Learning Language

By Agus Asrul Sani

Much remains to be known about we learn our native language. Detailed studies of individual children report when particular sounds were first uttered and when particular words were first understood and used. In general these studies are limited by their view of language as isolated words and sounds without relation to the total system of contrasts that is a language. Studies which take into account the relevant structure of language are few.
Before the child learns specific words he uses noise with a rudimentary system of intonation and loudness. He uses utterances of a sort which show certain differentiation akin to the intonation of the language of his parents. His use of intonation seems to develop ahead of other elements and units of language for several years, and young children are as a rule able to use effective intonation patterns at a complex level of the intonation system before they have mastered many words or the entire stock of the segmental phonemes of the language.
Progress comes not merely in the addition of new words but in the use of groups of words and sentence like utterances. He may use a sentence like “Don’t do that,” or “Stop that,” before he actually differentiates the elements of these sentences.
Major progress comes in the form of pattern learning, that is, learning sentence and word patterns which permit him to build new sentences by analogy. This takes place before he can analyze and differentiate the elements of the sentences he uses. Pattern and analogy come to his aid early and are powerful elements in language learning.

Learning a Foreign Language
1. Habit. We observed that the complex process of communication through language as we know it is made possible by the system of habits which operates largely without our awareness. The habits are deeply set in the nervous system of the individual and in his muscular, intellectual, and emotional processes. To change any part pd this system of habits is a major undertaking. To set up a parallel system in learning a foreign language is an equally formidable task.
2. Transfer. If we now place two speakers of different languages facing each other in a similar diagram, when the listener hears an utterance in a foreign language he is learning, his set of native language habits cannot be eliminated at will, and he hears units of sound, words, phrase and sentences that are those of his own language; that is, he distorts what he hears to fit the rapid-fire perceptions that he habitually hears. Similarly when he attempts to speak in the foreign language he thinks of the general meaning, the general thread of what he wants to says, but the encoding into language units down to words and phonemes he handles the only way he has ever been able to handle them; through the habits of his native language.

How We Learn a Foreign Language
Although we have made considerable progress in the linguistic understanding of problems in learning a foreign language, we know very little of the psychology (emotional, memory, process order) of learning. Teaching methods have been largely the collected practice and teaching habits of particular teachers who reacted to the memory of their own experience in learning, the example of their own teachers, and the fashion which seemed prevalent or attractive at a particular moment in the history of language teaching. It would be interesting and profitable to analyze the psychology of language learning underlying each of the more widely known methods, regardless of whether or not its author ever consciously worked out the psychology of language learning underlying his views.
In the grammar translation method, for example, the assumption is the student learns by memorizing rules of correct grammar and by translating from one language to the other. This learning assumption is woefully incomplete; that is. It says nothing specifically about how the student learns anything in particular.