Fopinions February: Language learning joys and hardships

[extrapenguin]

Today's Fopinions February is for sewn, on the joys and hardships of learning languages. Icon meme will happen tomorrow.

(Despite the forethought, I don't think I really have much to say about language learning beyond the resources pile I gathered for Chinese. This is misc blather.)

Joys and hardships are really two different things, I think – so I shall start with the hardships. The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation. The more one wants to learn, the more appealing it is, so the easier it becomes, and vice versa. The greatest hardship of mine in language-learning has been having to learn Swedish. It's mandatory for all Finns, despite only being spoken by a small and highly regional minority in Finland; I have never in my life lived anywhere it'd be useful, or where signs would be given in Swedish as well as Finnish. (It also ranks that the Swedish-speaking minority is much better-off on average than the Finns; that the Swedish is a remnant of quasicolonial overlords, just like Russian might've been, but no-one objects to Swedish like they object to Russian; and that it is very hard to study any of Finland's indigenous Saami languages in not-Northern Finland.) Having to sit through two+ hours a week of something one knows one will never use (oh, and we're also taught a BS mixture of Rikssvenska and Finländssvenska, so it's not like we can use it to properly communicate with anyone...) and listen to the lies of "oh of course you will use it! it's Super Useful!!!" was very goddamn annoying. Nevertheless, it was easy, because I already spoke English at a high enough level to be useful in "cheating", and had studied French, which was also a source of loanwords. I merely had zero motivation, so studying the language was a hardship.

Other candidates for hardships include my not yet figuring out how to install a Chinese input method on top of my Finnish keyboard layout in Linux. Also the Russian genetive plural, but that I could've solved had I been able to throw a bit more time into the language.

With the grumpy grumpness out of the way, let me talk about the joys! For me, the greatest joy is the grammar figuring out how something works, and also the "why" of it! I enjoy noticing little things and figuring out the grammar of how they work, such as e.g. the Guardian subs translating Ye Zun's 问得好！ as "Good question!" and noticing that this uses 得 and the literal translation would be more along the lines of "asked well". My deepest joy is the joy of understanding; figuring out grammar is but one way of making the unknown known.

On a deeper level, there's also noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently – I fairly often get blocked when writing English because I want to use a very specific Finnish word for which there is no real translation. I love the new approach to thinking about things, and the joy of understanding from that.

As for language study, well. 业精于勤。 Oh, and the ability to grasp stuff written in more languages is neat. As would be the ability to tell people they mistagged their fic's language using their native tongue.

Comments

[sewn]

This was interesting to read, thank you.

The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation.

Exactly. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people talk about languages as "easy" or "difficult"; Finnish is a pretty good example of that. It's not a difficult language -- it's that for a lot of non-native speakers who find themselves having to learn it, it happens in an environment where they don't necessarily need to know it in everyday interaction (expats, exchange students, and other groups who mainly work and study in institutions where English is the norm). So when your practical investment in learning a language is limited to "it would be nice to understand what people are saying on the street sometimes" -- of course it's difficult.

figuring out grammar is but one way of making the unknown known
&
different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently

This such a great, poetic way to put it. <3 Do you have any interest in cognitive linguistics? This is pretty much the founding thought the field is built on.

And here's my hot take: a language consists of nothing else but grammars (sic). ;)

[extrapenguin]

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people talk about languages as "easy" or "difficult";
OH and the rankings are so very often done with a monoglot English-speaker in mind! So no, Estonian would not be a hard language for me, a Finn, to learn, even if a monoglot English-speaker would struggle more.

Good point about the practical investment aspect. English is easier to learn in large part because of the stranglehold anglophone media has on global culture – we all get exposed to it a lot all the time.

I've mostly poked around the whole historic/reconstructive linguistics area, since I've mainly been interested in stuff for conlanging purposes + in Uralic languages. I take it cognitive linguistics is a bit further from the chronology and a bit further into psychology?

[sewn]

Cognitive linguistics does incorporate some concepts from psychology, but mainly from the field of cognitive science (which in itself is an interdisciplinary field that draws from psychology, neuroscience, comp sci etc.). I would characterise it as the dominant underlying theoretical framework of linguistics as they are taught in the Finnish academia, although historical linguistics have a strong presence as well, mainly associated with the Fenno-Ugric/Uralic studies (QED!).

