Still Doing Duolingo… and ruminations on context, reading, translating and speaking languages

I’m still doing Duolingo - partly out of stubbornness, because I want to maintain my streak & hit a year - I’m on 262 days now, so I have a bit to go, but it is also a good reminder to keep studying.

However, unless I forget to do my lesson and notice just before midnight*, I don’t just do the straight lessons.  I’ll make sure that I read all the bits out loud for practice speaking, and often, I will add onto the sentences, alter them, or reply to them.  

I noticed quite a while ago that speaking a language seems to use a different part of my brain than just reading/translating it does.  The main reason that I noticed this was that I would quite happily befollowing along in the lesson, both last semester and this, and know all of the words and grammar that was needed when the sensei called on another student, but then when I was called on to speak, my brain would go completely blank, and the words weren’t there.

Initially, I assumed it was some sort performance issue - because now I was the one doing it & everyone was watching, and psyching myself out, but it was too regular and too large and I could see it happen to other people too, and if I knew them well enough to discuss it with them, they too would agree that they knew everything until they had to speak it.***

So I formed a hypothesis****, that we use a different part of our brains/different look up paths, to speak language than we do for language related items, such as vocab or declension patterns, or grammar rules - that the other parts of language are more like trivia and just looking things up from storage, and that speaking a language uses different processes/processing power.

And that is virtually impossible to test in a home setting of course, although it did seem to fit the observable facts.  And our brains get an awful lot more practice at just looking up useful facts or even trivia in their storage than they do at speaking second and third languages, so they are likely to be much better at the vocab storage or the writing or the “what is this pattern?” Questions than having to integrate all of those things together on the fly, handle pronunciation which can be vastly different from our first language, and also choose the content of our speech (if free form, rather than just answering a question in a certain pattern in class) - not to mention that it is evident, if you stop to examine your speech in your own first language, that our brains hold a “buffer”# ^ of words ahead of where we are in the sentence, so it has to fill and load that buffer too so that we can speak at a natural pace, confidently without hesitations as we fish for the next phrase or sentence.

However, what I can do from home is google and see if anyone else has wondered about that & then studied it and published… And I found quite a few references about us using a different part of our brain or a different method of processing when speaking, versus reading/translating language.

So, this is one of the reasons why I modify the lessons in Duolingo - if they ask a question, I will answer it.  If not, I will change the sentence or add to it - one of the sentences in today’s lesson was “彼女は、本を読みません。” After my initial flippant response (in english) of “Well, we can’t be friends then”, I modified the sentence to be “彼女は、本を読みません が、わたしは、本をたくさん読みます。” - out loud of course, to improve this speaking part of the brain’s muscles.  Then I did other changes, like flipping it to be disliking and liking reading books (with nominalising the reading books phrase too), and doing that as dislike/like pattern, and as dislike & dislike+negative pattern, and like & like+negative to practice negatives etc. And to have fun with plain forms and stems, I can do the whole thing in plain form anyway, or go into the ~んです pattern on top of these other additions, or say that she does not read books, but I am currently reading a book, and so on.

[Side note - I really need to do a post about agglutinative languages, helper verbs/auxiliary verbs, that japanese adverbs aren’t really adverbs (I mean, they are, but they’re like superadverbs compared to english adverbs which can only modify verbs - adverb isn’t really a good term for them, they’re word enhancers/modifiers, much more powerful a category), and about bolting pieces of a language together and that if things were taught like that, it might be easier to see the patterns.  It’s possible that is actually on my “three steps forwards” post, which I think is still in draft form, because I got interrupted and there was a lot to write^^, but I have still more to add to that now than I did when I started writing it… which is typical, but also a sign of progress. Sorry, thinking about plain forms and negatives reminded me about that.]

So in short, you can make Duolingo lessons more useful, even if you may have grown beyond that lesson level, and they are useful revision (I apparently had forgotten several vocab words from chapter six that came up in the “hobby 1” or “hobby 2” module today, but remembered them once I saw them and fished for them for a bit, so now they are refreshed and firmer in my memory.

