Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  A German speaker who uses the term bald, for example, isn’t referring to someone who’s hairless, but is instead saying “soon.” To the puzzlement of many a tourist, the Menü in a German restaurant isn’t a list of all the dishes that the establishment prepares, but rather the day’s special (Speisekarte is the equivalent term for “menu”). A Puff isn’t a burst of air—it’s a bordello. And perhaps the most famous German false friend is Gift, which certainly sounds like it refers to something pleasant to a speaker of English. In fact, it’s the word for poison. Fortunately, the ratio of false friends to genuine similarities is quite low, but these exceptions are words to watch out for.

  For many European languages other than those with German roots, it’s still the case that your English vocabulary can be of considerable help. And once again, the reason has to do with the unusual history of English. What we now call England was ruled for half a millennium by the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon invaders, until they too were displaced by invaders from abroad. In 1066, William the Conqueror brought his army and his language to the British Isles. The invaders crossed the channel from Normandy, and Norman was a dialect of Old French. For several generations, the language of the ruling class was essentially a form of French, and what is now called Anglo-Norman was used for administrative purposes. The rest of the population continued to speak English (by this point, what we now call Middle English), but many Anglo-Norman terms found their way into the language of the commoners.

  Traces of this essentially bilingual state of affairs can still be seen today in the unchanging terms used in legal documents. Expressions like last will and testament, cease and desist, and aid and abet are actually expressing the same idea in both languages. These so-called legal doublets are just one of the many ways in which the Norman invasion profoundly altered English. The advantage for today’s speaker of English is the head start that it provides for learning vocabulary in many languages, and not just French.

  To understand why this is so, a brief historical digression is necessary once again. Modern French has similarities with other tongues like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian because they are all descended from Latin. Collectively, they’re referred to as the Romance languages, not because they are necessary the languages of love, but because of their common origin in the language of the ancient Romans. Even Romanian, spoken in Eastern Europe and far from Rome, Paris, or Madrid, was once part of this empire, and is also a member of the Latinate family.

  This means that many Romance terms entered English through Anglo-Norman, as new words replacing Germanic terms, or in many cases, taking up residence alongside them. As a result, modern English has many pairs of terms that are essentially synonymous—think of moon (Germanic) and lunar (Romance), and the legal doublets described earlier. These synonymous terms make the vocabulary of modern English unusually rich, and they also give the English-speaking student of modern Romance languages a considerable advantage.

  And in fact, the news gets even better. Romance terms entered English through two other avenues as well. Latin was the liturgical language used in English churches until the separation with Roman Catholicism under the reign of Henry VIII in 1538. In addition, many technical, scientific, or medical terms were coined during the early modern era by drawing upon Latin (and, to some degree, Greek) roots. Latin was universally known by the educated class in England, so entrepreneurs, scientists, and physicians naturally turned to these word stocks to create new terms.

  That’s enough history for now—let’s get back to the dividends that all of this will pay in learning vocabulary in other European languages. As an example, consider the word hand. We can readily identify it as Germanic, because this word is the same in modern German—Hand. And if you’re trying to learn another Germanic language, the similarities carry through to those tongues as well: hand (Dutch and Swedish) and hånd (Danish and Norwegian). So you’ve always known this word in Swedish—you just didn’t know that you knew it!

  If we turn to the Romance languages, we can begin with the Latin word for hand, which is manus. This seems quite different, but it should remind you of English terms you already know—manual as in manual labor, or manipulate. And hand in the modern descendants of Latin is also recognizably descended from manus: main (French), mano (Spanish), mano (Italian), and mão (Portuguese). The terms aren’t identical, but they have a family resemblance, and if you’re on the lookout for such similarities, these cognates, as they’re called, can be extremely helpful.

  Even in cases in which a word doesn’t derive directly from Latin, there can be a link if you know to look for it. In some cases, the common link is from the Greek, as in the word for heart, which is kardia. There are many English words and phrases that use this Greek root, such as cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary, and cardiac arrest. The Latin term is cor, which is fairly similar, and once again appears recognizably in French (cœur), Spanish (corazón), and Italian (cuore). More kissing cousins than brothers and sisters, perhaps, but the resemblance is still there.

  Not only is this metalinguistic awareness helpful for many languages in Europe, but languages spoken in other parts of the world often have their own historical connections you can exploit. For example, many words in a variety of Asian languages, such as Korean, Japanese, and Thai, have roots in Chinese. Likewise, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Czech, among others, are part of the same Slavic family. Connections among language families might not be helpful if you are studying one of these languages for the first time, but they will come in handy if you decide to move from Moscow to Prague. As mentioned earlier, there may be exceptions (so beware of false friends!), but an awareness of linguistic kinship will serve you well.

