Re: [Harp-L] Positions Playing

Iceman wrote:

"We learned to talk and communicate through learning the rules - noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb. Anyone remember "diagramming a sentence"?

Lots of rules, terms, definitions, just to learn the art of making a sentence.

Then, guess what - we proceeded to forget the rules while continuing our paths of communication. Not many people learned to communicate (speak/write at a high level) through ear training alone - at least not the ones who attended school.

Why not approach music and harmonica with the same concepts?”



JP Pagan responded:

“This may be egg-head niggling on my part, but the above is not true. We learn to talk and communicate without instruction whatsoever. We pick it up from people around us. Learning "the rules" (grammar rules) happens only after we can already talk and communicate. Pre-school children communicate quite well without having any clue what "noun" is, and there are grown adults all around the world who speak eloquently and communicate masterfully without knowing how to read or write, much less diagram a sentence. The parallel to music should be quite clear.

Language, like music, is an innate human capacity, not a "learned skill" like plumbing or typing or surgery. The "rules" (grammar) of language and music alike are abstractions and codifications of what we humans know how to do without even having to think about it.”



Winslow Yerxa responded too in a similar vein:

“Actually, we don't learn to "talk and communicate through learning the rules" - at least not explicitly. We learn the rules of spoken language intuitively. I didn't learn to diagram a sentence until the 7th grade, and I had no trouble stringing word together before that. But I found sentence diagramming fascinating because it gave me a way to break down and describe what I already knew intuitively.

That's all that music theory is - a way of describing accurately what you play and how notes and beats fit together. If you play intuitively, it's just another tool for understanding what you already know in a different way.”



Seems to me that both sides are correct, to a degree. We don’t learn our first language through rules but by absorption. However, seems to me that the analogy to learning music, or the language of music, is not from learning our first language in our childhood, but from learning a second language as adults. That seems to me a more apt analogy. If learning music is like learning our primary language, we’d all be proficient musicians just by listing to music, just as kids are proficient speakers within a just by listening. But that’s clearly not that case.

How does one learn a new language as an adult? There are a few methods. Some people tell you – “just go to a country where they speak the language and you’ll learn it within no time”. (That’s the equivalent to “just jam a lot and you'll learn to play”). Well, maybe. Maybe necessity is the mother of learning. But this method has several problems. First, how will you know how to even utter your first words, without any formal learning of the language? Second, what if you can’t just drop your job, wife, and kids, put your life on hold, and move to another country, just to learn the language? So the question is, How do you learn a new language while living in a country that doesn’t speak that language? Third, I have seen the results of people who moved to another country without having any formal learning of the language: Even after years of living there, they usually have a limited capacity of speaking and comprehension. They know pretty much what is necessary to get by and not much more. They typically make many mistakes (often mimicking the mistakes people around them make, without even knowing those are mistakes), their vocabulary is limited, their accent is poor, and they find it hard to take their newfound language to the next level, because they lack the basic skills or framework to do so. (Does that sound like some harp players?)
Yeah, throw young kids to a new country and they’d be speaking fluently a new language very quickly. But adults? Hardly.

Another method they tell you: “Get a girlfriend that speaks that language, and you’ll be blabbering away in that language in no time”. I guess that would be the equivalent of having a full time musician at home who doesn’t actually teach you, from whom you’re somehow expected to learn by osmosis. But that method is prone to the same problems I just described above. Unless you have a really patient girlfriend who will spend hours teaching you (which is the equivalent of having a full time, one on one, music teacher by your side), you’d end up with a poor vocabulary, just the minimum needed to communicate, making many mistakes (how often can she correct you?), and without tools to take the language to a new level.

So, it seems, that some formal learning of the language is necessary, particularly if you can’t just drop everything you’re doing in your life and move to another country just to learn the language, you’re already involved with someone, or you just think it’s silly to be in a relationship with someone just to learn from her a new language.

Ok, so let's agree that some formal learning is needed. Question is - what KIND of learning?

I believe the LEAST effective way is to learn the grammar first. You can spend a lifetime learning the grammar of a new language, and not know how to speak it. Intellectual knowledge of a language does not make one a good speaker of that language. I once spent an entire semester learning French, and by the end of the semester, I didn't know how to speak it one bit. A total waste of time. Students can spend years learning a language in class, and end up not knowing how to speak it at all. If you spent a few years in high school or college learning and language and can't speak it, raise your hand.
So why would learning music that way would be any different?

Another ineffective way is to learn it only from books. If you pick up one of those Berlitz books and try to learn a new language (KOH-MO EH- S-TA?) you’ll quickly realize that it’s virtually impossible, or let’s just say very difficult, to actually learn a language that way. You need to HEAR how the language is actually spoken, and you need some form of ORGANIC, i.e., integrative, way of learning the language. You need to use several senses: primarily your HEARING, second but not a far second is FEELING the language, third is SEEING (making a visual connection between words and objects or actions, both on a page and in real life). Using only one of these modalities is usually not enough. The more you combine different modalities the more integrative and effective will be your learning.

