What Language Learning Essentially Is

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While it is hazardous to generalize, and while many points of view

exist, I think is not too controversial to make the following
observation: that people, the world over, seem more interested in
trying to acquire the commodity which they believe a knowledge
of a foreign language represents; rather than in exploring what
language essentially is (that is their own language, and others
encountered in the ordinary course of life.)
This is a great shame, because they have unknowingly allowed a
simulacrum (i.e in simple language, a look-alike imitation) to
replace the real thing.
They then pursue this chimera, mistaking it for the real thing.
The unspoken root controversy about language learning is
probably this: is this an activity the results of which can be
accurately predicted?
The answers which will be forthcoming will depend on how one
goes about the language-collecting activity.
Here, one will find many merchants at work, selling nostrums
which are supposed, self-sufficiently and completely, to englobe
all that is needed in the process of acquiring the foreign
language. A comparison might be made with remedies in the
homeopathic medicine store.

But the truth is that no-one can say given the variety of the
human minds upon which it will play within what timescale, or
with what degree of success, the pursuit of this or that, single- or
multimedia approach, will deliver its results.
Just as no-one within the homeopathic medicine store deep down
expects all people who buy its products to be cured; and in this
case even the customers may recognize that within the store are
many things which are just there because they are plausible as
medicines (the leaf of this or that flower, for example) and which
in reality may not for whatever reason work for themthe
charitable view being that they would maybe work for other
people...
And the curious thing is that the results actually obtained are
never really scrutinized; nor are essential questions re the relative
efficacy of various possible approaches generally broached.
Language learning thus just stumbles on from class to class, from
semester to semester, with no essential questions asked; and
above all and sadly, apparently no new and corrective strategies
adopted. I guess, because they might be risky, experimental and
wrong.
People are thus left generally doing things which traditionally are
alleged to have worked for others, with no assurance that the
process will work for them; and with the added subtext that if it
does not, they may have only themselves to blame, as a result of
laziness, lack of intelligence or lack of application.

I think it would be much better to look for ways of approaching

language learning which demonstrably work, and from Day 1.
In order to do this I think we have to get away from the curious
but widespread notion that language learning is merely a matter of
study and taking in knowledge, in other words what the medieval
mind might have called an Art. For within the Fourfold Way of
the Middle Ages, Grammar and Rhetoric were both areas of
knowledge; and knowledge consisted in writing down observable
facts about the known world; with the chief master of this kind of
approach being Isidore of Seville.
Augustines idea, on the other hand, was that we formulate
interior words based on inchoate insights which are divine in
origin; and that the process of explaining an idea begins with a
flash of insight. This may be deeply unfashionable today in an
age which prefers to view the human mind as a conditioned
machine dependent entirely on biological and genetic givens but
in conceiving of language learning as a less static and rule-bound
event, as something more like a haphazard, even quantum, event
in the cortex, it is quite helpful. And I believe it will come back
into fashion.
And I would also give a lot of sympathy to the view that language
training is more a praxis than an art: more an act of training and
ritual repetition (with almost a meditative and transcendent
overtones, such as you might find in Japanese Noh theatre) than
an act of filling an empty receptacle, in the way that one fills the
salt cellar when the salt has run out.

And I am talking about a gentle and unforced repetition, of

actions done for pleasure and in a harmonious way; rather than
actions done out of a sense of obligation; or a desire to achieve
some illusory mastery.
Because the quantum nature of life will always guarantee that if
we apparently succeed, we will only receive Eliots husk of
meaning, which we thought we came for; and it may well also
allow that we succeed best when we resign control to certain
mysterious inner agencies, and go about the learning task with
great delicacy, open-mindedness and focused awareness.
Augustine, indeed, refers to the intellectual light shining within
our souls, implanted there by God; and I think that this is a very
good beacon to try and capture and transform into something like
The Northern Lights, if you are a teacher. There is no need to
give it an overtly Christian interpretation.
These words of The Prayer of Saint Francis come back to me,
entirely at random:
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

They are a great consolation and seem to hint at some mystery

right there at the heart of language exchange, which we must
gently explore and, in the interests of peace, continue to probe.