More on Learning Languages
More things that I wish I knew when I first set out (feel free to take these cum grano salis. I’m not a language teacher, nor am I you, your milage may vary, etc.):
When it comes to exposing yourself to the language, don’t stick to the path beaten by the textbook and course materials. You need to encounter the language in the wild, and to that end you should be promiscuous in your reading materials. Language Log makes a really good point about the dread textbook sentences that demonstrate a feature of the grammar, but no native speaker would ever actually say. (“The pen of my aunt…”) The more the merrier, and if it’s not all carefully selected to be appropriate to your current skill, so much the better. Actually, if you can afford it, having more than one textbook can be really useful to contrast the approaches of the authors; sometimes it just helps to have a grammatical point explained in a different fashion. If you have access to native speakers, that’s good too, but as someone whose current interests are Latin and Old English I don’t want to make too much of that. Watching TV and listening to radio in the language (if available) are also good, particularly for training your ear to hear word boundaries, but it’s pretty easy to fool yourself that you’re studying when you’re actually just watching TV.
Try to learn the example sentences and longer passages by heart, particularly if they’re selected from actual literature in the language. I find it really helps to be able to anchor grammatical knowledge in concrete examples. When you’re thinking about whether a sentence is grammatical in your native language, you often construct sample sentences that you know are valid to compare it to; when it’s not your native language your ability to spontaneously generate such sentences is going to be much more limited–having a ready-to-mind stock of sentences that you know pass muster with native speakers can help.
Be bold. Native speakers misspeak all the time, and the language police don’t hold them up to public humiliation, unless the speaker’s name is Bush. If you try to stick to only what you’ve thoroughly mastered, in speech or writing, then you’re going to spend much too much time creeping about tentatively in “The pen of my aunt…” territory, which ought to be just as embarrassing, as well as being boring for you and your audience.
June 3rd, 2004 at 11:38 am
Another good thing to do is to have imaginary conversations with yourself in the language you’re learning. It gives you all the time you need to construct the sentences, but you can still practice grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.