Now lately I’ve been practising my Japanese, mostly reading and singing along with Japanese lyrics. It’s very satisfying to be up to this stage for me, when I look back at the past years of ‘studying’. I’m still slow at reading and don’t know enough words, and I also get my tongue twisted so much singing along but it’s fun! My hearing has started improving far more since. Yet in the first year I lived in Japan I struggled to speak and read. Yet in the last 6 months I was there something ‘clicked’ and I just could speak with barely any effort. I of course wasn’t fluent and I made errors, but speaking began to feel natural. Why speak about all this stuff? Because this is similar to computer programmers who just ‘learn’ vs those who have ‘experience’. I read an article and watched a video around a week ago about “Language Learning vs Language Acquisition” and I kind of was like “that is exactly the word I’m looking for. Acquisition.”
Learning vs. Acquisition
Think about something you’re good at, a common place thing in the world. Operating a moving vehicle, checking your speed limit, mirrors, paying attention for pedestrians and signs, all the while you’re navigating to somewhere. It’s a lot. If you’re navigating to somewhere new, you use a GPS but then you’ll realise you need to pay extra attention. You need to be conscious of the road names, the next turn, the distance, and the road conditions if you enter an unfamiliar road.
We do this with pretty much everything! Lately I’m making a teaching tool disguised as a game to teach sorting algorithms via visualisation and timed objectives. I wrote the easy ones like bubble sort, insertion sort, and selection sort. Then I was looking up more complex sorting methods and they began to click. I could visualise the steps and what was required in order to visualise it to others. Then I could figure out what the ‘best’ case and ‘worst’ case would look like for these sorting methods.
Language too, for example, has many instances of phrases that don’t make sense but you ‘know’ how to use. Idioms are brutal for language learners. “Why the long face?” Imagine hearing that for the first time. If you go off what you simply ‘learn’ via a dictionary it makes no sense. How about nuance? I’d be hard pressed to find anyone that can teach nuance without contextual experience. The biggest one was in Japanese “気になる”. This phrase has so many nuances and meanings. From that phrase alone, there isn’t enough to translate it literally. Best attempt at it would be “to get a feeling/to get feelings”. From that you’d imagine “oh so it means to like someone”. Yes it can mean that, it also can mean to become worried, to become curious, to become suspicious. Nuance separates them. You can only acquire this understanding from using the phrase and seeing others use it.
Acquiring something is the moment something ‘clicks’ in your head. It’s the epiphany moment where it feels like a set of blocks in your head lines up and BOOM! It all makes sense now. The best way for this to occur is if there is contextual effort. For ‘practical skills’ we already know or assume you need hands on experience to understand and get better at it. This is acquisition.
Learning programming? Make something that solves a problem for you or someone. Learning a language? plaster post-it notes around your room to expose you to the language in an everyday scenario so you can tie context to it. Learning to sew? Make a cap. Learning to bench-press? Go and bench-press and do some push-ups.
All this to say, next time you’re trying to ‘learn’ something, think of how you can put yourself in the situation to use it. Think more ‘what does the end result of someone who knows this look like?’, put yourself in that situation or environment, and start down that path. You’ll ‘acquire’ the knowledge you need along the way.