Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

language learning

Warning: this entry is a boring personal speculation on how foreign languages are acquired.

I had four years of French in high school (and two years of French Lite in middle school before that), then a semester of French in college.

In my junior year in high school, I decided that Latin would be way more fun than more lab science, so I took two years of Latin.

In college, I took a full year of beginning German. It met every day at 8 am, so that we could absorb German while we were still half-asleep. I found this less painful than it sounds here. Then I took another semester of German in a more normal schedule.

While working, I took a semester of extension school Italian. It met once a week, I hardly studied, and I got virtually nothing out of it.

Each of these language experiences was quite different, and I've been reflecting on that the past few days. Latin was extremely grammar-based, and there was no expectation about good pronunciation or generating oral sentences. I had a better knowledge of grammar in general, a semi-photographic memory, and could learn a list of vocabulary words 10 minutes before class, in order to get an A on the quiz. I still remember quite a bit of Latin - nouns, verb stems. Not so much the conjugations.

French was also grammar based, although there was the pretense of developing speaking skills through practicing dialogues. We weren't required to memorize dialogues, though, and our teachers knew it would be futile to correct our horrendous accents, so they didn't even try. The focus eventually was on comprehending reading assignments, and producing grammatically correct written sentences. This past spring I passed the graduate course that allows you to say you read French on your CV, and it was more of the same, except without any pretense of being able to generate your own written French sentences. And no oral work AT ALL.

I didn't care for this approach, although I did like two aspects: 1) learning enough about suffixes and prefixes to recognize English words in their French garb; and 2) being encouraged to "read through" a passage and get as much as possible before finally resorting to a dictionary.

Nevertheless, the focus on Correctness - always generating the right verb ending, the correct article, the proper word order - was inhibiting. And since I'm a little obsessive about "being right" I would tend to freeze up and say nothing rather than speak incorrectly. Even now, I feel almost speechless in France - I have a lot of trouble generating even basic conversation, and even though I can read very complicated stuff without too much difficulty, I feel that my knowledge of the language is rudimentary. I think I would have benefitted from lots of encouragement to speak freely and a positive atmosphere of correction. And realizing that the most important thing is to understand and be understood, rather than be correct. If I tell the waiter "je veux lait" I will not impress him but he will probably bring me some milk anyway.

Posted by otto0114 at September 5, 2004 05:37 PM