Language learning stages

When learning a language with phrasing, there are a few “stages” of learning that I like to consider. Phrasing bases a lot of its methodology of of literature, so I would just like to point out this is based on experience, not on any specific formal research.

These stages are: 

1. Sound recognition (word boundary part i)

2. Word recognition (word boundary part ii)

3. Phrase recognition (word clusters)

4. Pattern recognition (grammar part i)

5. Structure recognition (grammar part ii)

6. Expression recognition (grammar part iii)

These stages will emerge naturally — I just focus on memorization, and I start noticing sounds, words, phrases, patterns, grammar, and eventually expression. Naturally, as I notice these things, I get curious. I just click around, see if I can find the answer, and ask otherwise.

I don’t worry things that are in a later stage than I’m currently at — although that doesn’t mean I intentionally ignore them. I’ll read through casually, maybe ask questions if I’m really curious, but I don’t really worry about retaining that information until I’m at that stage

Sound recognition

Word Boundary I ・ Local Expression

When you’re first exposed to a new language, a new sentence at a native level will blow past you. It is just a bunch of random sounds that you cannot make heads or tails of.

The first phase is just pure memorization of words and the way they sound. Do whatever you can to remember the word (mnemonics are extremely helpful at this stage) and try to listen for the word when the full sentence audio plays.

I still read through whatever phrasing has to say about the word in the chat, although I don’t worry about remembering it. Sometimes just reading a plain English explanation is enough for me to remember it!

Note: if you can clearly hear and make out different words when they’re speaking, you are already past this stage

Word recognition

Word Boundaries II ・ Across Expressions

As soon as you start recognizing words you learn in one expression in another expression, you’ve moved onto phase 2.

In this phase, when you notice the word in another expression, click around. Does it look different in this expression? Check out the glossary — what are the main grammar points about this word?

You’ll be seeing them both plenty, so just keep clicking around until you remember the distinction. If you’re confused about something — just ask in the chat.

Phrase recognition

Word Clusters ・ Phrases

Start practicing saying a few words before and/or after the vocab word. When you’re doing reviews, try to remember the word in the current phrase.

Click around and see all the translations in this phrase. Look at the glossary for each of them. Again, don’t worry about memorizing much, just think of the word order, see if there are any similarities across words in the phrases.

Pattern Recognition

Grammar I ・ Word Level

Eventually, you’ll start to pick up patterns that occur in the language across all of your expressions. This is something that will emerge naturally — the language centers of our brains have been doing this since we were born. The key here is to notice patterns across your expressions, investigate them, and then look for them even further.

For example, with Croatian, it took me just a few weeks to notice nominative -a words tended to be feminine. Within another few weeks I noticed -a was used a lot in the genitive masculine nouns as well, and sometimes in the dative. I also noticed -a was being used in neuter accusative. I'm not focused on memorizing any table or over analyzing all the cases, I just glance at the glossary as I'm entering words and some unconscious part of my brain files that information away and does the heavy lifting.

Another example is with Turkish: I only just recently started taking note of the -ir suffix. This is what Turkish uses to indicate the third person present tense (similar how we add an -s to run when saying "he runs"). I had several vocab words with this suffix, and I'm sure I read that explanation several times, but I had not committed it to memory (as I was not yet at this stage). At some point, my brain just found that a significant pattern, and sure enough I noticed it in another half dozen reviews that day.

This sort of pattern recognition will happen regardless, and until I start making these connections naturally, I don't try to force them. This is a big aspect of language acquisition, and one of the parts I really agree with — the difference is, I like to have the explanations in front of me and available at all times, and I like to look into these explicitly, following my curiosity.

Structure Recognition

Grammar II ・ Sentence Level

Once you know a majority of the words in a sentence, you can start to see how it pieces together. How is the sentence communicating the idea. What pieces go in what order. Relations between words across phrases, general order. The phrases themselves become “tokens”.

This is the step that I most often "do out of order". Most of the time, when I first see an expression, I'll analyze this information to help me get a "lay of the land". The difference is, before I’ve completed the previous stages, I’m not really worried about retaining it — not until this stage. 

Expression Recognition

Grammar III ・ Global

One thing that I feel is not considered enough when learning a language, is that it normally matters much more how you say something that what you say.

We’re not captivated by stories because they are grammatically correct, or find jokes funny because they logically make sense. Nor do we like to have deep, long conversations because they’re very well structured.

At this stage, you’ll be starting to recognize Expressions in the truest sense of the word. Is this expression expressing something happy, sad, serious or sarcastic? Is it formal or casual? Urgent or ponderous? How does the intonation contribute to the expression? The word choice?

A large part of why the app is called Phrasing is because the stage probably makes up half of your journey. The difference between a language learner and someone who is—and I loathe to use this word—“fluent” norming comes down to their phrasing. Can they string a sentence together, or express themselves.

Sure you can be technically fluent in a language, have a good academic working memory of it—and for plenty of people, this is enough. You can communicate ok with really doing much in this stage. But if you want to really connect with people, this stage is critical.

Progressing through the stages

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t avoid any information from the other stages. Phrasing Expressions come with ways to view all of this information, and it can all help you learn faster.

However, I relieve myself the burden of remembering any of it or even needing to understand until I’m at that stage. I don’t expect myself to be able to reproduce it until after that stage. It’s fine to forget things a bunch — that’s what spaced repetition is made for. 

Eventually you’ll remember, eventually you’ll progress, and at each stage I find the information just… makes a lot more sense. It’s very easy to remember at that point

These also are not ways to really measure language ability. I don’t progress universally across a language from one stage to the next. Sometimes I’ll have some words still in phase one, and other expressions in phase 6 in the same language. You might be in multiple phases at the same time for some sentences—languages are weird like that!