How to Learn a Language

How to Learn a Language

 

          It is common for people- at least for American’s- to say, “Isn’t English enough? Everybody speaks it today so, why should I learn there's?” or “It’s just too hard to learn another language”. The first problem leads us into a lot of dirty history which I don’t want to go into. But to say the least, it is not good that English is becoming a necessary language.

          It is not only making people whose mother-tongue is English arrogant and disrespectful towards other languages/cultures, but the spread of English is destroying the world’s cultures. There are too many people from around the world who learning English or any language for that matter for ‘practical’- reasons, then there are those learning for the beauty of the language, its poetry, people, history or culture.

 

 

 

         At least among polymaths and other intellectuals from the past, it was very common for people to speak multiple languages. It was a sign of respect towards other people, widened people’s cultural awareness and just their overall knowledge as well. If, as I argued in many past blogs, we need cultural understanding and unity of love amongst all peoples and countries, learning a language is the most direct way of learning about a culture.

 

 

 

        To say that learning a language is difficult, is something I think we all can almost all unfortunately relate to. Whether it be orals, tests, quizzes or whatever, all of those who teach a language in a primary or secondary school assume that their students can fit the basics of a language, in their short-term memory. Not only does this only create an over-amount of stress, but it defeats the whole purpose of learning a language.

          It may be true that the languages we learn in school pretty much have to do with what country may be starting trouble with us or have started trouble with us- I think Americans will all be learning Arabic and Chinese quite soon-, but the whole point of learning a languages is to communicate. And let’s be realistic, can you fit your entire mother-tongue in your short- term language, or even more, retrieve the exact word or thought you wanted right when you needed it?

 

 

 

 

          If not, then the way that we have been trying to learn a second language in school is taking away the passion that we could have for learning languages. In this blog, I will explain how one can learn a language and I’ll be basing it off of what I do for my own language learning. The process of learning a language may seem daunting, but once you see the steps that are required, it won’t seem as such a big deal.

 

1. Motive

 

What motive do you have for learning another language? Do you find the history interesting? Do you want to travel? Or do you have a French, German or Russian heritage that you want to become closer to? Whatever the reason, you should always remind yourself why you are doing it because, if you want to dedicate yourself to this challenge, there are going to be days where you either don’t feel like practicing your language, or where you feel like you are running a tread-mill and not making any progress. Reminding yourself of where you are going will help keep you focused.

 

2. Listening and Imitating

 

Before I decided to start learning German, I would listen to either YouTube videos of people talking or get into German music. This will help get you used to the special aspects of the way the language sounds-rolling your tongue, pursing your lips, making noises back in your throat, etc.

In conjunction with this, try imitating some of the sounds you hear. Even if it’s in a stereotypical voice, try to get the feel for the language. This stage should maybe last two to maybe three weeks, but you should definitely continue to listen to music- or even watch movies.

 

3. Speaking the Alphabet

Either by looking it up on the internet or buying a book with a CD, practice the alphabet for possibly two to three weeks, probably either during or after you started imitating the language. 

If it is a language with either new letters or with a completely different alphabet from your mother-tongue, expect learning the alphabet to take you maybe a month- it took me about 4 weeks to learn the Modern Greek alphabet. I would make notecards and or write the letters repeatedly in a notebook for maybe once a day for 15 minutes, while saying them out loud a couple times. I’d say spend one or two day’s per letter.

 

 

4. Chunking

 

Chunking will be a relief compared to what you probably had to go through with when you were in school. Instead of pounding a nail into your head in order for something to stick, chunking is taking a word, sentence or phrase and looking at the word and it’s translation without trying to remember what the word means. By making a note card with the mother tongue on one side and the foreign tongue on the other- or filling a whole notebook with vocab- spend 15 minutes a day reviewing the list of vocab you have.

You will see that this will not only be less stressful, but it is a more realistic method of learning. When you were in infant, did your parents have to test you using notecards and made sure you remembered a word/phrase? Of course not: you learned through casual exposure, not through brainwashing or drills.

