my mini stories in other languages.
I'm more interested in hearing the individual sounds of the words, but
I don't expect to remember them.
I'm just getting exposure.
Now I can go through the matching pairs, take a stab at them.
Again, it's so easy if you get it wrong, it changes to pink.
If you get it right, it changes to green.
It's just a way of getting additional exposure at this point.
I have no hope of getting this sentence right, but it is a form
of exposure and slowly, just as with the old man and his sons who
dug the mountain.
I will eventually get to the point where I can do this exercise, but
I don't mind getting it wrong.
I think it's important when we learn languages, especially at the beginning,
that we accept that everything is fuzzy and incomprehensible.
Not too good, but I'm looking forward to doing the next one already.
This is fun.
No idea, but it's fun and I'm gonna work through this one the
same way, and eventually this language will become clearer to me.
I just have to keep going.
So, as you see, there are a number of activities that I can
do on LingQ, which are low-anxiety.
I can listen, not understand.
It doesn't bother me.
I start to think that I may be recognize some sounds, maybe start to
identify some of those sounds with
some of the script.
So there's this gradual foolish old man who moved the mountain, uh, gradually,
slowly doing things that are low-anxiety, which are exposing me to the language.
And in time I will get a better sense of the language.
The language will become more familiar to me.
It's gonna be many months before I can actually listen to these
lessons away from the computer.
Big advantage, I'm doing the mini stories.
The many stories are familiar to me.
I always say in learning a language, try to connect the new with the familiar.
That's why I always use bilingual dictionaries.
The idea of a monolingual dictionary is weird to me.
How can you learn the words of a new language if you're using a dictionary,
which is also written in the new language?
You have to relate it to something that is familiar to me.
The mini stories are familiar.
I've used them for learning a number of languages, which then brings
me to when I started with Persian, say five years ago, which I started
together with Turkish and Arabic.
I was in the same situation as I am now with Punjabi. Strange writing system.
Sounds that just noise to me.
You know, I kind of said to myself, well, how will I ever learn this language?
I look up the, you know, explanation of the letters, but still, when
you see them in action in words, you still can't quite get it.
But it's just a matter of the foolish old man who moved the mountain.
You gotta stay with it.
So I just thought I would show you for reference what I do every
morning now, which is that I download audio files, radio programs
from Radio Fardo in Persian.
I import the sound files to LingQ, which converts them into text.
And then lo and behold, I open up these quite advanced, you know, news
broadcasts, serious material, adult material, B2 material.
And I know most of the words.
So somehow over this period, I went from everything being noise.
Everything being, you know, indecipherable script to something that I can read, that
I can listen to and I can understand a lot of, because I know a lot of the words.
So I'm just showing you that as an example.
Uh, an illustration of the fact that if we stay with it, we will eventually
overcome all these obstacles.
However, we can't go on the basis that everything is gonna be comprehensible.
Or Steven Krashen and others have suggested that we should only read material that
is n plus one level of difficulty.
In other words, it's 95% comprehensible vocabulary.
Well, that can't be because when we start at the beginning, we
have no comprehensible vocabulary.
So if the foolish old man and his sons and his grandchildren we're digging
them on with a shovel, we now have the ability, we have an excavator in terms
of the power of digital text looking words up in a dictionary, a lot of
other functionality, which enables us
To stay with material, which is essentially incomprehensible to us, but
we can gradually, gradually increase the level of comprehension that we have,
increase our vocabulary until we, at some point, depending on how much time
we spend, the level of difficulty, we can achieve our goal in that language.
But at the beginning, it's a steep hill.
However, it's a steep hill, but it's the most exciting part of
the discovery of the language.
We are learning about the history of a different
place, in this case of Punjab, which introduces us to India,
which introduces us to the cultures and the languages of India.
It's a whole sort of new journey of exploration.
It's exciting.
Later on, I'll reach that sort of stage,
the doldrums where it seems as if we never acquired all the words we need to
understand really meaningful material.
But in the early stage when we're dealing with incomprehensible material,
there's a number of actions we can take that will enable us to climb that first
steep yet exciting part of our journey.
So just wanted to show you that as an illustration of how I deal
with incomprehensible input.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.
