Eventually hearing ear worms
- learning a second language
Introduction
I watched the 7 year old daughter of a German friend, living in England, learn English over a few months and was incredibly impressed. If she could do that then so can I, I thought. So I started to learn German. That was in 1990. Many years later I have come a long way. These are my thoughts on the experience and what I think I have learned about the process of learning. But first a bit about children learning a language, compared to adults.
They say it is easier for young children to learn a languge - but I think there is a bit of a misconception about the way young children learn a language so quickly. The ability of young children to pick up a language is certainly impressive, but it should also be remembered that, as a generalisation, young children live in a much 'smaller world'. They need, and use, a far smaller vocabulary, about far more limited situations. Adults live in a 'bigger', or certainly more complicated world, converse about things with a more complicated vocabulary that uses a lot more nuances.....It takes adults longer to learn a language partly because, I would argue, adults need more language (if they are to participate in everyday life and in professional/work situations).
Part of growing up is learning a bigger and bigger language. That's worth remembering....
Adults also learn about different things. One of the things that I have found, through learning German, was that I could speak about and understand many professional things, in my own fields of interest, sooner than I could talk in everyday German.. You can get access to books, and go to conferences, and read papers. Many of the words are international, and you can often understand others through the context....but living day to day in another language is less easily accessible and practicable - unless you have friends and can actually live with them. Even if you do, and they speak reasonable English, the temptation on everyone is to lapse into English...
But I digress....
I disagreed with a German friend about learning a language. 5 years later she acknowledged that my method had worked for me. It might not work for everyone, and it might not work for you. Some people are happier working through very formal exercises. I am tempted to be rude and say some people have learned to be more obedient to teachers....
Problem number one - remaining committed
To me the chief problem in learning a language is not grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation it is remaining committed. Many things erode that commitment - for example, frustration, boredom and fear of failure. I knew I would never learn German unless I could maintain my interest and, if it was anything like learning French at school, then I would soon give up. The experience of school French was a regular experience of a teacher's acidic sarcasm, and therefore an experience of fear of humiliation. It was difficult for me to shake off those emotional associations set up by school French lessons, when setting out to learn German, for example, when I listened to a tape or read a textbook. So I didn't rely on these very much, although I did use them.
The fear of getting it wrong
Why should anyone submit themselves to humiliation regularly? A serious problem in learning in a language is fear of getting it wrong, feeling yourself to be small again, and feeling yourself to be a fool. It's not surprising that children learn to talk - they usually have parents who delight in their first sounds and will have burbled back to them when they make their initial sounds and nonsense talk. That way a baby who has loving parents (and not all do) has it easy tuning into the pronunciation of their mother tongue and their first words. There are no tests either, at which the baby can get it wrong and, unless the baby is unlucky, it is not usually under a timetable to improve. So it starts to make sounds, then words and exchanges with adults and peers, just when the infant is ready, and has something to say.
So the key problem is not understanding the difference between nominative, accusative, dative and genative cases, but working out how you are going to do it to minimise the frustration, boredom, fear and humiliation. Learning a second language later in life is not like learning your first one. To many people, learning a second language is largely about battling line by line, exercise by exercise, page by page, and chapter by chapter, through text books written by a teacher, usually with some examination in mind.
Textbooks
I've known some lovely teachers but when it comes to techniques for learning I usually part company. The point about these textbooks is that they are written for a general and mixed group of people (children) and aim to take the average pupil, through a timetable to be ready for an examination. In other words - no textbook has ever been written for you and your unique needs. No textbook has ever been tailored to your interests. No textbook has ever exactly matched your life context now. Not only that, textbooks deliberately have pressure built into them. They have exercises and tests to make sure that you have learned enough en route to that examination desk that you are going to be sitting at. What could be more disheartening, tedious and boring than this? No infant has to put up with a weekly test on its language skills - to reassure a teacher that it has taken things in. It spends ages listening and observing language in context before it attempts to speak it. If you are learning a second language and you remain committed, you don't have anything to prove to teachers....
Also learning a language from a classroom and textbook, is very different from what it is like to learn a language when you try to engage with native speakers, who are chattering away at their normal pace, or while you are doing the tasks of everyday life in the country of the language. That's why they insist language students go and live in the country of their language for a time. The tasks of everyday life are very varied and continually changing. You're not stuck on chapter one for a month - day to day life moves on whether you have understood it or not. If you have not understood that things going on around you then, nothing really terrible thing happens to you usually, because those around you adjust the way you work, play or relate together.
