By YUEN REN CHAO,

Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and

Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

 

The how of foreign language study

 

Coming now to some practical details of foreign language study, it is of prime importance for the teacher and student to realize that, since language is a set of habits, the acquiring of a new language consists essentially of acquiring a new set of habits, and for one who has already acquired a set of habits for his native language, it will be necessary to change many of these. Let us consider in turn the three constituent elements of language which a foreign language student has to deal with: (a) pronunciation, (b) grammar, and (c) vocabulary and idiom.

 

(a) Pronunciation is the most basic but also most difficult. It is the most basic because the very stuff of language is sound. If the sound is wrong, both the grammar and vocabulary may be wrong. A foreigner who cannot distinguish [i:] from [i] or final [s] from final [z] will not be able to distinguish the singular form basis [beisis] from its plural form bases [beisiiz], thus leading to grammatical confusion. He will also be unable to distinguish the latter from its homograph bases [beisiz], the plural of base [beis], thus leading to a confusion between different vocabulary items. It is a well-known fact in the psychology of language that a difference in sound which makes a difference in a language (i.e. a phonemic difference) will sound clearly different for the speaker of that language, but will be hard to perceive for the speaker of another language in which the audio-acoustically perceptible difference is hard to catch if it makes no phonemic difference. For example if a language, say Japanese, has only one kind of /i/, then the difference between seat and sit seems to be an extremely fine one. So is that between /e/ set and /ae/ sat for speakers of most languages of continental Europe. That this is purely a matter of habit and not a matter of actual difference in sound is seen in such cases where the actual difference in sound is a very gross one acoustically and physiologically and yet is very "hard to hear" if it makes no difference in the hearer's language. Thus, in a non-tonal language such as English, a word, say my, seems to have exactly "the same pronunciation", whether it is said with a low-dipping or a high falling pitch of the voice. No speaker of English will notice any difference until his attention is specially called to it, though to a Chinese ear one will be heard as the word ' to buy' and the other as the word 'to sell'. Moreover, the difference in tone is a difference in the frequency of the fundamental pitch, in other words, the gross difference in the sound waves which would be most obvious to the eye if exhibited on any kind of graph, be it a time-pressure graph or time-frequency graph, or what not. Sometimes a phonemic distinction exists between sounds in certain positions but is lost, and said to be "neutralized", in other positions, such as /s/ and /z/ in German, in which there is no final /z/. A German student of English should therefore learn to change his habit of unvoicing final consonants. He is quite capable of producing sounds such as b, d, v, z in other positions as in Bade and Wesen, but must acquire the habit of also making such sounds as in rib, bed, love, and is, which is contrary to his habits with sounds in German words. Again, with many Chinese learners of English, I can occur only before vowels, and r only after vowels. Thus, one lecturer, in trying to say Rice grows near the river, came out with Lice glows near the liver. The problem of pronunciation is thus not only concerned with the learning of unfamiliar sounds but also with the change of habits in making familiar sounds in unfamiliar surroundings.

 

One consoling fact about the learning of foreign sounds is the extremely small total number of phonemes one needs to learn in any given language. No language ic known to have an inventory of as many as one hundred phonemes. In some languages, there are as few as only about a dozen. Thus, Merry Christmas in Hawaiian comes out as Meli Kalikimaki, there being no /s/ in the language. Certain sounds, however, occur in most languages, such as k, t, p, n, and there is usually some low vowel of the [a]-type, some high vowels of the [i]-type and [u]-type, some mid vowels of the [e]- and/or [o]-type. Since any given language has only about a few dozen phonemes and about half of them have good enough near equivalents in the learner's own language, it remains to worry about the other half. Therefore, I always warn my students that the first task in beginning the study of the sounds of a foreign language is to pay special attention to "one half of a few dozen".

 

A corollary of the usual paucity of phonemic inventory in most languages is a corresponding distinctive importance in each phoneme. Since no language has as many as one hundred phonemes the failure to pronounce or distinguish a phoneme correctly would mean an error of more than i %. It may seem a reasonably good performance to have 75 % of the phonemes right and it should rate a grade of C. But if a learner does 75 % of his grammatical work right, the end result will be 75 % of 75 %, or only about 56% right, which should then rate as a failure. No effort should therefore be spared at the early stages to get the phonemic system right and the aim should be, not 80% or 90%, but 100%. To be sure, individuals differ greatly in their ability to imitate sounds and notice differences. But the aim of a 100% performance in acquiring the phonemics of a foreign language is not necessarily the same as trying to acquire a completely native like accent. If one can learn to talk like a native, well and good, but the essential thing is to be able to make all the distinctions that make a difference. In this respect Europeans are the best students of languages. They usually have all the necessary distinctions under control, even though they may make each sound slightly off, but not enough to be confused with the next near phoneme. They articulate so well that they are often said to speak better English than Englishmen or Americans. This however has more to do than their use of a more formal style of speech under circumstances where a native speaker of English would use a more casual style, including pronunciation. So far as minimum and sufficient conditions are concerned, my formula for students is: "Make different things different and same things the same."

