Goethe's paradoxical aphorism concerning our knowledge of complex phenomena could be used to identify the feelings which may prevail at two different stages oflearning a foreign language, at an early and at an advanced one. So, for example, it is not surpris­ ing when our students, back from an exchange visit abroad, complain about having felt blocked by their thorough structural language awareness, noticing at the same time that some other foreign students showed off their fluency and richness

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... of vocabulary, while calmly violating certain grammatical conventions. 1 Such self-conscious learners seem to miss their past lack of inhibitions, when they still naively thought oflanguage differ­ ences principally as neatly observable dissimilarities in language forms, feeling that their present awareness of more hidden foreign-language properties is rather a disadvantage in communication; so much so that they wonder whether it would not have been better to have invested all that time and energy into the acquisition of the lexicon instead.