Learning Languages
I love learning new languages. Too bad I’m not very good at it; at least, I’ve never reached the point of fluency with any language except English. At my best I’ve reached the stage of being able to read a newspaper or comic with the aid of a dictionary, but even that’s a peak that I need practice to maintain, and I haven’t kept in practice. What I really ought to have done is spent more time abroad, especially in college. I could have wasted my time just as efficiently in Italy or Japan, but at least I would have gotten plenty of opportunity to practice.
Still, just as it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, it’s never too late to learn (or re-learn) a language, and I’ve learned one or two things over the years that I wish I had known when I started out. For one thing, as Eleanor Harz Jorden points out in Beginning Japanese, all language learning is over-learning. In other words the entire point of learning something in a new language should be to learn it until recall is not just effortless, but comes to mind unbidden before you even have to direct your attention to recall. See, I was a good student, and had a good memory, but I would always learn things just until the point where I could recall accurately–and then stop. I would get A’s on the tests, but they took a lot more effort than they should have because I would always have to run through conjugations mentally to find what I was looking for, and reading and writing was mentally draining. Looking back, it was a wonder that I did as well as I did. If I had taken the trouble in the beginning to drill until I had overlearned it, instead of indexing through amo, amas, amat, amamus… as soon as I saw “they love” amant would leap directly to mind. As it was, I assumed that since I was getting A’s, I was learning and eventually it would somehow “click.”
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004