To study or to learn a language

With my first year as a language college student coming to an end I'd like to write a little more personal blog post to reflect on how I experienced learning a new language, as well as to what I mean by to “learn” and to “study” a language and tell you a little about my linguistic background.

So far in my life I have “studied” and also “learned” a language. By studying a language I basically mean what we do in College or school. We learn vocabulary but also especially the grammatical system behind a language and its rules for conjugation, declination, tenses whatsoever. By learning a language I mean the “sponge” method. You don't study a language's rules and grammar, you learn some words yes, but you mainly learn to speak and especially to understand the language by being around people who speak it, being exposed to it, incorporating it into your life.

Studying a language is more tiring, it takes longer and is boring once you get on a high level as grammar and syntax get more complex. Learning a language is easier, you often do it unconsciously, only have to study little, but you don't know why you apply certain words and suffixes . Now what is the better way to do it? I myself only “studied” two languages, Croatian and Spanish. Although I had English in school since the age of 11(not counting elementary, because come one lets be serious this was just as useful as the french classes I had in elementary) I don't consider it a language I have studied. Why so? The first four years of English in school were a complete mess. Soon after the first semester started our teacher left the school for some months and was only to return every now and then. While she was gone we had a variety of other teachers who never knew which level we are on and so on. So yes in these critic four years which I suppose are important when learning a new language especially when its the first foreign language you learn were not very satisfying. It was already back then that I was very fond of the English language and American culture, and I wanted to be a part of it by knowing their language better than my middle school classmates. So when I was 13 I started to intentionally expose myself to the English language. I read lots of articles and books in English, I tried to watch English movies even if I didn't understand a lot. It was especially the everyday and slang language I wanted to get to know so I would remember these things from movies and so on and use them. By the time I transferred to another school where we received a decent education in English language I found that I had it easier than most of my fellow students and didn't have to study for the tests. So although my first years of English were chaotic I think I mastered this language without school. When I speak it today it comes natural to me, I don't think of what to say or write and although I still have to look up certain words ( especially specialist terms) I consider myself fluent.

Currently I'm doing both, I'm studying a language (Croatian and now also English) at college and I'm learning one with the sponge method, which I'd like to compare now. In not even one year we learned a lot in Croatian. I am able to communicate in everyday situations and to produce new sentences I have not learned by heart, but the way there was not easy. It involved a lot of studying vocabulary and grammar as well as text production.

Now with my girlfriend coming from a bilingual family (raised in Greek and Albanian) I find myself exposed to a multilingual environment everyday. I started to learn Albanian some time ago and being around this language speeds up the process(I haven't studied a word since I started Croatian and yet I keep improving). Whether it's her talking to her family, Albanian facebook statuses or songs, with time you remember certain words phrases and structures that enable you to produce language without a clue about grammar like cases and conjugation. Then again most of our communication happens in English. As she is the person I talk to most this makes English the dominant language in my life, it's our home language if you want to call it that way for one and a half year now. English playing such a big role in my life has helped me a lot to improve my language skills as it doesn’t allow me to neglect it and that helps a lot, also for school.

So why study a language? Why wasting your time learning rules and grammar? Well if you want to professionally work with a language you have to know these systems. Since I learned English by doing I have no idea about its grammar. When I have a grammar test I just write what my gut tells me to. If my teachers would give me a sentence to transform into this and that tense (we all know the nice complicated names some English tenses have) I would have no idea which tense they might mean. This is something you have to know as a professional Interpreter and or translator. So I guess it always depends on what you want to do with language. If you simply want to be able to speak and understand it regardless of knowing the system behind it the easier way is to “learn” it. If you want to work with it professional you have to “study” it. So what's the best thing to do now? I guess first you should try the sponge method and then start to study why you do certain things the way you are doing them. I personally enjoy the multilingual environment I'm currently in and hope to gain as much from it as possible. Also I'm looking forward to the next semester since I'm planning to start yet another language.