Today I'm going to do a mini-review of the differences between the 1987 edition of German with Ease that I learnt German with and the most recent edition (2014). I'll try to be unbiased, though that will be hard as I certainly credit the 1987 edition of the book + CDs with much of my success in passing the German B2 exam. It was pretty much my only source of grammar, and I ended up with an intuitive feel for the grammar that no other course of approach ever has. I'm pretty confident the new edition (2014) could do the same so don't take this comparison as any sort of advice against buying the new edition. I really just want to discuss some of the points of difference that I've noticed.
The idea of the lessons is that they are short, so you can do one a day (although, due to my desire to mimic the whole dialogue as closely as possible, I didn't keep to this timetable as the lessons got harder and longer) and they are usually funny, even if just in a very simple way. It's not Seinfeld, but you'll get a giggle to help cement your understanding and to make it easier to listen to the lesson on repeat many times as I did. Despite listening and repeating many times, I essentially never did the exercises. I just listened to those sentences as well, and repeated. I would read the English whenever I needed to to make sure I was understanding 100% so as to capture nuance as well. One thing that I actually considered to be a great advantage of the method was that it doesn't try to give you tourist-centric dialogues that you can use "from day one". All the other millions of copycat courses do that, and poorly to boot. You will NOT be able to use phrases right from the start if the language is unfamiliar to you. You may say something useful, but you won't understand the replies, so why focus on that? Instead, Assimil builds the intuitive skills needed for comprehension of spoken language, the hardest skill of all.
Since I only have access to chapters 1, 50 and 100 from the 2014 sample linked above, I will just compare those with the same lessons in the 1987 edition and see how they stack up.
Lesson 1
The 1987 has a funny little dialogue at a cafe, but it's definitely not your usual first dialogue in a language course. The customer complains about his tea being cold. The waiter apologises and brings him a new cup, which the customer now likes. Too much it seems as he then complains about the cup being too small! 9 lines and 19 new words.
In the 2014 edition the first lesson is entitled "Good luck" and says that today's a special day because you're starting to learn German. Humour is subjective, but this one is definitely not funny. 5 lines and 14 new words.
Lesson 50
The 1987 edition's 50th lesson is entitled "Being a shop assistant isn't easy". A man goes into a store and gets help picking something for his mother. Not particularly funny but reading it now it is familiar to me. 13 lines and 153 words.
The 2014 edition "Advertisements for Holiday Apartments", in which a couple discuss a possible holiday in Spain. The ad piques the wife's interest by describing its location and reassuring its German audience that the Spanish can speak English. The husband agrees that it sounds good but they don't mention money and, besides, he'd like to go Spain to learn Spanish. OK, so, again, not Seinfeld, but this one is funnier than its 1987 counterpart. 10 lines and 76 words.
Lesson 100
The 1987 editions 100th lesson is called "Don't trust anybody". It is about a reader of the book talking to someone they've just met (it seems) about how sad they are that their German book ("German with Ease") has now finished and how they were looking forward to every day. Their interlocutor is intrigued by someone having such a strong reaction to a book and takes a look and flicks through it. He realises he can understand a little with his school German and finds the pictures funny and so ends up just taking off with the book, leaving its original owner distraught. Silly? Yes, but silly in a funny way and memorable because of it. 15 long lines.
The 2014 edition's lesson 100 is a long email to an old friend telling the story of how she met her now partner. The story is a bit funny too. I think it's sort of memorable, and I think it's a good idea to include at least one informal letter in the book (the 1987 has one at lesson 99). It consists of 16 long lines.
The final complexity between these two lessons is probably pretty similar, although the 1987 edition uses more of the little particles that can be so tricky for learners to master, like "nun", "mal", etc. I can't imagine the transition to that complexity is as smooth in the 2014 edition though because the lessons I've seen from the sample seem so much shorter and simpler. I suspect a reader wouldn't end up as confident of the grammar, etc, and would have a smaller vocab purely because they had been exposed (seemingly, from this admittedly small sample) to much less of the language. And yet, the 2014 book's last lesson ends on page 508 vs the 1987 edition's 386 pages. This is something I've mentioned before - the new books have a format that doesn't fit easily into a pocket, unlike the older format with the very handy red string bookmark built in. All the older editions I've seen of a similar vintage have the same robust cover, whilst the newer editions (one of which I own) tend to be much larger, but with lots of wasted space and padding out and, it seems, possibly even less content overall, and, in language learning, content is king. Sometimes they expand the number of exercises, which I see no value in at all. They're just a way for a beginner to feel like they're not doing well and they go against the principle of assimilation for which the method is rightly famous.
I'm pretty sure I've written about this change to a cheaper but bulkier format before so I won't dwell on it here.
My summary is that I feel like the course has been simplified in being "updated". It's still probably the best method available on the market to get a solo learner to the stage of being able to have conversations and access native content (and then getting one's listening up to native speed). I really didn't study any grammar or do any grammar exercises before completing the B2 exam, so I have to concur that the 1987 edition at least did deliver on its promise of getting me to a B2 level, sort of. Certainly in terms of grammar. I still needed to learn a lot of words and work on some writing skills, but I'd say that Assimil + learning words from appropriate content + speaking with native speakers regularly is enough to pass the B2 exam. I suspect that's still true with the 2014 edition.
What are you experiences with either edition? Let me know in the comments!
Thursday, December 16, 2021
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Dear Monica - An open letter on the difficulties of language learning in a traditional setting
I recently read an article by one Monica Dux in which she describes her difficult experience in learning German. Her struggles brought back many memories for me of my earlier attempts at learning any language with any seriousness. I felt her pain!
First let me recap briefly her approach and some of the key moments in her article. I think one quote right at the start of the article really sums up her path: "my husband in particular, enduring detailed descriptions of the irregular verbs I’m currently grappling with". Memorising verb tables? That way lies insanity.
