The Economist – Staff Writer
“WORDS and rules. That’s what language is, isn’t it? We have a mental lexicon, and we string words together with rules (grammar) to make sentences. So learning a foreign language involves stocking up on those dictionary-entries, and getting better and faster at applying the rules to them. This is true, to a point. But another approach to foreign-language learning is duly earning converts. It involves learning short groups of words that often go together, but are shy of sentences. Unlike “lexicon”, “morphology” and “syntax”, this method has a pleasingly Anglo-Saxon name: chunking. (Chunks of language are also known as “collocations”, but “chunking” is more fun.) Learning these chunks of words together—and practising them frequently—so that they rush out instinctively, without having to be freshly constructed each time, is a key to achieving comfortable fluency when speaking a foreign tongue. To take an example, if you said “close the light”, as many languages do, in English, you’d probably be understood, but would sound like to a non-native: “turn off the light” is a chunk, and a common one that should flow from the tongue of a fluent speaker. Another example is the tricky problem of set prepositions, which are often idiosyncratic and must be learned as chunks: in time but by noon or before six.”(more)