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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 121 of 123 03 August 2008 at 3:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are two ways to learn a language correctly.
A) be aware of your mistakes and learn from them; B) don't make any mistakes in the first place.
Oh yes. Thinking too much about what you're going to say kills spontaneity. That's why I prefer option B. But being happy to speak wrong(*) is a short-term survival tactic, it is not an effective learning technique. If you don't need to do it to -- literally -- survive, then I don't see any reason to do it. This is what I like about Michel Thomas (the original courses (**)) -- by not giving you a choice, he makes sure you never have to think about what to say, and it's not easy to go far wrong. Even if you do make a mistake you know immediately. This idea is not unique to MT -- even in many communicative methods, there is a controlled practise stage where it is next to impossible to make a mistake before moving onto the free practise (ie uncontrolled) task. Unfortunately, these controlled practise sessions are too repetitive and become mechanical tasks (change one word in a model sentence) rather than linguistic ones (produce a natural(istic) utterance). So while you're right about not getting too self-concious, I think there's a much better way to do it than you propose -- and that is simply to learn well. (*) "Speak wrong" in the sense of "not employ grammar", rather than "make the odd mistake". Making one or two mistakes is fine, and we do all need to accept this, but if everything is a mistake.... (**) Michel never teaches two things at once. Traditional teaching supplies, for example, the conjugation of a verb for a single tense, all persons, in a table. Michel teaches you I, then you and so on. This means that you don't end up mentally consulting a list. Some of the new teachers have failed to grasp the full significance of this -- in the Russian course, "fsyoh" and "fsyeh" (everyone and everything) are introduced simultaneously, and now I have no idea which is which! In the Japanese course, "kore", "sore" and "are" (this, that and yonder) are taught together, and I've been getting them slightly confused, just like the students on the CD. Also, Michel was pretty rigorous in correcting pronunciation. He didn't do it "big bang" style, but fixed the most important things first. He would never accept incorrect stress, but Natasha (the Russian teacher) did, and Helen (the Japanese teacher) doesn't press the matter enough with mispronunciation of long vowels as short. Even if you don't like the rest of Michel's style, you have to recognise how accurately his students produce new and complicated sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6264 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 122 of 123 07 August 2008 at 5:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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The American director Joseph Losey lived in France for a long time and made some of his films there. He never learned French even though some of his films are in French. Apparently, he did not want to do something he could not be good at right away, and nobody starts out fluent or word-perfect in a foreign language. I think if someone like him had been willing to speak bad French at first, he could have gone on to become fluent later. But he never took the first step on the journey of a thousand miles.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 123 of 123 07 August 2008 at 6:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I largely agree with what you said, but there's another aspect which he tends to suggest getting wrong: grammatical gender. I consider this a non-trivial mistake to bake into an English speaker's head right at the beginning. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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