I wanted to start a discussion and hopefully learn from all of you how to approach learning languages without many (any) study materials available.
To set the scene - I am studying Tagalog at the moment and there is sooooooo little content in that language at upper beginner / lower intermediate level! All that exists is either extremely basic beginner stuff (where most of the content is in English) or native level material with a lot of slang (think funny comedian stuff). There is of course news and official TV programs, but thatâs again, just a niche that is at the upper levels of learning.
Generalising for other âsmallâ languages, there is just not enough comprehensible input at (lower) intermediate level. No audio books, no subtitles, no comics, no thriving online communities⊠You know what I mean, right?
So the question is - how to approach learning such languages? Is it more about creating your own content (in which case what are the common tools)? Or the only (obvious) way is to learn directly from a native speaker through a large volume of interaction (just like children learn)?
Please share your views and ideas! There are no wrong ways of doing it, just many tools in the toolbox that can be mastered and used when appropriate.
I think there is a beautiful intersection between field linguistics and language learning when it comes to underresearched, underdocumented, underinstitutionalised languages.
Some linguists (myself and my supervisor included) use the so-called Monolingual Method to document indigenous languages for which there are no previous materials, as we are the first ones to create materials to start with.
Basically you use the language to learn the language. In my experience this enhances the learning process itself. Iâve learned indigenous languages that are typologically very distant from my native language way faster and more efficiently than I have learnt languages with the best materials, such as German for which pedagogical materials are based on the oldest and most robust research tradition on second language teaching worldwide.
I have had a bit of a struggle with finding materials for learning Kazakh, I have been using mainly news sites to get authentic content to study. Also check out these websites for lots of short transcribed texts in many languages - https://langmedia.fivecolleges.edu/ and https://gloss.dliflc.edu/ . I believe both sites have texts in Tagalog.
Also I started looking for Kazakh learning materials written in Russian, and it seems like there is more available there. You might be able to do the same for Tagalog.
I love the âusing the language to learn the languageâ idea. I have researched a bit about the TPR (Total Physical Response) method in the past and even tried it out on my non-Russian-speaking son. Works wonders, but⊠it puts most of the heavy lifting on a teacher. Basically, the effectiveness of the method is proportionate to how good the teacher is. What is interesting about the Monolingual Method you mentioned, is that (it sounds like) itâs up to the student to direct the learning.
Are there any resources on the method itself you can recommend? I have heard some anecdotal accounts on how a method like that would work, but never came across anything that describes it reasonably well.
Thanks for the links, @Ewan! Gloss looks promising!
Agree with you that getting into authentic native content ASAP is the way to go, but not for everyone - super high risk of overwhelm, burnout, etc⊠I have read about people that can somehow deal with that sort of âmass language overloadâ (e.g. Listening-Reading method), but I would lose my marbles very fast
Yeah thatâs true, the good thing with these texts is that they are very short, good for listening many times over. Often I only I understood only a few words on the first reading but read and listened many times until I almost knew them by heart. If they were any longer than a few minutes I would get discouraged easily though
The Monolingual Method is attributed to Ken Pike who was an amazing polyglot and even better linguist. Of course, this is something that other scholars have done before, whether in Ancient Sulawesi or Ancient Greece. More importantly, this is a language-learning strategy that indigenous people themselves just naturally do, as documented by Sorensen (1967) for the Amazonian Vaupes, where your average person speaks 8-9 languages because of social practices surrounding communication with the outgroup. It has been noted in many parts of the world (PNG, my region in Southwestern China, etc).
There is a documentary linguist in the USA, Dan Everett, who famously documented the Piraha language monolingually. He is very adamant about the beauty and usefulness of the Monolingual Method, and he does demos on how he does it as you can see in this free Youtube video:
I have a project of systematising this and writing a book on it. For now I am only in the planning phase. Will hopefully deliver a set of workshops on this at the Australian National University next year.
I learned Hungarian by immersion, talking with many people and later on reading books (without understanding much in the beginning). So Iâm convinced it works. The thing you might do is asking native speakers something, maybe the same question for several persons, and see their different answers. And of course try to react.
Of course, everything depends on personality, too. I love collecting things, and the fewer material there is out there the more valuable each little piece gets. I think it would increase my motivation. For Hungarian of course, it was the opposite, I had more input than I felt I could cope with.
A friend of mine learned German just by watching series. She looked up a few words she thought she had understood (without subtitles!), and from episode to episode she got better in understanding the content. She was very enthusiastic about this series, and I think this is an important factor. I havenât tried this method yet, but it does work for her, her German is quite impressive.
