Acquisition vs Learning

When it comes to learning a foreign language, there are two primary approaches: acquisition and learning. AJATT is a language learning technique that focuses on acquiring the language rather than learning it. The distinction between learning and acquisition is one of the most fundamental and important concepts to understand when it comes to applying the AJATT method.

In this article, we'll explore the differences between acquisition and learning, and why AJATT focuses primarily on acquisition rather than learning.

Origin

This idea originally comes from the linguist Stephen Krashen. He came up with five hypotheses related to language acquisition (インプット仮説). One of those hypotheses was the Acquisition-Learning hypothesis. It states that there are two ways to develop language ability: one is learning and the other is acquisition.

The acquisition-learning hypothesis claims that there is a strict separation between acquisition and learning. Krashen saw acquisition as a purely subconscious process and learning as a conscious process, and claimed that improvement in language ability was only dependent upon acquisition and never on learning.

Learning

Learning (or studying) is basically what we do in school. It is when you sit down and consciously memorize vocabulary and grammar rules in your target language. In other words, you are consciously stocking up on information about the language. When you're listening or reading, you recall this information and use it to decode the language that is coming in. When you need to speak or write, you use the memorized rules and vocabulary to produce the language.

Learning a language solely through studying is known as the "skill-building" approach. The basic idea is that you first consciously study vocabulary and grammar rules, then do a lot of speaking practice using those rules and vocabulary. If you practice enough, you will build strong speaking skills, and eventually using the language should become intuitive and natural. Hence the name "skill-building."

Most language learning solutions focus on skill-building rather than acquisition. And that is why they are not effective. They teach vocabulary and grammar as building blocks for constructing sentences. Using this method, you learn to translate your thoughts from your native language (NL) into your target language (TL). No amount of skill-building will make you fluent.

Acquisition

On the other hand, we have acquisition. "Acquiring" a language means building an intuitive knowledge of it. Acquisition is a subconscious, intuitive process. With the right kinds of exposure to your target language, you naturally gain the ability to understand it and later to speak it. Acquisition is how we all learned our native language (NL). Children unconsciously learn to recognize patterns in their first language by understanding messages. When we were little, we were not taught vocabulary and grammar rules directly. Our moms didn't sit us down with conjugation tables and word lists. We were exposed to our native language for thousands of hours, and over time we slowly became able to understand it and eventually reproduce it ourselves.

The downside is that pure acquisition can be hard for beginners who have no prior knowledge of the language. It requires more time upfront than studying grammar rules, but the long-term payoff is far greater.

When you acquire a language through immersion, it is not really a conscious process. You give your brain enough exposure, and the subconscious part of your mind that is dedicated to language acquisition does all the work for you, and you get to reap the benefits.

For example, you might watch a TV show in your target language, or have a conversation in your TL, and although subjectively you may not feel like you are learning anything, subconsciously, in the background, below your level of awareness there is a part of your brain that analyzes the language coming in, running pattern recognition, and working out word meanings and structures. You gain intuitive ability even if you do not notice it.

After you finish that episode or finish the conversation, you may not feel different, you may not feel like you have learned anything, but the next day while watching another show you might suddenly understand words you never understood before. You might think, "Hey, I know that word, but I can't remember studying it."

Your subconscious brain is essentially building a model of how the language works. Once this model is built, you can use it to speak in a natural, intuitive way, without having to think consciously about grammar and vocabulary.

Why learning doesn't work

In traditional language-learning curricula that focus on "learning," there's an implicit assumption that if you consciously learn something and practice it enough while speaking, it will eventually sink into your subconscious, and you will acquire it. In theory, that skill-building approach sounds reasonable, but in practice it is completely and utterly ineffective at helping people reach high levels in foreign languages.

For example, speakers of article-less languages make systematic article errors in English. They consistently swap "a" and "the" based on whether a noun feels specific. A Japanese speaker might say "I saw the interesting movie last night" when they should say "I saw an interesting movie last night." They overuse "the" with nouns that feel specific, even when "a" is correct. They might also say "She is doctor" instead of "She is a doctor," omitting the article entirely where their first language has no equivalent.

These speakers know the grammar rules for articles. They learned them in school. But knowing a rule consciously is different from having acquired it.

