Episode Description:

In this episode, I explain what I think is the most important aspect of learning a language.

Intro music by Lundstroem - "Great podcast intro" (Short version and Long version)

Youtube- https://www.youtube.com/@ShadowEnglish4649

So I imagine that most of you who are listening to this want to improve their English listening or speaking. I have been an English teacher for the past 14 years. Wow. I can't believe it has been that long.     And...there are many theories about language learning...and there are many differences of opinions. But there is one point of my own teaching philosophy that I wanted to express in today's episode. 

And that is what I believe is necessary to master a second language. 

For me, language learning is fundamentally about learning vocabulary. I know it might sound obvious at first, but you would be surprised on the various teaching methods out there that do not put this as the forefront of second language teaching. There are many reasons for this...and I won't go into the details of the counterarguments today. Rather, I just want to explain why I think vocabulary learning...or perhaps better put, acquisition is the most important feature of language learning. In future episodes, I will delve more into the topic. 

Basically...whenever I am studying for a Japanese test and I get an answer wrong, what I have realized is that I got the answer wrong for one of two reasons...Either I did not know the vocabulary well in the question or I did not know the vocabulary well wherever the answer is found. And this could be for both reading or listening questions. 

Basically, I didn’t know the vocabulary or I did know it and forgot it. 

Furthermore, even if I know the vocabulary, there are levels of comprehension…or getting used to any particular vocabulary item. And by the way, I use the word item deliberately. This is because I define a vocabulary item as a single word, multiword expression, phrase, idiom, or even grammatical structure. Some people might argue that grammar should be treated distinctly from vocabulary, and there is an argument there…but for my purposes, I treat it as a vocabulary item. 

You see, words (or vocabulary) are the fundamental building blocks of language, and therefore, of grammar itself. Thus, knowing words – their meanings and the way they relate to each other – forms the basis of understanding and constructing sentences, which is what grammar essentially is. A particular vocabulary word has collocations, which just basically means a word that another word is often used together with. For example, in English we say “Make a decision” but we “Do homework” or we are “at school” but “in class”. These conventions of which verb or preposition to use are related to the use of the vocabulary word itself and are not defined by grammatical rules. Moreover, grammatical rules are often broken, even by native speakers, like the usage of “Who” vs. “Whom”, or the use of “I” vs “me”, double negatives, and so on…

In any case…I don’t want to go on too much of a tangent in this episode.

So basically, it was the lack of vocabulary knowledge, or perhaps confidence, which trips me up when taking a test, and made me not know what the answer was or misled me to think the answer was something besides the correct answer. 

So, yeah, that is what it comes down to...acquiring vocabulary...or perhaps better put, getting used to the vocabulary (as I just defined it) so that when a particular vocabulary item is used in a novel context, I can quickly piece together the meaning.

 So, wherever you are on your langugae learning journey..whether it be English or another language, getting used to reading and hearing vocabulary in meaningful contexts is essential. Now how to go about doing that is another story...and one I will save for a future podcast.

Thank you for listening as always, and catch you next time!