Metaphor in Language Training

In 1991/1992 I had found that there are interesting implications in Lakoff's »conceptual metaphor« theory framework regarding language understanding and acquisition as well.

My idea was to connect the approaches of Vera Birkenbihl (who is famous in Europe, or at least Germany, for being the primary trainer in »brain usage«) for foreign language learning with some more sophisticated theorems by linguist George Lakoff, who claims that most of our abstract reasoning is based on metaphor. In his view, we draw conclusions in highly abstract realms by setting up metaphoric frameworks and mapping the 'inner logic' of these frameworks to the abstract realm in focus. To test this approach, I had written a thesis on the use of metaphor in the debate about immigration in Germany, finding a surprisingly coherent 'metaphoric reasoning' about immigration as a kind of natural disaster.

Now, most of my language students at that time were adults, professionals who had to deal with special vocabularies and who wanted to refine their style. I found out that in most situations, finding the right 'motivating metaphor' for a certain expression was crucial.

So I came up with the idea to teach along these metaphors (instead of 'subject matters') which means to treat all kinds of 'containers' as a unit, be they 'time', a 'topic', a 'country', or whatever. Once you understand the working of the metaphor, you understand to a better degree why certain expressions are used, others not.

Ironically, the mixture that I had in mind of 'metaphor' and 'easy learning' brought together Lakoff and his great opponent, Noam Chomsky, whose ideas about the general 'grammaricity' of the human mind explain why Birkenbihl's approach (word-by-word translations as a central means in language training) works: By listening to the 'strange' grammar of the foreign language in the words of our own, we understand intuitively how the grammar of the foreign language works. And that is, according to Chomsky, because we have a general and innate understanding of all kinds of wellformed grammar systems.

I never really worked these things out (I will however put my MA thesis on the web soon together with the shockwave files so that you can play around with these concepts), it's just too much for one person, and there was bigger fish to fry.

But I just found out that the 'easy learning' part has been brillantly done be Rosetta Stone.

This is the kind of learning environment that I always envisioned, and I will check it out (although it's expensive) for Russian and Portugese. But I wonder if this approach could profit from a better understanding of metaphor - how all of these 'real world' examples apply to abstract thought and reasoning. To take a popular example: Every language has a certain amount of metaphors and idioms when it comes to stock markets, and it could be very fruitious if I learned the language of stock markets (e.g. in French) along the metaphors used.

But I'm impressed, really. Rosetta Stone has it.