To get it right when speaking, every time they want to say a sentence, they have to stop, recall the rule, and apply it. In the middle of a conversation you usually don't have time to consciously recall rules, so it's not very useful then. People still make mistakes even though, if they stopped to think, they could get the right answer. If you've acquired the language, you speak correctly intuitively without thinking about rules.

Practicing a grammar rule over and over can make you faster at applying it and build good habits, but you won't reach deep native-like intuition and consistent high accuracy just by drilling rules. To get to that level you have to actually acquire the language.

Learning vocabulary and rules, and then drilling them doesn't work as well as immersion and language acquisition. The part of your brain that consciously understands abstract principles like grammar is different from the part that naturally and intuitively acquires language through exposure. Those two parts do not communicate much and they learn in different ways.

The language-acquisition center in your brain learns from concrete examples and forms abstractions itself, whereas when you learn a grammar rule, you are taught an abstraction from the outside and process it consciously. Those are two different processes.

That said, conscious knowledge of grammar can serve as a "monitor" for self-correction. When you have time to think, such as when writing or reviewing your own speech, knowing grammar rules lets you catch and fix errors. But this monitor is too slow to use in real-time conversation, and it doesn't help you acquire the language.

Acquisition and grammar

In our native language, most of us don't know grammar rules, yet we can produce grammatically correct sentences. We just know what sounds right and what doesn't. When speaking, we don't have to think about grammar or vocabulary. We think about the meaning we want to convey and the words come naturally.

For example, if you're fluent in English, you'd agree that the phrase "the big red dog" sounds more natural than "the red big dog". In English, when you stack multiple adjectives on top of each other, they must be in a certain order for a sentence to be grammatically correct. You probably aren't aware of the grammar rule that explains why, yet you can still tell that "the big red dog" is correct and "the red big dog" sounds off. That means somewhere in your subconscious you know this rule, and you have direct access to it in the form of intuition. You know what is right because it feels right, and what is wrong because it feels wrong.

This is the true mark of acquisition. It is something you have direct, automatic access to without conscious effort or thinking. You have acquired English because you can understand everything on this page without trying. In fact, if I told you to stop understanding, you could not. Once you have acquired a language, you cannot help but understand it. It is completely automatic and natural.

Common set phrases

Acquiring a language through immersion may seem counter-intuitive. After all, the skill-building approach is how you learned every other subject in school. However, language is different. It does not operate by rules. Linguists create rules to describe how a language already works, not to make it work.

Instead, language operates by patterns. Language is a collection of patterns. In other words, human language is highly specific in unpredictable ways.

Different languages express the same basic ideas in entirely unique ways. Native speakers tend to use conventional set phrases, so what sounds "natural" or "unnatural" in your target language often has no clear reason. You can sometimes translate a phrase word-for-word between English and Japanese, or vice versa, but it probably won't make sense, and even if it does, it will not sound natural. The examples below use Japanese and English, but the same principles apply to almost any language.

Literal translations are normally not how we say things. Every language has its own arbitrary set phrases for expressing ideas. Native speakers almost always express the same idea the same way, using the exact same words in the same order. It is not a creative process. It is just set in stone. We all do it the same way. We always do it the same way every time.

This means that if your strategy for speaking a foreign language is to think in your native language and then use memorized grammar rules and vocabulary to translate those thoughts into the target language, then at best you'll be understood but will probably sound odd, and at worst you will not be understood at all.

For example, a Japanese speaker thinking in Japanese and translating into English might say "can you teach me your phone number?" instead of "can I get your phone number?", or "do you know my phone?" instead of "have you seen my phone?" In the first case you'd probably still understand them, though it sounds odd. In the second case you might not even know what they're talking about.

Different ideas in different languages

Not only do different languages express the same ideas differently, they express entirely different ideas in the first place. There are words in Japanese that have no English equivalent. These are ideas that Japanese people express all the time that English speakers just never have reason to express.

For example, the word 即答 means "instant response." Imagine you ask someone out on a date and the second you ask, they immediately say "no." In Japanese, a common reaction would be to say 即答, meaning "instant response," basically "you didn't even think about it." You responded so quickly and confidently that you didn't even have to think about it for a second. This is a common thing that happens in Japanese interactions. There's a word for it, but there's no equivalent in English.

