Noticing

More about your mind on language

There’s some debate about how much you have to notice language in order to learn it. Some experts claim that you don’t learn anything that you haven’t consciously noticed, while others say that many things slip in below your level of attention. My belief, based on subjective experience and not on scientific evidence, is that you learn a lot of things you don’t realize you’re learning.

In my experience, and in that of many of my students who were learning English, it’s not unusual to have things blurt out of your mouth that you never knew you could say and had no idea you’d learned. One time I was sitting at the lunch table with my Czech landlord’s family, when something came out of my mouth that seemed far too sophisticated for my level of Czech at the time. I stopped and said, “What I meant was...,” and put it into my then normal clumsy version of their language. The family shouted, “You DID say that!” and the next several minutes were spent discussing theories as to how I could have just blurted out a sophisticated sentence that should have been way above my current level. We all figured I must have gotten it from the radio or that I had unknowingly heard it on the street.

Even if you do learn a lot of things you don’t know you have learned, noticing plays an important role in your overall progress. As you study grammar and vocabulary, you will gain theoretical knowledge of a lot of things you won’t actually have a handle on in actual use. You’ll know that words A and B exist, but they won’t be coming out in your speech so far. You’ll know how a certain type of question is formed, or maybe what suffixes the language uses to indicate that an object is being used as a tool. But until you get more practice, you won’t be able to use any of this when you talk or write.

Some people’s reaction to this predicament would be to say that there’s no point in studying grammar and advanced vocabulary, but they would be wrong. When you study these things, you know they exist. When you know they exist, you notice them around you — again and again and again. As you notice them around you, in different situations and in different language contexts, they get processed by your subconscious, and with time you are using them. Knowledge begets noticing, noticing begets comprehension, and comprehension eventually begets skill.

There’s a downside to noticing that’s really an upside. People know languages at two levels. At the passive level is the language you can understand and judge to be adequate. The active level involves the degree to which you can actually speak or write a language.

Generally, someone’s passive command of the language is far ahead of their active command, and this is where your noticing can lead to consternation. As your passive command of the language hits a new level, you can recognize more than before what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable language and what’s a mistake. With this jump in your sophistication, you start hearing more of your own mistakes than you used to. The mistakes were always there, but you didn’t notice them until your language comprehension improved.

At this point you may start whipping yourself, thinking that your language is getting worse instead of better. This feeling is proof positive that you are still improving. When I was training in aikido, our instructor from Japan sometimes told us that there is no progress in someone who already thinks he’s really good. If someone felt that his technique was terrific, there was sure to be stagnation. The people who imagine their skills are getting worse are usually the ones who are improving.

The same is true with language. In my ESL classes I’ve noticed that any student who thinks his English is really excellent will not progress anymore. Once a man told me that there was no difference between the way a Chaldean pronounces English and the way a native born American does. He insisted the two accents were identical. Naturally, this man had a heavy, unmistakable Chaldean accent. He had stopped noticing, so his pronunciation was not improving.

Another illustration of all this was when I would teach foreign students out of a book of English idioms. My favorite one is the hoary-old tome Idiomatic American English by Barbara K. Gaines, published by Kodansha. Most of the students believed they had never heard any of the idioms and insisted nobody used them. However, after even just the first lesson, they would discover these idioms jumping out of the radio at them, popping off the news page, and showing up everywhere. They realized the expressions had been all around them, but their minds just blipped over them without noticing.