Linguists have been arguing for years now about whether language is innate. “Innate” or “native”, in the sense that it belongs, it is essential, to our nature…
By the time we’re 3 or 4 years old, we can speak eloquently.
Innate or not… it made me begin to think about tango and how we learn…
On second thought, I came to realize that we learn tango in a very similar way to how we learn to speak:
When we were toddlers, we started out with language when mom and dad repetitively spoke those words to us until we could go “ma-ma” and “da-da”. Then, “cat”, “dog” and other simple words followed…
Then, we ventured out to learn words more complex, like “woman”, “future” and “automobile”, at the same time as making simple sentences like “I want water” and “daddy tell me a story”.
Before you took your first English (or whatever you native language is) class, you were able to form complex sentences and speak fluently.
And you only had to learn the alphabet when you began to learn how to write.
This is important! But, why?
Because it means you were never really taught how to speak, but you learnt how using two mechanisms that are very specialized in us: mimicking and integrating experience.
That is, you mimicked how your mom and dad used their mouth to produce sounds that we call “words” and then linked those words to an object or a concept. Then, using the rich, collective experience of hearing other people speak, you were able to form intuitions about what forms of words and sentences make sense and what forms do not. For example, if I said “You that look understand idea can” you would have had a very different intuition than if I said “Look, you can understand that idea”, even though the words are the same.
More than that, eventually, you were able to use those intuitions to form completely new and novel sentences that you had never heard anyone else say before. In other words, you unconsciously integrated the structure of speech and were able to use it to construct new sentences.
For a long time that is how we went about our language affairs and then a bunch of clever people noticed that even though all this happens without any conscious human intervention, language is governed by rules and so they set out to find what those rules were.
To do that, they studied how people speak and they invented “grammar”.
In fact, there are tens of grammars because they’re still trying to figure out a grammar that has rules (not exceptions) for every piece of interesting language we can come up with.
So then, we began to go to school and we were taught grammar and practiced it relentlessly. Remember that?
Well, the only difference between tango and language is that the grammars we have available for tango are very primitive.
Let me explain.
The following will vary somewhat, depending on where you live or who taught you but most of you, when you started out learning tango, you were taught perhaps how to walk in an embrace, about the embrace itself but more often than not: a simple step or sequence of steps. You already knew how to walk so you skipped “ma-ma” and “da-da” and went straight for “cat” and “dog”, or even maybe “woman”, “future” and “I want water”.
You did the same thing over and over until you went up a level and you started learning more complex sequences of steps (probably giros, saccadas and ganchos). You started making simple sentences that assumed some unconscious knowledge of the basics: verbs, nouns and so on. And I’m saying unconscious, because at the time, you had no idea that someone had named them “verbs” or “nouns”. In tango, that would be the concepts of axis, embrace, and so on.
Around that time, or when you went up a level, you went back to learning the alphabet although you could already speak: you hopefully learnt about technique of walking, shifting weight etc.
After the alphabet came the rules of the grammar, this time consciously and explicitly: technique of giros, technique of saccadas, technique of volcadas, etc. and it served to reinforce your already natural alas limited ability to form new tango sentences.
Why is this useful? I was hoping you would ask.
Because it informs us about how “tango grammar” can help us learn tango on a conscious level and raw experience, on an unconscious level.
This combination can be very effective and I will spend time in later posts explaining “how”.