Prejudice in language learning
Comments (0) There are many prejudices that burden language learners and range from broad generalizations about how hard it is to learn another language, to some specific misconception about an aspect of the language that is being learned. For this reason, children indeed do have an advantage in learning languages when compared to adults, since they accept things as they come without any false preconceptions of how things are supposed to be.
To me this happened often while I was learning English. For example, English inherited many words from Latin, which are also used in Serbian, my native language. However, they sometimes mean different things and are pronounced differently. This is perfectly normal, since each language took the original Latin words and molded them to fit the rules of the younger language.
The problems for me as a learner arose when I took English interpretations of Latin words as wrong, since they deviated from the way they are used in Serbian and other European languages I’ve been exposed to. “Americans are surely deaf to the way normal people speak and incapable of pronouncing words correctly,” was a pretty regular thought in my head at the time. “It’s not aluminum, it’s aluminium, you dumb Americans!”
Yeah…
Well, while I still think English is in many ways retarded and could be improved, it does me no good to be grumpy about the way it’s using words, no matter what their origin may have been. If anything, that approach only creates resentment, reduces the fun of learning, and slows down progress. Learning a language and being a language purist at the same time is simply a bad idea. Until you know enough of the language that you can effectively use it to discuss the most obscure nuances of its grammar, syntax, spelling, pronunciation, or whatever other grievances you may have, it’s best to just shut up and accept it the way it is used in your environment.
Sure, native speakers might use improper grammar, misuse common phrases, overuse slang, and so on, but in the end it’s their language, and they can do to it whatever they want. The point of a language is to communicate, and if most people around you are using the language in a certain way, even if it seems wrong in your head, it is still the best way to be understood.
I’m finding the same thing happening with people who are learning Japanese. After they get passed the “Japanese is hard/impossible” preconception and actually get to intermediate stage, they continue to complain about some parts of the language. Some complain that there are too many kanji which should be abolished to make the language easier to learn. Then again, others have invested great efforts to learn the kanji and are so much in love with them that they put kanji even when natives would just use kana instead. Yet others complain about overabundant usage of words imported from English and written in katakana.
The point is there are many things you might find strange, different, illogical, annoying, unreasonable, politically incorrect, or simply wrong about the language you’re studying, but let’s face the fact that you are just some foreigner learning a language you don’t know enough about to judge. Accept it as you find it, marvel its quirkiness and learn to use it just the way the natives are using it, even if at the moment it doesn’t make sense to you. Sometimes there just isn’t a reason why something is done in a certain way, except that someone once started doing it like that and others copied.
Once you become comfortable in the new language, you will develop your own isms and strange word usages that will make sense to you and be understandable by others. And who knows, maybe some of them will catch on and become a part of the language, if not in general population, then at least in your own community. Everything in its own time.
