Making a New Language Your Language or A New Language Does Not have to be Foreign to You

Transcription

1 Making a New Language Your Language or A New Language Does Not have to be Foreign to You For many students studying a foreign language is an overwhelming and often frightening task, but it need not be. By careful planning, use of specific techniques, and maintenance of a positive attitude, you can take control of this process and make it an exciting way to expand your horizons and increase your self-confidence. I. Choosing a Language: 1. Choose a foreign language that is interesting: It is best to select a language that one finds interesting, whether because of love of the language itself or fascination with the culture associated with the foreign tongue. Interest enhances motivation and makes learning easier. 2. Weigh how practical the language may be for you: Many persons will select Spanish, for its frequent use in New York and many major U.S. cities gives it an obvious pragmatic value. But other languages can have their own applications. For a person interested in Western Arts, Music, and Culture, French, German, and/or Italian can be key. For the person interested in international trade Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Portuguese (due to Brazil) can be very relevant. For the person with scientific interests, why not Russian and German? 3. Reflect on the personal and familial importance of the language for you: For African- Americans discovering a sub-saharan language may be personally and historically exciting; but that same principle would apply to persons of European and Asian ancestry. And a person who is of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant background may even find a special cultural resonance in Old and Middle English. 4. Consider the level of difficulty associated with the foreign language, especially given your own gifts and limitations: Realize that different foreign languages can present varying levels of difficulty, can be more or less foreign. Romance Languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) contain many cognate words (which can ease memorization and comprehension). Like English, they rely on word order and prepositions to make sense of sentences (verbs conjugate but nouns remain more or less constant in all parts of speech.) French is probably the most difficult of the four to pronounce and hear (for it has many silent letters); and brand new students in French and Spanish may face competition from peers who have had some brief exposure to the Language in High School or at home. Germanic Languages (Dutch, German, Swedish, etc.) also have many cognates with English. But they are case languages (noun and articles change form bases on their grammatical roles).

2 Slavic Languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc.) have few cognate words, utilize complex case structures, and employ an alphabet quite different than English. (Rumanian is partly Romance, partly Slavic.) (And Hungarian and Finnish are non Indo-European languages.) Asian Languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (in their classical forms) are based on characters, which are very different from the English alphabet. This can make reading and writing very challenging undertakings. The classical languages offer demanding grammatical structures. Both Latin and Greek are case languages; and anyone even remotely familiar with fraternities will understand that Greek employs a radically different alphabet. Classical languages can be very helpful for students who have difficulty with the oral and auditory aspects of language. They are ideal for persons who prefer to read, write, and translate.

3 Learning Foreign Language Page 2 II. A New Language and You: When you were born, you were given a name and you began the learning process. Very quickly you acquired motor skills, learned family and cultural expectations, and began to acquire your native language. None of these skills were acquired overnight. Each one required a long period of trial and error, direction from someone already proficient in the task, and, most importantly, the desire on your part to get it right. You did not imagine that you could not walk and talk, nor did you become depressed when you fell or use an incorrect word. You watched, listened, imitated, and asked questions. Gradually, you become proficient in all these areas. You must go through the same process to learn a new language. Take the task of learning this new language and turn it into an opportunity to add a new dimension to yourself. Just as you used to observe your parents and older siblings, pay attention to your teachers and drill instructors and use them as models. Imitate the way they speak, and even what they say. Allow yourself to develop a new side to your personality by modeling yourself after someone you admire in the new culture. Develop new friendships in the new language with your peers and practice together. Make the language a code among your group. Remember that this new person sometimes makes mistakes in the new language (otherwise, you would be teaching the class!). Be patient with him/ her, and remember that you cannot learn to walk until fall down a few times. III. You Learn by Doing: Other ways of saying this include: Study smart, Be an active rather than a passive student, and use it or lose it. Whenever you take up a new skill, such as a piano or racquetball, you expect to practice. Acquiring a new language is much like learning to play a new sport or instrument: it involves muscles (brain and mouth ones), and cannot be done by reading a book on the subject. Tennis lessons can teach you how to position your hand properly, but if you do not practice the stroke, you will not learn to hit the ball well. Language class can teach you how to learn, but to actually learn you must: Be a smart student in the classroom. If your mind wanders during class, you are not taking advantage of the opportunity to answer questions to yourself, under your breath, without the pressure of being called on. Do not tune out just because someone else is speaking listen to what the speaker is saying. Is the student answering correctly? Imitate what he/she is saying under your breath. Did you catch a mistake? Correct it to

4 yourself. You are not in class to perform for the teacher, but to practice, and this can be done just as well by thinking as by speaking. Always ask yourself: What is he/ she saying? How is she/he saying it? You should be mentally tired after class, just as you feel tired after a good workout. Work in a small group outside the class. Practice speaking the language at a specific time and place, such as at lunch or at the gym. Quiz each other on new vocabulary.

