I have decided to do something different recently: I actually enrolled myself in a short-term Chinese language course in China. So for two weeks, I was sitting in a classroom in Chengdu learning Chinese for 6 hours a day, either within a group setting, or one-on-one. And I have to say, my former training as a linguist helped a lot!
A foreign language is essentially a type of code, with a fixed set of rules. As a child, one learns this rules naturally, but as an adult, one needs to figure these rules out and remember them somehow. As someone trained in linguistics, I spent years looking at various different languages and figuring out what rules are there. So when I sat down in the classroom in Chengdu to take my very first lesson in Chinese, this was the approach I took.
And I also saw how my classmates were struggling, as they were not used to figuring out these rules rather quickly. There were multiple moments when we were given a new structure, or a new sentence, and I immediately saw the underlying pattern. Of course I would want to test my hypothesis whether my proposed pattern was correct, and therefore I would try to make up new sentences and extrapolate. But I see my classmates struggling even with grasping the meaning of the new sentence.
Eventually, it boils down to how one remembers these rules. One can of course simply remember the singular tokens: one can attempt to remember each and every sentence or phrase that one has seen before, and store it in memory that way. But that would be unsystematic, and is bound to fail. So instead, one should remember the rules instead, and together with the lexicon, one can then generate new sentences on cue, simply by using the rules that one has been given, and applying it to the lexicon that is also available.
As someone who spent years in graduate school being trained as a linguist, I have to say, that language learning is absolutely fun. Alas, I only did two weeks of this in Chengdu, but I would definitely consider doing this again at some point.
