Musings on confusings...

Since I first learned I had got the job in Sicily, my Spanish has suffered. The day after the job interview, I was at a Spanish/English language exchange, and I kept dropping words of Italian into my Spanish. The weird thing is that my Spanish was a million times stronger than my Italian then, but somehow my brain had switched "mode".

Obviously, living in Italy for four months has only served to intensify this, with my Spanish now being half-hidden behind fairly broken bits of Italian. My assumption for a long time was that my problem was in my accent -- I still speak Italian with a bit of a Spanish twang. This belief was bolstered by the fact that my Catalan, while being very, very weak from lack of use, didn't seem so badly affected. The Catalan accent is very, very different from Spanish and Italian.

However, I was at a Couchsurfing meeting on Friday night which changed my mind. There was an Andalusian tourist visiting, and when I spoke to her, my accent was more different from the one I use in Italian than I had expected. My brain started playing tricks on me, and I had difficulty speaking Italian when she was in my line-of-sight, and for a while I was wobbling between Italian and Spanish.

But that's not the important thing.

When I was speaking Italian, I got into much deeper and more complex conversations than I normally would, and rather than jamming up as I hit the limits of my Italian, I was automatically switching to Spanish to fill in the gaps. Now, I wasn't just importing words or grammar rules from Spanish into Italian -- no, I was switching into Spanish; conjugations, pronouns and all. As I became aware I was doing this, it dawned on me that I'd been doing it for my whole stay, but normally I'd just not thought about it too much and fallen back to English.

This is a bit of a new sensation... or actually, no. The only new thing is the fact that I was unaware of it. When it was Scottish Gaelic and French, for example, it would be instantly noticeable. The difference here is that the similarity of the languages (including, but not limited to, accent) allowed it to slip through the net on occasions.

The trigger mechanism is the same, regardless of language: hit a gap in your knowledge in one language and the brain will fall back on another. The only difference lies in detection.

This makes me wonder if the only option I have now to get my Spanish back is... to learn more Italian. My theory is that filling in the main gaps in my Italian will not only stop me falling back on Spanish when I run out of Italian, but that as a consequence of this, it will reduce the strength of the linkage between the two, allowing me to speak Spanish without Italian interrupting me.

It looks like I might be practising my Italian a lot, even once I leave Italy...

Counterintuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it's easier to start with the harder material...

In general, whenever we teach or learn something new, we start with the easy stuff then build on to the more difficult stuff.  But this isn't always a good idea, because sometimes the easy stuff causes us to be stuck in a "good enough" situation.

When I started learning the harmonica, I learned to play with a "pucker technique", ie I covered the wholes with my lips.  The alternative technique of "tongue blocking" (self descriptive, really), was just "too" difficult for me as a learner.  So for a long, long time, the pucker was "good enough" and tongue blocking was too difficult for not enough reward.  It limited my technique for a good number of years, and now that I can do it, I wish I'd learnt it years ago.

The same block of effort vs reward happens in all spheres of learning.  If you learn something easy, but of limited utility, it's far too easy to just continue along doing the same old thing, and it's far too difficult to learn something new, so you stagnate.  Harmonicas, singing, swimming, skiing, mathematics, computer programming; there's always the temptation to just hack about with what you've got rather than learn a new and appropriate technique.

This problem, unsurprisingly, rears its ugly head all too often in language learning, but with language it has an altogether insidious form: the "like your native language" form.  If you've got a choice of forms, one is going to be more like your native language than the other, and this is therefore easier to learn.  Obviously, this form is going to be "good enough", and the immediate reward to the learner for learning the more difficult form (ie different from the native language) isn't enough to justify the effort.  However, in the long term, the learner who seeks mastery is going to need that form in order to understand language encountered in the real world.

The problem gets worse, though, when you're talking about dialectal forms.

Here's an example.  Continuous tenses in the Celtic languages traditionally use a noun as the head verbal element (known as the verbal noun or verb-noun).  I am at creation [of] blog post, as it were.  Because it's a noun, the concept of a "direct object" is quite alien, and instead genitives are used to tie the "object" to the verbal noun.  In the case of object pronouns, they use possessives.  I am at its creation instead of *I am at creation [of] it.  Note that the object therefore switches sides from after to before the verbal noun.

Now in Welsh, the verbal noun has become identical to the verb root, and is losing its identity as a noun.  This has led to a duplication of the object pronoun, once as a possessive, once as a plain pronoun -- effectively I am in its creation [of] it.  This really isn't a stable state, as very few languages would tolerate this sort of redundancy, and the likely end-state is that the possessive gets lost, and the more English-like form (I am in creation [of] it) will win out.  In fact, there are many speakers who already talk this way.