5.  Reading

 

Take maybe ten or fifteen minutes whenever you are free- I prefer to do it as I’m having breakfast- and read at least one article on the internet in the language you are learning. It doesn’t matter whether you understand it or not: just like listening to music and watching a movie, this will give you plenty of exposure you need in the language and the magical thing about this is, it will help you learn new words by seeing it in relationship to other words you may know. If you are learning say French, German, Spanish, Italian or Gaelic and your mother- tongue is English, you’ll be surprised by the amount of vocabulary words you will recognize.

 

Once your vocabulary starts to grow, go into some poetry and novels. Better yet, either by a translation of a book and a it's original or buy a bi-lingual version of the book and compare the mother-tongue with the foreign language. But be wary of reading old novels/poetry that goes back over a century: if your goal is to speak to a foreigner, thou tongue mayst sound oldeth to thy hearers!  

If however you are learning a language whose alphabet is different from what you aren’t used to, try reading in your foreign language once you feel you have been exposed yourself to enough of the vocabulary. Learning a song and then printing out the lyrics, is another option. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Grammar

Teachers would gasp to find that I put this last. But I am not going to say that grammar is unimportant. Rather, the way that schools have taught us to learn grammar, is a waste of time. Teachers assume- including your literature teachers- that you must be a linguist: you have to know future-perfect, the definite and indefinite for all the cases, when and how the syntax/order of a sentence will manifest itself, before you even begin learning how to speak the language. To be fluent in a language does not mean to be a linguist, grammarian or syntaxologist: it means to be able understand and communicate in a language, where two or more participants can both give and receive a message.

And so, when you approach the grammar of your language, think of it like a board game: sure, you can learn the very basics in order to make the  most elementary moves, but don’t except to memorize or know what to do until you get to the point where you actually need to know or be reminded of a rule. In other words, spread the pain: try learning one or two grammar lessons a week- or even every three weeks as I do.

Conjugations of verbs as well as learning cases and rules should be learned like vocabulary, through exposure rather than through short-term memorization.

 

7. Learn the Culture

    

Learning the culture should be something you do right from day one: if you plan to live or travel to another country, knowing beforehand the social norms, how formal and informal situations function and getting insight about holidays are essential.

     Not only that, but learning about the history, music, art or literature can give you more motivation and inspiration to learn your language. For example, I was taking French classes from 4^th grade to my 1^st semester of college and I loathed every second. But when I discovered French Music like Eths and Zaz and fell in love with writers like Charles Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, Andre Breton, Albert Camus, Andre Gide and many others, I became inspired to learn French on my own.

 

 

One of my favorite French novels.

 

 

The question of what it means to be fluent, is tricky. The question is almost relative. Some people claim it can take a month to learn a language and others that it will take a very long time to be able to speak. I think both are wrong. Six months should be all that one needs to reach a level of competency in a language- knowing basic vocab/phrases- but if you are looking for fluency, it will take longer. But that’s okay because, if you learn your language through chunking and exposure rather than through intense memorization, the process of learning won’t be nearly as stressful as you think.

     In the end, we aren’t even fluent in our own language: there is a hierarchy of vocabulary which still waits to be explored by many of us and the journey will probably be a long one. But my soaking one’s self in music, movies and literature, reading a article a day and spending 15 minutes a day on reviewing vocabulary, you’ll be speaking and comprehending faster than you know it.

   Auf Wiedersehen! Au revoir! Adiós! Ciao! Vale!

   

How to Become a Philosopher

How to Become a Philosopher

 

          Philosophy gets a bad reputation for completely ridiculous reasons. Some claim it takes the joy out of life, that it is unimportant and that it is too difficult. I really refuse to believe that it is not important because, what can be more important than: the meaning of life, the purpose of life, what is right/wrong, what is Beauty, how to we know what we know, do we have free-will, etc..

