#second language acquisition

The possible reason for this misconception has two layers.

Non-native language users' speech patterns/utterances (short & choppy or word-chunk-like utterances; "Mom food love", "you no college", "Rocky new to ball") resemble first-stage speech patterns, occurring at a very early age, in infancy.

People generally associate language proficiency with their cognitive ability. Language is a powerful medium, which is used permanently once acquired & with much repetition, that can directly convey one's thoughts. Aligning with the said notion, people show great appreciation & respect to the people who have a way with words.

Misinterpretation occurs when putting these two together:

An adult non-native person's cognitive ability is equal to their current (non-1st) language level.

This misconception is prevalently & frequently consumed as jokes on sitcoms, especially as a hallmark joke for non-native characters.

(Character having an exaggerated accent with wonky pronunciation & wrong intonation. Mistook similar words or a certain word in phrases, and it happens all the time. The other character tries to rectify his phrase "No, it's~ not ~, (character's name). (*THAT DREADED LAUGH TRACK ENSUES*) At this point, you can probably hear the recorded laugh tracks any time that character utters a single word with their distinctive speech repertoire.)

Few examples:

Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (from "Modern Family") once shouted out with genuine frustration about being laughed at by others for her English.

Cha Eugene (from "Debut or Die" ("데뷔 못하면 죽는 병 걸림")), also a multilingual character (whose first language is English) and became an idol in Korea.

At first, the main character (MC) from the same group misconstrues Eugene as juvenile (not only that, BUT also his peppy, energetic personality & being the youngest member of the team heightened this notion). However, as they know each other more, MC realizes that Eugene is a very considerate & much more mature person, and he was blinded by the language. There are moments of this realization depicted in the novel, here and there.

i have been so so SO done with xp or fantasy currency and cosmetics being slapped on something and someone trying to sell you a product that will "teach you through playing a game!!!" when it barely qualifies as that. and it's just.. what? study cards? delightful. im sure they work for some people to keep them motivated to learn, but they are not learning through play, they are learning still in traditional methods and just returning to the app out of habit.

and having xp or cosmetics by itself is not play.

soooo guess what i'm making a game that helps with second language learning through actual play :)

yes the rant was an excuse to talk about this project to motivate myself to get back on my obsidian board and continue writing for it.

but anyways, it's a minecraft server with a questline that students and a teacher go through in topics and grammar increasing in difficulty, always staying slightly ahead of where the students are. they can only speak the second language, except to translate, but then having to say or ask the final sentences in the second language. i learned french this way and it was really fast, even through i felt like i was horrible at it constantly and that I wasn't improving (i was, the material just kept getting harder at a good pace).

but anyways, im using german for the first run of this server to test on my little lab rats (friends) since they wanted to learn german. but i wanna work on making it accessible to any teacher, with a control room in game set up to run commands that set up each quest, and since it's a server i use plugins to make the questlines accessible ingame - all in the target language ofc.

+ Reading comprehension is the first skill you pick up.

+ Listening comprehension is acquired second.

+ Pronunciation ability slowly develops simultaneously (although, for me, I have always built this skill fairly quickly for the languages I study).

+ Writing composition comes next.

+ However, the ability to verbally respond/communicate in the language you are learning seems to be the most difficult to build and is achieved last.

Advice from someone learning Mandarin Chinese for 5 years on how to maintain consistency when you hit the plateau in your learning journey!

Main points:

> Diversify sources of input and output for a balance between passive engagement with the language and learning with intention. You can incorporate your target language in your hobbies when possible (find music and tv shows in your target language, try to find bilingual editions of books that interest you, change game's voicelines to your target language)

> Studying a little is better than nothing, studying every now and then is better than never, and just passively listening is better than not engaging at all. But even when you cannot bring yourself to have enough focus for any of it, do not allow guilt over a self-imposed timer on your progress to suck the joy out of language learning.

• september 6th, 2023 •

spent almost the entire day studying at the library. making progress 💪

It's interesting because I haven't really seen this concept (passive vocab) talked about elsewhere in the language-learning world, but it's the user's claims about the rate at which their students acquire vocab that gives me pause. Her claim is that an intermediate learner (knows ~1000 words) can go to "fluent" in 4-8 months. To do this, you need about 4000 passive vocab words, learning about 100-200 words every week. I don't know. That strikes me as really difficult to be able to do. Are people really able to keep up with that rate of learning and actually remember what they learned when they go so quickly? Her key points for studying were repetition, speed (study each word briefly, not in-depth), audio (focus on listening), and consistency.