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Learning from non-natives | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 19 13 August 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Many people say the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in as much conversation as possible with native speakers and I mostly agree with that.
But from a formal teaching point of view, it is also widely accepted that natives don't always make the best instructors because they can't explain the finer points of grammar, they don't analyse their native tongue, they simply learned it as a child. I concur with this argument. I often asked my wife why some part of the German language behaved in a certain way, only to met with a shrug of the shoulders and the statement "because it does" I also find it useful to listen to non-native speakers using the target language. They often have the same difficulties or imperfections as me and hearing them tackle an issue in a way I can relate to (especially if they are English speakers) helps me develop strategies. If hear people making common mistakes that I have since sorted out, I find it reinforces the right way to say things in my head. As a non-native speaker of German, hearing obvious mistakes in this language does not make me wince in discomfort. They are often errors I used to make and I understand where the speaker is coming from. Edited by beano on 13 August 2012 at 11:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4527 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 2 of 19 14 August 2012 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I think non native speakers teach grammar, and reading better than natives, because they know the grammar and can read as well as natives, but have the added bonus of knowing which points you'll have problems with, through their own experiences.
However I think speaking and writing are best left to natives because it's harder for a non native to write perfectly naturally as a native would, (how many advanced speakers of a foreign language, who are authors, would feel 100% comfortable writing a book in their L2?), and of course, when they speak they speak with a native accent. Edited by ZombieKing on 14 August 2012 at 12:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6437 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 3 of 19 14 August 2012 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with the OP's reasons.
Natives are better to get a feel of the language. But people who learned it as a second (or later) language can often explain it better. I have also found that asking native speakers (granted, ones that weren't specifically language teachers) questions about their languages are often met with an inability to understand the question. This could be because they've simply never had to think about the language in that way before. Us on this forum, we're not typical cases. We could probably answer logical questions about our native languages because we've spent a lot of time thinking about languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 19 14 August 2012 at 6:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Depends on the language, imo, and on the part of it that non-natives commonly have trouble with. For example, hearing incorrect pronunciation is not the same as hearing non-natives make grammar mistakes. Even if you're aware of a pronunciation mistake, you still risk making it yourself.
Or also, if there's a lot of morphology to learn (like in Finnish), you may well remember the incorrect forms for words you haven't heard yet. Again imo: morphological mistakes are easy to notice (for native speakers), easy to "acquire" and hard to get rid of. Avoid them. So basically: pronunciation mistakes>morphological mistakes>syntactical & other mistakes and the first two kinds should be avoided, whether it's because the language is 'difficult' in this regard (Finnish, Russian or French, Danish) or because the particular non-native speaker is bad at something. Oh and there's another risk: if you don't speak someone's native language, you may assume he/she is using structures/expressions that you don't know while they're actually making mistakes. Edited by Serpent on 14 August 2012 at 6:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 5 of 19 14 August 2012 at 6:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose it's not a simple question (or answer, for that matter), but I'll take a
native speaker over a non-native speaker as a teacher every time, with a caveat: that the teacher's been properly trained in language instruction. And one would hope that that would be the case. This is in contrast to a conversation partner, where you'd simply be practicing your L2. I wouldn't expect a conversation partner to have the same capabilities as a teacher. If I had to choose between a native and non-native speaker, both equally trained in teaching me my L2, I'd take the native speaker. While it comes down to teacher training, the added benefit of being fully native wins, in my opinion. In addition to their training, a native speaker has a lifetime of cultural references that a non- native just doesn't have (or very, very rarely has). R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 19 14 August 2012 at 6:45am | IP Logged | ||
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But quite often the choice is between a non-native, who is a trained teacher, and a native who has no training
at all, and in some cases make mistakes in their native language. Unless their pronunciation is bad, I would go for a local, trained teacher. Putting a native speaker in a classroom does not really make him a teacher. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 7 of 19 14 August 2012 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||
That's very true. But I think things are slowly changing, depending on country and institution. While, for example, you can still find backpackers teaching English, it's becoming less common, and teachers are required to have more training than just being a native speaker. But that's for English, which is taught all over the globe. When I was studying Italian (in San Francisco) I may have been really lucky with my native-Italian speaking instructor, but she was well-trained as a language instructor, too. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 19 14 August 2012 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||
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For me it depends on the instructor, then what's supposed to be taught, and then the level of the students,
My best French teacher was Hungarian but she spent her life from adolescence onward in the Francophonie as her family had fled Hungary during the Uprising in 1956. She then settled on getting her teaching qualifications in Québec (I guess that her family wanted to take no chances and separate themselves from the communists with the Atlantic Ocean. ;-) I've never had a strikingly bad non-native instructor but at my university one of my German instructors was an American who had learned the language fairly late in life. His knowledge of grammar was fine, and he was fluent but he had a detectable non-native accent and some of my classmates who had German relatives and were already fluent found it off-putting. If we also include authors of language courses for independent learners, the record of non-natives compared to natives is mixed for me. For Estonian, Christopher Moseley has the dubious honour of creating the outrageously awful "Colloquial Estonian". I was much better served by "Teach Yourself Estonian" which was written by the natives Leelo Kingisepp and Mare Kistnik. A similar story applies to Finnish where I got the best results from the natives' "Finnish for Foreigners" (Maija-Helikki Aaltio) and "Teach Yourself Finnish" (Terttu Leney). When I tried to use Daniel Abondolo's "Colloquial Finnish" thinking that it'd be a solid way to learn spoken Finnish and complement all of the standard stuff that I was getting in the other courses, man what the heeellll was I thinking. Here was a non-native linguist trying to teach the language's colloquial register complete with unconventional and complicated explanations and nomenclature. Imagine if there were a non-native ESL teacher trying to teach only colloquial English, or arguably foolishly, Black American Vernacular... For Slovak on the other hand, I've got the most mileage out of Oscar Swan's "Beginning Slovak" followed by James Naughton's "Colloquial Slovak". Perhaps the comparison to courses by natives is a bit unfair since when I started learning Slovak, self-instructional courses by natives were very difficult to find outside Slovakia and quite expensive once accounting for shipping and customs. On the other hand, Slovaks were quite impressed by the degree and confidence to which I could express myself with proper grammar after having finished those non-natives' courses. Swan's audio drills helped especially (with native speakers of course; they gave the instructions in English with moderate Slovak accents). In a similar way, the best self-instructional Hungarian course that I've ever used was Jerry Payne's "Colloquial Hungarian" (the new edition by Carol Rounds isn't quite as good) while I was a little disappointed by "Teach Yourself Hungarian" created by the native Zsuzsa Pontifex since she didn't seem to explain the grammar as well. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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