Language learning is a very rewarding endeavor that can open up new doors and experiences that may be closed to those who didn’t take the time to hone their skills. While travelling and experiencing new cultures is open to pretty much anybody with a passport, the experience is very different for those who speak the language of the country they’re visiting than for people who don’t know the language.
If you don’t speak Arabic in Egypt, for example, you’ll likely be more limited to experiences curated for tourists and will pay more for ordinary things since locals assume that you don’t understand the culture and customs around bartering. Even being able to understand and respond to basic phrases can go a long way in building rapport with locals and having a more enjoyable experience.
If you’ve decided to learn the language, what should you focus on to maximize your efforts in the beginning? Just a word of advice, I wouldn’t focus heavily on grammatical accuracy in the beginning.
While grammar is certainly vital to precise communication, an overemphasis on complicated grammatical concepts early in the language learning process is both ineffective, and it isn’t needed to communicate the things that you need to communicate for simple interactions. After all, certain interactions need to be mastered first before offering a philosophical opinion on Plato’s Cave in Mandarin for example.
Context can communicate a lot.
Languages like Indonesian do not even conjugate verb tenses and yet they are perfectly able to speak about things that happened yesterday versus happening right now.
How?
Context. If a person at work is telling a story about how the chocolate cake at their friend’s birthday party was dry and tasted like it came out of a box, the listener can intuit that the event happened in the past by the context. Obviously, the event isn’t happening now.
The same can be said even if the grammar rules of your target language demand that you conjugate the verb in the past. In other words, you don’t need to have perfect grammar to be understood.
Generally, as a nonnative speaker, you also have the advantage of having your listener’s attention even if you can only say just a hair bit more than the stock phrases that they may be used to – particularly if your target language is not one that many English speaking people choose to learn. As a result. they’re likely to invest more into understanding what you’re saying out of curiosity and intrigue since in many countries, visitors don’t typically learn how to communicate at all in their language.
If you studied any of the research on second language acquisition, you would also know that there is research to suggest that attempting to master a grammatical form before you’re ready would be wasted effort.
Stephen Krashen articulated the concept of the natural order hypothesis in language learning. In a nutshell, it states that humans naturally acquire grammar in a particular order. Since a lot of language learning is unconscious, intellectually understanding a more complicated grammar rule is not the same as being able to produce it correctly in conversation and even understand it on the level of the interlanguage system.
Meaning, you would be unlikely to, say, use the past tense correctly in conversation even if you spent many hours memorizing conjugation charts. More recent methods on teaching language such as the natural approach and later the communicative approach advocate for getting lots of language input and practicing vital conversations rather focusing heavily on grammatical accuracy at this stage. The old cliché of watching movies and listening to music isn’t the worst advice during solo study time after all.