American Language Aquisition (What is Wrong with it)

[lydamorehouse]

As many of you know, I am a member of the International Pen Friends.  I also collected addresses of people who like exchanging letters via a strange cultural phenomenon known as Friendship books. So, occasionally, letters will arrive to my house from virtual strangers around the world.

Today, I got a letter from the Czech Republic. 

There is a line from the letter that really struck me about the difference between how Americans learn languages vs. the rest of the world. My new friend writes, "My first pen pal was a Russian girl. I was about 10 years old and I remember that my mum helped me to create first sentences in Russian." IN RUSSIAN. At ten, I was still learning English, you know?  

One of the reasons that I joined IPF a few years ago is because I had a vague memory of a writing assignment in fourth grade (or thereabouts) where we all practiced formatting personal letters, snail mail. Our teacher gave us each an address taken from an International Pen Friend list and had us write what I now call 'letter of introduction" to a potential friend. No one ever suggested that we learn to write in the language they were speaking at home. Instead, we were just supposed to be learning a little something about another country and practicing letter writing. Because I was probably ten years old, it never sunk in that the other person WHO WAS MY AGE was reading a foreign language in order to reply. 

I wasn't even offered a foreign language option until MANY YEARS LATER, in junior high school, where my choices were: Spanish or French.

I foolishly picked French because I thought a senior trip to Paris sounded cooler than a senior trip to Barcelona. No one ever suggested to me that maybe Spanish would help me speak to my fellow Americans... and a decently large portion of the rest of the world, as well. Although my French teacher was actually Canadian, so I guess there was that. (True fact, when we did go to Paris in high school Reagan was president and so when people asked us if  we were Canadian, we just said: YES.  Our accent had people guessing that, anyway.)

To be fair to me, I practiced my French in all sorts of weird ways, including recreationally using it while carrying on a massive missive LARP-fic with my friend Mary, with whom I was pretending to be the Scarlet Pimpernel. (We passed notes in our classes. Bonus, when it was in French, we got in less trouble because our teachers assumed we were doing some assignment for another class.)

However, despite all that (and several years of college French) none/very little of my French has stuck with me. I would be hard pressed to write to a French pen pal in French right now. In fact, I often start out my letters of introduction with an apology. I'm sorry that I am an American and can only write to you in English.... and then I usually promise to make it up to my new friend by being entertaining as FUCK.(Though I don't usually say it that way because the IPF group is a surprisingly conservative lot.)

My point, though, is that there is something WRONG about how we learn languages as Americans.

Obviously, we should be starting languages earlier, but also... I was never given a good reason to know another language. Mostly, when people tried to sell me on language acquisition they would say things like, "Well, you're going to need to pass a language requirement in university, so you might as well." Or, "Well, if you stay with it, you get to go on a senior trip." I mean, that last one worked to keep me going, for sure. I was all about wanting to travel to Paris.  But having gone, I then had no motivation to keep up with it. One thing all the experts agree on is that as soon as you stop practicing another language, you start losing it.

I guess I wish I were given the opportunity my new Czech friend had. The sense that--at TEN--if I could learn someone else's language I would be a better friend. 

I don't even remember where that first pen friend was from--was it France? (Oh, that would be ironic~) Shawn remembers having a Japanese pen friend and that rang some bells--like maybe I had a Japanese pen friend too? There was a time--I think popularized by the comic strip Peanuts--when pen pals were kind of the rage among my set. But, I was an obsessive saver and chronicler. If a letter came from a pen friend, I probably would have saved it somewhere. I have letters from the boy I met on our trip to France who was from Georgia (another great irony of my life--I went to France and met a high school boy from... not France, but Georgia).  But, I kept a daily journal / diary from sixth grade on, so you'd think I'd have mentioned something. Ah, well.  

Meanwhile, I am still struggling to try to learn Japanese. 

Although speaking of pen friends, I have one who turned me on to a new app called "Drops" that I really like. It's a vocabulary builder. A component I've been missing.

Comments

[quadong]

Language instruction in this country is a disaster. It saddens, but does not surprise, me that my children have nominally been learning Spanish since they were in kindergarten, but speak absolutely no Spanish. As far as I can tell, the teachers treat Spanish as a little secret code that lets you say numbers and colors in a different way, and don't give the students any sense that it's a language used to communicate. I'm sure the Spanish classes are conducted entirely in English. My children can't even answer "Como estas?", and of course being able to give a formulaic answer to that hardly means you can speak the language, either.

This despite the large Spanish-speaking population in our area. Many of the students who aren't in the Spanish classes speak Spanish natively! But there's no mixing of the two populations as far as I can tell. So besides the pedagogy being lacking, there's a segregation problem.