          However, I some-what understand why some may feel it takes the joy out of life and that it is too difficult. For the first one, I feel it is not the fault of philosophy for causing depression in an individual. If somebody gets depressed from asking serious questions about their life, that is proof that they actually Need to think about those questions: it’s touching a spot that needs healing and or investigation.

 

 

 

 

             But the latter problem I can admit more fully to. It seems sometimes philosophy builds its own complicated terminology to communicate things that make absolutely no sense- as so many scientists say in public discourse- and that things would just be better if we ‘dumbed-things down’ or became heirs to logical- positivism. Both options are horrible for the following reasons: you can- and it’s down frequently- to bring big ideas to a clearer context by making analogies. But like all analogies, they are limiting. And if you are to get really into detail and zoom-in to all the subtle structures of an argument or the subtle ways of saying something, you need that complicated terminology. Like all foreign languages, the mystery of their words begin to make sense and when one returns back to their mother-tongue, one realizes that certain words in that foreign language just can’t be adequately translated or made into an analogy.

          The other solution was theorized -falsely ,that is- from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and then latter theorized by A.J Ayer. Basically, Logical-Positivism says that any statement that cannot be empirically verified- according to sense experience- it is not true. But this is not only problematic for the arts(poetry, music, etc), religions and more-‘idealistic’ philosophies, but for the most central phenomena of human experience: humor, or more specifically, sarcasm. If you were to reduce humor, the arts and the religions to the level of empirical analysis, you have stupefied the human experience and destroyed the human spirit. But there is a much more problematic issue with logical-positivism: can we look at the world and See/Experience that the only truth that there is, only lies in the material world? In other words, logical-positivist contradicts itself by making an empirical-argument based on a non-empirical (non-sensual or abstract) assumption.   

          Because it is the second problem that I fear will remain with philosophy- that it is, its difficult- this blog will focus on how to become a philosopher. But as you go through this blog, you should realize that you all do philosophy on a daily basis, whether you are aware of it or not.

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophy as a Dialogue

       The most important philosopher that you can ever be acquainted with is the ancient Greek Philosopher, Socrates. It is because of his student Plato that we not only have knowledge of him, but we have an idea of how philosophy is and Should be done. Socrates would travel through Athens going up to random people who claimed to know about their own trade and through very rigorous argumentation, would show they had no knowledge about their so-called expertise. But what is essential about Socrates- and this is a quality that all philosophers should have- is that Socrates had no personal stake in arguing with people. He himself claimed to know nothing about anything and that he was merely one who wanted to search for wisdom. Because the word philosophy in Greek literally means, “the love of wisdom” you would think that this is what a philosopher has always been. But that has not always been the case in the history of philosophy.

          In fact, the very idea that one had to restlessly search for wisdom was to change right when Plato begin putting his own opinion through Socrates’ mouth in his middle- dialogues. In fact, it was his later dialogues and his most famous work, “The Republic” that Philosophy became about systematizing. But he is still an exception in the history of philosophy. Now only did he continue using the Socratic or Dialectical method- building up a single idea through counter-arguments indefinitely- but he later came to see problems in the system he built, and wrote new dialogues giving very impressive counter-arguments to his old ideas. He was one of the must responsible philosophers.

 

"The Death of Socrates"

 

 

           However, from the Christian era, The ‘Enlightenment’, 19^th century, Modern philosophy and today’s ‘Post-modern’ world, philosophy diverged from Plato and Socrates and was led down a road of systemizing on a grand scale. From the British Empiricists, French Rationalists, German Idealists, American ‘Pragmatists’ and many others, philosophy became synonymous with making a system of thought.

 

Philosophy as a System

A.  Fields

The most essential thing to learn about philosophy prior to actually doing philosophy, is to recognize the different fields of philosophy. There are basically 4 main fields: Metaphysics (the study of existence: being and non-being), Epistemology (the study of knowledge: how do we know what we know), Ethics (what is right and wrong) and Aesthetics ( the study of art: what is beauty?). All four fields have so many questions to ask, that it is merely impossible to study one field if you don’t know anything about the others.

