Learning Languages in Society with Gabi.

#001 - The number one trick to learn a foreign language.

• Juan Gabriel Saiz Varona • Episode 1

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#001 - In this first episode Gabi reveals what he thinks is the key to start speaking a new language right from the onset of the learning process. Additionally, he introduces Avram Noam Chomsky and gives a quick taste of the science of language.

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Welcome to the Learning Languages in Society with Gabi podcast, where it's all about the fascinating world of languages and culture. Let's rock.

Hi everybody, and welcome to my show. I'm your host Gabi and here we are in the very first episode of your new favorite podcast, learning Languages in Society with Gabi. So what is this show about? This show is mainly about learning foreign languages in the most effective way, making sure you're using those new language skills in real life situations. 

The key of this podcast and what sets it apart from other language podcasts is that I will teach you how to put those language skills into practice. In other words, I want you to be able to speak fluently, and most importantly, I want you to be able to express yourself using the exactly the right type of language in the right type of context, right from the beginning of the learning process. 

This podcast was created for all of those people who may need or who wish to learn to speak fluently, a foreign language, people who are excited to learn about a new culture, discover the traditions, and find out about the history of a foreign culture.

And incidentally, people who may be interested in various topics related to the science of language. So maybe you are relocating to that exciting new country for a new job opportunity, or maybe you're moving into a new country because you're planning to be with that special person you met on the internet. 

Or maybe you are simply like me. I fell in love with languages and cultures a long time ago, and I keep learning them for fun. So whatever your personal circumstances and reasons may be, you are in the right place. I want to make it a commitment to share with you all the secrets you need to know in order to learn languages. It's not hard, trust me.

Forget about all those boring grammar lessons and get straight to the point. Let's get down to business. Furthermore, I would love to share more about the interplay, between languages and culture, because this element right here is where the magic happens.


Now, say you're on a vacation, you are excited to be traveling to a new country. Your dream has come true. And let's say you happen to be in a situation in which you need to dust off in real time. One of those grammar structures that you are sure you've learned from an old textbook back in school. You are sure you have studied a way of saying something in Russian, for example, but for some reason, the grammar structure you're looking for isn't coming out. You're looking forward to remember a grammar structure, but you just simply cannot seem to remember it. You can't recall how to say what you want. 

So in a nutshell, you know your grammar structures, but they're completely fossilized somewhere in the back of your mind and thus are completely useless. So here we have several fictional examples, which could easily, easily be situations in real life.

Okay? So imagine you are stuck in a coffeehouse in a small village in southern France. You realize everyone around you speaks only French, and you want to try to order that coffee you saw on the menu in French. 

The waiter comes, you get nervous, you hesitate, and then you mumble. You mumble something, the waiter doesn't get it, he's in a hurry. And then you decide to just forget about it, and you nervously switch back to English and order your coffee in English. So your moment of glory is now gone. Right now, you're just puzzled. You don't know what just happened, and you're discouraged and helpless. Now, you don't understand why the French seem to have such a hard time understanding you in French. So things are not looking good for you in that coffeehouse right now. 

Here's another example. You are in Rome for a few days in a business trip, and suddenly you get a call from your new boss who is Italian, and you don't know him, you don't know him yet, but you realize that it's a good moment to shine and make a first good impression.


So you decide to try to use your Italian and answer the call. Long story short, you mumble something, your boss doesn't get what you're saying, and oops, the situation has suddenly become awkward for both of you, and then you go back to English and apologize. Right? So not very good either. Okay? 

And here's the last example. You are finally meeting this cute Russian girl you talked to on your local language exchange program, on a chat, for example. You have only written to her, but you have never spoken to her. So your communication has been basically all through a chat. She suddenly turns up to meet you at the local library, only for you to realize that your Russian pronunciation sucks. She can barely understand what you say, plus you brought her no little present and your date is doomed. You are doomed, my friend, but have no fear because Gabi here, and in this podcast, you're going to turn all those situations into small victories, one at a time.

So who am I? Well, as you can guess, my name is Gabi, and I am a professional translator and interpreter. I graduated back in 2017 from the UAB Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. I studied in the faculty of translation studies and interpreting. I studied English and Russian back then. And although I enrolled in university at age 27, I had long started learning languages and traveling by then. So in reality, by the time I started going to college, I already spoke six languages. 


And guess what? I am here to give you all my tips and support to turn you into a real polyglot. You too can become a polyglot. You too can nail those job interviews. You too can fluently converse about food in French and art in Italian, just like a local, okay? So at the faculty of translation studies and interpreting Spanish was my language, A, A language, right?

A as in apple. So A is simply a way to signal that Spanish was my mother tongue. So English was my B language, and Russian was my C language. Now, for those who don't know what this means, I'll explain. In translation studies, you basically learn how to translate from the language you're learning into your mother tongue. So you gotta take into account that you're only supposed to translate into your mother tongue, which is Spanish again, in my case. 