Monica takes seemingly traditional German language classes although she is now on Zoom lessons. I'm not sure if that was a post-covid development, or if she has always used online lessons. I think one on one online lessons would always have been better than classroom language learning as you don't spend your time waiting for other people to produce incorrect sentences at a stage when you have no idea what's right or wrong. Either way, the style seems to be the same. Work with a teacher as you go through a traditional textbook for your level. Monica is also supplementing with Duolingo it seems.
The reason I'm so certain that it's a fairly traditional textbook is because of the incredibly slow pace and the attitude of Monica's German tutor. On the timeframe, she says "I take my language classes seriously, so when I started, I decided that five years was enough time to become fluent." Her actual chosen level for "fluency" is B2, which is the same one I chose many years ago. It's not "native like" fluency, but it is often considered (by those who have achieved it) to be the first level where you feel reasonably confident in saying that you "speak" the language. It was a level where I felt I could move to German and get a job in a German-speaking company and, within a short timeframe, feel relatively comfortable because I would mainly just need to acquire more work specific vocabulary as well as more day-to-day language. The B2 level is where you feel you've "acquired" the language. That is, you won't lose it just by not using it. Yes, you can forget vocabulary and be out of practice speaking, etc., but you can more easily get back up to the same level.
The B2 level is a platform for listening to a whole range of native content and enjoying it with a high level of comprehension, as well asc ertainly being the level where most native level content can easily serve as an in-context source of new vocabulary without the crutch of your native language. It's possible to achieve some of those skills earlier, of course, but by B2 you should be able to do these things to a reasonably useful degree. So, toi toi Monica! It was a good choice of goal and certainly plenty of time. I think perhaps this goal was too long in fact as it loses some of the sense of urgency that can bring with it momentum. This is so useful in language learning as you will forget almost as much as you learn over time.
With a solid goal in mind, and a timetable, Monica mentioned it to her tutor who, with stereotypical German directness and certainty, told her that her goal of reacing B2 by a certain date was, essentially, impossible. Worse, although Monica was plowing her way through a B1 textbook at the time (the first of two), her tutor seemed to agree that proficiency might be another 10+ years away! TEN YEARS! A DECADE! EIN JAHRZEHNTEN! ONE EIGHTH OF THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN! Well, to be fair on the tutor, it's unclear from the article if "proficiency" meant C2, or, indeed, if the word meant the same thing to Monica and her tutor. Even so, it seems crazy for someone who's willing to stay focussed on the language for that time. It's been almost 10 years since I passed my B2 exam and I haven't gone on to C1 or C2 yet. I have considered them recently, but I haven't really done the work required, other than reading Sten Nadolny's Weitlings Sommerfrischer. I even translated the first chapter into English and wrote to the publisher to see if they were interested in my translation. No response yet, but surely the English-speaking public is keen to see more works from the author of The Discovery of Slowness? But I digress... I think my main point is that if I had pushed on to get to C2 instead of doing very different things with my "spare" time for most of the intervening period, including studying other languages, I am pretty certain that it wouldn't have taken me 10 years to get that certificate!
https://twitter.com/monicadux/status/1456047563522539522 The distance between the levels is non-linear. Roughly, you could consider the difficulty between levels to double at each step. HOWEVER, there are some important caveats. First, it has to be recognised by anyone who has achieved a high level learning a language after childhood, especially outside an "immersion" environment where you're forced to live the language, that the traditional "classroom + textbook" route is a long, slow road. People do achieve fluency that way, but it's excruciatingly slow and exacting and often, as a result, those who have succeeded along this path and then become language teachers themselves will then have a view that language learning can only have the goal of the level of standardised grammatical perfection that they themselves have achieved, and the only realistic road to that goal is the one they followed.
I used the traditional route for all language learning before learning German. In particular, when I was about 19 I started doing French classes at Alliance Francaise in Sydney. I did their 8 levels of French (without doing any exams) and, at the end of that process, dutifully doing my homework and trying hard in class, I realised that I couldn't really read or speak French, so I took the last two levels again. It was the classic approach of attending classes once a week, following a textbook, trying to perfect one small "simple" area of grammar before moving on to the next, and doing homework exercises on those grammatical points. Sometimes you even learn some vocabulary! This got me to the stage of still not being able to speak, read much, nor understand native content. Looking back, I realise now that the whole approach is pretty terrible. I think the classes are OK - I personally enjoy that style of learning - but they must be supplemented by daily practice and vocabulary acquisition through either of a few different paths. In fact, as I learn with German, the "supplemental exercises" are actually the core. I would only go to a traditional language class now at an intermediate level to prepare for an exam or because I had a lot of spare time and money. Ditto for online tutoring, really. You don't really need it below upper-intermediate, in my opinion, and even then it's perhaps questionable.
Most future projects would be some variant on what worked best for me with German to get to the B2 exam within about 2 years from when I started, and including moving countries and having my first child, having a fulltime job and trying to maintain a "normal" life (as normal as a new parent's life can be). Those key points are listed in other posts on this blog, but I'll condense them here:
(One thing to note is that the older version of German with Ease seems better than the latest, from what I've seen in the samples of the latest. I might write more on this later, but I can definitely recommend the older version that I used.)
I did other things as well, such as working through a single B2 exam prep book, as well as reading a German crime novel, and then recording all the unknown words and adding them to my Anki deck, but the above points are the main ones. In other, they were respectively the bedrock of grammar acquisition (including developing a "feel" for what's correct), vocabulary acquisition, developing speaking and conversational listening skills, and finally developing more formal, one-way listening skills.
What's important as a contrast with Monica's approach and my earlier attempt at French fluency is that I did essentially ZERO memorising of grammar rules or verb tables and I attended essentially ZERO traditional lessons. I never even owned or read a grammar to anything more than a passing glance, really. I did NOT follow specific levels in a textbook, except for the brilliantly progressive lessons in German with Ease which really did allow me to develop that elusive "feel" for how to form sentences correctly.
