Many years ago now, I attended Kaikorai Valley High School. It was a large school in those days (the early 70s). The roll stood at around 1300 students. Ten new third form classes started in my year (1970). Then, classes were streamed, and categorized as either Academic (2 of them) or General (8).
In both 3A1 and 3A2, French and Latin were compulsory, and I believe that some of the General-level classes had French too. I was obliged to take the two languages for two years, but was able to drop them in the 5th form by taking Art (Drawing & Design) as French and Latin were my worst subjects.
A year or two later, Japanese was offered at the school, and German thereafter. However, too late for me.
What I learned from the experience is that I am adverse to being schooled in a language. I'm allergic to the conventional, academic approach.
I once read that only 1 in 20 English speakers who try to learn another language fail. If that's so, then it's not a good success rate.
If, for whatever reason, a person is resistant to something about a foreign language, or how it's presented, then he or she simply won't learn.
Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that the way to learn another language is to study its grammar, and then to practice applying those rules, translating from one language into the other. That's the 'Grammar Translation Method'.
It is derived from the 'traditional' or 'classical' way of teaching Greek and Latin. Well, you know how useful that was for your schoolboy Latin!
Intuitively, grammar translation seems to be the way you'd go about learning another language. Trouble is, it doesn't work. Or rather, it does work (because every method will eventually get you there) but slowly, painfully, boringly, and tediously.
The Grammar Translation Method has been deemed ineffective by the authorities themselves.
We don't even get taught the grammar of our own language at school anymore for that very reason.
How can I get across that point most succinctly and forcefully?
How about this: no one out of all the billions of people in the world ever ,earned their own language through studying its grammar. Not one. And yet 99% of people could use their mother tongue within a year or two of birth!
The grammar of a language is NOT the language itself. They are two totally different subjects. No one confuses Physics with Physical Education.
Here's what's important for you (me) to know. In fact, it's crucial.
You don't need to study a language. You don't do it like other school subjects. You leave it up to your brain to sort out automatically.
Stay out of the brain's way! Just feed it with nice (enjoyable, understandable) input and sit back.
All those declension tables in Latin, and the grammar-translation method plus vocabulary lists in French put you completely onto the wrong track!
Remember how much better it went later with German and those 20-minute episodes?
You're 15. To me, at 58, that's the youngest age at which you're approximately an adult. You're mature enough to think, in other words (even though you've been philosophically-minded for over a decade already).
This is the age at which I want to catch you. I think that you're ready. Listen to me; don't let this opportunity go by.
You're smart enough to understand what I'm saying. You're doing well at school and in the next few years you'll achieve a number of academic 'honors'. You won't let that go to your head, I'm happy to say. You'll realize that they're not worth much.
Instead, I want to get you thinking about languages.
Listen, Maths and Science are child's play for you. You handle English and History well. Heck, you'll even pass Art. But you've already had some problems with language.
Now, it's not that you haven't the experience of knowing a language other than English. After all, you grew up with anuda muvva tongue. You switched between Dutch and English according to which school you had to attend, and in which country you happened to be. (How many people can say they've sailed around the world via the Suez and Panama Canals under the age of eight?)
So you know what it feels like to know another language well, to the degree of slipping along from one into the other, rather than clumsily 'switching'. You know what another language is about. You remember activating one or the other by reading, always reading: fairy tales, comics, library books . . .
But then you got French and Latin.
'Cause when you started high school you were placed in the academic stream. You were made topmost of the top. 3A1 above 3A2 above 3G1, 3G2, 3G3, 3G4, 3G5, 3G6, 3G7 & 3G8, and God how horrible it would be to admit to being in 3G8! But it was almost as bad having to admit that you were in the highest class.
So anyway, you were duly served up French and Latin.
Short story: you had issues with French. The teachers were female. The language itself sounded feminine. The Latin teacher was a manly man. I imagined him as a Roman warrior. (He died years later in his 50s climbing mountains, I heard.) True, Latin was nicely Mathematical, but I couldn't see the point in memorizing and applying the rules on a language that was dead.
Now, tt the age of 15 you're about to throw languages out with the bathwater. With the benefit of hindsight, I've come here to urge you not to do that.
You see, you're going to spend several years living and working overseas. You're going to have two wives (not at the same time) whose first language isn't English. You're going to have four children all of whom will speak languages that you don't understand.
You're going to mingle with hundreds of people from dozens of other countries, helping them to master English. This will enrich your life to an incredible degree. In fact, you'll feel more at home with people from other lands than the country in which you were born (New Zealand).
Learning another language is easy if you do it right. However, very, very few people know how to do it right. I do, but it has taken me several decades to get to that point.
Let us short-circuit that process. Take a look at what I've got to give you. Trust me. Within a year or two (of being fifteen) you're going to be exposed to German, and you'll love it. You'll make good use of it when you go cycle-touring through Europe.
Get a language, get a life!
That's the message of this blog.
As Johan Wolfgang von Goethe put it:
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.
(He who doesn't know foreign languages knows nothing about his own.)
