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Is Grammar-Translation under-rated ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5946 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 7 20 February 2014 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Grammar-Translation is a very old teaching method that involves applying a series of grammar rules to translate between your native and the target language. It was the primary method for teaching Latin, and was subsequently used for other foreign languages. It has a number of fatal flaws having no listening or speaking practice, and no training in how to converse in the language. As a language teaching method it was later subsequently replaced by immersive and communicative task based learning.
However, it does have one key strength. You will learn to produce grammatically correct sentences in the target language. It seems odd that people could leave school, and not be able to string a sentence together in a foreign language. With grammar translation that shouldn’t happen, as you’ll get plenty of practice going from your native into the foreign language. The method is still in use in some language product such as the Living series, Hugo in three months, and the Charles Duff Beginners courses. Though old fashioned I’ve found the Living German course very good at teaching you to generate your own German sentences. What are your thoughts ? Is Grammar-Translation under-rated ? Edited by DaraghM on 20 February 2014 at 12:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7000 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 7 20 February 2014 at 11:38am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if Grammar-Translation is under-rated, but when I was thinking that my personal study program
may be missing that element, I got some comfort when I thought, FSI has a bunch of sentence translation drills. They aren't quite the same thing, but one upside of FSI translation drills is that they are spoken and have to be done without a lot of thought. That is, they facilitate automaticity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5203 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 3 of 7 20 February 2014 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like the grammar-translation method very much and kind of "collect" 19th century primers/manuals/handbooks. There's a nice feeling of tidiness about them, "here's a rule, here's some vocabulary, here's somes short sentences to translate".
That being said, I think that what you see as is key strength is also its major weakness. You learn to produce grammatically correct sentences but this focus on correctness and attention to morphological details rather impedes active/oral use of the language. I think it's not a problem on the long run, i. e. building first a solid basis with a grammar-translation method and only then moving on to active use of the language is fine, but if the goal is to use the language, then the grammar-translation is not enough. There's a related debate in the teaching of Latin/Ancient Greek about the usefulness of writing in/speaking the language studied. For some this is anathema as "bad Latin/Greek" would be produced ! In my opinion, this is missing the whole point, which is not (primarily) to produce correct Latin/Greek but to develop a feeling for the language. This debate has been going on since the Renaissance when (Ciceronian) Classical Latin came to be seen by some as a kind of "holy" language, not to be defiled by people using it and (horresco referens) making mistakes in it. Some school-teachers forbade their pupils to use Latin outside of the class-room (and some even banished spoken Latin altogether). This reverence for pure Classical Latin did more harm than good I think since it removed it from the daily life sphere and prevented people from gaining complete, active mastery of the language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5327 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 20 February 2014 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Summary: I suppose it's OK as an intensive activity, as long as it doesn't create counterproductive links between an L1 and an L2—but I personally find that intensive activities are minor aid to extensive activities, where the language becomes a part of me.
