I have spent about 50 years wondering why next to no Danes are able to communicate privately or professionally in the real world of Greenland in spite of the fact that hundreds of highly motivated Danes every year enroll in Greenlandic for beginners.
Back in 2009-11 when I publiced Learn Greenlandic with Per Langgård. Module 1-2 it was the start of a new paradigm that gave hope to the many students embarking on or already struggling with this “most difficult language in the world” and success rate actually increased from a few per mille to a few percent. That of course was a good thing but clearly not satisfying so over the last years I have worked intensively on a revision that increase efficiency more than ever seen before.
And it works! With the revision students perform much better than ever seen before.
After many years of studies of Greenlandic and extensive readings in the international literature about L2 acquisition I believe that I glimpse central parts of an explanation though not the full explanation. Unfortunately, the factors are interconnected in rather complicated patterns so to understand the next few paragraphs you will need to keep a number of balls in the air. I cannot offer you an uncomplicated explanation of interconnected, complicated facts but here is an attempt to keep it is down-to-earth as possible.
Learning a language and acquiring a language are very different situations
During the 60-s a dramatic paradigm shift in L2 teaching took place when next to all applied linguists and language teachers gave up on the latin (paradigmatic) tradition with grammar and canonized (literary) texts. Instead the new Nature Methods focused on spoken language and real communication. Technically speaking teaching no longer aimed at linguistic competence but rather at communicative competence. Latin tradition and grammar was to quote a famous sentence from the period “a way to teach students to keep quiet in correct English”.
This shift in methodology caused the rise of a new paradigm in applied linguistics where acquisition rather than learning became the core of the science not least because modern psycholinguistics increasingly explicit rejected the belief that grammar-based learning naturally leads to real communicative competence. Genuine acquisition takes place via very different means namely via exposure to large amounts of comprehensible input from the target language. That is not via written pattern practice drills, translations and production training. In short, good acquisition of the target language starts with lots and lots of conscious listening and only occasional own production.
Please observe that this is exactly what we experience daily in Denmark and Greenland with the younger generations acquiring English in no time from pop-culture and the web.
This fundamental difference between learning and acquisition and the necessity of comprehensible input has for more than 50 years been the core in research and methodology development in the psycholinguistic paradigm of The Input Hypothesis. Among other things with the grammar concept recently being redefined from learning paradigms by heart to being an ad hoc tool for a deep understanding of exactly the word, the problem or the sentence that the student is struggling with in the real world this very minute. The strategy has been termed Integrated Focus on Forms, that is grammar as a helper in understanding exactly the problem a student face exactly now. Paradigms are considered of very limited use.
Internationally L2 almost exclusively starts in the acquisition spectrum. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Greenlandic L2. Here almost all courses, all compendia and primers base on a continuous learning-tradition unbroken since at least 1851 .. and the production of Greenlandic-speaking non-Greenlanders in self-govedned Greenland is steadily close to zero.
Greenlandic is typologically very different from other languages you have acquired the skill to master
The natural acquisition process does not start automatically in Greenlandic. For many reasons
It is generally supposed that the long words and the complex word formation in Greenlandic plays important parts in explaining why Danes so seldomly acquire Greenlandic. Words are, all right, long and the amount of derivational morphemes may seem overwhelming but we need to look elsewhere for the characteristica that more than anything else block the acquisition process even though they to a lesser degree immediately catch attention than do word formation and word length. Still, they are the real blocks for acquiring real Greenlandic so since our mission is to provide the tools for a bigger number of foreigners to acquire the ability of genuine communicative competence privately and professionally there is no way to surpass the real problems and do something about them. Even if it all is a bit technical and abstract.
A non-Greenlander embarking on Greenlandic L2 will always attempt to dechipher a Greenlandic utterance from left toward right having the subject as his starting point. Therefore Lene ilinniarpoq (Lene studies) is a sentence with few challenges both for perception and later production. Maliup Lene ilinniartippaa (Malik teaches Lene) holds a few problems but will after all unlikely pose insurmountable problems since the subject (Malik) matches our subject expectations so much that perception will come easily.
