I’m not a linguist, so there might be a lot of things wrong in this, but I just wanted to share my thoughts. Many might disagree with me and you’re welcome to share your opinion in the comments
Technically, if you learn the vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language you’re able to speak it. Except in practice it goes like this:
Imagine you’re a native speaker of LanguageX and you’re learning English. You are very hungry and want to communicate this feeling to your friend. So let’s say in LanguageX instead of saying “I am hungry” you say something like “It gives me hunger.” So you end up saying “it gives me hunger” except in English. While grammatically correct, no English speaker says that. You translated from your native language word for word applying English grammar rules and structure but not paying attention to the fact that different ideas are expressed differently in different languages. Before anyone comes at me saying “I’m hungry” is something you learn pretty early in learning a foreign language, I chose a simple phrase to illustrate how detrimental this approach is to language learning. This is something I noticed a lot in the way schools teach foreign languages. They treat language like mathematics. They give you a set of grammar rules, some vocab and tell you to work it out. The thing is, natural language is highly complex and illogical. How are the phrases “to be up for something” and “to be down for something” the same? Up is the opposite of down and we use them interchangeably and you (if you’re a native English speaker) probably never noticed this until I pointed it out to you. Now imagine a nonnative English speaker seeing the phrase “to be down for something” while previously knowing that “to be up for something” means being very eager to do it. They’d probably infer that if up means positive down means negative, therefore the sentence is expressing a negative thought and saying that they don’t want to do it. This follows all rules of logic, and there’s no doubt about it, but being logical is not how languages are. In English we say “to be up/down for something” and that’s it. No explanation needed. There shouldn’t be an explanation because honestly, what’s the point? Is it going to help you understand it better?
You can’t just take a formula in the form of a grammar rule and plug in some words and get a natural sounding sentence. You’ll oftentimes get a grammatically correct one, but say it to natives and they’ll look at you as if you’re from outer space. What I’m saying here is that we should stop treating language as a set of rules that must be followed and mindlessly plugging things in because the rule tells us so. The rule forgets to tell us that languages are like toddlers and will often not follow our orders because they’re, well little demons from hell toddlers. The reason a lot of people sound unnatural in their foreign languages despite having studied them for quite some time is because they treat them like math, learn some vocab (numbers) learn some grammar rules (formulas) and mix and match. Except they end up saying things that are very unnatural.
Language isn’t meant to be logical. It’s constantly evolving and there is no way something as natural as a human language can have no exceptions. It’s just part of what it is and instead of complaining about it we should accept that and start actually treating foreign languages as what they are - foreign languages.
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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