B.   Positions in each field

In most cases, philosophers will label themselves or others as belonging to a certain school of thought concerning different fields. But this is really just a superficial way of labeling philosophers because they tend to be based on generalizations. Plus, not all philosophers in a position or school have agreed with each other. However, it will be helpful to briefly go through the most popular/controversial positions that philosophers have held in the fields of philosophy.

 

-         1. Epistemology: a. Empiricism: the belief that we know what we know, because of our sense organs giving us information about the outside world (using a process called induction: collecting a portion of data from the world and then making an assumption based on the data about how the world functions- one part of the scientific method). This type of knowing is called A Posteriori or, dependent on sense experience. It may sound like common sense, but there has always been and continue to be disagreements concerning this idea and so, philosophers have developed their own systems around this position. Philosophers include Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Bertrand Russell and others.

 

 

 

 

 

b. Rationalism: we know what we know because of the contents of the mind. Plato’s early- on believed that knowledge (really wisdom) is innate and that learning is merely an act of remembering forgotten information. The method of discovering knowledge of the world is called deduction which is making a reasonable assumption about the world and then building subsequent truths based on that assumption- this is how mathematics works. Philosophers call this type of knowing A Priori or, independent of sense experience. Rene Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and to a certain extent, the German Idealists were associated with this theory.

 

 

 

-         2. Metaphysics: b. Monism: the idea that the world is made of one substance or essence. It has been either accepted by, or dealt with by the pre-Socratic philosophers, Rene Descartes, Spinoza and others.

                             c. Dualism: seen to have begun with Descartes, it is the belief either that reality is made up of two or more substance (more commonly called, pluralism) or that there is a definite and essential difference between the human mind, and the external world. This tends to be taken as true by the British empiricists- who I mentioned above- but it’s not always seen strictly from an empiricist’s point of view.

 

 

 

Rene Descartes

 

 

 

 

3. Ethis: a. Relativism: this ethical theory states that there is no objective or universal way of judging a ethical decision. This is sometimes associated with the school, Existentialism: which is the belief that there is no one purpose to life for everyone and that instead, we must create our own purpose of life to deal with the Absurdity of existence. But it’s also associated with Nihilism which says that there is no Truth what so ever whether ethical, metaphysical or epistemological. These views under relativism under recent years in America have become almost creed.

 

                b. Absolutism: known by many other names, it basically asserts that there are ethically truths and ethical falsehoods no matter what the time, place or situation. It is not a very popular position- due to the fanatical worship of relativism- but Absolutism in ethics and in epistemology and metaphysics is what keeps philosophy alive.  

 

Immanuel Kant: Probably the most revolutionary
philosopher that there ever was.

 

          I have not even begun to talk about the other schools of thought such as utilitarianism, phenomenology, theories on logic, free-will, causation, political philosophy, religion, theodicy and aesthetics- which deal with many complex issues- but this list of schools and positions is a good place to start.

But of course, in case one is curious, there is a distinct and rather eclectic school of thought which I mostly adhere to which I feel fits my practice of Zen Buddhism: German Idealism. Ranging from Schelling, Fichte, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hegel, Martin Heidegger and others, these philosophers don’t follow neither empiricism or rationalism, nor pluralism or monism. Arguably returning back to Plato and the Italian Renaissance, these philosophers believe in not making a separation between the contents of the mind, the world nor the multiplicity or uniformity of reality. Instead, they play with the intimate relationship between these above opposites and find a way of making things whole in essence while acknowledging their difference in substance. This can be seen as a more assertive version of William James’ Pragmatism, and it returns back to the dialectical method of Socrates, albeit making their own systems none the less. 

 

Hegel: If there has ever been a Genius,
Hegel is it.

 

 

 

Philosophy as Being Well- Read

 

          For better or for worse, philosophy today is mostly an intellectual endeavor and rather than arguing against it, it has to be accepted. You can read as widely or segmented as you want, but if you really want to be able to get involved in a philosophical discussion, reading widely and ruthlessly is a must.