And if you go back to their annoying stories after doing Elementary 2 for a while, all the annoying stupid new words that didn’t make sense and seemed like an entire third language, now make total sense because they are using plain form and various grammar constructs that we had never met at the time they suggested it was an appropriate time to start the stories (you’ve barely learned hiragana when they drop you into stories and don’t explain what plain form is or anything - so you have to learn all those words as exceptions without any pattern.  It’s horrible). So it’s worth doing the stories now too, because we’re at a level where we can follow them, both vocab and grammar patterns.

*  I can now do “Hiragana 1”, the first lesson, in less than a minute, which is lucky, because last week, I realised at 11:59 pm that I hadn’t done my lesson for the day… 😱 That’s also a sign of progress, because it used to take me a lot longer than that when I was new** to the language.

** I originally ended this sentence with “when I was new” & then decided to add “to the language” for clarity, since, given my age, I haven’t been new for a long time.  Definitely not under warranty still ;).  But it is interesting which bits of sentences or phrases you can drop in which language and still have it make sense and be acceptable or even good grammar.  “When I was new” would have been a perfectly comprehensible way to end the sentence and have it understood.  We do have context, and even high context, in English, we just don’t tend to notice it because we have been bathed in it our whole lives, so it seems natural, not something we have to work at.

*** This is definitely a footnote because this is jumping ahead to my main point, but it just occurred to me that I could actually write it out and then read the writing out loud and it would bypass this speech/different part of brain issue.  Of course, that wouldn’t help train the part of the brain that is struggling to do direct speech and which seems to get the least practice out of all the skills involved in using and being fluent/competent, whatever you want to call it, in a language. But in an emergency, if I were struggling to speak, I could write it out, accessing the pool of words and different look up patterns, and then either hand over the note or read it out loud.  I wonder if that would help people learning to speak again after strokes, where part of the vocabulary seems cut off?

**** because I’m the sort of person who not only does that, but labels it that :D 🔬🧑‍🔬

# I say it is evident, because usually in English, I have a good idea of what I want to say, and sometimes part way through the sentence, I will realise that a word is missing from the sentence and that I have forgotten it, and I have to keep talking, approaching the gap & desperately hoping that my brain will grab the word again and wrangle it back into place, or go find a substitute word ## before I get there.

## and that if it does, I will accept the substitute word instead of using it, and saying that's not quite right, I want a word that means x, and derailing the whole conversation while I try to find that one perfect word that I wanted to say, which probably wasn’t all tht different in feel to the alternate word my mind grabbed.

^ The buffer may actually be part of the problem, at least with languages where the sentece word order is very different - our brains are probably working by forming the sentenc ein english, then translating it literally into (in this case) Japanese & then looking at the new japanese sentence and going “that’s not right, we need to move this around, and this, and this bit goes at the end…” which means tht we start off by filling our buffer with the japanese words in the english sentence order, and then have to dump them all out and reload them in the right order, which totally does not help this speech issue.  

If you do that when writing, no one sees that time delay, or the moving around process, they just get the finished product.  I do it a fair bit when I’m answering a question on duolingo where you tap the japense words to form the translation, I’ll change my mind and decide that I need to move item x to the front and put a wa after it as a topic marker, and then have the location of the object afterwards, or something similar.  Not a problem in that context.  In speech, you’ve already gone byond there and screwed up, so perhaps part of the problem is that your brain knows that it is higher stakes, because you cannot adjust on the fly like that when speaking…

^^ because, obviously, I never have a lot to write on these language posts… 🙄🤦 :D  This one started off as a simple comment about enhancing Duolingo lessons to be more useful and get to practice other parts of language-using instead of just reading translation. And I’m in my third footnote system…  I usually start the second footnote system when I would have to go to 5 asterisks, because it is too clunky to type.  Today, I needed two footnotes from the same piece of text, so shifted to a third system… Then I started thinking about which bits of a sentence you can drop in english and context/high context, and then I digressed still further from there…