Learning from afar and learning 'on site'
Of course, people often do not learn the language in the country of the language. A lot of their learning is done 'from afar'. That is something that presents particular difficulties and issues - because you are robbed of the very contexts in everyday life and interaction which make picking up the language easier, more relevant and interesting. Nor is it that you are just robbed of contexts, you will also find it more difficult to find the time. In the country where your language is spoken every day there is more opportunity to pick up the language in a way that is not additional to your existing life routines, obligations and tasks. From far, however, learning the language can often seem another claim on your time. Unless you can regularly slot it into a spare place, then, when other things compete for your attention, it is the language learning that may not be sustained. Once the routine is broken it's difficult to go back to it. That is perhaps one reason that people do courses focused upon examinations. It routinises the process and imposes a certain kind of discipline. But this is nothing like doing the language for the pleasure of it.
Why I didn't do the exercises
My approach to learning German was different. In fact, as said, I did use textbooks and tapes but not a huge amount. I rarely did the exercises in them. I figured that I would find the exercises disheartening to do, it reminded me of school, so I didn't do them. Whenever it was going to undermine my morale I didn't do what the textbook or tape urged me to. If you get disheartened you'll never improve anyway, you'll give up. In the two or three books I used for a while I didn't wait to learn all of chapter one before going onto chapter two. Most of the content in chapter one is again to be found in chapter two, then chapter three etc - in the sense that they are, so to speak, built upon each other. I went onto the next chapter when I got bored, rather when I had mastered the exercises. As time went on I was more inclined to listen to tapes all the way through, rather than just do the first track, then the second etc. . Many laboured points, that a teacher says you've got to grasp, are already obvious 3 to 6 months later, as you've come across so many examples of this language point through repeated exposure.
As a general rule of thumb I only applied myself to learning when I found it interesting. If you are not going to battle through a textbook, but, instead, try to get stuck right into the language, then there is always the danger that you try and figure out something that you are "not ready for". But you have to be exposed to the language for a time, vaguely understanding it, to become aware of a grammar issue and formulate clearly what is puzzling you - for example I kept seeing references in a text, which I dimly understood, to 'der Frau. Now, because 'Frau' means woman, and women are female, what on earth could this mean? The female 'the' word is 'die' not 'der'. In my tape collection there is a song called "Das Lied von der Erde" - the Song of the Earth. Likewise the Earth in German is feminine, die Erde. So why, infuriatingly, was it spelled here as der Erde? By the time I could formulate the question clearly it was possible to find an answer in a textbook. In context of the sentence "der Frau" meant "of the woman" a reference to things belonging to the woman. Similarly 'die' is changed to 'der' after 'von'. So, when you get stuck trying to understand some words which you really cannot figure out from the dictionary - often this turns out to be because you have not understood a point of grammar.
But sometimes you can go backwards and forwards through a grammar book bewildered because you are not ready for it. You are going to be wasting your time, and getting frustrated into the bargain, trying to puzzle something out. After a point this becomes very demoralising and the most appropriate thing is to give up trying to understand it. Several months, or perhaps years down the line, you won't even notice a problem if you see the same kind of grammatical rule in use again.
Grammar - love it or hate it, you can't avoid it entirely...unfortunately
I would not be so foolish as to say never use a textbook or grammar book. Learning a second (or third) language, when a first one is well ingrained in your head, is not the same as learning your mother tongue. The very naive assumption about other languages is that all you need is to know is the different words - and that then you say or write things, as you would in your first language, using these different words. But as every school child soon learns, there is not only a different pronunciation and rhythm to other languages, there are different word orders or sequences; there are different ways of adjusting the words to make clear that you are talking about past, present or future, about completed actions, about continuous or static states of affairs; there are different ways of indicating doubt, possibility and conditionality; and different ways of expressing who or what are the initiators of actions, and distinguishing them from the words to express who or what are effected by those actions, and who or what own or possess, in some way, these objects of the action. Despite all their tediousness, textbooks are written with a sequence of ideas which takes you through these rules of the language, its grammar, step by step. In theory, if you follow the sequence of the textbooks, you don't tackle complicated issues of grammar, or exceptions to general rules, before you have first tackled the simple rules of thumb and the general rules themselves. It is when you try to early to understand complicated things that you get stuck and suffer that terrible frustration.