          One does not read philosophy books to just be ‘cultured’, but to train one’s mental-muscles to dealing with large ideas which require intense concentration. If I could mention three philosophers who make their ideas very clear and would serve as a good start, it would be Plato, Rene Descartes and Bertrand Russell. Plato’s dialogues will really train your mind and what’s excellent about his dialogues is that he covers so many topics with so many view points, and he shows how philosophy is done as a dialogue with other people. Rene Descartes and Bertrand Russell both write very well and Descartes is definitely a philosopher you’ll come across in many philosophy books.

          One of these days, I’ll be making a series of YouTube videos that will go over the entire history of Eastern and Western philosophy, but below are a couple philosophy books(in no particular order) which I feel have opened up my mind tremendously and which are known as being the most influential books in philosophy.

 

1.    “The Republic” by Plato (and his dialogues!)

2.     “Letters From a Stoic” by Seneca

3.    “Discourse on Method” by Rene Descartes

4.    “Confessions” by Saint Augustine (Even though this is a re-telling of his life up to his conversion to Christianity, he rigorously explorers many ideas that would become important to both other Christian philosophers and Rene Descartes’, “I think, therefore, I am”).

5.    “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche (a mythical/biblical summarization of his ideas. A book that got me out of dark times)

6.    “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge” by George Berkeley (One of the most persuading arguments against materialism I know of).

7.     “The Philosophy of Right” by Hegel (may want to wait on this one: reading Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacque Rosseau will help a lot).

8.    “The World as Will and Idea” by Arthur Schopenhauer( An important criticism of the most difficult philosopher- Immanuel Kant- and through that, combines his revision of Kant with Plato to create a system that is similar to Hinduism and Buddhism).  

9.    “Pragmatism” by William James (next to Francis Bacon, he is my favorite writer when it comes to his style of writing and how lucid he is. His essays were very influential to me as well.)

10.”The Story of Philosophy” by Bryan Magee( More       objective than Bertrand Russell’s, “The History of Western Philosophy”, he also writes very well and covers many important philosophers while briefly touching on eastern philosophy/religion. A book I’d recommend reading before attacking an actual philosophical work).  

 

Plato

 

Philosophy as a Creative and Spiritual Activity

 

          Once you have read enough books to train your mind and to give you access to many ideas and questions, make a bonfire and ritually throw your philosophy book in the flames. Watch them burn as the pages fly in the air, the arguments being scattered by the elements of the earth. And after that last book is burned, pick your choice: a pen, pencil, keyboard, your mouth or even just you mind if you’re more pure.

 

 

 

 

 

          The picture of the philosopher that has popularized probably during Hegel’s time is that one must have a P.H.D as a professor to be a philosopher. Nothing can be further from the truth: I have the experience of professors who either rant on their own opinions on philosophies that they hate, those who give a dull recounting of the history of philosophy or who have opened up the class for having debates and discussions on numerous topics. Even though I picked up handy counter-arguments from the first, interesting paraphernalia from the second, it was the third professor I had who really allowed Mother Philosophy to breathe freely and to teach us Her ways: philosophy is a free and open activity, available to everyone. 

            Her questions can cause depression, or rise you out of your, “dogmatic- slumber”- to use the words of Immanuel Kant. She can tickle you with fanciful ideas or stab you with unavoidable counter-arguments. Her footsteps in the Sands of your surroundings have led Her followers to the Oceans of Eternal Ignorance: they’ve swam with their imagination through Dialectical Contemplation and when they have returned to the Isle of Sophia, their possessions have been stripped from them by the waves of forgetfulness. The Light of their Third Eye illuminates out from the Platonic Cave of the mind and shines out, burning the flesh and bones of your shell until the Breath of God is released, reabsorbed by The Tree of the World.

          On Her Branches grow the fruit of Remembrance, and your curiosity is Her commands. Return.