When I first studied Spanish, back in junior high, I hated it. I wasn't ready for Spanish yet. The problem was my attitude. One of the things I hated the most, was the large collection of irregular verbs. I went in with a defeatist attitude, thinking, "Why do I have to study a foreign language? This sucks! I suck at languages!" Self-fulfilling prophecy, meet self. I couldn't conjugate an irregular verb if my life depended on it. And I thought they were ugly!
Jump forward quite a few years to my college Spanish experience. My attitude was much different. Let me explain. When I was in high school, I didn't like higher education. I thought it was kind of pointless. When I became an adult, I took the military route instead of the academic route. I became Airman Basic Glowing Face Man, a USAF weather forecaster journeyman. And that's where I saw how wrong I had been about education. The difference that college paper makes was clear all around me, where I saw officers treated like gods while us enlisted grunts were treated like dirt. (To be an officer, you need a four-year degree. Doesn't really matter what it's in, you just need that piece of paper!)
So I started going to community college in my spare time. I was working 12-hour night shifts, coming home for a few hours sleep, then getting up to go to school full time. Suddenly I had a radically different attitude, and I saw those irregular verbs in a totally different light!
I approached that college Spanish class with the attitude that I was gonna own this thing. I still didn't care about Spanish or about languages-- yet. I just had the attitude, I'm winning this biatch. I waded into those irregular verbs roaring and flexing like a soldier from 300. And then I saw the truth about the irregular verb. The irregular verb wasn't my problem in Junior High Spanish, my attitude was my problem.
I discovered that there's a deeper logic in the irregular verbs. A verb is irregular for a reason. It's a trace of the thousands of years of evolution which went into making the language what it is. That irregular verb wasn't just made up by mean pedagogues hellbent on torturing middle school students. Within the irregular verbs in a language, there's logic and beauty.
Exactly what is an irregular verb? It's a verb which defies some artificial list of conjugation rules. That list of conjugation rules is not part of the language. People can speak their languages fluently without ever looking at a verb-ending chart or an irregular verbs list.
Conjugation tables and rules are an attempt to consciously understand something very deep and complicated-- a living, evolving, human language. Grammar in general, is just a model. Like physicists try to simplify the overwhelming complexity of the world using Newtonian Physics, like an organized street map is more useful for navigation than a satellite picture, grammar is just meant to give us a snapshot of the overall big picture of the language. Grammar was never meant to define the language. By its very nature, a model is not the same as the thing it models. Verb conjugation methods are just a model, and they don't actually capture the true language, which is much more complicated.
Even the relationship between a verb and its "forms" is a man-made construction. English has the words "go", "gone", and "went", and the reality is that they're separate words. In an attempt to tame the beast which is English, grammar treats these words as being closely related, but this is just as artificial as borders drawn on a world map.
By fortune, most verbs are regular: there are patterns, which we can learn, greatly simplifying the task of language learning. It doesn't have to be like this. A language could be designed with no pattern linking a sentence like "I smile" with a sentence like "I smiled". In other words, languages could exist with no regular verbs. Kind of makes you glad there are regular verbs at all, and puts irregular verbs a little more in perspective!
There is logic and pattern behind the irregular verbs, it's just that to understand it completely, would be too difficult for the conscious mind. The conscious mind, the mind which reads books about grammar and verbs and parts of speech, is relatively weak compared to the wild jungle of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is like a cutting edge supercomputer while the conscious mind is like an old, monochrome Apple IIe.
By changing my attitude and opening myself to the deeper beauty and logic of languages, I removed the resistance I had to verbs, and my subconscious mind kicked in. I read the conjugations of the Spanish irregular verbs, and they made no sense, but I told myself, I'm gonna learn this stuff and I'm gonna like it. And then I went to sleep, and while I slept my mind parsed all that irregularity, and when I woke up, I understood it all just a little better. In a way I cannot articulate or explain-- suddenly, the link between "ir" and "vamos" just made sense in a deeper way that defies clever charts or formulas or conjugation matrices.
FURTHER READING
The Japanese language has surprisingly few irregular verbs. Probably because Japanese is so inherently logical and full of patterns, more so than any other language I've seen. Read more in my article on Japanese Irregular Verbs.
Studying languages with the conscious mind is fine and good, but don't expect to learn them that way. The truth is, you can't even speak your native tongue with just your conscious mind. When you're learning a language, most the real work is done subconsciously. Fortunately there's a cutting edge way to optimize the process of feeding data to the subconscious mind. Read about this at my article, Sentence Mining, and start making some sentence flashcards.
After my experience in college, my dread of languages turned into love of languages. (Well, duh, why else would I be writing this blog?) Here's a list of Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language.