Sure, to progress to C2 I will definitely need to have more deliberate focus on more complex grammar. I think at this stage it's more efficient in terms of time to try to remember a few grammar rules to apply in rare occasions (though practice is still key!) rather than trying to assimilate these through real world examples as the examples are too rare to reinforce the lessons.
Now, after this long, rambling piece, I come to my suggestions for Monica:
I talk about some of these in my post-mortem after having passed the B2 exam. This includes a description of how I make Anki cards so they're really useful (e.g., "sich um jdm kummern" not just "kummern", sometimes with irregular verb forms if I could be bothered looking them up, and nouns with their gender and plural always "der Mann/Männer" rather than just "Mann").
I hope this can help, or anyone in a similar situation as I was myself many years ago. Viel Glück!
First let me recap briefly her approach and some of the key moments in her article. I think one quote right at the start of the article really sums up her path: "my husband in particular, enduring detailed descriptions of the irregular verbs I’m currently grappling with". Memorising verb tables? That way lies insanity.
Monica takes seemingly traditional German language classes although she is now on Zoom lessons. I'm not sure if that was a post-covid development, or if she has always used online lessons. I think one on one online lessons would always have been better than classroom language learning as you don't spend your time waiting for other people to produce incorrect sentences at a stage when you have no idea what's right or wrong. Either way, the style seems to be the same. Work with a teacher as you go through a traditional textbook for your level. Monica is also supplementing with Duolingo it seems.
The reason I'm so certain that it's a fairly traditional textbook is because of the incredibly slow pace and the attitude of Monica's German tutor. On the timeframe, she says "I take my language classes seriously, so when I started, I decided that five years was enough time to become fluent." Her actual chosen level for "fluency" is B2, which is the same one I chose many years ago. It's not "native like" fluency, but it is often considered (by those who have achieved it) to be the first level where you feel reasonably confident in saying that you "speak" the language. It was a level where I felt I could move to German and get a job in a German-speaking company and, within a short timeframe, feel relatively comfortable because I would mainly just need to acquire more work specific vocabulary as well as more day-to-day language. The B2 level is where you feel you've "acquired" the language. That is, you won't lose it just by not using it. Yes, you can forget vocabulary and be out of practice speaking, etc., but you can more easily get back up to the same level.
The B2 level is a platform for listening to a whole range of native content and enjoying it with a high level of comprehension, as well asc ertainly being the level where most native level content can easily serve as an in-context source of new vocabulary without the crutch of your native language. It's possible to achieve some of those skills earlier, of course, but by B2 you should be able to do these things to a reasonably useful degree. So, toi toi Monica! It was a good choice of goal and certainly plenty of time. I think perhaps this goal was too long in fact as it loses some of the sense of urgency that can bring with it momentum. This is so useful in language learning as you will forget almost as much as you learn over time.
With a solid goal in mind, and a timetable, Monica mentioned it to her tutor who, with stereotypical German directness and certainty, told her that her goal of reacing B2 by a certain date was, essentially, impossible. Worse, although Monica was plowing her way through a B1 textbook at the time (the first of two), her tutor seemed to agree that proficiency might be another 10+ years away! TEN YEARS! A DECADE! EIN JAHRZEHNTEN! ONE EIGHTH OF THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN! Well, to be fair on the tutor, it's unclear from the article if "proficiency" meant C2, or, indeed, if the word meant the same thing to Monica and her tutor. Even so, it seems crazy for someone who's willing to stay focussed on the language for that time. It's been almost 10 years since I passed my B2 exam and I haven't gone on to C1 or C2 yet. I have considered them recently, but I haven't really done the work required, other than reading Sten Nadolny's Weitlings Sommerfrischer. I even translated the first chapter into English and wrote to the publisher to see if they were interested in my translation. No response yet, but surely the English-speaking public is keen to see more works from the author of The Discovery of Slowness? But I digress... I think my main point is that if I had pushed on to get to C2 instead of doing very different things with my "spare" time for most of the intervening period, including studying other languages, I am pretty certain that it wouldn't have taken me 10 years to get that certificate!
https://twitter.com/monicadux/status/1456047563522539522 The distance between the levels is non-linear. Roughly, you could consider the difficulty between levels to double at each step. HOWEVER, there are some important caveats. First, it has to be recognised by anyone who has achieved a high level learning a language after childhood, especially outside an "immersion" environment where you're forced to live the language, that the traditional "classroom + textbook" route is a long, slow road. People do achieve fluency that way, but it's excruciatingly slow and exacting and often, as a result, those who have succeeded along this path and then become language teachers themselves will then have a view that language learning can only have the goal of the level of standardised grammatical perfection that they themselves have achieved, and the only realistic road to that goal is the one they followed.
I used the traditional route for all language learning before learning German. In particular, when I was about 19 I started doing French classes at Alliance Francaise in Sydney. I did their 8 levels of French (without doing any exams) and, at the end of that process, dutifully doing my homework and trying hard in class, I realised that I couldn't really read or speak French, so I took the last two levels again. It was the classic approach of attending classes once a week, following a textbook, trying to perfect one small "simple" area of grammar before moving on to the next, and doing homework exercises on those grammatical points. Sometimes you even learn some vocabulary! This got me to the stage of still not being able to speak, read much, nor understand native content. Looking back, I realise now that the whole approach is pretty terrible. I think the classes are OK - I personally enjoy that style of learning - but they must be supplemented by daily practice and vocabulary acquisition through either of a few different paths. In fact, as I learn with German, the "supplemental exercises" are actually the core. I would only go to a traditional language class now at an intermediate level to prepare for an exam or because I had a lot of spare time and money. Ditto for online tutoring, really. You don't really need it below upper-intermediate, in my opinion, and even then it's perhaps questionable.
Most future projects would be some variant on what worked best for me with German to get to the B2 exam within about 2 years from when I started, and including moving countries and having my first child, having a fulltime job and trying to maintain a "normal" life (as normal as a new parent's life can be). Those key points are listed in other posts on this blog, but I'll condense them here:
- Daily practice: at least a little every day. I wasn't perfect - life does get in the way - but it was a goal I stuck to fairly closely.