It would be tempting to say that most native speakers of a language do not understand or know the rules of their own language - they just use them, because they grow up with these ways of expressing things, as self evident, obvious and as a kind of second nature. Most English people probably do some grammar at school and then never apply themselves to grammar again. However, in the case of German, it is a bit different. In nearly all the German homes and offices that I have ever visited there is a copy of Duden. Duden is a publisher that has become almost a state institution - publishers of texts on grammar, spelling and so on. And not only that - people actually refer to these books! In this regard, it's important to realise that people's attitude to their native language is often different when it is not English. English is the predominant world language. It dominates the worlds of commerce, economics and politics. It was the imperial language of the British empire and is now the language of the American commercial one. Other people, the world over, are more precious about their own languages because their own languages are a bulwark, a protection of their separate identities, it is the language of their great poets and myth tellers, their philosophers, the political and religious leaders. It is what makes them different, not just another appendage of McNikeColaSoft.
Keep your morale up first - accepting 'good enough' and later 'a bit better'
Having said that, the "keeping your morale up rule" should still, to my mind, be the predominant one. It's better to learn ungrammatical German, "pidgin German", that you can communicate in, than no German at all. As a foreigner it helps to understand that, usually, people are rather pleased that you are making the effort to learn their language. Particularly if you are an English speaker, it is rather a novelty. Morever, if you realise it's pidgin German, and if you keep on raising your standards of exposure to the language, puzzling out the grammar, not resting on your laurels, improving when you are ready (reading more and more sophisticated articles etc) then you will keep on getting better. Accept that you approach perfection through imperfection and never fully get there.
The main thing is to keep on at it, long term. If you keep at it, you'll learn the language. Slowly. Often it makes more sense for the long run sustainability of the effort, to give up for now and be contented with an imperfect grasp of the thing. That's another aspect of the learning of a language. You have to learn to live with imperfection over a long period of time. You've got to learn to take it slowly, as an integral part of your lifestyle. By keeping at it, giving yourself more and more interesting things that widen your experience of the language, you will get better.
This is important, for example, to the vexed question of learning the gender of nouns - are they 'der', 'die' or 'das' words? Are they masculine, feminine or neuter? This problem terrifies no German child. That's because they are not sitting down to learn the gender of words on memory exercises set by a teacher - learn this list of words, said my French teacher, giving us a list on the board. Of course this is intimidating and difficult because it is an inherently dum thing to do. It is like learning someone elses's shopping list and remembering off by heart their choice of brands and prices. You learn. A native speaker picks things up by repeated exposure to words and phrases used in context over and again, which they then start to copy. You will not get it wrong and say "in der Haus" when you should be saying "im Haus" when you have heard it said a thousand times by mother, father, friends. If you want to learn your 'der', 'die' and 'das' then expose yourself to the language repeatedly and then, when you are ready to speak, it will just pop straight back out of your mouth, completely correctly. If the words comes out garbled that will probably be good enough anyway - although it does mean that your brain hasn't had enough attentive exposure yet on the points in question.
Repeated exposure to language about the things that would normally interest you anyway
This still leaves the issue, if you are learning away from the country, how you find the time, and how you maintain the interest? Ideally you give yourself repeated exposure to the language with the things that interest you normally, in your day to day life. If you are interested in literature then that means German novels, poems and the like. If you're interested in politics, then it is newspapers and magazines. If it's fashion, then it's fashion magazines and fashion trade journals. You can use a short wave radio, but much better, a satellite TV connection, or films and Internet, to find the programmes and subjects that you want.
One might think that you have to wait to get the basics first before you pick up these specialist fields and before you start trying to figure out a TV programme or read a sophisticated newpaper. I don't agree at all. With literature you can often find dual language books, with the language of your choice on one page, and an English language translation opposite it. These are useful up to a point, but you can read stuff directly in your chosen language without this kind of aid. You can read a newspaper to different depths, for example. Even the most sophisticated magazines use headlines, subtitles and have captions to the pictures. So too do many books. At the start of learning a language you can pick up basic words and phrases by translating headlines and captions. The next step is the bullet point summaries that articles sometimes contain, or the 'news in brief sumamaries', or first paragraphs. Adverts often juxtapose pictures and text in helpful ways that make it relatively easy to work out the meaning of the words from the context. Then there are other relatively short articles - weather forecasts, horoscopes, cartoons, births, marriages and deaths, recipes, would like to meet adverts, and job vacancies. These sorts of things are useful for everyday language. Given the known context of these, it's relatively easy to work out what things mean and "pick up" vocabulary and standard expressions quickly. The same is true for TV broadcasted weather and news, and adverts.
