Very good point!
But quite confusing interpretation (or conclusion, if you will):
There is a serious difference between “to study” and “to learn”, especially when it refers to a process of gaining ability to speak, read and communicate in a language.
Let’s say that you use a beginning course of English, you read it, think over and do a terrific job to understand a structure of the language: you break your study into some sort of sections – grammar, punctuation, syntax, lexicon, etc.; you try to understand a connection between predicate and subject and pronoun, morphological derivation and so on. Such attitude is known as studying – you
study English.
On other hand, I don’t pay much attention to grammar rules or to a order of words in a sentence, I’m not interested in etymology, I don’t force myself to memorize bunch of words – I just try to grasp a meaning of sentence as a whole. I read texts and listen to audio over and over, try to communicate with natives, making mistakes and getting them corrected. Such attitude can be described as learning – I
learn English.
You get a good
knowledge and deep understanding of a language. On contrary, I get a
skill to use a language. You’re fluent in theory and I’m not, but we both can communicate (presumably) with others in English.
You mentioned a bicycle. Good! Let’s see what it means to learn to ride it and to study it.
You just sat for the first time on a saddle and try to ride a bike, and then you fell down. And again and again. Until you intuitively found the way to keep a balance. From this moment on you are able to ride a bike, you’ve learnt how to ride it – you’ve got a skill.
I took an instruction about riding a bicycle. Something like this:
“A bike remains upright when it is steered so that the ground reaction forces exactly balance all the other internal and external forces it experiences. Steering may be supplied by a rider or, under certain circumstances, by the bike itself. This self-stability is generated by a combination of several effects that depend on the geometry, mass distribution, and forward speed of the bike”. From this instruction I got a knowledge, I studied how to ride a bike.
You got a skill without studying, I got a knowledge and my skill is questionable – do you see a difference?
В русском языке есть весьма приблизительная аналогия – «учить» и «изучать», «выучить» и «изучить».
Now, I realize that you incline to trust “official” or rather publicly expressed opinion by experts. Then I suggest to study this little lesson and learn from it:
⚠ Тільки зареєстровані користувачі бачать весь контент та не бачать рекламу.
To learn is for pupils at school.
Ну зачем оно выползло из своего русского торонто?
