When learning a new language, what's more important: grammar or vocabulary?
Well, first I would like to say is that it's really hard to understand any sentence- or any,
anything that's being said, in another language, if you don't understand the syntax that's used,
even if you know the vocabulary, because in some languages like Spanish, French, Italian
and English, there's a lot of vocabulary that is shared between the languages. So you might
get an idea of what's being said without having studied that language very much.
But you may not be able to actually communicate in that language. And so even without grammar, you
would be able to understand things. So I would say that the first part is that if you understand
vocabulary that's going to come before grammar. So even if you understand the vocabulary does
not- does not mean that you're going to understand the whole sentence. The whole sentence is
really syntax, and syntax is different than grammar, grammar is more like declensions
and conjugations of verbs. And you know, where what words are, are changing other words in
the sentence and how adjectives agree with the, with the, you know, the nouns that they're
describing. And so grammar is kind of a really loose concept. And so I don't really talk
about grammar all that much, because they're like very specific things about it.
When you're learning a language, one of the most important skills
is that you're able to hear the sounds correctly, you're able to produce the sound.
So that's phonology and understanding how
the tongue position in your mouth will help you pronounce things better.
The second thing will be vocabulary. So without a massive amount
of vocabulary, you can even learn how to speak
a language with a small number of words, maybe
500 to 1000 words you can you can speak a language fairly-
fairly okay, if you have a good grasp of the syntax and how words go into the sentence.
So for example, in a language like Japanese, you know that you're going
to be saying certain things in a certain order and your verb is going to come last, and in
German, sometimes you have, you have like a helping verb at the beginning of a sentence
and then your main verb is going to go last.
And so you have to learn how to manipulate
words and place them around the sentence.
And in languages like in the Slavic languages,
for example, Czech, Polish Russian,
when you want to talk about things that that have been
completed, you're going to be using a lot more prefixes on your verbs and then which
prefix to use is sort of a grammatical thing.
But if you're practicing these in full sentences,
you get a feel for how those prefixes work.
So you'll get an idea of how 'oт' versus 'с' ,
meaning to come out of, or come away from, works and it can actually-
once you learn that skill, it actually applies across most of the Slavic languages in the same way.
It's just you know, what are the main differences between the languages is probably just some
very slight changes in pronunciation structure of the, of the vocabulary.
So I would say that the most important skill that you can have is vocabulary.
And then if you have the ability to actually analyze vocabulary,
like you can look at a word and see its history.
For example, if you know that the 'W h' words in English like 'who, what, when, where, why',
and even words like 'while' these words if you know that they came from a very ancient Indo-European
sound 'kʷ', and then you find that that 'kʷ' becomes like a 'tʃ' in some languages, becomes
a 'k' in some other languages comes a 'ð' in some other languages, you can actually
acquire vocabulary quite quickly. And so, for example, if you're if you're learning
like a Slavic language, I remember at one point, you know, I learned the word, chwilę
in Polish and it means a while It means like for a period of time, you know, so it's like,
oh, while - relay, it's like pronouncing while with all of the vowels, you know, chwe - ei - ley
So you can sometimes find some connections between languages between words that seem
on the surface completely different,
but they probably do share a common history.
And so that can actually help you acquire vocabulary faster.
Understanding how the 'p's become 'ph's from like,
from the Latin languages to Germanic languages.
There's particular rules in the history of vocabulary that can tell us
like Grimm's law, and how these sound changes
happen across these different groups of languages.
So one thing that's interesting is that if you take a word like
like, you know, I was just mentioning this this "Hw" sound, the 'Hw' in 'what', 'while'
although we don't normally pronounce the 'H' in English, you get like a sound In German, but in,
in most of the romance languages, they're going to be 'K' sounds, and so you can actually find-
because this is a condition of the of the of human language in general how sounds
change over time, in a natural way,
you can actually find parallels in other language families, for example,
many of you know that I'm a near native speaker of Chinese and
I live in a Chinese speaking environment., and so even in the Chinese world, in the Semitic
world of languages, for example, the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin, you'll also
find words like 花(hua), which means flower, and that's going to be pronounced か(ka) if the-
for the sound that's borrowed into Japanese, and then-
which is separate than their own word, which is hana but
you also find that word in Cantonese which would be pronounced with a 'fa' so you
have this 'hwa' and then 'fa', you know that difference between Cantonese and Mandarin
kind of similar to how you have between the romance languages and dramatic languages.
Another example is the word 'kuai' in Mandarin, which is 'fai' in Cantonese. So when you learn
the sound changes between languages,
you're also able to pick up vocabulary at a much faster pace
and with more understanding of vocabulary when you hear things in context,
when you hear a new vocabulary in context, you're able to understand those sentences
much faster, you're able to pick up on that vocabulary and turn it around into something
that you're able to use directly right away in your conversation. And so that's one of
the most powerful skills that polyglots will have.
I remember Richard Simcott was telling me a story how he would,
he would sometimes share little stories of things that he's learned
from some of the South Slavic languages like Croatian and Slovene, Serbian and Macedonian.
And he says, you know, a simple, simple word in Macedonian,
if you just change like one vowel sound, or one constant sound you get the equivalent
in Croatian, Serbian and Slovenia. And sometimes
people who don't have any knowledge about languages,
even the native Serbian or Macedonian speakers will just be like,
their mind is blown. Really? Where do you see that?
I don't understand what how you got to that conclusion. It sounds completely alien to me. You know
that same word in just across the border sounds completely alien to a native speaker but the
polyglot on the other hand actually hears the same word with slightly two different pronunciations.
So you kind of have to think about language learning in a sort of a meta state,
you have to step away from it and say:
Hey, these sound changes happen over a vast area,
and they and they kind of get dispersed into different languages.
And if I want to focus on just improving my French or Italian
or one of these languages, you just focus
on what are the sound changes in there, and you're able to pick it up very quickly.
You know, one very simple example with French is that you'll find the same thing happens
in Italian if, if a word starts with a 'st-' or a 'sp-'
Well, normally the Italians, they can't use the regular article
they can't use,- they have to change it to a 'lo' or 'li', you
know, they have to put a vowel in between there. And then so that that vowel carries
over into other languages like Spanish and French.
And so in Spanish, you have that additional 'e' at the beginning of the word.
So instead- instead of saying- saying study, or students
you would say estudi-.
Estudi- , and in French, that 's' has disappeared, so becomes étudiant, étudiante.
And so you have that specific sound change. And when you step back and think
about it in a meta way, and you can see the big picture, you can see how the sound changes
are happening. And then you can carry those ideas over to other language families, like
for example, in East Asia, or in in Africa, in North and South America. You can look at
other language families and see how the same sound changes are happening over time.
And so we can actually find out how old words are. For example, if words are in one language,
backgrounds, 'k', and another language are pronounced, 'tʃ', that we know that 'tʃ'
is probably the newer word, because it changed over time into, it became a softer sound over
time, it's probably unlikely that it went from a 'tʃ' to a 'k' over time.
So we would say that the code languages is probably the source, vocabulary for that other language.
And there's like hundreds of these little sound rules that if you know them quite well,
you're able to kind of produce the whole other dialect or language, and even track this language,
where it's going into the future
and how this language is going to sound in the future, or maybe how that language sounds
and a neighboring country as a different language. And so, phonology itself is a very fascinating thing,
but you need to tie phonology in with your vocabulary
so that you can acquire vocabulary really quick.
You're able to see the word and catch on to it and learn it very quickly.