  Words, Words, Words

  When most people think about learning a foreign language, they spend a great deal of time trying to tame the language’s vocabulary. And although it’s just one of many aspects of competency, it is undeniably essential—after all, one has to know the language’s words in order to communicate. So let’s take a look at perceptions and misperceptions of acquiring a new language’s vocabulary.

  One pervasive belief about foreign language learning is that you will have to master the pronunciation, meaning, and in some cases, the grammatical gender of thousands of words in order to achieve proficiency. This is such a daunting prospect that it probably scares away many would-be language learners. But it may not be as bad as you think. First of all, just how many words do you really need to learn?

  If your native language is English, then you know that its vocabulary is immense: estimates range from a half million to a million words. Of course, this number is inflated by all sorts of factors: obsolete words, technical terms, and names for things rarely encountered (such as exotic plants and animals). All of these certainly fatten up the unabridged dictionaries of the language. It’s also the case that, because of English’s complex history, as described earlier, there is often more than one word that refers to the same thing. For example, both kingly and regal refer to the same concept, but you don’t have to know both words to express the idea “fit for a monarch.”

  So if we factor out the obscure and the duplicated, we’re left with a much smaller number of words than a half million. In fact, it’s estimated that a native, college-educated speaker of English is unlikely to know more than a fraction of these—perhaps only about 17,000 words.5

  How do you measure up against this number? You might think that the best way to determine to determine the size of your vocabulary would be to see how many words you know in a dictionary. However, this method would depend on the size of the dictionary. If you have a couple of dictionaries lying around your house, you can try the following experiment. Open the smaller dictionary at random, and point to one of the words defined on that page. Read it and see if it’s a word you know. Now repeat this exercise nine more times. Multiply the percentage of words you recognized by the number of words defined by that dictionary (it’s usually listed prominently on the cover). Now repeat the
process with the larger dictionary. Do the two estimates of your vocabulary size converge? They’re likely to differ substantially from each other. Although you probably recognized all the words you pointed to in the small paperback dictionary, you then multiplied the percentage by the relatively small number of words defined by that book. With the larger dictionary, recognizing even just a few of the words leads to a much higher score, since you’re multiplying by a much larger number of defined words. So this method tells us more about the size of one’s dictionary than the size of one’s vocabulary. In reality, it’s virtually impossible to accurately count the number of words in someone’s vocabulary.

  But if we can’t measure the size of one’s vocabulary that way, perhaps we can by answering a related question: What does it mean to “know” a word? The estimates of vocabulary size provided by researchers typically refer to a speaker’s receptive vocabulary. These are the words that a speaker knows the meaning of, but might never actually speak or write. For example, when was the last time you used the word microorganism? You undoubtedly were exposed to this term repeatedly in high school biology, but unless this led you to a career in microbiology, you have rarely or never used the word since. So it’s more accurate to say that a college-educated speaker of English has a receptive vocabulary of about 17,000 words, but uses far, far fewer than that on a daily basis.

  And how about all of a word’s variant forms? Should we count those? If you know the meaning of help, do you automatically get credit for knowing helps, helped, helping, helper, helpful, helpless, helplessly, unhelpful, and unhelpfully? Should this count as one word, or as ten (or more)? Linguists deal with this issue by designating one word as the lemma, or citation form (in this case, help). The other terms are considered to be variations of a single underlying lexeme. It is assumed that if you know the lemma, you also know (or can figure out) these variations.

  And then there is the existence of what researchers call frontier words. These are words that you only partially know the meaning of. For example, you might know that truculent or supercilious are bad things to be called, but if someone asked you to provide their dictionary definitions, you might find yourself at a loss. Not surprisingly, therefore, the existence of frontier words greatly affects estimates of the size of one’s vocabulary. If someone has a dim sense of the meaning of a word, does he know it or doesn’t he? Clearly, the answer is not black and white.

  Another reason why it’s so hard to estimate the size of someone’s vocabulary is that all of us speak in our own special way, which is called an idiolect. An idiolect is a native speaker’s unique, idiosyncratic way of using the language. This is different from a person’s dialect, which reflects the common linguistic features of a group of people. We all speak an idiolect and it includes not only vocabulary and grammar, but also particular turns of phrase. Idiolects are so specific that forensic linguists have compared a person’s idiolect to a specific text in order to determine if the same person could, in fact, have produced it. This technique has been used to identify the Unabomber, the authors of the Federalist Papers, and the author of the book Primary Colors.6

  If native speakers have a receptive vocabulary of about 17,000 lemmas in their idiolect, does this mean everyone studying a foreign language will need to acquire a similar number in order to speak a second language? Seventeen thousand sounds a lot better than a half million, but it’s still a very large number. As it turns out, you can probably get by with less than a tenth of that. We know this because there have been several attempts to create a stripped-down version of English that can be learned more easily by speakers of other languages. In 1930, the linguist Charles Ogden proposed a vocabulary subset that he called Basic English. He suggested that a core vocabulary of around 1,200 words would be sufficient for communication for many purposes.7 The fruits of such an approach can be seen in the Simple English Wikipedia, which (as of this writing) contains over 115,000 entries, many of which use only the words from Ogden’s list. In the late 1950s, the Voice of America began to broadcast programs using Special English, which has a core vocabulary of around 1,500 words. So it is possible to communicate meaningfully with a relatively restricted number of words.

