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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is …
I THOUGHT I KNEW THAT!
Or
THE U-SHAPED LEARNING THEORY
When I was researching something for this podcast, I came across a concept I’d never heard of before, the U-shaped learning theory. This, it seems, can be very easily applied to language learning. So, what is it?
Well, the theory says that you will start out at a very high level with your learning, then your level will drop significantly and you’ll start making mistakes with what you thought you knew already, causing a big dip in the graph’s curve, and then you will get better again. So the shape of the learning curve is like a U. There may be multiple dips, creating a wave-like graph.
But why is this? Surely what you’ve already mastered can’t get worse? Or can it?
Let’s look at a specific example of something that might cause a drop.
When you first start learning a foreign language, that early stage involves very fast acquisitions of a lot of simple words and constructions that make you feel like you’re making significant progress. But that can’t last forever, because you have to start learning more complex things.
The basic present tense is probably learnt in that first high phase and you pick it up very easily, but once you start adding other tenses, your progress will likely go backwards and confusion reign.
The best tenses example, in the languages I’ve learnt, would be deciding between a simple past tense and an imperfect tense. Let’s say you’ve learnt the simple past first and you believe you’ve got a handle on that. You’re happy with the idea that everything in the past can be assigned this construction. Okay, there might be auxiliary verbs, but you’re riding high on the curve, because you’re finding this easy to comprehend. Then, horror of horrors, you get introduced to the imperfect tense and you find that everything is not quite as simple as you’d thought. There’s now doubt as to whether what you’re talking about is a completed action or a continuing action, or a regular action that someone used to do. You start to get confused as to which tense you are supposed to use and even though you were fine with the simple past before, now you start making errors even with this, because there’s always that question mark in your head - does it need to be in the imperfect? The result is that you’ve basically got worse at something you thought you knew and the curve has dipped right down on your simple past learning. But after a while you get the differences, if not completely, to a large extent, and you go up the curve again.
And then you get introduced to the pluperfect and the whole process starts all over again, because the ‘had done’ in your language isn’t quite the same as the ‘had done’ in the other language and you now have three past tenses to juggle. But, more time passes, and you get the hang of that, and the future tense, and whatever other tenses your target language has and all is good in the language learning world.
Until someone mentions the subjunctive.
This, in my experience, is very much what language learning is like. Even if you’ve learnt multiple languages, and you know it’s coming, you will still have the confusion, because each language has its quirks and doesn’t apply the rules in quite the same way, all the time.
So, if you ever feel like you’re getting nowhere with your language learning, it could just be that you’re at the bottom of a curve like this and you simply need time to assimilate and get used to that new thing that was thrown into the mix and sent everything into confusion. It’s natural. It’s normal. You just have to accept that it’s part of the process.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.