Myself and my partner, Haohan Wang, decided a few years ago to begin making Mandarin as prevalent in our communication as was English. My first formal langauage being English and Haohan's Mandarin (Chinese), meant that it should be much easier than others without a fluent speaker around.
In the past much of our communication (over ~95%) was in English. I knew very few Mandarin words, we put off learning Mandarin for about 2 years until we decided together that it was time to get serious about it.
Instead of going the traditional language learning route, we decided on taking a much different path to language learning that will be the topic of the rest of the essay. My studies in the past in cognitive science and neuroscience exposed me to the idea of embodied cognition which has been heavily influenced by linguist and cogntiive scientist George Lakoff and the late neuroscientist Francisco Varela. They pushed the idea of embodiment in biology, linguistics, and psychology. I will cover their work more in depth, but the basics that are relevant here is that if you take embodiment or embodied cognition seriously, you'll realise that memorising symbols from a book and learning textually how to combine them outside the context of a world in which your body is truly engaged will not give you the type of grounded meaning that you pick up when many of us learned our first language.
After I exposed Haohan to Lakoff and Varela's work, Haohan also wanted to engage in this approach but realised that it would be difficult and we would need to build it from the ground up. So we took what might be called a radical embodied approach to learning Mandarin (Chinese) and after about ~1.7 years, we would like to share some of the experiments we've ran and our learnings both good and bad.
If you have a partner, if you spend a lot of time under the same roof. If you are willing to work on your patience and consistency. If you are experimental and wnat to learn a language through experience rather than through translation of experience.
Links: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00237/full
#Principles
- Never ever translate
- Practice deep patience