(Note: I originally wrote this for r/LearnJapanese, but I believe what I discuss is relevant for learning any language, and especially relevant if the language you're learning is very different from your native language.)
Recently I was talking to two friends. I'm American, one of the friends is half-Japanese half-American, and the other friend is American. The half-Japanese half-American guy, who spent most of his youth in America, was recounting to the American friend something that happened with a couple Japanese people several days prior, where I was involved but the American friend was absent. The half-Japanese half-American guy told the story, at one point mentioning that the two Japanese people had reaction X, with the implication being that they felt emotion Y. I concurred with the account, but then the American friend, who has a deep grasp of the culture after having lived here for nearly 20 years, replied with incredulity, explaining that Japanese people don't have reaction X within such situations, as it doesn't communicate emotion Y.
My first thought, of course, was that it was strange that he was correcting our story, given that he wasn't there. How would he know that they didn't do X, when he wasn't there to witness it? It's nonsense for him to correct us when we were the witnesses of the event and he was absent. But just a moment later I was struck with an insight that I've had in the past: Human memory isn't like a recording, where what shows up is simply a carbon copy of what happened. Human memory involves interpretation. It's less a dead copy of the past, and more a living reconstruction of what you believe you must have experienced at that time, as a function of your present models of how reality works. Even though the American friend wasn't present during the event, his model of what had to have happened was more accurate than ours, and thus he interpreted our past experience better than we did.
But what was the source of our error? Why did we think that they had social reaction X, when they actually didn't? The answer became immediately clear: What we did remember was that they were communicating emotion Y, and the reason we believed that they therefore had reaction X was because in American culture, individuals who feel emotion Y will often have reaction X. In other words, we accurately recalled one aspect of the experience, but then we made an error when we 'filled in the blank' by taking a model that works within the context of interpreting social events in American culture, and accidentally applied it outside of its sphere of relevance by using it to reconstruct a memory of an event in Japanese culture. We remembered something different than we actually experienced, because we applied a model that makes sense with Americans to an event that occurred with Japanese.
After this happened, I was struck by the fact that this mechanism could explain a lot of the cultural misunderstandings that I see foreigners have on a daily basis here in Japan. Essentially what can happen is that you end up systematically applying the various models you created during your youth in, say, America, to social events here. While a Japanese child growing up in Japan will usually pick up on most of the cultural nuance over time, foreigners will often end up 'capped' quite quickly, where they run into a wall with interpretation and never seem to get much better. Unfortunately most Western foreigners in Japan, no matter how long they spend here, tend to still make elementary errors in cultural perception on a daily basis. My theory is that one of the main reasons is that they systematically remember not what they actually experienced within the social events, but some combination of what actually occurred on one hand, and what they think must have occurred given a misplaced application of the models they created in an entirely different cultural context on the other.
Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because I believe this is actually identical to the mechanism by which foreign learners end up with grammatical fossilization. Most people who have tried to teach a Japanese person English will be familiar with the interesting phenomenon where you speak a sentence to them containing the word "the", ask them to repeat it back to you, and then when they repeat it they somehow skip the "the". Didn't you just say the sentence like one second ago? How did they mess it up, especially if you know that they do in fact know that the word "the" exists? Simple: In the same way that I explained above, we need to note that human memory isn't a dead recording; it's a living re-construction of the past based on one's present models of what the past must have been like. When someone's grammatical intuition lacks an appreciation for the place of "the" in the language, it's easy for them to hear it and then instantly forget it. They're not just repeating the sentence; they're re-constructing it based on their understanding of the meaning and intuition of grammar. Humans are not recording devices, but thinking agents.
I've been thinking about the topic of grammatical acquisition for quite a while. Children of course make plenty of grammatical errors as they're learning, but those errors smooth out and they end up with a native intuition for the grammatical system. Adults also make plenty of errors, but these errors frequently fossilize, in that their intuition for the grammar gets stuck and stops progressing. What's going on here? Why do foreign learners often get grammatical fossilization, whereas native children don't? Now that I've thought of the above mechanism related to cultural perception, my theory is that there's a generalized fossilization that tends to happen in adult learners, where they systematically apply the models that they created in their youth to their new situation. Grammatical fossilization isn't the only kind of fossilization; social fossilization is another phenomenon which operates in terms of the same underlying mechanism: what we could perhaps call perceptual fossilization.
