Good News for Second Language Learners

You don't need to learn hundreds of adjectives to speak another language.

Source: narciso1 / Pixabay

At the beginning of a new year, many people resolve to lose weight or to rein in their spending. Another common resolution is to learn a new language. And just like shedding a few pounds or adhering to a budget, the challenges of acquiring a second language can be daunting. It may be helpful to keep in mind the many things that you don’t have to learn when trying to master a new tongue. Let’s consider three of these: vocabulary, concepts, and word order.

Vocabulary

You probably know tens of thousands of words in your native language, and the prospect of having to learn thousands more may seem overwhelming. It’s important to remember that you only need to acquire a fraction of this number. If you’re planning to visit another country, for example, it should only be necessary to learn a few hundred terms to engage in simple conversations and to make sense of street signs or directions (Roberts & Kreuz, 2015).

Even better, you may already know some of these words without being aware of it. If you happen to be an English speaker studying another European language, you’ll typically find that many words or parts of words are shared between them. If you know that the English prefix “cardio-” refers to the heart, you’ll have a head start when you encounter cardiovasculaire in French or Kardiologie in German. And it’s estimated that there are some 20,000 Spanish-English cognates, such as problema, radio, and vocabulario (Nash, 1997).

But beware of “false friends”—new words that may seem familiar, but which have very different meanings. English speakers learning German, for example, may be happy to encounter the word Gift—until they find out that it means poison. And blessé looks like “blessed” but means hurt or injured in French.

Concepts

Imagine how confusing it would be to have to learn an entirely new conceptual structure in addition to the vocabulary and grammar of a new language. Fortunately, all human minds seem to carve up the world in similar ways, and this is reflected in the vocabularies of the world's languages. The word for the concept “tree” in your new language, for example, will refer to the same collection of tall green living things as in your native language.

Once again, there are exceptions. Speakers of Russian don’t have one term for the concept “blue,” for example. Instead, they differentiate between голубой (“goluboy,” or light blue) and синий (“siniy,” or dark blue). Specifying the shade of a blue object is optional in English but obligatory in Russian. But for the vast majority of concepts, the mapping of animals, vehicles, furniture, and the like will closely match the intuitions that someone might derive from their native language.

Word order

Languages vary considerably in how words are strung together to form sentences. English is fairly picky in this regard because word order is the primary way that subjects and objects are specified. Many other languages, such as Greek, Turkish, and Japanese do not have a strict word order, which gives non-native speakers of these languages one less thing to worry about.

But how about the ordering of words within a phrase? In English, we might refer to a particular garment as a “beautiful old Norwegian wool sweater,” placing the adjectives describing the noun in a particular order. It would sound rather peculiar if someone referred to the “Norwegian wool beautiful old sweater” or the “wool Norwegian old beautiful sweater.” It turns out that English has a preferred order for adjectives—one that all speakers of the language unconsciously adhere to. Moving from left to right, it goes like this (Forsyth, 2014):

opinion => size => age => shape => color => origin => material => purpose

This explains why “wool Norwegian old beautiful sweater” sounds odd: material (wool) should come after opinion (beautiful), age (old), and origin (Norwegian). You’ve been following this rule for your entire life without even realizing it, but it becomes obvious when this ordering is violated in some way.

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But guess what? The order of adjectives is another thing you probably don’t have to learn when you study a new language. Although there are some exceptions, most languages seem to adhere to this adjectival ordering scheme. Researchers are divided about whether this reflects some fundamental aspect of human perception or cognition (Scontras, 2023). But for the second language learner, the reason doesn’t matter; it’s just one more thing that doesn’t need to be learned or memorized.

As far as resolutions go, weight loss and fiscal discipline can be challenging. Acquiring another language also requires determination and effort, but you can leverage what you already know to help you. When it comes to learning a new language, you can take some comfort from the notion that you’re never starting from scratch.