On second-language acquisition.

At a recent conference that I attended and presented at, this incidental point made by a specialist in second-language acquisition really hit home for me:

Morphemes that have a high functional load – e.g. plural endings, signalling of the person on a verb – are often super-short and subject to phonetic reduction, which makes them even harder for non-native speakers to catch, despite their great importance.

However, that said, they are often contextually cued and grammatically redundant – like when the plural ending of a noun is also reflected on the verb – and so a listener can often pick them up by other means.

It makes sense when you say it, but it’s something that I had never thought about before, and it really went a long way towards explaining how I’ve been processing or failing to process the Duolingo listening exercises on the one language that I’m now studying for potential EU-country dual citizenship purposes, where certain important endings get swallowed up like the noun plural, but I pick them up when they’re repeated on the verb and so everything ends up being okay.

It also makes you realize that while something like Duolingo is nice, it just drops sentences on you without any real contextual cues besides knowing the grammatical theme of the unit that you’re working on, unlike real life or even a classroom-set situation where you do stuff like mimic interactions at a restaurant or a train station and you have a lot more vocab cues and whatnot.