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| Foreign Language Study Tips |
A personal aside:I learned Italian and some French on my own, after exceptionally painful experiences with traditional college teaching of German and Russian. Here are some of the processes that helped me:When I was a student, I worked part-time as a proofreader for a major daily newspaper. One of the full-time staff was said to know over 8 languages. I asked him if he could give me some pointers, as I was struggling at college. He was currently teaching himself Turkish so he sketched out the method he was using:
"First, I go through a dictionary and learn 10-20 words a day until I have a working vocabulary of 800 to 1,000 words. (I asked him how he knew which words to choose - he replied "after a while you get to know". Thanks, I said)
"Then I sit down with a novel and a dictionary and translate a page a day
"Then I read a contemporary play, because you find many ideomatic expressions in plays
"Then I hang out in the language section of the public library and when I see someone reading a book in the language, I try to start a conversation. Sometimes I am able to find a person who is willing to trade English instruction for conversation in their language."
Wonderful, I said.
Years later, when my wife and I were living in Italy (which is another story), I worked for an English language daily. The editorial staff were either Americans or British and the typesetters and printers were Italian. One night each week I worked the late shift with the printers, waiting until the first issues came off the press to check for typos in headlines, to see that photos went with the right captions, and that stories that jumped to inside pages actually made the leap. The shift supervisor was a pleasant man from the Abruzzi region who made a real effort to help me learn Italian.
His method was very simple. He told me stories about his childhood, the village he came from, his family; then asked me to do the same. Naturally there were a fair number of similarities, so I could repeat many of the words he used in telling my stories. He patiently corrected my flawed grammar.
After a year in Rome we moved to Milan where I was a foreign correspondent for McGraw-Hill. I needed to improve my Italian in a hurry. I started by using a variant of the technique suggested by my multilingual friend. Instead of a novel, I clipped a wire-service (such as the Associated Press) news article from the International Herald Tribune and compared it with the same article printed in a major Italian newspaper. I found this this technique an almost effortless way to build my understanding of the language. I made flash cards for words that troubled me.
Later, I would read reviews of books, art exhibits, and concerts for they are written in an entirely different style.
We found a college student who was interested in exchanging language instruction and I would clip articles from newspapers and magazines, with passages underlined that I didn't understand. She would translate those for me and I found myself going to the dictionary far less often.
If you would like to try the method of reading a text in English and then the same text translated into another language, we have taken a UNESCO press release and presented it in both English and French.
Now try it on your own. Look at The Cairo Conference Home Page presented by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. This document is also in English and French. Further down on the page, however is a gopher link to documents in English, French and Spanish.
- Print out both versions
- Read the English
- Read the French fairly quickly and circle every word you don't understand
- Starting from the first paragraph, read a paragraph in Englishfollowed by the same paragraph in French. Make a flash card for every word you don't know. Find that word in the English paragraph and write the English word on the back of the flash card.
- Go through the press release paragraph by paragrah as in 4).
- Reread the press release in English. Reread it in French. Underline those parts of the sentence in French where word order is different from that in English.
- Go through your flash cards looking up each word in the dictionary to get a richer sense of the meaning of the word.
You will be pleasantly surprised at the number of words of a useful vocabulary you will understand. Look up troublesome words in the dictionary and make flash cards for study and review.
For another approach to learning a foreign language look at Tips on Studying a Foreign Language from U. Of Texas, Austin, Learning Skills Center.
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