While many people in the language-learning community argue that what truly matters is making yourself understood, and that it's unimportant to try to perfect your accent or grammar as long as you're communicating effectively for your objectives, in my opinion the reality of the situation is that most people who have broken grammar also have a lot of trouble understanding cultural nuance. There seems to be a tight correlation between broken grammar, and what we could call broken cultural perception, and I believe the mechanism I explained above shows why. If you're in the habit of hearing sentences in your target language and then re-constructing them based on misplaced models from your native language, it's likely that you're also in the habit of experiencing social dynamics within your target culture and then re-constructing them in terms of misplaced models from your native culture. And in the same way, those whose minds are open to create entirely new models of grammatical patterns will tend to be those who are also better able to see with fresh eyes the social events they experience in their new culture.
For grammatical fossilization, the solution is to learn how to take what you hear and bring it into the future with you. Take the example of the Japanese person omitting the word "the" that I gave above. Someone like that will almost definitely make that same mistake when speaking of their own accord. The only way they could use immersion to create native-like grammatical intuition in this sense would be to change this fact about themselves, and make it so they actually remember that the word "the" appeared when they hear a sentence with that word. If every time they hear it they just forget it, their grammar will fossilize. To prevent grammatical fossilization, you need to cast your native language aside, and facilitate the creation of entirely new models. You need to make it so you're very good at remembering what you heard.
To be concrete, my strategy is the following: I find sentences that exemplify a certain grammatical pattern where I think my grammatical intuition may be lacking, and then I enter them into Anki. When a sentence comes up in my Anki studies, I read it, look away from the computer screen, and then handwrite it in a notebook. I've noticed that when I handwrite a sentence, I don't merely regurgitate a dead recording of what I read; as I mentioned a couple times above, what happens is instead a re-construction. Especially toward the latter half of the sentence, I make decisions about what to write less based on just a dry reading of the sequence of words, and more based on what would make sense in the situation, given the meaning. My grammatical intuition has gotten much better through this method, and when I hear or read sentences in my immersion I notice that moments or days later I'm much better at remembering what was said or written, and thus I'm far better at producing language I've absorbed in immersion.
For social fossilization, unfortunately the details are bound to be much deeper, and the solution therefore much harder to grasp and explain. Verbal language is a much simpler enterprise, and that's surely why fields like syntax have achieved something much closer to hard science than fields related to social dynamics. But the underlying mechanism is nevertheless the same. You need to see what you're experiencing with fresh eyes, where rather than ignoring parts of the experience and then re-constructing it based on misplaced models, you experience the social dynamics as a child would: unadulterated by pre-conceived notions.
One reason humans don't just recall like a recording, but reconstruct like an intelligent being, is because it allows us to store data more efficiently. We can strategically forget a lot of details, because we're then able to employ our models of reality to derive them whenever needed. It takes up less storage space to remember an equation that you can use to derive a thousand details, then to remember all the details individually. But when the models you're applying were built with a different set of social conditions in mind, this memory system is bound to lead to systematic error. The only solution is to scrap these shortcuts, and to cache far more details of each situation than is natural for an adult to do. Once you do this for long enough, new models will develop and you'll be able to perceive social situations in a proper native-like way.
One of the limitations of linguistics as a field is that many of their theories don't take into account the bigger picture of human cognition. To be fair, this isn't just a problem with linguistics but a common problem within modern science, now that we've entered the age of hyper-specialization, with all of its benefits and drawbacks alike. And beyond that, there are some sub-fields of linguistics that are popping up in an effort to slot the experience of speaking a language into the big picture of human psychology in general.
But either way, the reason I'm mentioning this is because I want to point out that the above explanation is an attempt to slot a certain problem that foreign learners usually have when they acquire their target language (grammatical fossilization) into a big-picture understanding of the psychological considerations of placing yourself into a new language and culture as an adult. Natural language doesn't have its own autonomous spot in the brain, but rather is intimately intermixed many other cognitive systems. Grammatical fossilization happens by the same mechanism as what I'm referring to as social fossilization, and both of these phenomena are generalized psychological phenomena. Understanding how these phenomena happen is the first step to figuring out how to solve them, and thus how to acquire a more native-like grasp of both the grammar and the culture.
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