So I took English as my, as the main language of my degree, the language I would translate, from mainly. So that's called language B. And then I chose Russian along the way, my degree, which in turn is called or was called language C. So essentially this all means that I'm qualified to translate and interpret from those long from those two languages into my mother tongue, however, and a big.

However, as you will notice during the following episodes, I also speak French, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan. For those who don't know, Catalan is the regional language of Catalonia, which is where I live. All right, so what is coming in this episode and in the following episodes. So, most of the episodes in this podcast will be divided in two sections. 


First, we're gonna discuss how to put into real practice in everyday situations with real and pragmatical examples, your language skills. We're going to have you test your language skills with real people. And second, we are gonna talk a little bit about the science of language for those who might be interested in this aspect of language. And here's a quick win for you. By the time this first episode ends, you will already have learned the most important trick to learn a new language.

So please stay tuned and please don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Okay? So how do you start? How do you start? How do you go from zero to hero in the world of languages? You might wonder, well, hmm, hmm, I can only appeal to your common sense right here. Okay? 

What do I mean by that? I mean, well simply think that in order for you to learn how to speak a new language, what you should do is duh, start speaking it right from the onset of the learning process. 

And that's a quick win, right? 

There it is, right.  So start speaking right from the onset of the learning process. That's a real, that's the trick. Okay? So, uh, how do you exactly do that? I mean, where exactly do you start? If when you open a grammar book, the first thing that you will see is almost unreal conversations, right?

And language apps hardly make any sense, to be honest. So it just seems like a little puzzle right there. Hmm. Well, first of all, look at it this way. We as humans do not learn languages from grammar textbooks when we are children. As you might have guessed, you might wonder how it actually happens then. Okay? Well, don't get me wrong. 

First of all, I think that learning grammar is a fundamental part of the process too, but the key is to start using the grammar structures right away. So I'm gonna insist on that. You must start practicing those grammar structures with native speakers, if possible, straight away. The linguistic knowledge in your mind must be uttered through your mouth so that there is a connection between the two, right? So those verbs, adverbs, nouns, those sentences, that new vocabulary, all of it, otherwise it won't work, just won't work.

And so that's, that's my, that's my advice there. The most important advice I can give you. Okay? Although much has been said and written on the topic of language acquisition, the truth is that it isn't yet crystal clear how your average person or child learns a new language from scratch. Okay? There are certainly many ways in which you can pick up a new language as an adult. And people, people usually go about doing this in different kind of ways, right? 

So you gotta take that into consideration. Okay? But before we go on, um, I would like you to, I would like to introduce a little bit of theory right here, okay? And I'm gonna give you a big disclaimer. Uh, this, uh, podcast is a necessarily scientific, okay? But I thought it'd be fair to outline a few, uh, ideas here.


So a little bit of theory here, okay? The theory of language here, okay? So what is grammar first of all? First of all, what is grammar? Hmm, that's a good question right there. Well, grammar in the world of linguistics could be explained as the set of language rules that you use most of the time unconsciously to create phrases and sentences that convey meaning. So basically, every native speaker of the Spanish language, for example, uses Spanish grammar unintentionally as they speak, in other words, without knowing it in order to speak properly, right? So you don't make a conscious effort, it just comes out naturally. 

A common contemporary definition of grammar is grammar, is the underlying structure of a language that any native speaker of that language knows intuitively. So the systematic description of the features of a language is also grammar. These features are the phonology.

So the study of the sound system of language morphology, the system of word formation and syntax, the system of patterns of word arrangement under what constraints. We put words together kind of thing. And then there's semantics, the meaning of words, okay? So depending on the grammar's approach, a grammar can be prescriptive for that is, uh, provide rules for correct usage. 

So it tells us how to use language, or it could be descriptive. That is, it describes how language is actually used, okay? Now, the traditional focus of inquiry has been on morphology and syntax. And for some contemporary linguists and many traditional grammarians, this is the only proper domain of the subject. Interesting, right? 

But let's take it little by little. What is linguistics? Now the Linguistics Society of America says, and I quote, in a nutshell, linguistics is the scientific study of language linguistics.

It Applies the scientific method to conduct formal studies of speech sounds and gestures, grammatical structures and meaning across the world's 6,000 plus languages.  Interesting right there. So that is what linguistics is. Right? Now, you might have heard about Avram Noam Chomsky, I'm going to introduce Chomsky to you. Chomsky is an American public intellectual, first of all. So,  according to Wikipedia, he said to be the, the father of modern linguistics. He's also known for his work on political and social activism. So you might have heard about Chomsky's political views on a number of topics. And he's one of the founders of the field of cognitive sciences, right? 


So Chomsky and others have suggested for a very long time that there is such concept as universal grammar. Okay? The universal grammar hypothesis, and I'm quoting Chomsky here, is the idea that human languages as superficially diverse as they are, share some fundamental similarities, and that these are attributable to innate principles, unique to language that deep down there is only one human language.