My biggest takeaway from this discussion so far and the most important difference with what I am doing now is the required mindset change. To successfully learn (or acquire in this case is more appropriate?) a language with limited / non-existing resources needs a mindset of discovery, not consumerism. Looking back at how I studied languages so far, I expected it to be delivered to me all nicely packed in an appetising package. But now I see so much appeal in discovering my new language bit by bit, slowly collecting the pieces and combining them into small islands of fluency (not my term, I believe I heard it first from Chris Lonsdale), then connecting these islands with bridges into a networkâŠ
This brings me to another thought that there must be way to go through this process in an efficient way. Granted that some âwondering aroundâ is part of the discovery, but I am sure an experienced âexplorerâ would know what pieces to collect first and how to make the islands bigger and closer to each other⊠What I understood from this video is that itâs important to learn / identify the language building tools (questions, pronouns, etc.) aiming at helping to build the rest of the language as early as possible.
Does anyone have any other examples of activities, tools, hacks, etc. that would help to build this âlinguistic scaffoldingâ?
Thanks for taking the time and watching.
The main thing to be said is that Dan Everett is a profesional linguist. That means that he is trained to know all the kinds of things that the worldâs languages can do and how to identify them, predict them on the basis of already collected data, and nest them within their respective places in the linguistic systems.
To me an in-depth technical understanding of Linguistic Typology on the one hand and monolingual language learning on the other are deeply intertwined. But thatâs because I am a trained field linguist. While I am not sure all of that is necessarily helpful for a language learner, if one loves languages I donât see any reason not to learn some linguistics. It can certainly never harm.
In my book that I am planning to eventually write I expect to sort out which aspects of the MM are most useful for the general public or say, anthropologists who donât necessarily know a lot about linguistic structure but still need to learn their field languages quickly and efficiently to investigate social structures.
In the past I could never understand how itâs possible to âtalk with many peopleâ when one is at level zero in a language, but I am coming to realisation that these âconversationsâ are more like the demo in the video shared by @Manu⊠It all makes sense now - I can have (in theory) hours of interaction of this type and itâs only limited by my motivation and the availability of the native speakers willing to speak âbaby languageâ with me.
Intrigued by your example about learning a language through watching a series (I have read similar stories like this before, mostly about reading and listening though, e.g. Listening-Reading or The Norsk Experiment). Again, it didnât make sense to me in the past, but I can now see how these methods are in a way similar to the Monolingual Method (esp. The Norsk Experiment storyâŠ). It does take a very special mindset to pull things like that off, though
Does anyone have any other examples of activities, tools, hacks, etc. that would help to build this âlinguistic scaffoldingâ?
My suggestion would be to read as much as you can about linguistic typology (how languages differ). Depending on your tolerance for theory-heavy linguistic jargon, there are different levels on which you can approach it - from reading handbooks and scientific articles on various topics to consulting World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (wals.info - great resource) to following up Wikipedia links (âAustronesian alignmentâ is a possible starting point for you, reading it in Tagalog shouldnât be too difficult) to whatever else works for you.
A possible âgentleâ approach would be to take a look at the collective wisdom of the conlangers. People who construct languages for fun tend to know quite a lot about real-world language diversity without being too âacademicâ about it. Zompist Bulletin Board (I think itâs called âIncatenaâ now) was particularly useful for me back in the day (you may also want to check Mark Rosenfelderâs aka âzompistâ other writing too - itâs very clear and readable)
The key point, though, is knowing what you need Tagalog for. Find some stuff (a book, a movie, a comedy skit) that you really want to understand and start small. Memorize a scene and see if you can analyze it (ie. understand how the language works), then look for similar patterns elsewhere.
Play, experiment, test your assumptions about how this language works, let the native speakers laugh at you (and laugh with them). Itâs going to be a bit messy - enjoy!
[btw, language âin the wildâ is always messy, which is why it is so difficult to move beyond textbooks/classes/set curricula]
I think it also depends on the language. I think you can start understanding Norwegian after some time reading it a lot, if you know English and German. It wouldnât work for a completely different language, I think. For me in Hungarian it worked because people were willing to make me understand and because I got clues from the environment.
But I think the point is that nothing is impossible, if you are determined to learn a certain language, not even lack of material.
And I think you can find native speakers who are willing to speak baby language with you, if they are learning your language and are happy to have you as a patient language partner.
- super high risk of overwhelm, burnout, etc⊠I have read about people that can somehow deal with that sort of âmass language overloadâ (e.g. Listening-Reading method), but I would lose my marbles very fast 
