Foreign Language Study: My Perspective

I like foreign languages. They're neat.

I'm certainly not an expert, and I know nothing about linguistics and all that, I just like learning the languages themselves.

Talking about "languages" like this makes me sound like I know 10 languages or something, but I'm not that good (yet?) -- I'm reasonably fluent in Japanese, and I'm currently trying my hand at Korean.

I've also 'dabbled' in a few other languages, in the way you might try an interesting-looking restarant, without any particular intention of eating there for the rest of your life. I've concentrated for a month or two at a time each on Russian and Chinese (the Taiwan/Mainland China version, so that's no help with Kung-Fu movies...) I've also taken a few years of French in school from the 7th through 10th grade, though I showed neither particularly great interest nor proficiency back then. I chose French over Spanish at the time simply because I knew that the comic Tintin was originally in French, and living in Detroit, just across the river from Canada, French radio/TV stations were part of my 12-year old conciousness, while Spanish simply was not. (The name "Detroit" by the way comes from French! "d'etroit" means "narrow", and the Great Lakes get really narrow there, becoming the Detroit River! Wow, bet you didn't know that!)

But back to languages...

When I was in 7th grade also I remember being enthuzed for some reason about taking Latin which was offered at the time, and was terribly disappointed when I wasn't able to do so that year. Then the next year when Latin became a required subject, I'd found I'd totally lost any budding enthusiasm I'd had for the subject, and barely managed to squeak by without failing. So it looks like motivation is a key point here. (:


My real beginning with a foreign language was when, when I was 19 in 1985, I discovered Japanese animation. I decided that if I was going to make sense of any of it, I was going to have to work on the language somehow (there were blessed few English translations around at the time, and nothing comercially available.) I started to hack my way through Katakana, making up my own kana -- phonetics chart, and happily continued from there through the rest of the '80s, all on my own time. I picked up the only kanji dictionary I could find, and character-by-character began making totally ludicrous "translations" for my own benefit.

Over the next few years even though I never formally studied Japanese at a school, my self-study, combined with the neverending flow of new videotapes in Japanese created a pretty effective self-reinforcing study environment, and my broken ratty Japanese eventually became pretty good broken ratty Japanese. (:

When I took the plunge and moved to Japan at age 26 (1992), I started "officially" studying Japanese for the first time at an actual school, and over the next two years there I learned about 10 times as much as I'd learned over the previous seven years. Studying at a school every day certainly was a big point, as was having a Japanese wife (ahem...), but simply living in the country of your language is absolutely the best method I can think of for advancing in language proficiency. All you have to do is open your eyes and there's some more text written somewhere that you can use for practice! Billboards, advertisements on the trains, anything!

But there's a warning here: just living in the country is not enough. I've met people who've been living here for a decade or more and still can't read for beans. This at first totally confounded me, as by then I'd been studying Japanese for so long that I'd forgotten that I used to not understand it either. But it seems that osmosis only goes so far, and the advantages of living in 'the motherland' are only realized if you are already comitted to studying the language in question. Only then does the environmental 'noise' starts to come into focus to help you. In other words, you have to already be concentrating on the subject to take effective advantage of your environment. Be warned.

Many of these friends have the cliche foreginer's job of English-language instructor, so in their everyday lives they use English a lot, whereas I used Japanese at home, at Japanese school, and I had the motivation of planning to attend a regular school (i.e. with real Japanese students,) where I wouldn't be able to count on my English skills at all. So if you want to learn (and retain!) a foreign language, you have to find a way to use it in your daily life!