22 lines
5.9 KiB
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22 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
Bad at languages?
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<p>I had a very international childhood – lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona). The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen. </p>
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<p><span id="more-3985"></span></p>
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<p>OK, maybe 2.5 languages would be a better count; I never thought I was very fluent in spoken French, though I could read it well enough (in the late 1960s, when the available English renditions of the <cite>Asterix</cite> comics were pretty bad, I translated them myself for fun). I was a crib bilingual in Spanish, though, and my Italian became passable. </p>
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<p>This had some interesting though minor effects on my later life. One is that, like many crib bilinguals, I am much better at hearing and correctly reproducing phonological features outside the inventory of my native language than most monolinguals. (There’s recent research showing that crib bilinguals organize the language-processing circuitry in their brains slightly differently.)</p>
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<p>When I traveled in Asia I found this gave me a useful knack. Chinese and others who deal with Westerners often take Western nicknames to, er, make themselves pronounceable; I, noticing this, developed the habit of asking them for their real name and then pronouncing it back at them. This invariably produced delighted smiles.</p>
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<p>(Note: This doesn’t work in Japan, Japanese phonology is too simple. You need to go somewhere that pronouncing the language is actually difficult for English-speakers.)</p>
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<p>OK, so, crib bilingual, spoke three languages besides English, good ear (like Frodo) for foreign sounds. Here’s the funny part. <em>I thought I was bad at languages.</em></p>
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<p>The handful of polyglots in the audience are now laughing at me, I know. As well they should; I didn’t begin to get a clue until I tested out of my French-language requirement at college. Um, that was six years after studying it and not having used it at all.</p>
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<p>But I didn’t really clue in until I started doing my second round of traveling as Famous Internet Guy in the late 1990s. And noticed that when I was with a group of monolinguals, I was pretty much always the one who clued in on street signs and bits of the local language the fastest.</p>
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<p>I think it really hit home when I visited Warsaw for a Linux conference. Polish is not closely related to any language I’d ever spoken, yet…after a day on the ground I was starting to get bits of it. And the other visitors – weren’t. Indeed, they behaved as though it never occurred to them that they could, as though the language barrier was impermeable without concentrated and effortful study.</p>
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<p>Yes, go ahead, chuckle at my naivete. But it was a bit of a wrench when I realized that <em>they</em> were the normal ones. It’s my ability to absorb languages through my skin that is unusual in an adult. (Children, of course, do it routinely.)</p>
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<p>The point of this rant is actually the question that preoccupied me for a bit once I thought through my observations and did a little research, enough to realize how very mistaken I had been. <em>How in the hell did I develop the belief that I was bad at languages?</em></p>
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<p>Because what I found out, of course, is that this is the history and behavior of somebody who is really <em>good</em> at languages – a natural polyglot. Crib bilinguals tend to be like this more than others, but it’s a tendency rather than a rule.</p>
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<p>This, too, made a (minor) difference in my life. By the time I visited Taiwan a couple years into the new century I was confident enough to set myself the goal of learning to hear and reproduce the tones in Mandarin Chinese during the few days I’d be there. And I succeeded, though that’s not really the point I’m driving at here.</p>
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<p>No. The point is, I did eventually figure out why I thought I was bad at languages for so long. It was because I was bad at <em>language classes.</em> Found them boring, didn’t get good grades at them, got shut of them as soon as I could, and felt greatly relieved when I tested high enough to fulfill the foreign-language requirement at Penn.</p>
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<p>So my conclusion is this: the foreign-language instruction methods in our schools suck horribly. I mean, really horribly. I think it must constitute something near a worst-case <em>definition</em> of suck when you take a crib bilingual with a good ear and a strong knack in one end and spit him out the other with a belief that he’s bad at languages so fixed that it lasts nearly thirty years. </p>
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<p>What makes this funnier, in a way, is that I cultivated an interest in linguistics over those three decades and <em>still</em> thought I was bad at languages…</p>
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<p>I don’t really know what can be done about this. But I started reading <a href="http://www.fluentin3months.com/polyglot-project/">The Polyglot Project</a> recently, motivated by a conjecture that I’d find I’m more like those people – the sort who eat languages like bonbons – than like most monolinguals. And indeed it seems that I am, but that’s not my point either.</p>
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<p>My point is more like this: Jesus H. Christ and his bastard brother Harry on a pogo stick, why isn’t the educational establishment <em>listening</em> to these people? What in the <em>hell</em> are we doing numbing childrens’ brains to insensibility with the 413th repetition of a textbook drill about la plume de ma tante when it is utterly clear that immersion and motivation through native-speaker materials is both more effective and more fun?</p>
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<p>I know, I know…our educational system is very broken in general, I shouldn’t be surprised at yet another symptom. I managed it, though; thus, this rant. The best I can hope is that it might set somebody to thinking.</p>
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