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The g-word and finding patterns
The days of the so-called "grammar-translation method" for learning foreign languages are long gone. This method was mostly devised to teach classical, dead languages, like Latin and Ancient Greek, when they were still taught to many children in the course of elementary or secondary education. It consisted of memorizing grammatical rules, reciting paradigms ad nauseam, and painstakingly translating famous, and often boring, sentences and paragraphs. I can still hear my older sister reciting the Latin first declension in bed, stella, stellae, stalae, stellam, stella, stellae... stellae, stellarum, stellis, stellas, stellae, stellis, early in the morning before going to school. Not such a pleasant way to be woken up in the morning... While the grammar-translation method made some sense when it came to learning languages which one was never intended to speak in the first place, it was bound for failure when it was applied to learning living languages. Generations of bored young students hated French because of it, and slammed the door on their foreign language classes incapable of uttering a word, especially a practical, useful one, in a language they had "studied" for years. So it's no wonder these traumatized students struck back when they grew up, and came up with ways to learn languages that were more fun, but, often, also directly opposite of the grammar-translation method. Grammar became a "g-word." We now know much more about how languages are learned than we did in the forties, fifties, or sixties, and we also know that there isn't one, full-proof, miracle language learning method. "Methods" are best combined for different purposes, and as a learner, you need a variety of strategies for learning, all depending on your age, motivation, goals, learning style, context of learning, language you're learning, and so on. Language is a system of patterns and it is quite natural for language-learning humans to want to look for such patterns. Children do it intuitively, but adult language learners need and like to do it a bit more consciously. In fact, because of their more advanced memorization and analytical skills, they have an advantage in language learning over children. So, this month's simple, language learning tip is to look for patterns in the language you're learning and to try to understand how they differ from those found in your native language. While this will not teach you how to order food in a restaurant, it will help you master certain aspects of the language better and, eventually, make you a more fluent speaker and writer. Those places where a language differs from the familiar patterns of your own language are where we have the most difficulty, and, not surprisingly, are also the places where we tend to make the most mistakes. Tags: grammar-translation method, language learning methods, newsletter, patterns
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