But for the learner, learning this newer form at the beginning is a false efficiency.  There are plenty of places where the old form is still current, so unless the learner knows for certain that they'll be spending their time in an area with the newer form, they're going to need the conservative form anyway.  To a learner who knows the conservative form, adapting to the newer form is trivially easy, but for someone who knows only the newer form, the conservative form is really quite difficult to grasp.

So teaching simple forms early risks restricting the learner's long-term potential.  So while you want to make life simple for yourself or you students, make sure you're not doing them or yourself a disservice.

The 3 sources of confusion in vocabulary.

There are various pieces of advice on the internet regarding how to learn vocabulary, but most writers set out to write their advice with the goal of convincing you that their way is best.  This means that they skip the weaknesses in their chosen method, and they attack other methods on rather simplistic, superficial grounds.  I would be happy to do the same thing, as it would really stoke my ego to know that people were doing stuff because I said so.  But that wouldn't be particularly useful, so I'm going to try to avoid telling you how to learn vocabulary.

Instead, what I want to do is arm you to make an informed decision on techniques yourself.  It's a topic I may revisit later, but for now I want to focus on the reasons vocabulary items become confused.  As per the title, I break confusion down into three main categories: confusion by form; confusion by function and confusion by co-occurrence.

Confusion by form
Confusion by form is the simplest.  If two words sound and/or look alike, they are very easy to confuse.  English is full of great examples -- classic spelling mistakes between homophones such as "bough" and "[take a] bow", "aloud" and "allowed" etc.  Most languages aren't quite as bad as English for having homophones that are written differently, so the confusion is normally between similar words, not identical ones.

But there's more to it than that.  Have you ever been trying to think of a word and you've got a sort of shadow of the word in your head?  The features of words that are easiest to remember are the first syllable and the number of syllables, as well as which syllable is stressed.  So similarity doesn't rely on just having similar letters all the way through -- it can occur on just the first syllable, or the words may both share a particular rhythm.

We can consider so-called "false friends" as simply a special case of confusion by form, as the only difference is that the confusion occurs across languages, rather than within a language.


Confusion by function
Confusion by function can be split into two subcategories: function of grammar and function of concept.

Confusion by function of grammar is fairly simple but has extremely absurd results.  Some people can't believe it exists, but keep your ears open and you will hear it at some point.  A word gets dropped in that fits the grammatical category of the place it is in the sentence, but it makes no sense.  Anecdotally, I'd say that I've seen it occur mostly with verbs.  So for example someone might say "I like drinking books".  It's rare, but it happens.

Confusion by function of concept is where two words mean something similar.  The obvious example would have to be that high school language class favourites: pets.  I could never remember whether un cobaye was French for a gerbil or a hamster, and still don't.  I don't suppose I would have recognised the difference between the two animals anyway, so the concepts in my brain were very similar: little fluffy critter.

But the two types of confusion by function can combine to create even bigger confusion.  While we do occassionally see completely nonsensical statements like the "drinking books" example, learners will quite often substitute a verb with a similar meaning.  So instead of saying "I didn't say anything" they might say "I didn't speak anything", of instead of saying "open the door" they might say "close the door", or even "close the window" (I had massive problems getting my open and close and door and window right in Welsh).

Confusion by co-occurrence
Finally we come to the one that is the most complicated and troublesome: confusion by co-occurrence.  Basically, the brain likes to associate things with each other.  We have salt and pepper and we have bread and butter, but we never have pepper and salt or butter and bread.  When things appear with each other a lot, they start to stick.  So when we're learning vocabulary, we can accidentally trick our brains into linking particular words more strongly than it should simply by having them appear next to each other a lot.  This is one of the biggest risks with word lists -- in a list, each word is forced to co-occur with the rest of the words on the list, particularly those directly before and after.  Reading the same list multiple times is almost guaranteed to create confusion by co-occurrence.

Multidimensional confusion
I've already demostrated how the two types of confusion by function combine to make a bigger problem, and of course all different forms of confusion can combine in this way.

I used to confuse my oats and my hazelnuts in Spanish.  Both are food and go together in my breakfast bowl for a sort of home-made muesli (confusion by function of concept).  They were stocked less than a metre apart in the local supermarket and I kept them next to each other in my kitchen cupboard (confusion by co-occurrence).  Oats is "avena" and hazelnuts are "avellanas" (confusion by form). Even when I came back to Scotland, I still couldn't get the word right.  Ironically, it is only when I started using this example that I became able to make the distinction correctly.

Lessons to be learnt
A learning technique cannot eliminate the confusions completely, but it must try to minimise them.
When evaluating a vocabulary learning strategy, or devising your own, look out for the 3 types of confusion.  When you're learning, be mindful of your mistakes and what they tell you about how you're learning.  If you can't think of a word, or keep getting it wrong, the chances are it's down to one of these types of confusion, and you should be able to refine or alter your technique to help you remember that word correctly, which over time should help you avoid making the confusion with new vocabulary in the future.