Supposedly, the most effective way to learn a new language is to go to a really good immersion program. One of those programs where you spend a month or two communicating solely in that language from morning to night. I haven’t done something like that, but I know people who have, and the results are amazing. You don't need to spend years and years learning boring textbooks.

Not knowing exactly what they do, and not in a position to take off a few months to learn a new language, I have devised for myself a method, that can be applied to music learning too. This method involves both linear and non-linear ways of learning. I believe you need to have both to learn effectively - more emphasis on the nonlinear than the linear.

First, find a good audio program. I’m now learning Spanish, and I’ve checked numerous programs. Almost all of them are terrible. Boring, dull, linear, ineffective. I’m amazed time and again how bad some programs are and wonder who buys them. Some of these programs are from well-respected language schools. I don't see how anyone can learn a language from them. So, first, find a good language program that works for you.

It’s important to have an audio program because you need to learn how the language SOUNDS (unless all you want to do is read books and not communicate with others). And so with music – if all you learn are notes on a page, unless you’re a fluent sight-reader (in which case you probably know the language fluently anyway), you’re probably going to sound very different than what’s actually on the page. You need to HEAR how the music sounds, how those squiggles on the page COME TO LIFE in actual playing, in order to MAKE SENSE of them.

I did find a few good audio courses, and they seem to have several elements in common:

(a) Things are broken down to their smallest components, and then QUICKLY built upon. Let’s say you learn a new word, the instructor tells you how to pronounce it properly, down to its smallest components, then how to pronounce it in full, then how to conjugate it in some basic tense (let’s say, first person, singular). You learn right away something useful. Pay careful attention to HOW it's pronounced. Make sure that the instructors themselves, if they aren't native speakers, at least have a solid accent. I've heard language course where the instructors' accent was awful. Don't use them. Learn only from those who sound authentic. Same with music. If they're bad players, don't learn from them. Only learn from the best, the ones who can really play. This goes both to audio courses and real life teachers.

After learning a few words, you put those words together, and voila! you’ve uttered your first sentence. The key is NOT to learn phrases. I've seen instruction courses that only teach you phrases. That's idiotic. It's kind of ok if you don't have any time to learn the language, you're traveling to a different country and you need a phrasebook to help you get by. But you can't learn a language that way. If you only learn phrases, that’s all you’ll know. You won’t know how to express new sentences in new ways. You won’t be able to truly express yourself, your ideas, thoughts and wants. You’d be limited to what you memorized by route and not more. Real-life situations are never like the simplified ones they give you on the cassettes. You need to be able to use, RIGHT AWAY, what you learned, even if it’s just a few words, in NOVEL ways (novel to you, of course – we’re not talking about reinventing the language - i.e., ways that aren’t limited to just the instruction you got). If within 20 minutes of listening to a new program, you can say a sentence in a new language, a NEW sentence you weren’t taught, you’ll feel you’ve actually learned something, it’ll show you that learning a language isn’t all that hard, and that you can do it. You'll start wiring your brain to accept the new language.

(b) You immediately are given scenarios to use what you’ve learned in CONTEXT. And not just any context – an INTERESTING context. If the program is boring, you won’t be propelled to learn more. If the teaching is boring, you won't learn. It's as simple as that. And if the learning has no context, you won’t find it useful. Same with music: you need to take ANYTHING and everything you learned, even how to blow a single note, and IMMEDIATELY APPLY it in a INTERESTING CONTEXT. Let’s say you learned how to blow the 4 on a C harp. Take a song in C, and just blow along to it. Make some sort of rhythm, in a way that you will find INTERESTING and CHALLENGING. That’s another key element – variety. Always push yourself to something new, to a new height, even when you’re just starting off. That’s how you make it your own. The greatest musicians in the world continue challenging themselves to the day they die. Look at Howard – to this day he finds ways to make life difficult for himself, and by working out problems can do things that are way beyond almost all mortals. He doesn’t rest on his laurels. Howard, by the way, started composing within a few weeks of learning the piano as a kid. It's certainly part of his genius, but it's not only genius. It's his METHOD of learning. He started APPLYING what he learned, right away. He didn't wait 10 years to become proficient on the piano to start composing. No no. He had a few piano lessons, and right away put what he learned to use, in a new way. He started "speaking" his new language, even before knowing a lot of it. You don't have to be Howard to do that. Anyone can.

(c) The courses do give SOME RULES, but you’re not bogged down with rules. You have to find a balance between the degree of rules you need to know and the point that the rules hinder you. And the rules can't be taught in a linear fashion. If the course just gives you charts of verb conjugation, it would be very difficult to apply those charts to the spoke language. You learn a rule, you apply it immediately, you use it in various contexts, you form new sentences and express new things, and when you get that rule, you turn to a new one.

