A typical kind of L2 learning mistake is to use L1 syntax and semantics to generate a L2 sentence. Some people may think that every type of L2 mistakes made are related to one's L2. However, outside of the domain of phonology, I'm not convinced that's the case. Take myself for example. I speak Chinese as my L1, a SVO language. However, when I started learning Japanese and be exposed to lots of L2 SOV sentences at the age of 18, I did not feel weird at all about the SOV word order. Also, when I was learning English, I did not end up making lots of mistakes that look like Chinese syntax/semantics in English. Instead, I learned all the correct usage of subtle details about the language, not being aware of many of its differences from Chinese (like native speaker who is not aware). Therefore, what happened here is not that I am (unconsciously or consciously) comparing English to Chinese when I was learning it; rather, English sentences, with all its details, just was presented to me in a holistic fashion (with its information about phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc), and I was able to rather unconsciously extract all those information from my brain's statistical learning mechanism, rather implicitly. In this case, for example, Japanese cannot be confusing with Chinese to me because the SOV word order is associated only with those sounds in Japanese. That is a good strategy to learn a new language-make good use of your brain's native function. And that strategy is much better than an explicitly grammar based and analytically based approach. That route is a different one, i believe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
NEWSLOG
|