Text 21416, 81 rader
Skriven 2008-10-01 08:23:34 av Roy Witt (1:397/22)
  Kommentar till text 21395 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Languages
=================
01 Oct 08 08:16, Robert Bashe wrote to Roy Witt:

 RW>> Maybe you had a barrier to learning it.

 RB> To the contrary... I was enthusiastic, intentionally isolated myself
 RB> from English speakers and associated only with native Germans. That
 RB> naturally made the learning curvre steep, but my attitude was that it
 RB> was the only way to really learn the language.

That's a good example.

 RW>> She didn't. I would think that a person who teaches German at a
 RW>> university must have a better grasp on the language than even some
 RW>> Germans. It would be like the American English you see written here
 RW>> sometimes. Bad grammar, spelling, etc...

 RB> Funny you should say that... I've seen very poor English _and_ very
 RB> poor German from native English/German speakers in the course of my
 RB> translation experience, and I've often enough had to correct the
 RB> German.

That's what I meant. You'll see English grammar here that isn't what they
teach in English 101. It's not that the user doesn't know, since you can't
graduate from high school without a passing grade in English. It's just
habitual misuse among their peers that makes it hard to use English
correctly.

 RB> In fact, there have been German texts from people whose style
 RB> I was familiar with, that were so bad that I had to explain their
 RB> meaning to native Germans.

There are English texts with the same problem.

 RB> The point being that experience and a certain feel for the language
 RB> counts more in language ability than merely being a teacher.

That's where you're in error. Nancy is an English teacher, which means
that she attends summer sessions where English teachers are given
refresher courses and they learn new methods to teach it. Not to mention
that it was a requirement that they attend a 5th year in College as a Grad
STudent to become an English teacher in a school of higher learning. She's
about a hair's breadth away from a PHD.

 RB> Please don't simply assume that someone teaching a foreign language
 RB> at a university in the States is automatically a linguistic genius -

I'm not assuming that they are genius' in their teachings, just that they
do teach it and have enough on the ball to be able to interpret other
languages. One does not have to be a perfectionist to know the difference.

 RB> I've seen enough examples to the contrary to know that's not
 RB> necessarily the case.

 RW>> Rose Stone, or is that Well Stone, claims to be able to teach you to
 RW>> be a conversationalist in a foriegn language in weeks.

 RB> Yeah, I've read claims like that too. What they amount to is an
 RB> expensive total immersion course and at the end you speak the foreign
 RB> language a little like Babelfish ;-)

That's about it...

 RB> Cheers, Bob

 RB> P.S. You know, with all this talk about learning languages, I
 RB> sometomes wonder whether I'm a linguistic ignoramus - it took me a
 RB> full two years in Germany before I could read my first book in
 RB> German, and even than I had to look up every second word - or whether
 RB> a lot of the claimed "instant success stories" are just a "trifle"
 RB> exaggerated. For me, learning a foreign language fluently was bloody
 RB> hard work and took many years - even with "total immersion". But
 RB> maybe my definition of "fluent" is pretty strict too...

Probably.

                R\%/itt



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