- Assimil's brilliant German with Ease (although I used an older edition). This book got me to a B2 level of grammar with strong intuition for "correct" forms. I used a form of shadowing. I would listen and repeat after the audio until I could keep up with the whole dialogue for all participants. At this stage, I had memorised the meaning as well (this is fairly easy - one or two quick reads of the English are generally enough). Only then would I go on to the next lesson. The exercises are unnecessary, indeed even anathema to the assimilation process.
- Anki . Absolutely amazing and indispensible. I went from thinking I was just hopeless at memorising vocabulary to rapidly acquiring and maintaining a solid vocabulary. Make sure you get the official app only - there are lots of rip-off versions floating about!
- Make friends with a conversation partner. I did this once I had reached I was about 80% of the way through German with Ease, IIRC.
- I made my own parallel translations as well of content that had audio. This was especially helpful for learning to comprehend the news at full speed which is a very relevant skill for passing a language exam.
(One thing to note is that the older version of German with Ease seems better than the latest, from what I've seen in the samples of the latest. I might write more on this later, but I can definitely recommend the older version that I used.)
I did other things as well, such as working through a single B2 exam prep book, as well as reading a German crime novel, and then recording all the unknown words and adding them to my Anki deck, but the above points are the main ones. In other, they were respectively the bedrock of grammar acquisition (including developing a "feel" for what's correct), vocabulary acquisition, developing speaking and conversational listening skills, and finally developing more formal, one-way listening skills.
What's important as a contrast with Monica's approach and my earlier attempt at French fluency is that I did essentially ZERO memorising of grammar rules or verb tables and I attended essentially ZERO traditional lessons. I never even owned or read a grammar to anything more than a passing glance, really. I did NOT follow specific levels in a textbook, except for the brilliantly progressive lessons in German with Ease which really did allow me to develop that elusive "feel" for how to form sentences correctly.
Sure, to progress to C2 I will definitely need to have more deliberate focus on more complex grammar. I think at this stage it's more efficient in terms of time to try to remember a few grammar rules to apply in rare occasions (though practice is still key!) rather than trying to assimilate these through real world examples as the examples are too rare to reinforce the lessons.
Now, after this long, rambling piece, I come to my suggestions for Monica:
- Develop a habit of daily practice. Do at least something small each day.
- I know you're already at B1 but try Assimil's German with Ease (I recommend older version). You can race through the early stuff, but remember to shadow the dialogues. Listen and repeat at full speed and with full comprehension (read the English text once when necessary) until you can repeat it without mistakes (while shadowing). Only then should you move on. DO NOT BOTHER DOING THE EXERCISES!
- You must get Anki. Start out perhaps with a pre-made list of "B2" level words. It won't be perfect, but it will help bootstrap your vocab to a great extent. At some stage you should be making your own list based on words you've gathered from your own sources.
- Find a conversation partner. You can try a language exchange. I've found the best conversation partners for a learner are those who themselves have struggled to learn a foreign language in their late teenage years or later. They understand your pain. Traditionally trained language tutors may not make good conversation partners.
- Ditch the current tutor/language school. They're slowing you down!
I talk about some of these in my post-mortem after having passed the B2 exam. This includes a description of how I make Anki cards so they're really useful (e.g., "sich um jdm kummern" not just "kummern", sometimes with irregular verb forms if I could be bothered looking them up, and nouns with their gender and plural always "der Mann/Männer" rather than just "Mann").
I hope this can help, or anyone in a similar situation as I was myself many years ago. Viel Glück!
Sunday, November 7, 2021
On the nature of human language
This post, after a hiatus of so many years, will also be a little change of pace for the blog. Actually, after so many years, just posting is a "change of pace", but this will be a change of pace for other reasons.
The inspiration for this post was when I recently watched a lecture on the evolution of language by a distinguished scholar named Mark Pagel, which you can see for yourself here. He states some uncontroversial points about human history, but interwoven are a number of comments which seem odd, and a general thread that only late Homo Sapiens could speak, and this is taken as a given. For instance, in a discussion on Neanderthal/Sapiens interbreeding in which he states, matter of factly, that we don't know if their children would have had language. Indeed, in his language, he is extremely explicit about this point - at about 29 minutes in he discusses the human family tree, including Neanderthals and Denisovans and states, very firmly that "not a single one of them has language, as far as we can guess". His criteria for this seems to almost totally based on culture toolkits, but for Neanderthals he has to have an an extra reason to exclude them because they seem to have had fairly sophisticated culture (although, at other times, he just discounts Neanderthal culture altogether). His extra "evidence" for this is that, although they had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it is affected by different regulatory genes. This accepts rather uncritically the idea that FOXP2 is a vital component of language communication in humans. It is perhaps possible that modern human languages rely on the gene, but not that language itself (whether spoken, or mixed-mode with signs, or whatever) requires the gene. In any case, this is still highly speculative and should be couched in terms more appropriate to indicate it is.