[lydamorehouse]

THIS.

I feel the first part of your comment really hard.

I have taken several in person classes in Japanese as well as tried tapes, etc. and the thing that SHOCKED me is that the only program to teach me, "I'm sorry, I don't understand Japanese" in Japanese was Pimsler. They started with it, which makes the most sense. I mean, if all else fails you have at least communicated that you are unable to converse, which is, ironically, a form of conversation.

"Do you understand me?"
"No, I don't."

That's a beautiful exchange right there. The other thing that I learned from another source (a Japanese language podcast) was how to say, "I'm sorry. Again, please. Slower, please." Which is absolutely dead useful.

What is funny is that I'm not sure in all the years that I learned French was "Je ne parle pas Francaise" ever explicitly taught.

But, yes, vocabulary is kind of the least important part about language.

[sraun]

Irene spent some time learning French in high school, and then took German in college. After the final for the first class, a bunch of the students were hanging around talking, the teacher came out and told Irene, "I finally figured it out. You don't speak German with an American accent, you speak it with a French accent!" Irene replied, "I think it sounds better that way."

And you're right about how Americans learn language. Katie's girls are going to the Twin Cities German Immersion School - I think they're getting better foreign language instruction than anyone who isn't speaking a different language at home.

[lydamorehouse]

I have no idea how well immersion schools work, either, but they're certainly better than nothing at all. Duolingo is very fond of telling me that there are more Americans learning a foreign language via there app than in public schools, but every time I read that I think, "Is that hard? Seems like a low bar there, Duolingo!'

I have tried French, Russian, and now Japanese. My Russian is nearly nonexistent because I only took one semester in college and I managed to miss the day we learned the alphabet. So, I can't even sound Russian out very well.

[mindstalk]

"Obviously, we should be starting languages earlier"

I started Spanish in kindergarden, and grades 1-4; that was mandatory at my school. It was not effective, despite seeming to have a native teacher (Ms. or Mrs. Garcia.)

I think it's imperial privilege. We already speak the global lingua franca; there's simply no coherent incentive to learn anything else. All the non-English countries have a good reason to learn English... though some (most of Europe) are better at it than others (Japan).

[lydamorehouse]

Are you suggesting that many Japanese don't speak English? Or do you mean learn languages besides English? Because I have a Japanese pen pal and my understanding from talking to a lot of people who have traveled to Japan that finding someone who understands English isn't difficult.

However, you're right, of course, about imperial privilege. It's absolutely part of the problem and part of what I implied with my story about how it wasn't even SUGGESTED in fourth grade that I needed to learn another language in order to have a pen pal anywhere in the world.

It's sadly still true.

[mindstalk]

My impression is that while they all study English in school, thus perhaps explaining the taste for bilingual puns (you can count on much of the audience getting it in a way that won't be true in the US), how effectively it's learned is going to be highly variable by student, especially at a speaking level. I've also heard many Japanese are pretty shy about speaking English. Whereas it seems like *all* e.g. Dutch or Swedes below a certain age speak English very well.

[lydamorehouse]

To be fair, the grammatical structure of English and the grammatical structure of Japanese are extremely different. (We don't put our verbs at the end of sentences, for instance.) English is a really hard language to learn if you don't speak a romance or Germanic language, is my impression. Japanese, likewise, is one THE hardest languages for English-speakers to learn.

I'm not arguing your point too finely, of course. Obviously, the ability for people to fully comprehend English is going to vary everywhere in the world.

Some of that comes down to how languages are studied, too, I think. For me, I have focused intensely on listening comprehension. I want to be able to understand when being spoken to. And, if at all possible respond with a simple yes/no or gesture, you know? This is not how languages are taught, however. The focus is rarely on learning to listen. It's almost always on x number of words acquired, etc. I couldn't tell you the Japanese word for tree, but I can often guess through context if I know the word for climb. No one teaches that way--partly because it wouldn't work for everyone, I'd imagine.

[mindstalk]

There's also that Japan is itself a big country (120+ million people) somewhat isolated from anyone else. While one can fairly easily fly to Australia or engage with world media, one can also get through work and non-work life, including lots of travel (from the cold of Hokkaido to tropical Okinawa), without having to deal with English (or any other language) at all. Also your pool of English speakers is mostly other Japanese people, unless you seek out expats or good teachers.

If you're in a small European country, you're much more adjacent to other European countries with their own languages but English as the current lingua franca/Schelling point. So the utility and urgency of learning it well is much higher, which in turn makes the pool of good English speakers much more accessible as well; bit of a circle. (Not to mention the UK itself.) And yeah, grammar and vocabulary overlaps probably help too.