LANGUAGE LEARNING REFLECTIONS

I love learning foreign languages! When it comes to learning a foreign language, for me, listening and modeling are key. Learning the elemental sounds - the basic and unique units of the spoken language – is the most important and this even supercedes connecting meaning to the sounds. This is not so easy, since there are often no direct equivalents to the sounds we have in English. When first learning a foreign language, I will begin with the basic phrases like “Hello”, “Yes”, “No” and “Thank you”. But later on, when learning vocabulary, I will sometimes acquire words without understanding their meanings right away. It sometimes happens that with street names, or names of cities, or towns, or people’s names for example, I will have an “Ah-HA!” moment later on, and understand that the word is not only just a name, like “John”, but it actually means something, too, like “Rose” or “Sunday”.
I also find that MUSIC is a great way to learn languages. After learning individual words and phrases, music really helps with learning intonation and patterns within sentences, and helps me model them authentically. I find that there is an amazing retention factor to music. And of course if you can sing in a foreign language, native speakers are always impressed and will be much more open to talking and communicating with you.
My foreign language strengths are speaking and communicating, rather than reading and writing. Writing Kanji in Japanese is very challenging, and after years of study, unfortunately, I still only have really learned the very basic characters. I am not a visual learner – it is a real challenge for me, for example to read a Japanese newspaper, despite the fact I have studied Japanese for a number of years. The characters all start to look alike after a while!
For me, the difficulty arises when attaching meaning to the visual characters. Japanese characters are extremely complicated with some containing up to 20 or more strokes! In addition, each character in Japanese has an “on” or “kun” reading – the Japanese or the original Chinese pronunciation, so each Japanese character can be pronounced in more than one way. Consequently, it regularly happens that I can read a sentence in Japanese and understand it, but not be able to read it aloud, because I have not connected the visual to the pronunciation.
When learning a language, I tend to “chunk” information, clumping words and phrases together and learn them as one unit of meaning. It is difficult - nearly impossible to dissect each and every word in a sentence and define each word in before speaking, so “chunking” is a much more effective and efficient a way to process information.
In addition, when first learning a language, my strategy is to seek out kids to talk to. For me, children are the most effective teachers. Children use simple “baby-language” and will laugh when you make a mistake, not correct you and try and explain the mistake as adults do. Acquiring language from children comes in a low-anxiety environment, where you can learn and have fun without the fear of making mistakes.
As I wander through the Borders and Barnes and Noble through their foreign language sections, I am always amused at some of the titles of the books - “Learn Italian in 10 minutes a day!” , “The Fast Way to German”, and “Easy Japanese”, which I think is an oxymoron. In reality, no one can learn a language literally overnight, and it takes a lot of practice and diligence to learn to read, speak and write a foreign language.
I met an elderly gentleman few years ago as I was beginning to learn Japanese, an American, who spoke amazing Japanese. He told me that it is easy to learn the basics in Japanese, but it is very difficult to learn Japanese well. It is my constant goal, to slowly, over time, learn grow and develop my foreign language capacities.