One of his major points supporting the idea that only Homo sapiens have ever had language is an image shown at around 57 minutes in. It shows the geographical and chronological distribution of human ancestors starting with Homo ergaster then Homo erectus, neanderthalensis and up to sapiens. Even just the initial split of ergaster as separate from erectus is controversial. The image he shows demonstrates that sapiens spread over the whole world in a relatively brief period of time. It seems to me uncontroversial to suggest that sapiens were smarter and more adaptable than most of their forebears, although I'm not sure we can guarantee that there were no Neanderthals, for example, who were smarter than a modern day human, given the wide range of abilities exhibited in any sufficiently large population. The small percentage of neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans perhaps owes more to the neolithic farming revolution than to any specific advantages of Homo sapiens over Homo neanderthalensis. In any case, the image also shows that Homo erectus lasted an extraordinarily long time and covered all of Asia, but almost nothing else (it is unclear from the image, but it seems to be indicating a relatively brief early presence in Africa as well). However, being a big fan of paleoanthropology and John Hawks in particular, this struck me as ringing a little untrue. A quick check of wikipedia reveals a much greater extent, which is to say all of Africa, Europe and Asia, including small islands that can only be reached by boat, showing a level of sophistication and planning which Mark Pagel ignores completely in his lecture. It's not like his lecture is so old that it couldn't include this new information either as it's from 2019. Indeed, his distribution of neanderthals is similarly too limited as they were in Europe, the Levant and central Asia. Certainly one of the most famous neanderthal finds is from well outside of Europe. John Hawks has written on the topic of the "myth" that African populations lack neanderthal ancestry. Wikipedia has a similar type of picture to Pagel's but which shows an African population of erectus persisting until Homo heidelbergensis appears, representing either an evolved state of Homo erectus or a replacement. The main point to note is that this picture, which seems to me based on my other reading, to be more the "consensus" view, is quite a bit different from that presented as uncontroversial in Mark Pagel's lecture. It seems fairly safe to say that Homo erectus was pretty widespread. Not as widespread as sapiens, but we should also remember at the same time that the evidence for sapiens is from more recent time frames and thus more likely to be observed by us whereas our ancestors used stone and wood, lived at much lower densities, may often have lived in areas that are now flooded as a result of sea rise at the end of the last ice age, and are thus just far less likely to be observed by us today. A culture that makes extensive use of wood and hide, for example, will largely disappear without a trace after 100,000+ years, so we shouldn't take the distribution of skeletal and tool finds as being indicative of the whole range of the species, but as a minimum area they must have travelled across at least. To my mind then it would seem clear that both Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were quite successful and widespread, erectus especially so. His almost cartoonish characterisation of the lives of neanderthals seems to belong to another age altogether. I found myself opining as I listened to him, what would be conclude about Australian Aboriginals and their ability to speak any language at all, on the basis of what evidence would survive 100k years. No rock art of highly decorated barks or dilly bags would be found, no instruments (being as they were wood). They had great stone tools which we might be able to determine were hafted, but erectus had pretty good stone tools. Lost are all the dances, ceremonies, songs and other aspects of their intensely symbolic lives. And of course, gone would be all traces of language. Would Mark Pagel conclude they had never had language at all?
There is one funny point he makes in response to a question at about 1:22:00 in the lecture where he says "Nobody I think is saying Hebrew is the mother tongue" which segues nicely into the next source of inspiration for this post, which is Chomskyan linguistics in general, and the following strange lecture given by Chomsky in particular. The link with Mark Pagel's lecture comes at about 1:28 in Pagel's lecture when he says that "the basic structure of language is, again, kind of like Proto-Semitic" and again at around 1:32:50 where he says "Uli(?) and Proto-Semitic are the Ur-languages", Ur-language being a Frankenstein borrowing from German of Ursprache which, in this context, means "the original language". In other words, Chomsky is very clearly suggesting that the ancestor of biblical Hebrew is, indeed, the "original language", at least in our brains, and every other language is just a remapping of this underlying, genetic, built-in grammar to "surface" forms. These latter are Chomsky's way of saying "written languages of the world". I'm hesitant to use the word speech because, as should be obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with Chomsky's work in linguistics, he clearly seems to be "studying" a rarified, pure, written form of languages and then trying, and as can be seen in terms of the history of Chomskyan linguistics and in terms of results, failing, to say something deep and meaningful about what real language is. In fact, although the above linked lecture of Chomsky's is from quite late in his career, it would seem to be the one that best summarises the underlying purpose of the enterprise in Chomsky's mind and that is to prove that Hebrew is essentially the original language, or the basic language grammar at least from which all modern languages are just deviants. To my mind, this actually explains a lot about why he has pursued such a strange mathematical formalism as a mechanism for pontificating about the origins of language which completely eschews statistical methods, comparative linguistics, or, indeed any kind of field work or evidence. He seems to prefer a kind of mental source, pulling all the evidence he needs from the English language itself coupled with his knowledge of some other languages. He apparently spoke fluent Hebrew some 50 years ago, but now doesn't feel comfortable to speak it any more and I couldn't find a video of him speaking any other languages, but he claims reading fluency at least in a few other than English.
Just to clear things up at this put, I am in no way against Chomsky. I may have sympathy for his controversial political stances. I can't say for sure as I've never read any of his books on those topics and his discourses in public honestly strike me as roughly as confused and tortuous as his linguistics, but I certainly don't hold his politics against him at all. In fact, I first really heard of him when I was a teenager and I heard about this wonderful new world of Generative Linguistics which, I read, held all the answers as to how language works and its origin. So I bought a little primer on the field. Unfortunately, the book left me extremely cold. It did its best to present the body of theory (really only hypotheses) in the field, and to discuss the problems and changes made in response to those problems. I don't know why it seemed so obvious to me, but not to many of those involved in the field, but it was clear that this was trying to understand written communication and the formalisms behind it, which is problematic to begin with, but also that it was just a very unsatisfying and unsatisfactory attempt at an explanation. Even in my teenage years, it seemed clear to me that it was as if I had asked for an explanation of all the amazing variety of life on Earth and when I finally read a book purporting to explain it the answer turned out to be something like "God did it". The explained mechanisms had no basis in biological reality and made little to no reference to the variety of languages available in the world. However, I wasn't deterred and just thought that I mustn't be understanding it properly and that in time, with more reading and research, I would understand it better.