  But is learning a language simply a matter of learning a certain number of words? We would argue, in fact, that the learning of words should not be seen as a primary goal in your attempt to acquire a second language. For one thing, most languages, including English, contain a large number of idiomatic expressions. For many such phrases, there is only an arbitrary relationship between the literal meaning of the words and what they refer to. We commonly use expressions like kick the bucket or let the cat out of the bag even though knowing what a bucket or a bag is has nothing to do with dying or revealing secrets. If your knowledge of a second language consisted only of what individual words mean, you would often miss the forest for the trees.

  So while it’s important to learn vocabulary, you will probably do just fine if you learn several hundred terms. If your primary goal is to communicate with others, it may be more helpful to concentrate on learning how to combine the terms you do know to make expressions that speakers of the language commonly employ. You’ll be able to infer the meaning of many new words from context, and over time, you can develop an impressively large receptive vocabulary in your target language.

  Learning to Swim by Swimming

  In an episode of the US television program The Big Bang Theory, the brilliant but eccentric physicist Sheldon Cooper is arguing with his long-suffering roommate, Leonard Hofstadter. To make a point, Leonard asks Sheldon to remember the time he tried to learn how to swim by using the Internet. Offended, Sheldon replies, “I did learn how to swim.” Leonard points out that he had learned to swim on the floor. Sheldon replies by claiming that “The skills are transferable—I just have no interest in going in the water!”

  This interaction is humorous because everyone knows how impractical and ineffective it would be to learn how to swim in this way. And yet many people learn a foreign language by doing something quite similar. If your goal is to converse with native speakers of your target language abroad, then learning vocabulary by listening to prerecorded lessons, flipping through flashcards, or practicing drills on the Internet is akin to swimming by moving your arms and legs on the floor. You might not drown, but you almost certainly will not give Michael Phelps any sleepless nights.

  Just like for Sheldon, one of the biggest challenges for the second language learner is how to transfer artificially constructed language practice to the real world of language usage. In other words, how can we turn what we know into what we do?

  Fortunately, cognitive scientists take an interest in the concept of knowledge transfer. Sometimes the transfer of what we have learned in one domain helps in acquiring new information. Noticing similarities in cognates is a kind of positive transfer if the two words in fact share a meaning. Sometimes, however, the transfer of learning can be negative if it interferes with acquiring new material, such as erroneously using the word order from your native language in your target language.8 Clearly, then, the goal in language learning is to maximize positive transfer and minimize negative transfer.

  There are two mechanisms that adult language learners can use in order to facilitate positive transfer. First, low-road transfer is reflexive and happens when well-rehearsed material from one context is applied to a new context. For example, if you’ve been driving a car for a long period of time, and now want to drive a rental truck, low-road transfer is all that is needed. This is the typical transfer strategy of many foreign language learners: repetition, repetition, repetition. Low-road transfer can happen automatically, but only with plenty of practice in a variety of settings. It is useful for scripted activities, such as greetings, politeness rituals, and goodbyes. Low-road transfer, therefore, emphasizes outcome over process.9

  However, a potentially more powerful type of knowledge transfer is high-road transfer, which is mindful and relies on metacognitive ability
to consider consciously how new material applies to both previously learned knowledge and future situations. High-road transfer requires actively looking for patterns and connections in the material, which will take time and effort. It’s not as simple as merely rehearsing a phrase in a variety of settings. But the payoff is much greater because using high-road transfer will allow for flexibility in the use of the language. High-road transfer, therefore, emphasizes process over outcome. Consider the following example:

  Richard and Roger once took a trip to Berlin, and as they prepared to leave their hotel room, there was a knock on the door. Roger, whose German at that time could be charitably described as rusty, opened the door and encountered a housekeeper, who asked him a rapid-fire question. He frantically tried to make sense of what had just been asked of him. Fortunately, Richard, whose command of the language was a little better, overheard the question and provided an appropriate response. As the housekeeper headed down the hallway, Roger finally understood the question. He was grateful for Richard’s intervention, but felt quite foolish. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the housekeeper was probably used to dealing with tongue-tied foreigners.

  How can Roger transfer what he learned in this situation to future interactions with housekeepers? If he tried to create low-road transfer, he could easily memorize what Richard said and repeat it over and over in many different situations so that the next time a housekeeper knocked on the door, he would be ready with the answer. The problem with this strategy is that Roger is likely to encounter some negative transfer along with any potential positive transfer, because it is unlikely that every housekeeper he encounters will ask him the same question.