I have lunch most days at place here called The International Society. Today I happened to overhear a gentleman in his early forties (most likely a senior staff member at the university) teaching a Chinese girl about the finer points of English. I only noticed their conversation after I heard him talk about the pace of language learning. This seemed to have been prompted by the girl talking about her English-learning goals for the next 6 months. He paused for a long time, perhaps trying to work out how to break the news to her that she was unlikely to meet those goals in that time frame. He talked about how early on, the pace of language learning is fast but as you get better and better, up to her level, progress slows considerably. And so the first point of contention.
I don’t believe that pace slows; quite the opposite. There’s this milestone which, when reached, allows for an explosion in pace. When you start learning, you’re learning in your own language and memorising words and grammar rules. New words and concepts are explained in your language, with a smattering of the new language. But eventually you’ll get to the level where you can learn in the new language. You’ve achieved what I call momentum; your learning pace explodes because you’re conversing exclusively in the target language and learning new words/concepts directly in that language.
At this stage I wanted to interrupt and challenge what he was saying as he was demoralising this girl for no apparent reason. If you aim high, you have chance of getting there. If you aim low, then you’ll hit the mark but you won’t have done anything extraordinary. Squashing enthusiasm like he was doing seemed wrong. If I wanted to be extra cynical I’d say that perhaps it is something to do with his own performance with other languages. Sadly after this the misinformation continued, which is what inspired me to write about this.
If he’s demoralising students then I’d like to make some small contribution in the other direction. It turns out that this girl is also learning Japanese. This professorial character had learned some Chinese and Japanese. She mentions that she thinks Japanese must be harder for English speakers than Chinese. He immediately disagrees, “It’s the other way round; Japanese doesn’t have tones so it’s easier”. Well, Japanese does have intonation, it just doesn’t have tones as a formal part of the language as Chinese does. I would contend that Japanese is harder for English speakers than Chinese due to there being more similarities in the way Chinese sentences are constructed.
That aside, I wonder how widespread this “Japanese intonation is flat” myth is? We can debunk this in one go: ask a Japanese person to say 親切（しんせつ）and 新設（しんせつ）and listen to the difference. Same kana, different intonation. I am not an expert on either Japanese or Chinese, but what I aim for is that what I do say regarding these languages is based on facts from reliable sources. With that said, if you disagree with anything I say please comment and state your claim! The take home message from this article is, if you’re learning a language, challenge conventions! Don’t be afraid to be skeptical of what people, even teachers, tell you; sometimes they are not the best people to be learning from! For more on why that’s the case, see this article.