I started an electrical engineering degree at university which gave me a solid understanding of higher mathematical concepts, including discrete maths. This seemed to possibly be the key! I think once of the books I read at this time even referenced one of Chomsky's results in computer "languages", which impressed me. However, it was also very clear to me that a formal mathematical language is an extremely different beast to a natural language. Still, Chomsky had a mighty intellectual reputation so I sought more information. At about this time I read two books in this area. One was the very popular and highly praised Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (in 1994) and the other was much less well known amongst the general public, a collection of academic papers from 1998 titled "An Introduction to Connection Modelling of Cognitive Processes". I think I may have read this latter first and I was truly fascinated by its biological approach and its focus on modelling and experiments, even though it was with toy systems at the time due to limited computing power. It demonstrated that complex behaviour and learning was possibly with simple models, including that which Chomsky had "proven" to be impossible using formal mathematical languages, namely that human languages are impossible to learn due to a paucity of stimulus, a point of view which has been parodied as a "paucity of imagination" on Chomsky's part. It showcased small scale models which showed human infant like learning patterns, etc. It literally blew my mind. I felt a great dawning in my brain. Here was a system of modelling with a biological basis which could show human like traits. I could see that the limitations were due to the use of simplified models. In retrospect, I can't understand why the field of connectionist modelling didn't immediately cause the whole field of Chomskyan linguistics to be abandoned and all that wasting funding to be poured into language preservation and connectionist modelling related studies. This way back in 1998, but it took a while for anything much to show in linguistics. Still there are linguistics departments today in thrall to Chomsky's unscientific field of study. It's unscientific in the sense that it is seemingly impossible to disprove as the definitions can always be made slippery enough to evade any issue. My experience with Pinker's "The Language Instinct" was very much the opposite. I read it with a very open mind, expecting to be blown away, but found myself instead continually frustrated at the strawman arguments and false dichotomies which seemed to me very often to be the result of a paucity of imagination as well. Even if it hadn't had those problems, I was still left wondering "so what?". It seemed to basically say that language just appeared in our brains due to a language module and then tried to find something in the brain which could be described thus. It seemed to have no real explanatory or predictive power, quite the opposite of the book on connectionist modelling from a few years later.
At about this time I also read Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species". This was an extremely interesting and careful evaluation of the evolutionary history and neuroscience of human language, including a very careful categorisation of different forms of communication, pointing out that only humans have the highest level of complexity, "symbolic communication". It ended with Deacon's personal pet hypothesis on the evolution of language. It was an interesting take, although highly speculative of course. John Hawk's did a great review of this book. The Symbolic Species and An Introduction to Connectionist Modelling were the first two books I read that took on Chomskyan linguistics head on with actual research, facts and a proper scientific viewpoint. They really resonated with me for both the approach and the results.
Since those days it has become clear to me that there are two broad groups of linguists in the world, those who study real world languages and work in recording and preserving those, learning fascinating new insights along the way, and then Chomskyan linguists who see to be doing the same old ivory tower work, sometimes perturbed by facts from the outside world. The former group very rarely pops their head up over the parapet because they saw no advantage in starting an argument using evidence against what seems more religious than scientific. There have been a few notable exceptions, however. Daniel Everett was certainly one. I've read several of his books which all attack the foundations of Chomskyan linguistics "from the inside" so to speak, as he himself was a former Chomsky devotee, but he has also worked in language documentation in remote, endangered languages and they changed his worldview very starkly. Even his latest book, ostensibly on the topic of the origins of language itself (spoiler: he traces it back to Homo erectus, which I agree at least makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective, although the evidence will always be weak) called "How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention". He's also gone head to head with at least one Chomskyan in a live debate which just reinforced for me the muddle-headed worldview that Chomskyan linguistics induces in its obviously intelligent adherents. Somewhat like hearing a very intelligent person try to explain why they believe in a Young Earth.
Another very strong rejoinder to Chomskyan linguistics was delivered in a paper co-authored by a very highly respected Australian linguist, Nick Evans, who I first learnt of through his grammar of Bininj Kunwok. The paper is titled The Myth of Language Universals and I highly recommend reading it. It is a detailed, clever and careful piece by piece dissection of whichever parts of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device which could be pinned down to a single definition for long enough to take apart. The other dissection of Chomsky, this time by an AI researcher, Peter Norvig who has switched from the grammar rules based approach to a statistical learning approach to language modelling problems, and comes in from a very different direction, that of the philosophy of science itself and the results achieved by the different approaches. For anyone looking for the most comprehensive and comprehensible takedowns of Chomskyan's field of linguistics study, look no further than these two papers.
To wrap up this winding diatribe, I would like to recommend one of Jeffrey Elman's lectures on connectionist models for an update on the field and Michael Tomasello talking about his fascinating research on pinning down the underlying difference between humans and chimps which is the fundamental divide between us socially and, therefore, linguistically.
And, very finally, although I recently watched another lecture on the evolution of languages, the link for which I currently can't find, but which repeated the claim that click languages of Africa represent an ancient language and that we all used to speak using clicks but have lost these. This arrogant view that "primitive" hunter-gatherers must not be innovating in language because their material culture hasn't changed rapidly is thoroughly destroyed, in my opinion, by Tom Güldemann's paper "Clicks, genetics, and “proto-world” from a linguistic perspective". If we can just drop these prejudices and strange mid-20th century ideologies from linguistics, our progress in studying, recording, preserving, understanding and modeling language can only accelerate!
The inspiration for this post was when I recently watched a lecture on the evolution of language by a distinguished scholar named Mark Pagel, which you can see for yourself here. He states some uncontroversial points about human history, but interwoven are a number of comments which seem odd, and a general thread that only late Homo Sapiens could speak, and this is taken as a given. For instance, in a discussion on Neanderthal/Sapiens interbreeding in which he states, matter of factly, that we don't know if their children would have had language. Indeed, in his language, he is extremely explicit about this point - at about 29 minutes in he discusses the human family tree, including Neanderthals and Denisovans and states, very firmly that "not a single one of them has language, as far as we can guess". His criteria for this seems to almost totally based on culture toolkits, but for Neanderthals he has to have an an extra reason to exclude them because they seem to have had fairly sophisticated culture (although, at other times, he just discounts Neanderthal culture altogether). His extra "evidence" for this is that, although they had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it is affected by different regulatory genes. This accepts rather uncritically the idea that FOXP2 is a vital component of language communication in humans. It is perhaps possible that modern human languages rely on the gene, but not that language itself (whether spoken, or mixed-mode with signs, or whatever) requires the gene. In any case, this is still highly speculative and should be couched in terms more appropriate to indicate it is.
