Learning Chinese: Acquisition or Learning?

It’s been one week since I started my Mandarin journey, and in this episode I reflect on the difference between learning and acquisition

It’s been just a week since I officially started my journey into Mandarin Chinese, and let me tell you, folks, it has been both exciting and humbling. I hadn’t tried to learn a new language in such a long time. The closest experience was trying to use my Spanish (that is more like Portuñol, to be honest) in Peru and Mexico at the beginning of the year. I got by. Actually, I might say I passed with flying colors! I had whole conversations about anything and hardly had any problems.

But Chinese is different. On day one, I opened Duolingo, listened to the cheerful little green owl, that people confuse with Athena, my stuffed owl that travels with me, and repeated “nǐ hǎo” with all the confidence in the world. By day three, though, I realized I couldn’t quite remember how to say “goodbye” without double-checking. Learning a new language is certainly about memorizing words, but it’s also about using them as often as possible so that you stop forgetting them.

As a matter of fact, how is it that people can learn a second (or additional) language? Like I promised, this whole learning Chinese adventure is also an excuse for me to explore the universe or language learning (or should I say acquisition?).

Learning, Acquisition or both?

If you are an English teacher or TESOL student, this might be easy for you. If not, you might be asking: aren’t acquisition and learning the same thing? Not exactly. According to Stephen Krashen, acquisition is the subconscious process of picking up a language naturally, the way children do with their mother tongue. It’s what happens when you hear words in context, understand their meaning, and internalize them without necessarily thinking about grammar rules. Learning, on the other hand, is the conscious process, which usually involves going to a school and explicitly being taught grammar rules, vocabulary, and skills.

In my case, learning seems to apply best. After all, I’m studying the different tones, memorizing characters, practicing stroke order, reading explanations of sentence structures etc. But can I say that I’m also acquiring the language? Well, think about me listening to podcasts and being exposed to the language daily. Is that learning, if I’m not writing things down or analyzing sentence structure or word order?

Here’s the real tough question: can I even stop my brain from wanting to analyze the grammar and other aspects of Chinese when, for instance, I wonder if my “nǐ hǎo” sounds right, while maybe remembering that “hǎo” has a falling-rising tone?

Input versus Output

This brings me to another pair of important concepts: comprehensible input and the output hypothesis. Krashen famously argued that we acquire language when we understand input that is just beyond our current level (i+1). That means listening to short dialogues, watching videos with subtitles, or hearing your teacher explain something in the target language, as long as you can follow along. I get input from reading and listening (receptive skills), so should I just increase contact hours with the language throughout the week to speed up the process? In other words, if I read lots of texts in Mandarin and listen to podcasts or watch videos every day, will that help me master those skills and even speak and write fluently?

One of the significant issues here is that most of the input I get is incomprehensible and I simply can’t speed things up too much because my brain needs time to consolidate memory. I need to build the foundation slowly so that I can understand each dialogue more and more as the days go by. I’ve noticed this when watching simple Mandarin YouTube videos. Even when I watch tutorials on useful phrases, I might feel that I caught every word, or that the context provided enough to make sense of what’s going on. But then, I can’t remember much the next day and I can’t speak more spontaneously.

Merrill Swain added that input isn’t enough. Her Output Hypothesis showed that learners need to produce language (to speak, to write) in order to notice what they don’t know and, when I think about the Science of Learning, that makes perfect sense. Remembering the meaning of a word (semantic memory) isn’t the same as knowing how to use this word in a sentence or a conversation (especially considering that I must also remember word order and tones).

So, what does this mean for me, one week into Mandarin? It means I need that exposure that will help me absorb the rhythm, tones (the musicality so to speak), and patterns of Chinese, and the practice that forces me to try, fail, try again and refine. I know I’m not going to achieve fluency in a few weeks. But I might learn just enough if I combine listening and reading a little bit every day with the discipline of practicing and producing (that’s what Duolingo and Google Translate are for).

I know I’m building a foundation without which I cannot truly learn. “我是老师 - Wǒ shì lǎoshī” means “I am a teacher”, but it feels great to be a student again.

Watch the video to know more about the strategies I’m using and make sure you visit the Learning Cosmos Education Hub if you want to access more materials.