There are two distinct activities:

• Linguistics. This means language science. It is the conscious study of the components of a language or language in general. This is like all other sciences and intellectual persuits: biology, chemistry, mathematics, etc..
• Language learning, or rather, language aquisition (which is the term I'll use for the rest of this article). This means developing the ability to understand, speak, read or write in a language. This is not a conscious activity, but rather training your brain, programming it, more like muscle memory than studying math.

Both are worthy pursuits. Some people are interested in only one, some people are interested in both (I'm interested in both).

However, the great, fundamental misunderstanding, is that most people believe that developing the first (linguistics) will lead to the second (language acquisition). This is completely false.

As Steve Kaufmann likes to quote:

The title of this post is very misleading... I could already speak Polish at an intermediate-ish level before I started reading Harry Potter. However, this experience has really taught me alot!

What and why?

First, some background. Along with my own evolving ideas about language acquisition I've recently (maybe over the last 6 months?) become interested in the ideas of Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann. They both emphasize "comprehensable input" as the primary means to language acquisition. This means reading and listening.

So, I decided that I wanted to read more in Polish. I had two primary goals:

• To expand my vocabulary.
• To read something interesting that I would enjoy.

I chose Harry Potter for the following reasons:

I've been studying Russian and Polish language for about four years now. It has been a great experience for me. I discovered that not only do I love learning languages, but I seem to be pretty OK at it. During that time, my thoughts on how one should learn a foreign language have been constantly evolving.

In the beginning, I was largely focused on grammar. This was primarily because the class I was taking focused on grammar. This agrees with a general trend in modern American education, which emphasizes understanding the ideas rather than memorizing the facts. In general, this is good thing. Language courses of the past focused on memorizing vocabulary. Now understanding grammar is the main focus.

Also grammar was easily interesting to me in its own right. Its like math with words. My programmer brain liked it. And it was comfortable. I didn't have to go out on a limb and risk personal embarrassment like with speaking.