One thing for sure: You need to know some basic rules. There's no way around it. You need to have at least a basic understanding of the structure of the language. You need to know a bunch of verbs, and how to conjugate them – present, past, future, single, plural, imperative, and some of the more complicated but common tenses (many languages have complex tenses which you hardly if ever need them to communicate, so learn them later on, after you've gotten a good grasp of the language). And you need to know nouns, adjectives, irregular conjugation and a few other things. So very quickly, you need to learn a bunch of basic rules, and those rules need to be INCORPORATED IMMEDIATELY into your speaking. A language is a living thing, it must be part of context, otherwise you won’t know how to really apply the rules. That’s the key: applying the rules, not just learning them in abstraction. Once you're comfortable with those rules and you feel they're becoming spontaneous, learn new ones and follow the same process.

Learning the rules and immediately using them, will allow you to DEVELOP A FEEL FOR THE LANGUAGE. When you’re actually speaking, you can’t be thinking about each rule, because it will take you 3 years to utter the simplest thing. The rule has to be accessible to you right away. You need to know that this or that SOUND, means “first person, past, plural” or whatever. You can’t be thinking of “first person, past, plural”, because that’s an abstraction and doesn’t mean anything unless you FEEL the meaning of it. You have to associate a given sound or feel to that rule. Learn what the feel/sound of “first person, past, plural” is, and forget the grammatical terminology. Same with music.

So much about learning a new language is about developing a feel for it. It’s about knowing that “this sounds right” and “this doesn’t sound right”, even if you’re not sure which rule applies where. You get that feel by spending some time INTERNALIZING the rules. You PRACTICE them in actual situations, or, if you're not as comfortable with that, you make up situations. You VISUALIZE scenarios where you'll apply the rules, and SPEAK out loud. With enough practice and focus, you move from what’s called Conscious Incompetence, to Conscious Competence (but unconscious incompetence), i.e., where you still have to think before you do, to Unconscious Competence where the learning has become so internalized that it feels natural and automatic.

Throughout the learning process, you also need to expose yourself to as much of that language as possible. Radio and TV shows in that language, movies, books, newspapers, websites, etc. Hear as many native speaks speak it. Go out on a limb and speak with them as much as you can, even if at first you make a fool of yourself. Approach it from any possible angle, because do don’t know what will do the trick for you, what will solidify things for you, and will give you that epiphany where suddenly it all makes sense. Same with harp. Don’t only stay in 2nd position, in the comfort zone. Try new things, all the time. Listen to the greats. Listen to great music in general. Listen to the kind of music you'd like to learn how to play. [That's another important aspect of learning: YOU NEED TO HAVE A GOAL IN MIND, otherwise you'd be wandering and meandering and not knowing where you are at and where you want to be]. And it's ok to make mistakes, because mistakes are your friend. They tell you want you still need to know, and they're one of the paths for discovery. Some of the best inventions were actually errors that someone was smart enough to realize their potential and put them to good use.

Then there’s a question of how much rule-knowledge is necessary. I guess that depends on your goal. If you want to write a PhD dissertation on isiZulu, you should be pretty well versed in all the intricate rules of that language. But if your goal is not academic but to be able to communicate fluently with your Zulu buddies, chances are that understanding the basic rules and internalizing them to the degree that they’re habitual, having a feel for the language, developing the right accent, the right cadence (every language has its own rhythm, or so it seems to me), knowing where to put the emphasis on the word, and having some sort of a gestalt of the language (which includes many aspects that can’t be taught from a book – like the basic metaphors of the language, how the language ties in with the culture, etc.), will be enough to communicate like a native. There's a point where rules become mere theory and not useable.

Without knowing rules you’re really shooting darts in the dark. You don’t really know what’s correct and what’s not, and native speakers won’t always correct you. You might delude yourself into thinking you sound good, and those who don't know any better might agree with you, but ultimately, it's hard to really advance without having, at some stage of learning, a good understanding of some of the rules, and then internalizing them.

Once you learn the basic rules, you practice them in novel situations. You make up scenarios where you want to express this and that, and APPLY what you’ve learned. By applying the rules in made-up scenarios, you’ll find that many times, at first, you don’t really know how to USE them even if you intellectually UNDERSTAND them. You might also discover how much, or how little you know, and the gaps in your practice that you need to fill in. If you find there’s something you want to say but don’t know or don’t remember how to say it, go back to your course/book/online material, and check up on that. The more you USE the basic rules of the language, the more you get them internalized, and ultimately the less you have to think about them. The goal is to get to the point where do you don’t have to think about them at all. You immediately know what fits where, without having to think about it. Again: Unconscious Competence.

After all is said and done, there’s always an unconscious learning process going on too. I think of it like baking a cake. You combine all the ingredients, put them into an oven, wait, and voila! in due time, without any further action on your part, the masterpiece is ready. Same in learning a language or the language of music. You need to have that “baking” period, where you do nothing, and allow your unconscious mind to make the necessary connections and to integrate what you’ve learned. Just letting things sink in. That’s why sometimes NOT playing anything, and NOT thinking about music or anything related, is more helpful than actual practice. The downtime between practices (as long as it’s not TOO long of a break) is very important.

Just some musings, on a nice, sunny, Saturday afternoon here in New York City.

Zvi



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