 

(b) Grammar in foreign language study operates also in a multiplicative manner and should therefore be put on a firm basis in the early stages, from a few weeks to a year, depending upon the language and the intensity of the programme. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that to understand a point of grammar is not the same thing as to have a practical knowledge of it. It is easy enough to understand that he, she, and it are the masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively, of the third person singular pronoun and that they and them are plural forms for all genders. But it takes a Chinese student of English two, three, or five years, or forever, to learn to say them in referring to inanimate objects. Instead, he will keep saying things like: These oranges have spoiled, throw it away! or These shoes are all right, I'll wear it now. He could pass a theoretical test any time with a perfect score, but will keep using it for a plurality of things because in Chinese one says ta instead of the plural form tamen when referring to things (cf. similar use of TO in Greek). It is therefore one thing to understand these points of grammar but quite another to be able to apply it - I mean them! I often use the analogy of language learning and photography. Before taking a photograph the view has to be brought into the right frame; the distance focused and the exposure adjusted. This is the theoretical part of language study, which at an early stage may even be done more efficiently in the student's native language than in the language being learned. But when the point is understood, the task of learning is only begun and not, as is the practice with some teachers and students, to be considered done. The main task of learning still consists of repeated practice with the language itself. This, then, is the exposure part of my photographic simile. Having understood that they and them are pronouns for things as well as persons, the student must practice with many spoiled oranges and throw them away, many pairs of shoes and wear them now, and many other things and treat them as they should be treated, grammatically. To stop with a purely theoretical understanding of the point is like having the camera ready for everything, including the setting for the exposure, without actually releasing the shutter.

 

(c) The learning of the vocabulary and idioms of a foreign language is both easier and more difficult than the learning of its pronunciation and grammar. It is easier because the requirement for good performance is not so critical. If a word is said or understood in the wrong sense it usually affects only the sentences in which it may occur instead of affecting thousands or, in the case of a frequent phoneme, millions of instances in the life of the language to be used. In other words, the effect of vocabulary is additive and not multiplicative. It is more difficult because one never graduates, as one does with the learning of the pronunciation and grammar of a language. Not only is there an enormous amount of relatively unrelated items to be added one after another but each item, in order to be properly learned, has to be taken in context, since meaning depends very much upon the context of use, as we have seen (chapter 5), and cannot be learned from the necessarily sketchy and summary treatment in dictionaries. It is often objected that learning the meaning of words in context would involve the hearing or reading of tens or even hundreds of thousands of phrases or sentences instead of a few thousand words to be learned. The answer is that it simply cannot be helped. Words are not really learned except in this way. This is the way children learn to talk and grown-ups learn to read and write. The most a direct translation from a good bilingual dictionary can do is to give a good start, the rest of the learning comes only from use.

 

The so-called language laboratories which have come into general use in language schools and language departments have given a great practical impetus to some of the principles of language learning outlined above. If a teacher has only so many class hours a week to explain the material clearly, he will not have enough time to let the students practice and correct them when necessary. I was therefore not being quite fair to my German professor of second year German, who had only two hours a week in which to wade through a novel and a play in one semester. With the aid of recordings on discs and tapes, the actual contact hours are not only greatly increased but one also achieves what we called time uncoupling between teacher and student, which is a great practical advantage. The use of recordings is, to be sure, as old as "His Master's Voice". But recent refinements in mechanical aids have moved in the direction of automation of not only the exposure part of language learning, such as spaced recordings for the student's repetition, but also some of the focusing part, as in the teaching machines in which a student's answer is matched and "corrected" by the model. The chief advantage however is in the greatly increased amount of contact hours approaching, though not nearly reaching, those of a child's contact hours with the language. Parents and teachers like to feel that they have done a great deal in teaching children how to talk properly, but long before they do much direct teaching in the didactic sense, children have acquired through exposure the basic and most difficult elements of the language, namely the phonemic and grammatical structure, subjects which few parents or even teachers know how to teach.