superlinguo:

Thanks for your question!

We had a poke around the internet, but we couldn’t find any papers that specifically looked at whether linguistic training made people better at learning a second language (if anyone knows of any please let us know!). That means that the rest of this post is going to be mostly anecdotal, based on my (Lauren) experiences of learning Italian and Polish before studying linguistics, and learning Auslan and Nepali after majoring in Linguistics as part of a Bachelors of Arts. I’ve also been chatting with Georgia about learning Italian before, during and after her degree.

I’m sure some of my learning improvement came about because of general skills from my Bachelors. Also, I learnt (pitifully little) Italian at school, with no real choice or understanding of why I was learning a language, living in Poland made the motivation factor much much stronger, but by time I was learning Nepali I was living there and really stubborn, so I was better at creating situations where I could practice. Basically, there are other factors to consider when learning a language.

For me, linguistics has helped with language learning in three different ways:

1. I have the metalanguage

I am super comfortable with words like suffix, derivation, aspect and first person inclusive pronoun. As an English speaker, you have intuitions about a lot of features of your language, but being able to name and understand them makes them less scary. I remember finding case marking really confusing when learning Polish, because I’d never encountered it before and teachers weren’t always that great at explaining it, but with Nepali I had the language to understand what case marking was, and what each case was used for.

2. Languages are different and that’s ok

This is related to the first point - the more you learn about how languages work, and acquire terminology to talk about it, the more exposure I had to languages that were very different to English. This has made me more comfortable with learning new languages, because instead of finding things really odd in comparison to English I’ll think to myself ‘woo, I’m finally learning an ergative language!’ 

This doesn’t necessarily make these features easier to memorise, but it does make you more curious about seeking them out. Also, because studying linguistics means you begin to think more about languages as complex systems, you may find your study approach becomes more systematic too - although a good linguist knows that languages are systems with their own irregularities, so you may also find yourself becoming more zen about those difficult verb paradigms.

3. I know how brains learn language

I took a subject on second language learning in undergrad. It was really great, and I’ve applied lots of what I’ve learnt to my own learning, and teaching, since. Some things that have stayed with me are that motivation is important and immersion is important, but only if you’re getting some structured input as well. It’s also ok that some features of your language use will get better, and then get worse, and then slowly improve again - especially if it’s an irregular pronoun or verb.

I hope that helps! Linguistics won’t necessarily make you a better language learner, but it may make you a more adventurous one, or at least more articulate when talking about what you’re learning. I’m sure other language learners and linguists have their own experiences too - feel free to share them as reblogs or in the comments!

I’d also say that studying linguistics can help you a fair bit with sounds. For example, if you learn how to pronounce the whole IPA, you will literally never again encounter an unfamiliar sound in any language. That’s the entire point of the IPA. (It may take a bit more practice to say it in exactly the speed and context you’re aiming for in the language, but you’ll know what your mouth should be doing, so it’ll be easier to work on at home.) Of course, it’s possible to be a linguist and not know how to pronounce the entire IPA (lots of people have difficulty with trills, for example), but in general, learning about sounds that aren’t familiar to you ahead of time will help you when you encounter them later. 

A thorough knowledge of IPA (especially if you’ve done some transcription tests or a field methods class) also helps you “fake” a foreign language – when you hear a name or word that’s unfamiliar to your first language’s sound system, you’re more likely to be able to repeat it back to the speaker with their pronunciation because you’ve learned how to hear sounds that aren’t just in your L1, and you can also write it down accurately for later reference. 

Learning about sound patterns, as in a phonology course, is also useful. For example, when I was learning Arabic, the textbook told us to memorize two lists of letters: the “sun” letters, where the definite article al- changes to match the following consonant, as in ash-shams "the sun", and the “moon” letters, where the definite article doesn’t change, as in al-qamar "the moon". But because I’d already studied phonology, I noticed that all the sun letters were coronals and all the moon letters were non-coronals (labials and dorsals). So it took me about 10 seconds to learn the rule to 100% accuracy, rather than a couple hours of memorization and still with the potential that I’d forget later which list a particular letter belonged to. Certain phonological processes, like voicing assimilation, nasal assimilation, and palatalization, are common in many, many languages, and spotting them will generally save you time and memorization.