The most effective way to learn a German, is to speak it
Is it possible to understand the grammar of the German language?
Language is an unbelievably complex thing, the ability of the human mind to communicate through words and sentences is nothing less than amazing. When are we asked how we did it? How we managed to compose a sentence in our mother tongue, almost none of us can answer this question.
That means we perform an action which we actually have no ability to explain what we have performed. And now, let's think about the difficulty of explaining to other people the syntactic structure of the language.
It is true that there are people who can understand the structure of the language, simplify it for explanations, and even teach it to other people. But these people are a minority. The great majority of us humans are not interested, nor would we like to, and cannot analyze the structure of the language.
The grammatical approach
The syntactic approach holds that if we learn the syntactic logic of the language, we will succeed in producing the language ourselves. This is the general approach to language studies in the last hundred years. We all learn a second language in school, and we all know the way a language is taught. Amazingly, most of us can acquire a second language, but it's not at all clear if it's because we understand the syntactic logic of the second language or because... we'll get to that later.
Think about your second language. For most of us, it is English. Do you know how to hold a conversation in English? How many of you remember the rules of English grammar? How much do you think about English grammar rules while you are conversing?
Something doesn't work with the simple logic
In the last twenty years, more and more alternative language learning movements have been developing, and their common denominator is dissatisfaction with the poor results of second language studies. More and more people have come to the conclusion that people acquire a second language despite the syntactic approach, not because of the syntactic approach!
The proof is very easy to find. People who have learned a second language and manage to communicate and speak it, often fail to repeat the main principle of the syntactic at all.
And here we should remember the famous saying of Albert Einstein:
"If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself."
New approaches to language learning
Given that humans do not really understand grammar, the question arises - then what do they actually understand when it comes to learning a new language? And the amazing answer is that likely almost nothing.
A man hears a language and repeats it without understanding its syntactic structure. Therefore there is no point in trying to understand the syntax, perhaps beyond general knowledge. Even if you try hard to "understand" it, you will find it hard to build sentences with that knowledge.
Instead, there is an emphasis on repeated practice of using the language, and by this, the human brain assimilates the new language.
This can be done in the most natural and simplest way, as children do, by hearing and imitating. Over time the vocabulary increases, and the brain that assimilated the structure of the language, will develop new uses beyond the assimilation of what it absorbed by hearing. (YES!)
The Shalva method
Shelva method is established on the idea of assimilating the new language. Each person needs to hear and imitate some X number of hours of conversation in order to master the new language. This practice is extraordinarily effective because it allows real assimilation of the language in the most natural way, and not through memorizing syntactic structures that are not actually absorbed.
N. Shalva, Berlin 2022.
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