Jump forward quite a few years to my college Spanish experience. My attitude was much different. Let me explain. When I was in high school, I didn't like higher education. I thought it was kind of pointless. When I became an adult, I took the military route instead of the academic route. I became Airman Basic Glowing Face Man, a USAF weather forecaster journeyman. And that's where I saw how wrong I had been about education. The difference that college paper makes was clear all around me, where I saw officers treated like gods while us enlisted grunts were treated like dirt. (To be an officer, you need a four-year degree. Doesn't really matter what it's in, you just need that piece of paper!)
So I started going to community college in my spare time. I was working 12-hour night shifts, coming home for a few hours sleep, then getting up to go to school full time. Suddenly I had a radically different attitude, and I saw those irregular verbs in a totally different light!
I approached that college Spanish class with the attitude that I was gonna own this thing. I still didn't care about Spanish or about languages-- yet. I just had the attitude, I'm winning this biatch. I waded into those irregular verbs roaring and flexing like a soldier from 300. And then I saw the truth about the irregular verb. The irregular verb wasn't my problem in Junior High Spanish, my attitude was my problem.
I discovered that there's a deeper logic in the irregular verbs. A verb is irregular for a reason. It's a trace of the thousands of years of evolution which went into making the language what it is. That irregular verb wasn't just made up by mean pedagogues hellbent on torturing middle school students. Within the irregular verbs in a language, there's logic and beauty.
Exactly what is an irregular verb? It's a verb which defies some artificial list of conjugation rules. That list of conjugation rules is not part of the language. People can speak their languages fluently without ever looking at a verb-ending chart or an irregular verbs list.
Conjugation tables and rules are an attempt to consciously understand something very deep and complicated-- a living, evolving, human language. Grammar in general, is just a model. Like physicists try to simplify the overwhelming complexity of the world using Newtonian Physics, like an organized street map is more useful for navigation than a satellite picture, grammar is just meant to give us a snapshot of the overall big picture of the language. Grammar was never meant to define the language. By its very nature, a model is not the same as the thing it models. Verb conjugation methods are just a model, and they don't actually capture the true language, which is much more complicated.
Even the relationship between a verb and its "forms" is a man-made construction. English has the words "go", "gone", and "went", and the reality is that they're separate words. In an attempt to tame the beast which is English, grammar treats these words as being closely related, but this is just as artificial as borders drawn on a world map.
By fortune, most verbs are regular: there are patterns, which we can learn, greatly simplifying the task of language learning. It doesn't have to be like this. A language could be designed with no pattern linking a sentence like "I smile" with a sentence like "I smiled". In other words, languages could exist with no regular verbs. Kind of makes you glad there are regular verbs at all, and puts irregular verbs a little more in perspective!
There is logic and pattern behind the irregular verbs, it's just that to understand it completely, would be too difficult for the conscious mind. The conscious mind, the mind which reads books about grammar and verbs and parts of speech, is relatively weak compared to the wild jungle of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is like a cutting edge supercomputer while the conscious mind is like an old, monochrome Apple IIe.
By changing my attitude and opening myself to the deeper beauty and logic of languages, I removed the resistance I had to verbs, and my subconscious mind kicked in. I read the conjugations of the Spanish irregular verbs, and they made no sense, but I told myself, I'm gonna learn this stuff and I'm gonna like it. And then I went to sleep, and while I slept my mind parsed all that irregularity, and when I woke up, I understood it all just a little better. In a way I cannot articulate or explain-- suddenly, the link between "ir" and "vamos" just made sense in a deeper way that defies clever charts or formulas or conjugation matrices.
FURTHER READING
The Japanese language has surprisingly few irregular verbs. Probably because Japanese is so inherently logical and full of patterns, more so than any other language I've seen. Read more in my article on Japanese Irregular Verbs.
Studying languages with the conscious mind is fine and good, but don't expect to learn them that way. The truth is, you can't even speak your native tongue with just your conscious mind. When you're learning a language, most the real work is done subconsciously. Fortunately there's a cutting edge way to optimize the process of feeding data to the subconscious mind. Read about this at my article, Sentence Mining, and start making some sentence flashcards.
After my experience in college, my dread of languages turned into love of languages. (Well, duh, why else would I be writing this blog?) Here's a list of Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language.
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1 comments:
I went through similar evolution. My parents were German immigrants and I spoke only German from age 0 to 4. Then English. Then the parents forced me to German school. Then the priests forced me to study Latin. I live in Canada so the powers that be forced French on me too. Oh the pain.
Then when I studied formal languages and automata, something clicked.
Now I love to study the roots, the similarities, the differences, the history.
Fracht und (and) freight, is and ist. Went to Alsace to listen to the lovely mix. Went to Austria to listen to Alpendeutsch. "I' bin I', u' I' schi Voelkl!" Saw the Latin everywhere. Fantastic.
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