Long form: I do some translation exercises with ancient Egyptian, but only because my level is so low that I can't really do anything else. If I'm going to look up every third word in the dictionary, why not write out a nice gloss and translation? It looks pretty in my log. :-) But in French, once I reached a level where I could actually read books, I couldn't imagine wasting time translating things into English. What's the point of translating a text when I can just look at it and read most of it? If there's some unknown words, or a strange verb ending, I can just look that up, and save myself time by leaving the rest untranslated. I think there are two major issues with grammar-translation, at least for me: 1. It privileges intensive activities (getting every detail right) over extensive activities (going for sheer volume). Now, I personally find that intensive activities are very useful, but only on an occasional basis. If I spend so much time on them that I neglect my extensive activities, I wind up knowing a bunch of grammar rules, but I have no "organic" feel for how the language works. For me, one of the most important parts of language learning is taking the stuff I can kinda sorta read, and solidifying that by massive exposure. And intensive techniques like grammar-translation are of little use there. Intensive techniques help with decipherment, not fluency. 2. For at least a few people, translation is poison. I'm one of them. French is not English, and if I build strong links in my head between the two languages, it does horrible things to my French. I loose out on the nuances of French words, I choose French prepositions based on English rules, and I find myself trying to translate back to English while listening (which is far too slow to be useful). Instead, I need to create a space in my head for French, all by itself, and "shut down" my English as much as possible. I have reason to believe that I'm unusual in this—this may not apply to most people. Everybody's brain is different. I imagine that other people benefit quite a bit from grammar-translation. As intensive activities go, it seems like a perfectly reasonable one, at least in moderation, and at the lower levels—or as a refresher at upper levels. But I know that I won't get any kind of real "feel" for Egyptian, however, until I bootstrap myself up to the point where I can more-or-less read extensively (using parallel texts if necessary), and until I start to go for more volume, saying, "Ah, forget the details." There are some nice people on another forum who are really into grammar-translation, and they keep telling me I should put in two years of dedicated study before I even attempt to read the Westcar papyrus. But you know, it's a fun text, and I can already more-or-less read it if I'm willing to fudge a few parts, keep an English translation at hand, and use reference books as needed. Who cares if I sometimes mix up the seven different sDm=f forms? If my experience with French is any guide, that sort of stuff will sort itself out eventually, and there's no harm in fudging it for a while. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5203 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 5 of 7 20 February 2014 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I've seen quite a few people doing this kind of thing with Egyptian/Latin/Ancient Greek. They were really good at grammar but completely lost when it came to reading an actual text. They had focused so much on rules and perfectly deciphering isolated sentences that they had no feel at all for the language and how reading and understanding a text is as much a question of context than of grammatical analysis. That is, I think, a pitfall of the grammar-translation method, some people remain forever stuck in the analysis-translation mode and never get to the point of actually reading. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6498 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 20 February 2014 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I learned Latin from a teacher who was the epithome of grammar-translation pedagogics. And I forgot my Latin as soon as I stopped reading Latin texts. But the emphasis on learning grammatical rules and reinforcing these rules by applying them on translations in both directions turned out to be useful when I later I started out learning Latin with the intention of making it an active language. For instance I found that I hardly had to relearn the irregular verbs because they all where stored for later use somewhere at the bottom of my memory.
I have of course thought about this, and the obvious conclusion is that grammar-translation can't stand alone, but on the other hand also that it does its limited job efficiently. My main grievance is with the notion of translation itself. As emk and others point out you simply don't have the same semantical and grammatical structures in any pair of languages, and making a translation in exquisite English from a Latin original will mostly mean that you have to smash the Latin structures to smithereens and put the pieces falsely together to make them fit the irrelevant Procrustes bed of English. That is in my view absurd and unnecessary, unless your goal is to learn to make literary translations for the benefit of those who can't be bothered to read the Latin originals. Either you do hyperliteral translations (in some cases with added comments when an implied meaning has to be spelled out) ... or you can just as well drop the translations from target to base language. In the other direction the translations should of course be 'good Latin', though I personally would prefer aiming for a more natural and less stilted language than that found in some classical texts. Or in other words: it is better to make ten simple sentences than it is to construct one long and contrived sentence using all the most complicated features of the language. With time you will learn enough Latin to understand the Eneid, but it is better to wait a little longer and then in the meantime acquire a language which actually can be written and spoken by you - even if that's a simpler Latin language than the one used in the second Catilinarean. Edited by Iversen on 20 February 2014 at 2:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6704 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 7 20 February 2014 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Under-rated or not, it may be one of very few ways to learn the language in the first place. There are no podcasts, audiobooks, comic books, crime novels, sitcoms etc. for dead languages.
Apart from Ancient Greek which I devoted some time to in the early 1990s, my only experience with grammar-translation is my current adventures with Old Irish, where we also focus on translating from the target language, rather than into. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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