One of his major points supporting the idea that only Homo sapiens have ever had language is an image shown at around 57 minutes in. It shows the geographical and chronological distribution of human ancestors starting with Homo ergaster then Homo erectus, neanderthalensis and up to sapiens. Even just the initial split of ergaster as separate from erectus is controversial. The image he shows demonstrates that sapiens spread over the whole world in a relatively brief period of time. It seems to me uncontroversial to suggest that sapiens were smarter and more adaptable than most of their forebears, although I'm not sure we can guarantee that there were no Neanderthals, for example, who were smarter than a modern day human, given the wide range of abilities exhibited in any sufficiently large population. The small percentage of neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans perhaps owes more to the neolithic farming revolution than to any specific advantages of Homo sapiens over Homo neanderthalensis. In any case, the image also shows that Homo erectus lasted an extraordinarily long time and covered all of Asia, but almost nothing else (it is unclear from the image, but it seems to be indicating a relatively brief early presence in Africa as well). However, being a big fan of paleoanthropology and John Hawks in particular, this struck me as ringing a little untrue. A quick check of wikipedia reveals a much greater extent, which is to say all of Africa, Europe and Asia, including small islands that can only be reached by boat, showing a level of sophistication and planning which Mark Pagel ignores completely in his lecture. It's not like his lecture is so old that it couldn't include this new information either as it's from 2019. Indeed, his distribution of neanderthals is similarly too limited as they were in Europe, the Levant and central Asia. Certainly one of the most famous neanderthal finds is from well outside of Europe. John Hawks has written on the topic of the "myth" that African populations lack neanderthal ancestry. Wikipedia has a similar type of picture to Pagel's but which shows an African population of erectus persisting until Homo heidelbergensis appears, representing either an evolved state of Homo erectus or a replacement. The main point to note is that this picture, which seems to me based on my other reading, to be more the "consensus" view, is quite a bit different from that presented as uncontroversial in Mark Pagel's lecture. It seems fairly safe to say that Homo erectus was pretty widespread. Not as widespread as sapiens, but we should also remember at the same time that the evidence for sapiens is from more recent time frames and thus more likely to be observed by us whereas our ancestors used stone and wood, lived at much lower densities, may often have lived in areas that are now flooded as a result of sea rise at the end of the last ice age, and are thus just far less likely to be observed by us today. A culture that makes extensive use of wood and hide, for example, will largely disappear without a trace after 100,000+ years, so we shouldn't take the distribution of skeletal and tool finds as being indicative of the whole range of the species, but as a minimum area they must have travelled across at least. To my mind then it would seem clear that both Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were quite successful and widespread, erectus especially so. His almost cartoonish characterisation of the lives of neanderthals seems to belong to another age altogether. I found myself opining as I listened to him, what would be conclude about Australian Aboriginals and their ability to speak any language at all, on the basis of what evidence would survive 100k years. No rock art of highly decorated barks or dilly bags would be found, no instruments (being as they were wood). They had great stone tools which we might be able to determine were hafted, but erectus had pretty good stone tools. Lost are all the dances, ceremonies, songs and other aspects of their intensely symbolic lives. And of course, gone would be all traces of language. Would Mark Pagel conclude they had never had language at all?
There is one funny point he makes in response to a question at about 1:22:00 in the lecture where he says "Nobody I think is saying Hebrew is the mother tongue" which segues nicely into the next source of inspiration for this post, which is Chomskyan linguistics in general, and the following strange lecture given by Chomsky in particular. The link with Mark Pagel's lecture comes at about 1:28 in Pagel's lecture when he says that "the basic structure of language is, again, kind of like Proto-Semitic" and again at around 1:32:50 where he says "Uli(?) and Proto-Semitic are the Ur-languages", Ur-language being a Frankenstein borrowing from German of Ursprache which, in this context, means "the original language". In other words, Chomsky is very clearly suggesting that the ancestor of biblical Hebrew is, indeed, the "original language", at least in our brains, and every other language is just a remapping of this underlying, genetic, built-in grammar to "surface" forms. These latter are Chomsky's way of saying "written languages of the world". I'm hesitant to use the word speech because, as should be obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with Chomsky's work in linguistics, he clearly seems to be "studying" a rarified, pure, written form of languages and then trying, and as can be seen in terms of the history of Chomskyan linguistics and in terms of results, failing, to say something deep and meaningful about what real language is. In fact, although the above linked lecture of Chomsky's is from quite late in his career, it would seem to be the one that best summarises the underlying purpose of the enterprise in Chomsky's mind and that is to prove that Hebrew is essentially the original language, or the basic language grammar at least from which all modern languages are just deviants. To my mind, this actually explains a lot about why he has pursued such a strange mathematical formalism as a mechanism for pontificating about the origins of language which completely eschews statistical methods, comparative linguistics, or, indeed any kind of field work or evidence. He seems to prefer a kind of mental source, pulling all the evidence he needs from the English language itself coupled with his knowledge of some other languages. He apparently spoke fluent Hebrew some 50 years ago, but now doesn't feel comfortable to speak it any more and I couldn't find a video of him speaking any other languages, but he claims reading fluency at least in a few other than English.
Just to clear things up at this put, I am in no way against Chomsky. I may have sympathy for his controversial political stances. I can't say for sure as I've never read any of his books on those topics and his discourses in public honestly strike me as roughly as confused and tortuous as his linguistics, but I certainly don't hold his politics against him at all. In fact, I first really heard of him when I was a teenager and I heard about this wonderful new world of Generative Linguistics which, I read, held all the answers as to how language works and its origin. So I bought a little primer on the field. Unfortunately, the book left me extremely cold. It did its best to present the body of theory (really only hypotheses) in the field, and to discuss the problems and changes made in response to those problems. I don't know why it seemed so obvious to me, but not to many of those involved in the field, but it was clear that this was trying to understand written communication and the formalisms behind it, which is problematic to begin with, but also that it was just a very unsatisfying and unsatisfactory attempt at an explanation. Even in my teenage years, it seemed clear to me that it was as if I had asked for an explanation of all the amazing variety of life on Earth and when I finally read a book purporting to explain it the answer turned out to be something like "God did it". The explained mechanisms had no basis in biological reality and made little to no reference to the variety of languages available in the world. However, I wasn't deterred and just thought that I mustn't be understanding it properly and that in time, with more reading and research, I would understand it better.