5 Foreign Language Page 3 When reading or studying, avoid writing English translations on the same page as the new language. Have confidence that you will remember the word the next time you see it, and use the context to help yourself recognize it next time. If you write the English equivalent, you will remember the English and not the original. Even if you should forget it, the process of forgetting and looking it up again is an important part of the learning process. By the third or fourth time, your brain will decide to remember the word. Use the language actively, by making up your own sentences. As you progress, you may decide to keep a journal, take notes or write a short story in the new language. Think about your professor s classroom and testing styles. Learn what they expect of you, and begin to anticipate in advance the exercises and activities you will be doing. Try to predict the questions that will be asked, and prepare to answer them before you are called on. Recognize the assistance your professor can offer and use office visits to enhance your efforts. Come prepared to discuss: 1) your strengths: what you can easily do, what you are good at. 2) what you find difficult, patterns of weakness or problems. 3) your study habits: how you study and prepare for class. IV. Explore the World of Language Outside the Classroom: Why are you studying this language? Whether you want to read literature or a newspaper, converse with native speakers here or travel abroad, there it no time like the present to start working towards your goal. Do not wait until you are in an advanced class to pick up a newspaper, magazine, or book in the new language. Scan the paper for words you know. What news stories are being discussed in the foreign press? Are they the same ones that are discussed here? In many cases, you already know the content of the news itself look for something you recognize whether words, names, or places. Congratulate yourself for understanding even one idea in a text this is the real thing! You are reading what native speakers read. By repeating this exercise periodically, you can gauge your progress, and you will be surprised how quickly you find yourself reading. Do you like to watch movies and television? Check the language lab often there are video tapes you can watch alone or in a group that provide a wealth of culture as well as language training. Although you may not remember it, as a child, you watched many programs that you did not entirely understand, and you watched them over and over again, catching a little more each time. You did not learn your native language with your nose in a dictionary.

6 V. Reading in Three Phases: The one thing you never did in acquiring your native language, and that you should never do in a new one, is pick up an article or text in one hand and a dictionary in the other. Not only is this a crutch, but it will slow you down, and may even lead you in the wrong direction and confuse you. Consider a student of English who picks up an article titled 3 Courses Served at White House. Not knowing the word course the student immediately opens the dictionary, without looking for more clues. He/she begins to interpret the article as a discussion of national policy, or an educational opportunity. It is the context that makes the word course immediately clear to a fluent reader, and determining the context is essential to reading comprehension. The three steps you should follow in approaching any reading project are: First look at the assignment as a whole: its length, topic, title, subcategories and any other immediately visible clues, without your dictionary. Survey to get the big picture. Take a minute to think: given this topic or context, what kind of information or arguments can I expect to find in this article? If it is an article on schools in new Germany, can I expect to find contrasts made between old East and West German systems? Problems of overcrowding? When you read in your native language, you approach each text with certain expectations. Similar expectations should be brought to any new text, in any language. Now read a second time again without a dictionary. This time read looking for the main point in each paragraph. Skip words you do not know and see how much of the general idea you recognize. Fill in as much as you can by guessing. Are your expectations being met? Now go back a third time without the dictionary, and read sentence by sentence. Use your grammar skills to help you identify the types of information given in each sentence: who, what, when, where, and why. You should be able to identify these types of information, even without knowing the meaning of particular words. What is the most important new information in each sentence? As you go through this process, keep track of recurring words and phrases that seem to be important to the discussion. Notice that you are understanding more this time, even without looking up any new words. After reading the article three times, use your dictionary to learn the meaning of five to ten new words that are important to understanding the subject. You will now understand the point of the text and its main arguments. You will have also figured out how the arguments were developed, the important terminology used in this language to discuss the topic, and in the meantime, you will have actively used important language acquisition skills the same skills you used to learn to read in your native language.

7 VI. Vocabulary building: If you are trying to build vocabulary do not do it by memorizing words list culled alphabetically from a dictionary. Instead do two things: 1) try to remember words that are grouped according to a common theme (foods, articles of clothing, types of buildings, etc.); 2) deepen your memory of the object and construct a sentence in the foreign language which includes the new word. VII. Use of the language laboratory: Students in chemistry or physics would never think of trying to master those scientific subjects without using the laboratory facilities provided. The same point should be used for a foreign language. Use the language laboratory frequently and conscientiously. Even if you find it naturally easier to read than to hear a language, increased capacity in the latter function will enable you to acquire control of the language more rapidly. VIII. Language acquisition and learning disabilities: There is a small number of persons who cannot acquire at least moderate proficiency in a foreign language due to severe disability. Persons who are profoundly deaf or would have suffered severe head trauma may have special difficulty in commanding a foreign language, at least in spoken dimension. However, it is rare to find students who cannot acquire at least some facility in a foreign language because it involves so many varied functions: speaking, listening, reading, writing, and grammatical manipulation. It is quite unusual to find persons severely handicapped in all or most of the above areas.