Okay? Hmm, interesting definition right there. So that was Chomsky in the year 2000. Alright? Now he explained, uh, further universal grammar is taken to be the set of properties, conditions, or whatever that constitute the initial state of the language learner. Hence the basis on which knowledge of a language develops. So that's pretty interesting too. 

That comes from, comes from rules and representations, Columbia University press 1980. And so, so what is universal grammar? Hmm. So universal grammar, grammar is essentially a theory that presupposes that human beings are biologically endowed with a natural capacity to learn languages. So we are, in other words, as humans, biologically hard-wired to learn new languages. Uh... 

So according to Chomsky, what is the commitment of the study of language then? Okay, so I'm going to quote him right here. He says:

''to restate the same commitment, in essence from a different point of view, I assume that our aim is to assimilate the study of language to the general body of natural science. So linguistics then may be regarded as that part of human psychology, which is concerned with the nature, function and origin of a particular mental organ. We may take universal grammar to be a theory of the language of faculty, a common human attribute genetically determined: one component of the human mind through interaction with the environment this faculty of mind becomes articulated and refined, emerging in the mature person as a system of knowledge of language''.


Okay, very cool. So in essence, this mental organ fully blossoms when exposed to the environment. There you go. That's in essence, uh, what it is right? Now. The principles and parameters, theory of syntax. So what is this? Principles and parameters is a framework within generative of linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with the general principles. That is abstract rules or grammars and specific parameters, that is, markers and switches that for particular languages are either turned on or off.

For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head initial or head final is regarded as a parameter, which is either on or off for particular languages. That is English, for example, is a head initial, whereas Japanese is a head final. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists, Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics. 

Okay, that's cool. So, a little bit of education right here. I'm going to try to explain a little bit some of the, some of the terms that I just mentioned. So, generative linguistics is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as a study of a hypothesized innate grammatical structure. All right? 

What is a natural language?

Now, a natural language, it's a language that has emerged naturally in a human community. For example, Spanish is a natural language, but Python is not a natural language, right? So now the head is the element that determines the category of a phrase. For example, in a verb phrase, the head is a verb, okay? Therefore, head initial would be: verb object languages, and head final would be: object verb languages, okay?


So English, as I mentioned before, would be a head initial language, and Japanese would be an object verb language. It would be a head final language. Okay? 

So that's, that's interesting, a little bit of theory right there. Now keep in mind that the principles and parameters theory of syntax also suggests that all human beings are genetically endowed with the capacity of knowing the set of universal principles shared by every human language.

These principles specify the constraints on the grammars of all human languages. In other words, what is true of all human languages and what all human languages share in common, and the parameters which specify the different set of options for grammatical variation. 

So the knowledge of a particular language then consists of knowledge of the settings of a finite number of parameters, which define exactly how those universal principles need to be applied in order to construct grammatical sentences. So technically, if you found all the parameters which rule all human languages, then a specific human language could could completely be described by the values it assigns to each particular parameter. 

So in that case, it would be the only language with those parameters exactly set or switched in that specific way. ah... that's cool. Now, if the parameters, according to which languages may vary, could all be found, then a given human language could be completely described by the values it assigns to each parameter.

It would be the only human language with that or with those parameters set in that way. Now, however, as it turns out, things are not as simple as one would hope. And as the scientific framework involving universal grammar has developed during the past decades, it has also increased the list of set principles. Okay? There are subsystems of principles and overriding principles which further constrain what is supposed to be true of all human languages, right? 

And with respect to parameters, there doesn't seem to be an agreement on a concrete list of parameters shared by all scholars. Likewise, it is argued that there doesn't seem to be a list of lexical categories and a list of features which can be applied to all languages. But instead, generative linguists seem to propose specific ones when they study a language; that is, a specific language. So with that in mind, it is becoming harder these days to agree if universal grammar exists and what it actually contains.


So Chomsky's work is quite extensive and I'm not going to go into all of it, obviously, right? I'm going to give you here a list of his work in case you might be interested:

Syntactic structures in 1957;
Current issues in linguistic theory, 1964;
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965;
Cartesian Linguistics, 1965;
Language and Mind, 1968;
The sound pattern of English with Morris Hall, 1968;
Reflections on language, 1975; 
Lectures on government and binding 1981;
On the minimalist program, 1995. 

I'm only going to be summarizing in the next episodes some of his main ideas and also name some of the currents in linguistics, which offer counter arguments and counter evidence to these ideas, such as a paper written by Ewa Dobrowska a cognitive linguist, which we're going to be examining. 

Now, she believes that there is very little agreement on what universal grammar really means, or what the evidence for it is. Okay? She thinks that it is more productive to think in terms of language making capacity rather than thinking in terms of an innate set of language properties. 

So we're going to be talking about all this really exciting stuff. 

Anyway, thank you so much for listening. You're awesome. 
And please stay tuned for the next episodes, and don't forget to subscribe. Bye-bye.