In the following series of 12 blogs, I am going to discuss Language and how we can best learn a language. Initially, I will be looking at language itself and the learning process, and I will argue that language is speaking. This will be followed by showing how this process has guided the creation of inlingua books and other inlingua language learning material.

A further examination of inlingua’s online learning solutions will follow. I will illustrate how inlingua’s online language programs can be used as an integral part of blended learning or other customized learning schemes and how they can enhance the learning process.

What is Language – and How do you Begin to Learn a Language?

Language is speaking! This may seem a bit of a rash statement to begin with, but I would like to point out here that I am not writing about computer language or how artificial intelligence conveys information, just simply human communication in its raw form.

Clearly, there must be the process of listening included here, but what we are listening to is essentially the spoken word. I agree that human communication is, indeed, far more complex: requiring the ability to respond to body language and may include other senses in the observation of facial expressions and so forth. However, what can be best learned in a language learning classroom (live or virtual) must start with beginning to speak the language (see Further discussions below).

This may be obvious, but it seems to have been ignored, for the most part, in formal education for the last hundred and twenty years or more (see the next paragraph). Millions of us have been subjected to being forced to conjugate grammar tenses in another language in a language class full of disinterested pupils and expected to be able to magically speak the language. It just doesn’t work like that! You need to learn to speak the language first.

The Direct Method of language learning, on which the inlingua method is based, focuses primarily on speaking. It was first presented to the world as early as 1880 by the French linguist Gouin and later developed by Paul Passy and others at the end of the nineteenth century. More details of the Direct Method can be found here. The inlingua method has grown since our inauguration in 1968 and many more recent developments in language learning have been integrated. This will be discussed in a later blog post.

Starting to Learn a Language

When we start learning languages, most of us will begin by translating the word into our native tongue to extract some meaning from the new utterance.

This is rather like adding synonyms to what you already know in your own language. At a certain point, there is a breakthrough where new language seems to create a separate set of language labels for the concepts and sounds being learned and the new language can be used without continual reference to the mother tongue. But you have to begin by speaking it…

Some research has been done from the physiological point of view. Though it is rather inconclusive.

Reading and Writing

Right, now what about reading and writing then? Is that not also language? Well, for me, no. Writing is a set of symbols we use to illustrate the utterances we produce. This may not be so in some languages where pictorial images are used to convey a concept and the relative sound is inferred, but, at least in most European languages, this seems to be the case.  [See the Further discussions section at the end of this blog for additional discussions on this specific topic.]

Reading then, for the purposes of this discussion, is the interpretation of those symbols. Can we not learn languages simply by reading then? Initially, this is very difficult. Even a language that is more or less phonetically written, like Italian, takes a long time to learn for the vast majority of people if it is not heard and used in context. Here is a discussion from the Messofanti Guild you may find interesting. Some polyglots disagree. I think these are very special cases and in the small minority, however.

Activating a New Language by Speaking

It seems that, unless the language is activated by speaking, the words stay on your internal temporary folder until deleted a short time afterwards. I am writing here about the early stages of learning. Perhaps the reading part of your brain forms some sort of synapsis with the speaking part of your brain in time. It is true that you can often understand written words that you never use in the spoken form, but this is at a more advanced stage. See the video from Britannica.com for a physiological position.

Some people only ever need to write a language and manage quite well until you try to communicate orally with them. They have learned the symbols, but not the sounds. It’s a bit like being able to read music but not being able to play an instrument. This is not very useful for language training.

In Conclusion

The point I am trying to make here though is, speaking is the main essential ingredient and we need to start there. Once a word or phrase has been produced correctly in the spoken form, then it is certainly of no disadvantage that the adult learner is exposed to the written form as soon as possible. To do it the other way around is really ‘putting the cart before the horse’ for the beginner. When all is said and done, language is speaking!

Further Discussions and Reading

• This evidence of  why learning a language should begin with speaking is discussed in more detail here and here.
• A discussion about reading as a basis for learning languages.
• You may be also interested in the discussion from the Oxford English Dictionary about emojis and the role they play in language.
• Broadly, you may argue, of course, that the term ‘language’ is used to cover all forms of communication as presented on the Natural Language Processing website.

Next …

In the next blog. I will be looking at how languages are learned in a bit more detail and how the inlingua method of language teaching has been developed to facilitate rapid and thorough language learning.

I will deal with the discussion regarding grammar in the third blog in this series: Grammar versus lexis. I will make a comparison with other approaches and methods.

Peter Lambie, Method and Materials Consultant, inlingua International.