Another example: 逆ギレ, which literally translates to "reverse anger." It's when someone who is clearly in the wrong gets angry anyway, kind of in an attempt to defend themselves. Imagine you put your yogurt in the fridge and told me not to eat it, but I go and eat it anyway. The next day you confront me, and I get mad at you and say, "well, if you didn't want me to eat your yogurt, you shouldn't have put it in the fridge in the first place!" I'm clearly in the wrong, but I'm getting angry to defend myself. In Japanese, there's a word for this exact behavior: 逆ギレ. If we were Japanese speakers, you'd say 逆ギレ, meaning "what the heck, why are you getting reverse angry? You're clearly in the wrong!"

Japanese people express ideas that English speakers just don't have words for.

Language isn't math

So what all these examples show is that because native speech is set in stone, meaning native speakers tend to say the same things the same way every time, and highly specific in unpredictable ways, abstraction alone won't get you very far. If you want to express an idea in a way that sounds natural to native speakers, you have to know the exact, specific phrasing they use. And if you want to speak like a native, you also have to know the kinds of ideas native speakers tend to express in the first place. Either you already know how native speakers speak and can imitate them, or you don't and you're making blind guesses based on your native language. And when you do that, you will be wrong most of the time.

Language simply isn't like math, where you can use a formula to deduce the answer. Either you already know the answer ahead of time, or you're stuck. There is no room for guessing or for getting creative.

Of course there is plenty of room to be clever and creative when it comes to language use. Otherwise, things like poetry wouldn't exist. But creative use of language depends on having mastered the patterns first.

If you try to be creative before you've essentially mastered the target language, you'll at best sound weird and unnatural, and at worst you won't be understood at all.

Replicating acquisition

As you can see, learning something does not mean you have acquired it. And acquiring something does not necessarily mean you know anything about it. These are completely separate processes. Because native speakers operate almost entirely from acquired ability, if you want to function like a native speaker you need to acquire the language as well.

Children acquire language because they continuously hear their parents speak to them. Eventually their brains pick up the patterns and they learn how to speak.

The reason babies can acquire language is that there are parts of our brain that are specifically dedicated to language acquisition. Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, wired to decode and absorb the language we get a lot of exposure to. Every one of us is born with the ability to naturally acquire language.

Contrary to popular belief, this ability does not disappear when you become an adult. The idea that Stephen Krashen is suggesting is that even as adults we still have access to this function. And that is what the experience of myself and many others has shown as well. Everybody who did AJATT essentially became native level in Japanese or any other language they wanted to learn through this process of acquisition, provided they didn't slack off of course. This process is unconscious, and it is similar to how infants learn languages. In fact, by pairing your mature analytical mind with your innate language acquisition ability, you can learn languages faster than children.

As adults, we don't have a parent to talk to us 24/7, but we do have access to the whole of the Internet. Using movies, anime, dramas, manga, books, and other widely available media, we can emulate the language acquisition process that children experience. Immersion also gives you firsthand experience of the language and culture, which makes the language learning process more fun, enjoyable, and meaningful.

How to acquire a language

To acquire your target language, you first need to learn to understand it. With the right kind of exposure, you'll gradually be able to understand more and more.

Once you can understand everything you read and hear, speaking usually comes naturally. When you want to say something, phrases in the target language start popping up just like they do in your native language. That said, achieving native-like results requires a lot of practice.

After you acquire enough of the language and start practicing speaking, it will feel like your native language. You will not need to think about grammar rules or conjugations. You will just know what feels right. With enough speaking practice, the language will be there when you need it.

Memorize intelligently

As adults, we can study grammar and memorize vocabulary, which gives us an advantage over infants learning their first language. When you memorize a word's meaning, input becomes more comprehensible. You can notice that word during immersion. The more you comprehend, the more you acquire.

To retain a word in long-term memory, it needs to be reviewed occasionally. Use SRS to memorize words. A spaced repetition system (SRS) is a program that helps you memorize and review what you want to learn. It reminds you to review information efficiently before you forget it so you can retain and strengthen your memories. When you first learn a new word, the associated memory is weak, so the SRS will show it to you often. Over time, as the memory strengthens, the SRS will show the word less and less often.