To generalise, cognitive linguistics views language as a function of a person's cognition -- not something reflecting our thought, but the thought itself. I've found studying language through this lens incredibly satisfying. If you're at all interested in it, there's a ton of literature out there. -- Not to push unwanted recs on you, I just thought to ask. :D

[extrapenguin]

Ooh, so people think via language, instead of dressing their thoughts into language? Did I get it right? As a bilingual, I shall now toss awake at night, trying to figure out whether this actually is true for me, and be consumed by doubts.

I have taken zero linguistics courses ever in my life; all my knowledge is from the internet. Do other places teach linguistics differently?

[sewn]

More or less! I guess I would formulate it: people think as language. Having a fluency in a language opens up new ways of conceptualizing (not just verbalizing) the physical and mental experience you have of the world.

Linguistics as a discipline is pretty broad these days, yeah. It doesn't divide into specialized fields or separate schools of thought neatly, either. My knowledge is mainly of fennistics, and I've only quite recently realized how different the Finnish departments around the country are. I've been taught in a highly theory-oriented environment; some departments are more practically-oriented, or focused on "traditional" (from my pov) linguistic analysis. (There has, historically, been a lot of... I don't want to say animosity, but there are definitely tensions between departments.)

Fennistics divides into specialized fields such as variation studies (study of dialects and idolects, mostly), conversation studies, comparative linguistics, onomastics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and interactional linguistics... Something like kielenhuolto (which has no direct equivalent in English! but overlaps with areas such as language planning, language policy-making and language standardization) is also a field of its own, but obviously it isn't an academic discipline as such. All of these fields interact with each other, and other disciplines; in practice, a lot of the linguistic work that is done defies neat categorization. And this is just in Finland; the international differences between universities can be huge. As much as American scholars have contributed to "our" academic tradition, many of the US schools come off as rather old-fashioned and rigid in their thinking when compared to fennistics. Again, I'm biased, but frankly reading some of their stuff is just funny.

Uhhh apologies for these long comments. I could blather on about this a lot. The point is: different places do teach different kinds of linguistics; and so do different individuals; humanities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[extrapenguin]

I guess I would formulate it: people think as language. Having a fluency in a language opens up new ways of conceptualizing (not just verbalizing) the physical and mental experience you have of the world.
Nodnod! This definitely sounds like reality. (And to take it further, I think learning about stuff like maths and music and art etc also opens up new ways of conceptualizing the world.)

Huh, I didn't realize that kielenhuolto didn't exist in English! This is interesting. It's also interesting to see how humanities divides into things based on ... approach, I guess, when my field divides into subfields based on what we're studying.

As much as American scholars have contributed to "our" academic tradition, many of the US schools come off as rather old-fashioned and rigid in their thinking when compared to fennistics. Again, I'm biased, but frankly reading some of their stuff is just funny.
Huh, this is interesting! Has the US suffered from having a critical mass of people so that the subfields could segregate completely, or was there something else going on?

Also, no need to apologize; this is one of the things I'm a sort-of hobbyist in, and I always like learning new things!

[sewn]

Kielenhuolto is often translated as language planning (kielensuunnittelu, which is an overlapping concept, but not quite the same), but it's essentially a Nordic concept. I quite like that this word is in itself an example of the conceptual differences languages create. :) The verb huoltaa is after all very different from suunnitella or ohjailla. A similar ethos exists all around the world, but it hasn't been crystalized into a government-funded program that cares for a language, or does language maintenance.

As far as I understand, the segregation of fields is exactly what has contributed to the occasional, um, humour value US scholars' work holds for me. Obviously there are many departments which do work that I tend to think of as "European-style" -- interdisciplinary and porous. However, there are pockets who are still affected by the legacy of Noam Chomsky. His work was instrumental in the historical development of modern linguistics, but he unfortunately popularized the idea of universal grammar (the theory that humans are born with an innate knowledge of grammar), which is obviously just... not true. It's frustrating (and funny) reading literature that begins with an apologetic critique of Chomsky. It's something I'd never considered was needed.

[extrapenguin]

I didn't know kielenhuolto didn't exist outside the Nordics! TIL.

Egads, Chomsky. I'm not even really a linguist proper, but ... no. One would've thought that grammar not being universal* would have been obvious, but apparently not!

* Should we ever discover aliens, no doubt the grammar of their language(s), should they have something that we recognize as a language, would be utterly alien to us, but even human languages have considerable variation.