What is the best way to learn a foreign language?
I am English but I am studying German.
When I wish to express particular concepts in German, I sometimes have difficulties since there are no equivalent expressions in the two languages, e.g. like “table” and “Tisch”.
In many cases the English and German versions are expressed completely differently.
I have problems with words such as “allerdings”, “zwar”, “tatsächlich”, “in der Tat”, etc., and often do not know which words or sentence constructions may be used or would be better.
Similarly, perhaps German speakers who are learning English have difficulty in understanding the differences between “I baked a cake”, “I have baked a cake”, “I was baking a cake” and ”I did bake a cake”.
I have books to help me, but by means of complex rules, one page after another, full of rules. The rules are admittedly reasonable, but there are so many of them.
It seems to me that a child learns his/her mother tongue without any explicit knowledge of the rules of speech.
He/she does not learn by means of rules, but by means of examples together with a process of generalisation. For these reasons, adult native speakers recognise immediately what is correct in their mother tongue without being able to explain why in terms of the appropriate rules. This often poses no problem since they speak mostly correctly.
When an adult learns a foreign language, therefore perhaps it's best if they do not structure their learning solely around rules, but with the aid of examples and generalisation. The example sentences serve as patterns.
Consider for example: “Ich komme mit, ich muss allerdings erst zur Bank.”
It is now possible to generalise: “Ich gehe einkaufen, ich muss allerdings erst frühstücken.”
This pattern is independent of other patterns, e.g. “Ich muss allerdings sagen, dass ich nicht viel Zeit habe.” and “Das ist zwar wahr, aber...”
In this way, even when the generalisation is false and so results in a speech error, one remains understandable. It seems to me more important to be understood than to speak painfully correctly.
Of course, in time one refines one's collection of examples and so improves one's speech.
Similarly for rules of grammar. English children often say “I bited my apple” or “I drawed a picture”. That is incorrect but it remains understandable.