I may be awfully stupid, but it took me years to drop the idea that one can learn languages simply by attending courses. It never occurred to me that successful language learning takes an enormous amount of private work, parcelled into a long series of manageable tasks. Today I suspect I could learn even mathematics, so long as the plan of work was divided into sufficiently small parts.
That's why I am hesitant in recommending language classes. However, it cannot be denied that formal classes are a good resource, if only because you have at least one fluent person in front of you serving as a model.
University Classes (Day)
At nineteen, I believed firmly that you found languages came easily or you were dumb at them. Thus, I wasted a lot of time shedding tears over my Greek textbook, feeling stupid and hating myself. I did much better at Latin, which which I was already somewhat familiar. I flunked Irish outright, in part because I hated the sound of myself struggling with the words and so ceased trying. Lord, it was awful to be nineteen.
Were I to wake up and discover myself nineteen again, only--please God--without the fear and the crippling self-hated, I would sign up for Russian and Business and work towards becoming a multi-millionaire. I would locate and befriend my best friend Trish on the proper day, but otherwise I would keep my head down, make a workable plan and memorise, memorise, memorise, speak, speak, speak.
Undergrad university programs are valuable for their resources. Both my universities (Toronto and Boston College) had excellent language labs, but unfortunately I never used the Toronto one. I often used the BC one a for French and German, which seemed to make the Language Lab Librarian happy. They also have exchange programs with other universities, and this is important because apparently immersion really does the fluency trick. Finally, they have professors who are so potty about their languages they did PhDs in them and now need to justify their courses' existence with the numbers of students who take them. Thus if you show yourself keen, they will love you and help you with all their power.
University Classes (Night)
I am a morning person, and I am afraid to be out after dark on my own. Nevertheless, I went to night classes at Edinburgh University for five years to learn Polish and brush up my Italian. The principal Polish instructor is a very dedicated and very clever teacher. If she could make her students fluent in Polish sheerly though teaching, she would.
However, the two big problems with night school classes are that (A) you are surrounded by people who also don't speak your target language fluently and, more seriously, (B) there are no tests.
No tests, no grades. I suspect the "Languages for All" program is shrewdly thinking that adult learners hated tests and grades when they are students, and now just want the fun parts of learning. I sympathise. But testing is HOW we memorise and grading is HOW we can judge our progress. We cannot learn to speak languages very well without testing our recollection. Every foreign language conversation is a kind of test.
In despair I asked my night class teacher if any of her night school students had become fluent in Polish, and after thinking about it awhile, she said yes--one. I think he was Dutch.
But despite that depressing statistic, under her watch Polish night school courses are flourishing. There is a sort of Dumbledorska's Army at Edinburgh Uni marching onward and onward towards fluency, never quitting, no matter how many years they have signed up with Languages for All.
If I were starting Polish 1.2 all over again, I would make all the vocabulary in Dumbledorska's excellent class materials into flashcards, memorise them, and then read her meticulously written dialogues aloud to captive Polish friends, or cajole them into reading them with me.
Another advantage of night classes is that if you take them long enough, you find yourself with a small band of people just as obsessed as yourself and who (unlike other family and friends) admire you for your stubbornness. And if your mutual obsession is Polish--Hej, chłopcy, bagnet na broń just about sums it up because you are actually becoming Polish by osmosis.
Private Tutors
I have had six private Polish tutors, and one Italian one, and only three of them have been paid. In general I have operated on an Language Exchange basis: I proofread your university papers, you listen to me read Polish.
Paid-in-cash tutors are the best tutors, in my experience, for a few reasons. First, tutors who are friends are too kind and gentle and, unwilling to see me suffer, let me give up too soon.
(That said, one of my friends has been an enormous help by writing me long letters in Polish in difficult handwriting. Although the handwriting has occasionally reduced me to tears, it turns out that the longer it takes to read a word, the better you recall it. Thus there is a virtue in chicken-scratch handwriting hitherto unappreciated.)
Second, paid-in-cash tutors have skin in the game, as the kids say. Mine seem very conscientious, too.
The advantages of paid tutelage over night school classes are very important to me:
1. you, and you alone, are in the linguistic spotlight for the lesson and you have no place to hide;
2. you can meet your tutor at the time of day you are most brainy and/or comfortable;
3. you can reschedule meetings, so you never lose your money's worth; and
4. at the advanced level, you can just have conversations for most of the lesson, which is the best way to reach your linguistic goal, if that is to have conversations with native speakers. *
The disadvantage is that going to a tutor costs more than going to class, if you are the sort of person who never misses a class.
