Chunking: the secret to fluency? fragmentación del lenguaje||secreto|| チャンク化|||| Fracionamento|||| Chunking: das Geheimnis des flüssigen Arbeitens? Chunking: ¿el secreto de la fluidez? チャンキング：流暢さの秘訣？ Chunking: o segredo da fluência?

Today, I want to talk about learning languages in chunks. |||||||||stukken |||||||||fragmentos |||||||||pedaços

I'm sure it's a concept that many of you are aware of.

I'm going to tell you why I think it's important and how we go about

learning languages in chunks.

Quite a while ago, maybe 25, 30 years ago, where up until that point, people

tended to think that language learning was all about words and grammar.

So if you have all these words and you learn the formula.

Then you'll be able to use the words correctly according to sort

of standard usage for that language.

Then a professor Lewis came along and suggested that, in fact, no, as much as

60 percent of any language, it consists of these sort of formulaic or formula ||||||||||formulematig|| ||||||||||定型的な|| ||||||||||fórmulas fixas||

based chunks, words that belong together.

In my view, it's not just the obvious sort of collocations, you know,

by the way, or on the other hand.

or expressions like that.

Everything about the language consists of words that normally

are used together with other words.

And I remember when I was correcting English at LingQ, the biggest problem

was not grammar per se, but that people would choose the wrong word.

Word choice, word usage.

And that has all to do with this idea of chunks.

And so words are used together with other words.

And those are chunks.

So how do we learn the chunks?

One person suggested back in 1925, a certain Harold Palmer suggested that ||||||||ハロルド・||

we should learn the most frequent patterns in the language and learn to

use them, memorize them, come out with these prefabricated chunks of language. ||||||||vooraf gemaakte|||

This is kind of like the phrasebook approach.

Personally, I've found that very difficult.

I can't remember these.

Prefabricated phrases.

I mean, they'll come out naturally at some point if I've kind of acquired them in

some way naturally, but to deliberately learn them has never worked for me.

Now there's been a lot of research and I'm going to leave a link to

a very good presentation on the subject of chunking from Cambridge.

And if you have the time, you can go through it and you will see that

one of the sort of proofs that.

Chunking works that they refer to is that a group of students who went

to France and had a lot of exposure to French, they ended up speaking

in sort of natural sounding chunks.

So they had acquired an ability to speak in chunks and that made |||verworven|||||||||

them sound more natural and they were able to speak more quickly.

We can't all fly off to the country where the language is spoken

that we are trying to learn.

But as you'll see from this link that I left you, the teachers want to teach.

So if chunks are important, then they want to teach them, they want to have,

you know, do we teach them for frequency?

Do we teach them for ease of learning?

They come up with different criteria so that they can deliberately teach the

chunks that the learners should learn.

Which, in my way of thinking, is kind of putting things

backwards, as I shall explain.

Now, of course, part of this desire to teach the chunks, or teach

vocabulary, is that if you allow the learner to simply learn from, you

know, a lot of meaningful content, they may shy away from deliberately ||||||||terughoudend zijn|weg||

learning the language, deliberately learning the grammar, the rules.

But maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I'm a believer in crash, and I believe wholeheartedly in The power of input.

So I avoid doing too much sort of deliberate learning and more sort of

getting the language in me more naturally.

In fact, you'll see in that study that I sent you to that one commentator ||||||||||||||commentator

said that who was kind of pushing back on the idea of learning chunks that

yeah, we can acquire chunks from being exposed to a lot of different contexts.

And in fact, there is research to show that we learn Patterns and verbs more

easily from a variety of contexts, as opposed to sort of frequency of exposure.

There are more traditional, you know, vocabulary learning techniques.

We learn it better if we're exposed to a lot of different contexts.

But this one person said, the sheer enormity of the amount of material that |||||||膨大さ||||||

we have to, you know, consume in order to acquire our vocabulary and our text.

Chunks from sort of input is just, it makes it impossible.

But then I go back to these students who were studying French, who went to France

and came back with natural chunking.

They didn't do it because they deliberately studied chunks.

They did it because they had a lot of exposure in meaningful

contexts and speaking to people.

They were interested in what they were hearing.

They were picking up the language.

They were trying it out and gradually they spoke more and more naturally.

Gradually.

They used more natural chunks.

So this brings me back to my Turkish learning.

So this morning I had a lesson with my Turkish tutor, and of course I struggle

mightily to produce, particularly the verb forms, correctly in Turkish.

And kind of I say to myself, will I ever be able to do that?

And, of course, I know from experience that I will gradually be

able to do that better and better as long as I trust the process.

So I have a lot of words in my vocabulary that I can trot out in our conversation

connecting them with very poor grammar.

And over time, I believe I will get better at it.

So my strategy is massive.

So, as I did with Polish, as I did with Danish, as I did with other

languages, I find a website which has audiobooks and e books, which

in the case of Turkish is Storytel. ||||||Storytel ||||||ストーリーテル

And the big advantage of getting on these websites is that in addition to

podcasts that you can subscribe to, you can also, once you connect with audible.

com, if you're learning English or Spanish, or in

my case, Storytel or publio.

com.

PL or, or Saxo, I think it was for Danish.

It shows up on your Apple CarPlay screen. ||||||CarPlay|

So the minute I get in the car, I just turn on an audio book

that I'm listening to in Turkish.

I'm listening to it.

I am picking up chunks here and there.

I don't understand actually what they're talking about, but I do hear

very clearly defined chunks that form part of the language that I,

eventually want to be able to use.

And so what I then do is, because I always get the audiobook and the e book,

then I go into the e book on LingQ, and in particular, as I'm reading it,

where I see some really useful chunks, I can go into sentence mode, I can

link some of these words together to form phrases, I can review them, and

then I have to reassemble the sentence.

And in this way, I get a sort of a random exposure to different chunks.

Of course, it's not the tremendous number of chunks that I will eventually need,

but slowly I'm going to be picking up and noticing and collecting more and

more of these chunks through massive exposure to the language and the

occasional effort at Sort of in isolating and focusing in on certain chunks.

Based on my experience, I will eventually get better.

I won't be perfect and it takes a long time to sort of reduce

the number of mistakes we make.

And that's why in, in one of these other links that I leave with you, where they

compare, you know, frequency versus time.

Diversity of context to help you learn vocabulary.

They sort of say for early production.

Why for early production?

We don't need early production.

We don't need to be able to speak right away.

I've been at Turkish now for five and a half months.

I can't expect to speak that well.

I don't have that sort of goal.

I want to get the language in me.

And I will gradually get better, and I can always go back to

content that I've done before.

Even easy content like the mini stories, I can go through it in

sentence mode if necessary, focus in on certain chunks, or patterns, or

verb forms, and continue to improve.

All the while enjoying my language learning, and not being too focused

in on deliberately learning anything.

So, there you have it.

I hope that was helpful.

Thank you.

Bye.