I started an electrical engineering degree at university which gave me a solid understanding of higher mathematical concepts, including discrete maths. This seemed to possibly be the key! I think once of the books I read at this time even referenced one of Chomsky's results in computer "languages", which impressed me. However, it was also very clear to me that a formal mathematical language is an extremely different beast to a natural language. Still, Chomsky had a mighty intellectual reputation so I sought more information. At about this time I read two books in this area. One was the very popular and highly praised Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (in 1994) and the other was much less well known amongst the general public, a collection of academic papers from 1998 titled "An Introduction to Connection Modelling of Cognitive Processes". I think I may have read this latter first and I was truly fascinated by its biological approach and its focus on modelling and experiments, even though it was with toy systems at the time due to limited computing power. It demonstrated that complex behaviour and learning was possibly with simple models, including that which Chomsky had "proven" to be impossible using formal mathematical languages, namely that human languages are impossible to learn due to a paucity of stimulus, a point of view which has been parodied as a "paucity of imagination" on Chomsky's part. It showcased small scale models which showed human infant like learning patterns, etc. It literally blew my mind. I felt a great dawning in my brain. Here was a system of modelling with a biological basis which could show human like traits. I could see that the limitations were due to the use of simplified models. In retrospect, I can't understand why the field of connectionist modelling didn't immediately cause the whole field of Chomskyan linguistics to be abandoned and all that wasting funding to be poured into language preservation and connectionist modelling related studies. This way back in 1998, but it took a while for anything much to show in linguistics. Still there are linguistics departments today in thrall to Chomsky's unscientific field of study. It's unscientific in the sense that it is seemingly impossible to disprove as the definitions can always be made slippery enough to evade any issue. My experience with Pinker's "The Language Instinct" was very much the opposite. I read it with a very open mind, expecting to be blown away, but found myself instead continually frustrated at the strawman arguments and false dichotomies which seemed to me very often to be the result of a paucity of imagination as well. Even if it hadn't had those problems, I was still left wondering "so what?". It seemed to basically say that language just appeared in our brains due to a language module and then tried to find something in the brain which could be described thus. It seemed to have no real explanatory or predictive power, quite the opposite of the book on connectionist modelling from a few years later.
At about this time I also read Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species". This was an extremely interesting and careful evaluation of the evolutionary history and neuroscience of human language, including a very careful categorisation of different forms of communication, pointing out that only humans have the highest level of complexity, "symbolic communication". It ended with Deacon's personal pet hypothesis on the evolution of language. It was an interesting take, although highly speculative of course. John Hawk's did a great review of this book. The Symbolic Species and An Introduction to Connectionist Modelling were the first two books I read that took on Chomskyan linguistics head on with actual research, facts and a proper scientific viewpoint. They really resonated with me for both the approach and the results.
Since those days it has become clear to me that there are two broad groups of linguists in the world, those who study real world languages and work in recording and preserving those, learning fascinating new insights along the way, and then Chomskyan linguists who see to be doing the same old ivory tower work, sometimes perturbed by facts from the outside world. The former group very rarely pops their head up over the parapet because they saw no advantage in starting an argument using evidence against what seems more religious than scientific. There have been a few notable exceptions, however. Daniel Everett was certainly one. I've read several of his books which all attack the foundations of Chomskyan linguistics "from the inside" so to speak, as he himself was a former Chomsky devotee, but he has also worked in language documentation in remote, endangered languages and they changed his worldview very starkly. Even his latest book, ostensibly on the topic of the origins of language itself (spoiler: he traces it back to Homo erectus, which I agree at least makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective, although the evidence will always be weak) called "How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention". He's also gone head to head with at least one Chomskyan in a live debate which just reinforced for me the muddle-headed worldview that Chomskyan linguistics induces in its obviously intelligent adherents. Somewhat like hearing a very intelligent person try to explain why they believe in a Young Earth.
Another very strong rejoinder to Chomskyan linguistics was delivered in a paper co-authored by a very highly respected Australian linguist, Nick Evans, who I first learnt of through his grammar of Bininj Kunwok. The paper is titled The Myth of Language Universals and I highly recommend reading it. It is a detailed, clever and careful piece by piece dissection of whichever parts of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device which could be pinned down to a single definition for long enough to take apart. The other dissection of Chomsky, this time by an AI researcher, Peter Norvig who has switched from the grammar rules based approach to a statistical learning approach to language modelling problems, and comes in from a very different direction, that of the philosophy of science itself and the results achieved by the different approaches. For anyone looking for the most comprehensive and comprehensible takedowns of Chomskyan's field of linguistics study, look no further than these two papers.
To wrap up this winding diatribe, I would like to recommend one of Jeffrey Elman's lectures on connectionist models for an update on the field and Michael Tomasello talking about his fascinating research on pinning down the underlying difference between humans and chimps which is the fundamental divide between us socially and, therefore, linguistically.
And, very finally, although I recently watched another lecture on the evolution of languages, the link for which I currently can't find, but which repeated the claim that click languages of Africa represent an ancient language and that we all used to speak using clicks but have lost these. This arrogant view that "primitive" hunter-gatherers must not be innovating in language because their material culture hasn't changed rapidly is thoroughly destroyed, in my opinion, by Tom Güldemann's paper "Clicks, genetics, and “proto-world” from a linguistic perspective". If we can just drop these prejudices and strange mid-20th century ideologies from linguistics, our progress in studying, recording, preserving, understanding and modeling language can only accelerate!
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