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Do you speak the TL you learned at school | ||
Tags: School Education | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5596 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes  Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 33 of 53 16 August 2012 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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In high school I had two years of Latin followed by two years of French. Latin was mainly
reading (translating excerpts from Julius Caesar) and writing but very very little speaking. It helped with my English vocabulary and whetted by interest to learn other languages. I did three years of Italian in university:the first two years were conversational and the third year was reading Dante's Divina Comedia in the original Italian. The class lectures in the third year were in Italian. French was much more conversational.I enjoyed it and did well but recall one unpleasant incident when I first started. Two "friends" copied my homework. We got caught because,as the teacher said, I used verb tenses known to me and God alone. I have been studying French on my own, now, many many years later. I am surprised at how much I was able to recall and how much came back to me. I must add that I have reached a much higher level of fluency in French on my own than I ever did with formal instruction. I would suspect others here have had a similar experience. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5788 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 34 of 53 16 August 2012 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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I tend to agree with John Holt about this: if you want kids to speak a language, then
send them somewhere were they speak the language (not necessarily abroad) and let them talk to people. His point is that people are not very good at learning something because it may prove useful one day in the future. They learn brilliantly what they want to know now. I would add that IMO children are even worse than adults in that respect . At school I wanted good grades in my TL. I got them (I got a 2 = a B in most systems), but I couldn't speak the TL. Nowadays I want to learn the language. It's a completely different thing. I think I read somewhere (possibly one of Holt's books?) that in Summerhill the teachers, when they needed to speak without the children understanding, communicated in German and that they had to end the practice because the kids were learning German. Edited by Random review on 16 August 2012 at 5:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5339 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 35 of 53 16 August 2012 at 6:31am | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps that is the key to success. We always spoke English when we did not want the kids to understand, and they are now both at the top of their class in English. I guess we should talk more often in German in front of them, but either because my husband and I are more insecure in German, or because we less often see the need to say things that they are not supposed to understand, we do not seem to do that very often. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4627 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 36 of 53 16 August 2012 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A lot of people say you can only learn a language when you are young and it's true that little kids seem to soak up languages like a sponge, but I don't think the teenage years are ideal for language learning. Adolescents can be terribly self-conscious about speaking another language and at that age they are also forming their own opinions, leading many to reject the notion that learning a language could be potentially useful. We can make a special case for mass-media languages, even the most grudging of youngsters will see the potential there. But if a typical 15-year-old boy in the UK is told he should study French, or 14-year-old Swedish girl is expected to apply herself to Spanish.....they would take a lot of convincing. Obviously there are exceptions; a few kids will genuinely love languages and there will be an academic top-end that will study whatever is put in front of them at school, but the majority are much harder to reach.
If I tell fellow English speakers who aren't linguistically minded, that I'm able to spontaneously converse with native speakers in another language, a very common reaction is "Oh I wish I'd tried harder in (insert language) class at school" Edited by beano on 16 August 2012 at 2:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4552 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 37 of 53 17 August 2012 at 5:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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I learned French to a rather good level, and I would say I can read almost any material
in French and understand the gist of it, as well as write about topics such as philosophy. My Achilles heel is my listening comprehension, which I readily admit is ghastly. I can, however, hold a conversation with a native speaker if they have sufficient patience to repeat things slowly with me. I don't quite remember why, but in Elementary school I suddenly developed a desire to learn French upon learning how to count in French. I took French in Middle school all the way up to High school culminating in an independent study AP French class, so I've spent five years of my life studying and being graded on my performance in French. I was always one of the top students, but frequently frustrated at my lack of understanding when it came to things like popular songs and such. I don't know how it happened, but there eventually came a point where I could read pretty well in French. My knowledge of Spanish gave me quite an unfair advantage in that field, but without it I don't know how far I would have gone in French studies. Perhaps Swedish would have been a better language for a beginner like me, with fewer conjugations and more cognates. Then again, the comparative lack of resources would have been a hindrance... questions we can never answer, I suppose. I tell people, with a bit of timidity that yes, I do speak French. I also say that I speak to some level, Russian, but I always try to say that I am still learning. French is something I've kept on the back-burner, to use the stove metaphor, by reading French crime novels every now and then (I'm not sure why every fiction novel I find in French appears to be a crime novel, but there you have it). Undoubtedly my level of active production has gone down from the years when I was all about the French, although I reckon I'm not terribly bad. I don't know how to encourage people to speak a foreign language in school. Students who reach, say, French III, IV, or AP French should be spoken to entirely in French, with level of complexity depending on how advanced the course is. I think it would have been very helpful if my teachers had used things like graded readers. We did use a few of them, but I remember them being more headache inducing than confidence builders. One thing I do wish was around was AP French Literature. Unfortunately the year I departed from middle school marked the end of that class. I would have been very interested in taking it - the French are, after all, renowned for their literature, and being able to discuss it in French with similarly interested classmates would have been a dream. My language studies are unfortunately much more solitary now, and one of the things I miss from those school days was the companionship that was sometimes to be had. I shall soon be embarking on a course for a language I already know to some degree. Why? I believe I would benefit from having to start over from the beginning - it would be humbling, I would have the opportunity to correct fossilized mistakes, and it certainly wouldn't do my GPA any harm. I'm interested in seeing how college compares to grade school when it comes to language classes. I don't quite know what to expect. The class is on the verge of being canceled, so I do quite hope it pulls through so I can continue my dual Russian/Swedish studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5224 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 38 of 53 17 August 2012 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Seems like the consistent theme for success here is making the student want or need to communicate with people; whether that is by summer school, TL instruction or whatever.
I agree that the modern syllabi in schools, in the UK at least, are more geared towards actual communication than my schooling which is positive but fewer and fewer children are opting to take language past the compulsory phase. I don't have a solution for that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4833 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 39 of 53 18 August 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
:-) Didn't the English upper classes use to resort to French when they didn't want their servants to know what they were talking about? "pas devant les domestiques" http://everything2.com/title/devant+les+domestiques
:-) I'd like to have given you an extra vote for that alone :-) Edited by montmorency on 18 August 2012 at 5:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5788 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 40 of 53 18 August 2012 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hmmm, I'd love to more about this. If they did it regularly then I'd be amazed if many of those servants with a job that allowed them time to "gossip" (to use the word from the article you link) in the first place (probably a minority) didn't start to pick up a passive knowledge of French. The article claims that by saying "not in front of the staff" in French rather than English they avoided drawing attention to the fact they were talking about sensitive information, but as someone near the bottom of the working class hierarchy and therefore used to seeing bosses exchange looks that mean "we'll talk about this later" I can guarantee you that they'll very quickly have figured out that the use of French meant something was being hidden. We may not know WHAT is being kept from us (although it's often possible to work it out from context), but trust me, we know when something is being hidden from us. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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