As regards to speaking a language too, you can speak at different levels of sophistication. You can point and say single words with an appropriate expression on your face, at the most basic.
In regard to "finding the time" to study - with a little organisation you can, in a relatively short period of preliminary learning, do in your chosen language, what you would ordinarily do in English. By this I mean that if, for example, you listen to, and watch, the TV news twice a day, with a satellite TV (or a short wave radio), you can do that once, in the language that you are learning. This may be difficult to set up for some languages - with written texts it is somewhat easier. Certainly weekly, or even daily newspapers, can replace your English language one. At first that means that you are not taking in very much but, relatively soon, you will be picking up something, if in not nearly the same amount of detail as before.
Listening to, and reading, what you don't understand - the experience of 'not taking in'
At first, of course, you will not 'take much in'. To listen to, and watch, the news in a language that you don't understand may seem bizarre. However, listening is actually useful to your learning, even when you think you are not taking anything in, you are getting to recognise the distinctive sounds of a language.
It seems obvious to say, but I can no longer listen to German in the way that I did when I did not understand any of what I was listening to. It's obvious but it is useful idea to think about. I cannot now unlearn it. Although I may forget individual words, now and then, I cannot forget what I have learned. In the early stages you hear a flow of sounds in which you cannot even make out the individual words. If I say, in English, to a completely new non speaker "How do you do?" then it will not be obvious that "Howdoyoudo" is not one word or perhaps 2 words - "How doyoudo". When they are speaking fast, an English speaker is likely to run the last 3 words closely together, so if you didn't know the language you might interpret it as one word with several syllables. To give other examples, it isn't obvious, either, that the word "together" is not, in fact, the two words " to" and "gether" . And you will have to listen closely to not hear the word 'example' as "egg sample". So, as you listen to a language that you do not understand it takes a long time to be able to separate out and notice the individual words.
At first you are therefore hearing in a different way, a very different way, from the way you hear when you have learned the language later. In fact, I have, in a sense, lost the ability, to hear German in the way I first heard it. This is akin to the way infants first hear their mother tongue. They are immersed in it for a long time, surrounded by the stream of sounds, before they begin to imitate the sounds and then find the giants in their world, playing the making sounds game with them, and echoing back to them - in a way that repeatedly relates particular sounds to particular events, contexts and objects, inclusive of their own identity, wishes and needs. In second language learning, in later life, this does not happen in the same way. However, one usually finds that when one is in a conversation with someone, because one is directly in the full context oneself, it is easier to understand, than overheard conversations between second and third parties.
When you are complete beginner though, initially, the stream of sounds is not a stream of meanings. You cannot take it in as a stream of separate words and you may just find yourself listening to try to recognise the odd word that you know. It is, in fact, difficult to listen because your brain has no references with which to organise the inputed raw data. In a recent article in Der Spiegel there is an article about a blind person whose sight was restored, after almost a whole lifetime without it, by an operation and it describes his experience. Despite the restored physical facility he still has great difficulty "seeing". He is unaccustomed to organising the incoming visual data, into familiarly recognised objects. He is reported as repeatedly finding it difficult, for example, to recognise the face of his wife. He is startled, even alarmed, by changes in light and shadows. In a similar way, as you hear a language for the first time, and indeed for a long time, your brain cannot take it in and therefore there is a sense in which you actually do not really hear it.
