When children learn their first language, they learn the meaning of words through association. They associate sounds with objects and activities. Someone points at the wood thing in the dining room and says tay-bull, and they eventually learn to associate the two. As they gain more experience, they understand with more nuance what that sound means.
They learn the sounds and then the combinations of sounds and what they are associated with. They learn the grammar rules implicitly by trying to communicate with others. Eventually, they learn how to represent the sounds in written symbols.
This is the process of learning a language from the bottom up. Starting with the foundational sounds and building up to more abstract layers.
But, when most adults learn a 2nd language, they try to go from the top down. This is the popular approach in schools where they start you with verb conjugation exercises and memorizing conjugations and translations. They focus on translation. They find out the words that others say and use Google translate to find an English (or whatever their native language is) equivalent.
As a result, the learning is incredibly boring, but also unproductive. Because you see everything through the lens of English you learn to enough to communicate with people who speak Spanish (for example), but you aren’t actually learning Spanish, you just learn how to speak English using Spanish words.
When you are reading, listening, or speaking you are forced to constantly translate. You have to invest a ton of energy in working out whatever the English equivalent of the word you are hearing is. But in another language, nothing is ever equivalent. They are certainly close, but nothing is ever the same. There are words that translate to mean something in English, but in practice have a very different use in another language. There are concepts that have one word in English, but multiple in Spanish, or vice versa.
The result of the top-down attempt to learning languages is a rough, slow, and badly pronounced attempt at a new language. You eventually reach a plateau and never reach a functional conversation level.
The path to truly understanding and speaking a language is to go back to the way kids to learn. To initially build associations to words through use, and to pick up grammar and conjunction instinctively through use. Once you have laid the foundation of understanding sounds and meanings, it can become very productive to memorize some grammar or conjugation rules as a way to polish up your speech.
**I learned this from experience taking Spanish classes in high school and then actually going out and learning in a self-directed way in 2014. But it is made clear by Gabriel Wyner in his book Fluent Forever, which is the best book on language learning I’ve ever read.
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