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Hi. Today I want to talk about language feel.

A lot of people talk about the feel for a language, and naturally having a gut feel for how to use the language being an important stage in learning that language. But most people don’t really know how this comes about. Now what’s very interesting is that the part of our brain responsible for language, one of the things it does is that it filters for the sounds of the language. So, if you’re listening to a new language and you don’t have the filters, it will sound very unclear, it will sound mushy.

Importantly, this part of our brain does something else. It calculates statistics, and very sophisticated statistics. It can begin to calculate that when it hears a sound, the probability that the next sound will be a, or b, or c. So as you’re listening to language, the bran is processing ahead, and deciding what is most likely to happen next. Now I just said ‘next’ after a pause, and your brain would have already been processing that and have determined that there was a likelihood of the word ‘next’ coming up. So the brain is doing statistics at the level of phonemes, but it’s also doing statistics at the level of words and phrases. So you get to a point in learning a language that you know what’s coming at an unconscious level, because the brain has done the statistics. Now, this begs an important point, because you cannot do the statistics in the brain by swatting individual items of vocabulary. You actually have to hear lots of the target language in natural conditions for the brain to do its job and calculate the statistics of usage of the language. So the key to building the feel for a language is to hear lots of it, process lots of it and allow the brain to develop its own unconscious understanding of what the rules of the language are, and the likelihood of various different things happening as language is being spoken.