The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

A new sort of work has to be performed, and instead of acquiring the new habit or habits which will perform it we select habits already formed and strive to make them do the new work. Let us take a few examples in order to realize what this means. Suppose we wish to make Chinese characters with a native writing-brush. This is a new sort of work; in order to do it successfully we must hold the brush vertically in a way we have never held a brush before; we must form a new brush-holding and brush-using habit. But the average European adult will strive to use the brush and to trace the characters by holding the brush as he holds a pen; he will be using the known pen-holding habit instead of acquiring the unknown habit of holding a writing-brush.

Or we wish to learn to pronounce the vowel generally represented in French by é. This will require a muscular habit unknown to the average Englishman. What does he do? He seeks immediately to replace the required new effort by a known effort—and replaces the French é by the English ay. If this is too unsatisfactory he will strive to modify his ay until it seems to resemble sufficiently the required sound. Similarly, he will substitute for French au, u, or on, English o (as in ‘boat’), ew (as in ‘new’), and ong.

Or the English adult student may wish to learn to use French word-groups or sentences, in which case we shall almost invariably find that he only learns to use those which correspond most nearly to English constructions; he prefers to adapt his known syntax-habits rather than form new ones.

Now children have not this same reluctance to form new habits, either because their minds are more plastic, i.e. they are so used to forming new habits that a few more do not incommode them, or because they are not clever or intelligent enough to make the necessary selection from their stock of acquired habits.

Language-learning is essentially a habit-forming process, a process during which we must acquire new habits. It is, then, one of the cases where we cannot always proceed from the known to the unknown in the more obvious sense of the term; we must often consent to plunge (or be plunged) straight into the unknown.

The most important thing we have to do, then, is to train the student to form new habits and to cause him to refrain from adapting his old ones in cases where we know that such adaptation will be fruitless. We make this last qualification advisedly, because there are certain cases where successful adaptation is possible. A foreign language is not wholly different from our own tongue, and where identity exists obviously no new habit is required. (We must, however, see that the student selects the right previously acquired habit, that is to say, the nearest native equivalent.)

The capacity of forming new habits of observation, articulation, inflexion, compounding, or expression for every new language is one of our spontaneous capacities, and the student must when necessary be taught to form such new habits.

Another very characteristic feature of the natural process is unconscious assimilation; we learn without knowing that we are learning. What we therefore have to do is to train ourselves (or our students) consciously to learn unconsciously; we must set out deliberately to inhibit our capacities for focusing or concentrating our attention on the language-material itself. Attention must be given to what we want to say and not to the way we say it.

How shall we do it?

In the first place we must set out to sharpen our powers of receiving and retaining knowledge communicated to us orally. This may be difficult; we have become so accustomed to acquiring information from the written word via the eyes that we feel very bewildered and incapable when deprived of this medium. We hear a foreign word or sentence, and this auditory impression is such a rapid and transitory one that we feel that we cannot possibly retain it in our memory; we feel that we require at least one good look at the word so that we may hereafter reproduce in our imagination the written form. But we must resist this tendency; we must discipline ourselves to forgo this artificial aid to memory, for ear-memory cannot be cultivated while we are visualizing. If we truly desire to tap the natural language-learning energies we must obey nature; we must train and drill our ears to do the work for which they were intended. If we make up our minds to train our ears to be efficient instruments we can do so: a little patience, a little practice, and we shall surely regain the power that we had allowed to lapse.