Language as a Lego
Have you ever think about a language as a Lego constructor? Well, look at it; words are like small Lego-parts and grammar rules are ways of connecting these pieces.
But this metaphor works only with written language. I mean that when you try to write any sentence you take infinitives of the words and put them in the right form and order according to the grammar rules. When you try to read and understand the text you are doing quite the contrary : trying to recognize the structure of the sentence (the subject, the predicate, the objects, etc.) and translate all these words.
This assumptions is not suit for speaking: in many cases it’s difficult to distinguish the structure of the phrase which you hear; and when you want to speak fluently you have no time to �€˜take pieces and connect them�€™ but you just speak �€� that�€™s true�€� \r\nBut I have just started to learn Spanish and it�€™s nice to perceive it like a game. By learning by heart new words you acquiring new Lego-pieces and by studying grammar rules and making exercises you are really feel like playing with Lego. To tell the true I like to read about grammar and looking at similarities with my own language or with English but I find it boring to learn words by heart. But I have to! Otherwise knowing the grammar rules is meaningless�€�
And one more comment �€“ it�€™s interesting to learn one foreign language on another. I mean that when you read explanations of Spanish language in English�€� I think it helps to improve both languages. It�€™s a pity that I wouldn�€™t be able to find in Moscow Spanish courses which are taught in English. But I wish it could be possible�€� ok�€� at least now I am using teaching materials which are in English.\r\n
Mayo 24th, 2004 at 22:46 #jorgeml
Nice entry
I have been thinking about the lego thing for a couple of days. Although I think it’s a pretty metaphore, I think that it makes a big assumption: all pieces are Lego-style.
What I mean is that I would say English, Spanish, Netherlands are “lego-languages” but then there are languages which use other kind of pieces like Russian
, where symbols are different (let’s say pieces look different) or Chinese, that has a completely different structure (ideographic?).
Mayo 27th, 2004 at 9:46 #irina
About different languages
You made a good note that in Russian ‘pieces look different’ and I can add that that is really so. We have another alphabet (Cyrillic) but we also have infinitive forms of words and grammar rules how to conjugate them. I think the very difficult thing in Russian is to explain for a European the word order in Russian sentences – I can’t formulate them even for myself, sometimes it looks like there are no rules of word order at all and Russians just feel how to put words within a sentence. May be I am wrong and some linguists can explain this phenomenon of the word order in Russian. But it is too scientific and complicated for ordinary people.
I agree that Lego-style does not work with Chinese and other oriental languages (may be with Arabic also)… And I don’t think I will decide to learn it some day – I don’t want to break my mind
Enero 3rd, 2006 at 13:18 #jorgeml
This post was written by Irina.