Grammar as rhythm
Yet when you listen to a language that you do not understand you obviously do hear something. After a while, indeed, you may even begin to hear a certain kind of typical rhythm, a typical range of tonal sounds. This is very difficult to describe purely from memory when I cannot hear in this way anymore. However, if I try to remember what it was like to listen to German, I think I remember the sound of German becoming very familiar even before I understood it. So in what resided it's familiarity? Later I remember noticing what is probably best described as broken runs of sounds, followed by emphasised single sounds, or, occasionally a skipping sequence of two or more sounds, before the next run of sounds started. ( Perhaps that was only typical of the making of statements in newsbroadcasts.) In fact, I wonder if this distinctive rhythm is the template which an infant first notices and uses for the later taking in of the grammar of the language. If so, the broken sound runs, are likely to be the phrases and clauses of longer sentences. The emphatic single sounds, are the words put at the end of the sentence in German - so that these sentence long sound flows frequently ended with an emphasised sound, or two or more of them. These would have been words like, for example, "werden" or "muessen" - verb words which, in grammar, indicate the passive or modal case. The grammar thus partly parallels the rhythmical beat of the sound flow, the first thing noticed by a child. (The 'passive case' is where a thing or situation is being described as something happening to the subject of a sentence, rather than as that thing or person doing the action: not, 'I hit the ball', but 'I was hit by the ball'. The modal case is where you are indicating whether things may, must, or are wanted to, or will be allowed to happen. I want to hit the ball but I am not allowed to etc.).
To repeat, at this point, ten years on, it is difficult to describe this experience of hearing as I cannot hear in the 'unlearned way' any more. I can only hear German now as a string of meanings. I still may not recognise some words, particularly if people speak very fast indeed and I may also lose the drift of some passages, but usually the difference is that if I hear words I do not understand, I nevertheless now more likely to take them in as individual words, and am therefore able to look them up.
An English friend of mine who has lived in Germany for a number of years told me how she would speak very fast in order that Germans did not hear whether her endings to words, the basics of much of the grammar, were correct or not. In fact I suspect that if she could speak very fast her endings must have been pretty near correct and her grammar pretty good - this is because the grammar is the way the speakers of a language optimally inflect/adjust/sequence and organise the particular repertoire of available pronounced sounds in a flow - as this flow comes out of their mouth, in phrasal and clausal sound bursts, between in-breaths, simultanously conveying their meaning most efficiently - i.e. Rapidly.
This is something wrote to Noam Chomsky about. I wrote
....I suspect that people first of all pick up the grammar of their language, through hearing the rhythm of the sounds - each languange has a characteristic rhythmn (presumably to optimise the sound stream, given breathing needs and the pysiology of the mouth lungs and vocal chords, to create optimal overall flow with a particular sound repertoire ). Infants gradually become clear on the meaning of the sounds (specific words) on a rhythm template that sounds right - (e.g. German frequently has a sound stream with emphatic sounds at the ends of what we come to know, later, as sentences - these are frequently the verbs. There presumably has to be a rhythmn or time phase sequencing to get brain, mouth, lungs to work in sequence).
Chomsky replied
On rhythm, etc., there's some work that might interest you. Jacques Mehler and his associates some years ago found that newborn infants can distinguish between languages, and later work found, as expected, that it's between categories of languages, which seem to be distinguished by prosodic features (pitch, stress, prominence peaks, etc.). More recently it's been shown that untrained Tamarin monkeys make similar distinctions, but probably using different features. Also, there's some evidence that point of prominence of pitch-stress may play a role in directing the infant to determine whether the language is what's called "head-first" (like English, with verb preceding object, etc.) or "head-last" (like Japanese, which is almost a mirror image of English).
Living with vague understandings
In the transition from that beginners state of mind, to the state which I am now in, there was a long long slow transition. As I have said, it is worth while trying to start working in the language, in your own fields of interest, and at your own level, as soon as possible. From relatively early on you will be picking up worthwhile things from the headings, diagrams, bullet point summaries, brief articles and so on. Even relatively long texts will yield a vague sense of meaning, rather like a rough outline is visible through frosted glass. If you want a metaphor to describe the learning of a language, it is not like memorising long lists of words, and a set of grammar rules and then as it were, turning the handle - applying the grammar to the vocabulary like an engineering exercise, in an endless set of exercises until you are ready to communicate outside of the classroom. (I suppose it could be like that, of course, if you want to learn in this way, or if you are obliged to learn in this tedious fashion). It is alternatively, to use another metaphor, a long process in which the dim, fuzzily outlined shapes, the blocks of meaning in the other language, in texts or in speech, gradually become clearer and more sharply delineated. It is perhaps like those computer generated images gradually appearing on a computer screen, with the image very coarse at first, and made up of big crude dots, but later the image becoming more and more clear, as more and more pixels of information, are added in, and the information becomes greater and greater, so that it becomes possible to receive and transmit messages inside a greater and greater (bit flow) process. Eventually you have a broad band ability and can receive, and return quickly and accurately, complex patterns of meaning.
