You don’t need to consciously calculate the trajectory and velocity of a ball in order to catch it. You just catch it, and your wonderful brain takes care of all the dirty calculations for you!
Language isn’t much different.
Not everyone can catch the ball the first time. It takes practice. And more practice. And more practice. But you condition yourself for it. After enough practice, you’re able to catch it.
You can run through the calculations before hand to try and prepare yourself for it, but nothing beats getting out there and doing it for yourself. It’s much better to analyze it after you’ve experienced it.
You need to realize that there is a natural syllabus that builds on itself, and we can use that to our advantage as language learners.
Take for example a class in which the target language is これは～です。 A terrible teacher might start explaining,
これ means ‘this’. は is a particle (now you might even be thinking, “What the hell is a ‘particle’?”) that marks これ as the topic. です expresses a state of being (Is this philosophy 101?!), similar to the English “to be”, although it’s not a verb in Japanese.
So what does a good teacher do? She shows you the language. You already know the nouns, now all you have to do is read her actions and listen to what she’s saying. Pick up the pattern. これはペンです。これは時計です。これは机です。これは？and she points at something on your desk, and you respond, ノートです。
The problem we have as adults learning a foreign language is that we’re trying to learn the foreign language as native adults speak it. We’re adults after all. We need to speak like adults, right?
Wrong. You’re a big baby! Stop trying to discuss the complicated calculus involved in timing the synaptic firings that lead to chemical messages being sent to muscle receptors to command them to intercept the increasingly large, round object on a specific trajectory with X velocity when you can’t even catch the ball yourself!
Take baby steps, go listen to the same thing over and over and over (the way a baby watches the same Sesame Street episode again and again and again), find the patterns, internalize them, accept them as they are, and build on it.
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Nice approach. I’m in my fifth month at Japanese School in Matsumoto, and started to hate the grammatical approach, with daily test, daily new grammar and Zero practice. I feel like I more studying for the school than for the life.
“I feel like I more studying for the school than for the life.”
Excellent comment! That’s exactly what Manfred Spitzer means when he talks about “school for life”. The point of learning is for utility, not for tests and analysis. (Unless you are producing thesis papers on linguistic theory)