Language learning

Editor: You know what sells these days? How to.

Author: So we need to go beyond description.

Editor: And apply what is described to help people get better at something.

Author: I didn’t see this as a how-to book.

Editor: Even academic books can contain something useful. They can go beyond mere “as can be be seen from the diagram…” type phrases to “Here’s what to do in five steps…”

Author: I suppose that’s the difference between descriptive linguistics which show things like how sounds are made and grammatical rules and applied linguistics which goes into the teaching and learning of these.

Editor: Any ideas?

Author: We could throw in evaluations of the conversations, comments on what works and what doesn’t as communication.

Editor: To help people communicate better?

Author: Leading by example. Like one of my heroes, Kenneth Hale. He was a professor at MIT, who could speak 50 or 60 languages. Said he picked up the essentials of Japanese in 30 minutes watching the English subtitles of a Japanese movie.

Editor: A special gift.

Author: And he had strategies. Said he found it more effective to learn not just one language at once but two or three.

Editor: Not for everyone I fear.

Author: Were it so easy to pick up other languages, we would all be linguists in the old sense.

Editor: The old sense?

Author: When linguists were people into learning languages instead of just describing them.

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