Your brain will decide if, and when, it wants to remember particular words.
So I am putting forward a process which is better described as "picking up" the language rather than 'learning it' through a formal process of taking lessons. Your brain will decide if, and when, it wants to remember particular words. To use another analogy - sometimes you find there is a tune that you cannot get out of your head. Once your brain has decided to remember something, it stays. If you were to try and forget a few English words you would find it is not something in your capability - unless perhaps you have only just started to learn English and take yourself out of and English speaking environment over very many years. No English child tries to remember a list of English words. Repeated exposure makes memory inevitable. Instead of trying to remember words - just go for repeated exposure to the language and you'll soon notice that some words keep coming up over and again. You may have to look them up a few times but, if you see them often enough, their meaning will stick in your mind fairly quickly. In fact, the difficult and frustrating thing at the early stages of grappling with the language is deciding how much understanding to be content with, when to let go and acknowledge that your understanding is a long way less than you would like it to be. There is no way a prescriptive answer can be given for this in advance of every real life situation.
The stages of comprehension
What is this process like subjectively? Very early on in the process you'll be noticing some words and names that are the same as in one's own language. For example in a news broadcast or newspaper the names of people and places who are internationally known and some words that are common to all languages, like the word "international" itself - though noticing the different way the words are pronounced.
Later you will understand what the theme of the talking or text is, but not about details, or what specific points are being made. Pictorial contexts make that easier. Documentaries on daytime TV are very useful as learning aids and, even better, programmes with subtitles.
Later, as your skills develop, you have a very vague idea of issues being raised.... now and then.... interspersed with being mostly in the dark about the language You understand odd sentences and, occasionally, specific points that are being made. Then, in your favourite topics at least, you are able to understand which viewpoint the speaker is representing now and then.
At this stage you might be vulnerable to getting too confident in the language because, while you understand what issues are being talked about, you are missing lots of important details - like the fact that an issue is being discussed as a hypothetical possibility, or that the facts are agreed to be in doubt, or that something is being called for, but hasn't yet happened. Also, you are tempted to think that you know what a word means, because it sounds like an English word. I learned very early on that the German word "Gift" actually means "poison". However, I only learned about 5 years into my German, that the word "eventuell" means not "eventually", but "possibly" and "if necessary". That is an important difference in meaning with possible consequences....
Good language days and bad language days
At a certain point in your language development, when you are in the country, you often seem to oscillate between language good days and language bad days. Having cockily translated a bit of a conversation for a friend of colleague, on a topic in which you are reasonably familiar with the vocabulary and expressions, and having passionately expressed yourself on something that you feel strongly about, you sit down the next day, and hear German friends talking away excitedly about something that you cannot follow at all. Your articulate fluency of the previous day dries up completely and, as your morale collapses, you stumble even more over quite mundane expressions. You may feel uneasy as people talk to you, wondering how much they are aware that you've only a vague or partial grasp of what they are saying. You don't want to be saying that you haven't quite fully understood what has been said, over and over again, so you keep your mouth shut. You then become more uneasy as people speak to you in a way that seems to assume that you understood. In crowded places, like bars, where it is difficult to hear anyway, this leave you a bit uncomfortable about your sociable presence in the group. You are uneasy - unless people who have been talking to you ask you a question which is premised on the wrong assumption that you have fully understood what they have said. There may still be long periods where you understand nothing - particularly in new subject/topic fields where the vocabulary is totally unknown to you.