In the real world outside the L2 classroom one hears only few sentences with subject information in the far left end of the sentences. This is exactly where a learner in the initial stages runs into problems with perception. Examples like Lene ilinniartippat (You taught Lene), .. Lene ilinniartikkipput (.. that we have taught Lene) or Lene ilinniartikkanni pikkoreqaaq (Because I taught Lene she is skilled) need to be dechiphered from right toward left. We namely do not get information about the subjects in any of the sentences until we reach the last word (typically the main verb). Not until then we get information about who does what in the sentence and whether the sentence is an independent (main) clause or a dependent clause. Students without extensive exposure to comprehensible input therefore almost as a rule wrongly perceive all 3 sentences mentioned above à la “It is something about Lene teaching”. They normally never make it to the conjunctions and the subjects and objects burried in the very last inflectional ending.
In Greenlandic we have no personal pronouns (I, you, her, she etc.) in a way directly comparable to pronouns as we normally understand pronouns. And conjunctions like that, because, if etc. are for the most non-existing. Equivalences to pronouns and conjunctions bury themselves in the verbal inflections. So to perceive a Greenlandic utterance we need to learn to twist our perception 180 degrees and start understanding from right toward left. This is not a capacity that comes to a grown-up student for free. On the contrary the learner needs hundreds or thousands of successful dechipherings of real language before internalizing such skills safely enough for real communicative use.
Of course these thousands of potential training sentences exist in the real world in Greenland but for a beginner there is much too far between useable sentences. To be useable they need to be comprehensible or almost comprehensible. Otherwise they will not do as training data. There is unknown words, derivatives and inflectional morphemes in almost every sentence the beginner meets outside the L2 classroom. Accordingly the input he is exposed to is not comprehensible og therefore no acquisition will take place.
And here we made it to the most important reason why next to no Danes know how to communicate in Greenlandic. The necessary input students got almost automatically when they acquired English or French simply does not exist in Greenlandic for quite a period.
.. and what about the practical implications of such observations?
When I began the revison of Learn Greenlandic with Per Langgård in 2022 I soon realized that the challenge not was adding more and better paradigms, grammatical explanations and the like (such have over the years been provided by myself and others in rather big numbers) rather to face the real problem in Greenlandic acquisition namely the shortage of training data in the shape of comprehensible input.
For the first time ever are such data now available. At www.learngreenlandic.com students now have access to a sentence generator that at any point of the acquisition process will generate all possible combinations of stems, affixes and inflectional endings known to the student at any given time. That is lexical material that is comprehensible. In a polysynthetic language like Greenlandic this means vast amounts of sentences.
As one example will a student after a few months of study have got to know about 80 stems and affixes and a dozen or so inflectional endings. Out of such known bits and pieces the generator will produce more than 12,000 running words that will generate an almost infinite amount of sentences. After about half a year of study the system will generate about half a million running words and after about one year of study a double digit million of words. Students simply never run out of relevant training data that always will press them to the edge of their perception but never beyond. Every bit og every sentence will always contain known data and known data only.
This is exactly the point where the acquisition process in Greenlandic approaches the acquisition process in any other L2. Once the students have perceived and understood known stems and combinations a satisfying number of times data will automatically internalize and eventually be robust enough to form the scaffold they can base on while taking in new lexicon and grammar in the real world outside the L2 classroom.
This is exactly the way we comparatively easily acquired the L2’s we have acquired over the years and exactly the way we must acquire Greenlandic. The generator is thus nothing but the midwife needed to get over the initial problems caused by the extreme complexity of polysynthesis. After a year or so of study students will proceed the natural way acquiring from actual language in real use outside the L2 classroom…
and we know from experience that it works!
Per Langgård
1: Note in this connection an often seen flaw caused by bad teaching when well-meaning friends and teachers try to “help” the students by extraposing non-existing “subjects” and make them produce sentences like Uanga Perimik ateqarpunga where uanga is supposed to match the pronoun for 1. person singular (I). Only that this sentence does not mean unmarked “My name is Per” rather an utterance with a marked subject à la “It is I who am Per” ↩
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