I'm very grateful for my five years of Dumbledorska's night school classes, and I do plan to return from furlough when it's feasible, but I have to say that my ability to converse in Polish has really come along only since I began:
1. lessons with my current tutor,
2. to read a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magicians' Nephew a week with
3. strict attention to the meanings of ALL the words and
4. memorising 5-10 of the new ones every day with
5. meticulous record keeping.
*You don't need a tutor for Latin. Work though Wheelock, then purchase an advanced grammar and a good dictionary, and get to work translating Caesar, Horace and Cicero.
You may yet inspire me to pursue language study, something I lacked patience for in youth. I wonder if the softening of the brain cells that is said to occur with getting older might be made up for by that increase in patience? (Written with a smile - I am not feeling gloomy!)
ReplyDeleteI wanted to address something from your last piece but was not sure you would check there now that you have written another. It was your description of the way little children learn languages, how they are encouraged, listened to, asked to repeat themselves, doted on when they get it right, and never mocked when they get it wrong. Your implication - I may be mistaken in this - seemed to be that it is primarily this which enables children to be such marvelous language-learners. I would like to respectfully disagree or disagree in part. Children's brains are different from those of adults; in fact, they start to lose that language capacity at around the age of 7 or 8, long before adulthood, although they don't lose it altogether. As you are rereading The Magician's Nephew, I will point to the scene in it when the mere dropping of a bit of iron from a lamp-post gives birth, as it were, to a new lamp-post springing from the ground. Aslan explains that Narnia is so fertile because it is so new.
I think the minds of small children are analogous to the soil of Narnia, although it is quite unscientific of me. My mother always told me that when we moved to Warsaw, I sat in the kitchen with the laundress and other cleaners and learned Polish in about 4-5 weeks. (Of course I have long since forgotten it.) You and I, with the greatest encouragement in the world, could not learn a language in that time. It's not merely a matter of being lovingly encouraged to repeat everything. To use a stale and also unscientific metaphor, our brains are wired differently. That said, I think a great mistake in language-teaching of the last 40 years or so has been the assumption that adults can learn language the way children do. Thus the emphasis on taking classes in 'conservational' French, for example, at which no one learns anything, including how to converse in the language. Adults, or at any rate literate adults, cannot learn languages in that fashion.
I mention literate adults because I noticed early on, when living in poor countries where there were many illiterate people, that one advantage of illiteracy (there are not many) is the retention of certain elements of the way children learn language. It may be that part - not all - of the 're-wiring' that makes adult brains so different from that of children, and those of older children so different from those of 4-year-olds, is literacy. Being illiterate forces people to memorize and pay attention because they cannot rely on writing words down and reading them later. But it's more than that.
Perhaps this is all old hat to you as you know far more about the practices and psychology of language-learning than I do. That is why I'd be interested in your comments on what I've said here and whether you think there might be something to it.
Clio
I do know that children pick up a language very quickly when they are immersed in it. It's not foolproof though. IF you locked up a poor child in a closet and never spoke to him and actively discouraged him from learning, they'd be sunk. My point was really that the infant is encouraged to speak, just as your household staff sat down and chatted happily with you. (Which is a lovely illustration of the old-fashioned Polish love of children, by the way. I recommend you relearn Polish just to see if it evokes memories of happy days in Warsaw.)
DeleteBut, yes, I am a bit tongue-in-cheek there. I noticed when I worked for the ODSP (welfare) office, a newly arrived Roma family got their young son to do all the talking. This was a bit difficult, however, for although the boy had picked up English quickly, he didn't have the cognitive abilities necessary to understand the intricacies of bureaucracy or even what illnesses his elders were claiming their benefits for.
So although children do have the edge in one sense, adults have the edge in another. Stuck as we are in a literate society (and that is a good point about the multilingualism of the illiterate: I'd forgotten, but that is the explanation for how Homer's works were passed down), we can run rings around children when it comes to reading, writing and figuring out difficult rules of grammar.
I read somewhere that the best age to plunge children into language lessons was 11. That is interesting, for my school system introduced children to French at six although unfortunately, unless the school had a proper immersion program, it was more of an inoculation than an introduction.