Dialects and colloquialisms - on ear worms and surrealism
At this stage too another reason that you might not understand becomes clearer - you suddenly tune into matters of local dialect. This maddening word that you don't understand "yute" is, in fact, the Berliner's way of saying "gute" or 'good'. This is the stage too, that you might decide to get a bigger dictionary - as some everyday expressions simply are not to be found in your small one anywhere. Of course, you cannot carry the big ones around. You notice colloquial expressions expressions too. One I remember is "Ohrwurm", which translates literally as the phrase 'ear worm'. When I first hear this composite word, it was in a video and I assumed from the context that it was a composite word made up by artists, for a surrealist effect. It turns out that it is a colloquial expression for a tune that you cannot get out of your head. In fact, the video that I saw, called Ohrwurm, was partly about the idea of misunderstanding the meaning of colloquial expressions. The video, partly produced by by a Canadian living in Germany, was intended to draw attention to the surrealist effects when you go looking for things, like ear worms, because you have not understood the colloquial meaning because you are a newcomer to the language. I missed the intention of the film, which was perfectly clear to the Germans, because I did know that ear worm had this colloquial meaning. This made the video more surreal for me, exemplifying what the film was about.
(Because I work in mental health, about two years into learning German I became interested in language and psychological development and, in particular, how partial (mis)understandings might, in particular contexts, be very frightening to very young children. I remembered for example how, when I had been very frightened in my adult life, the idea of a stroke had come back into my head in a regressed psychological state - a regressed state is when your mind has the powerful experience of returning to childhood emotions and thoughts. When I was about 3 my grandmother had something called a 'stroke' and died which, of course, had a powerful and frightening effect on my mother, who was the centre of my world. It turned out that strokes were something that happened in your head and could kill you. This was a very frightening thing as giving the dogs and cats in our household a stroke on their heads was a nice thing to do - yet apparently these strokes were the kind of thing could kill you. Thinking in depth about language enabled me to explain the earlier experience of the strange regressive thoughts of my 3 year old self. In my regressed state I had been walking around feeling if my life was hanging on a thread, fearing that some gentle unseen hand was about to stroke my head, and it would all be over...How many childhood terrors and fantasies, I wonder, are the result of language misunderstandings of this type? How many later apparently inexplicable psychotic fantasies are also thus explainable. This is not, something, that, as far as I know, has ever been studied by clinical psychologists.)
As you get deeper into a language so you will be getting deeper into the life of a place too. For me there came a point where I was so far into the language that it was like a mountain that you have started to climb. I didn't realise it was going to take so long, or that it would just go on like this, but it has become so much a part of my life that there is no going back with it now, I can only keep on going upwards. There was a stage where I could to read all of some of the tabloid newspaper articles, and some comics. I could also read the more serious magazines and journals from the beginning to the end of long articles. This was worthwhile although, with the more serious papers and magazines, I still did not understand perhaps as much as 30 or even 40% of the text. I kept on reading and I kept on slowly improving. However, my written German is still very hard work. I have given lectures in German - but it took me an awfully long time to write half hour talks and they were less than perfect. The worst lectures I just staggered through, but I managed. More to the point I have noticed that if you keep on regularly reading and watching TV, and regularly visiting, you keep on improving.
Perhaps at this point it ceased to be important to me to reach an illusory 100% fluency. Unlike a computer downloading a file from the internet which goes from 1% to 100%, and is then definitively completed - there is no definite 100% fluency in any language. You never reach some place where you can say I have learned the language perfectly. Come to that, you don't in your own language. If asked to listen to a lecture on nuclear physics I am unlikely to understand much, even when it is in English. It is, perhaps, as well to remember that sometimes, you do not understand something in another language, because you would not understand it in your own either - although you may be wrongly assuming that it is your language skills that are inadequate. Usually, in your own language you just switch off in those situations - you don't usually think consciously to yourself, "that's something that doesn't interest me and I don't know anything about" you simply switch off from it and turn your attention elsewhere. Most people are unconscious to any message, including in their own mother tongue, that they cannot take in.
In conclusion - language fluency as a means to an end, not an end in itself
At a certain stage the rewards for your efforts should show - if you are lucky as you learn you also develop your life in the other country - personal relationships develop, places become familiar and there are new places to visit perhaps, professional relations too may evolve into joint ventures. It brings self esteem and self confidence. If these 'rewards' do not develop alongside your growing skills then I wonder, indeed, if you will still want to continue with a language. Picking up a language is really connected to learning about new places, new institutions, another history, a different way of doing things and a different way of understanding things. Sometimes that is fascinating and sometimes it is infuriating. Some places are off limits to foreigners too, unless one wants to risk being beaten up when one opens one's mouth. (There are places in Nottingham I wouldn't visit as well). All these are different sides of the relationship to the other country - the language learning, after all, is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Brian Davey
December 2002