Our method of language learning is not a traditional one, and we are finding it very useful! I don't want to go into all the details (see any of Greg Thomson's work if you want to know more), but just thought I would explain a few of the principles.
First of all, this method prefers not to talk about “language learners” – since in theory at least you could learn a language alone in a room with book – but “growing participants” – people becoming more and more involved in a language community.
The idea is that you can learn more quickly, and more naturally, by first understanding and responding to language input, and then allowing this passive knowledge to “surface” as active knowledge. This means that at first you don't concentrate on speaking, or on understanding grammar, but on responding appropriately to what someone says to you.
When you do start learning the language, it's important to realise that you will speak it badly. Adults often hate the idea of speaking with grammatical “mistakes” or sounding like a child or someone of limited intelligence, but unfortunately this is inevitable if you are going to communicate your own thoughts and not just memorized expressions.
Those of us who feel we are visual learners don't always like the idea of learning without writing anything down. But the only way to improve listening comprehension is to learn to understand spoken language – insisting on seeing the words won't actually help in the long run! (Few people in the real world speak with subtitles!) Since we are learning a language which is written phonetically, if we learn to hear and speak it accurately, we will automatically be able to read and write it pretty well too!
In a way, using a method like this is liberating when learning a language like Monkolé for which there are no formal courses, very little literature (the New Testament in Monkolé and a few literacy primers), few audio recordings (some sermons recorded for the radio) and for which no systematic grammatical analysis exists.
As parents of small children, we have the advantage of already having a good stock of toy animals for learning to talk about animals, plastic bricks for learning colours and positioning (left, right, next to, etc.), story books to look at with our language helper and so on! Compared to formal language lessons, this format is much more “kid-friendly”, as the children can wander in and out of the room where we are, and can take part in the activities if they want to.
The challenge for us is to discover what we need to learn. We realise that there are a lot of things we don't need to know how to talk about, because they are unknown to the Monkolé people, such as seaside holidays, mountain life, central heating, waltzing, MacDonalds – to name a random few! So what do people talk about? What is important to them? What are the everyday concepts that any small child is aware of, and which we need to know about? Our language helper can help us with this, but we can't just put the question to him, as these things are so obvious to him that he may not realise that they aren't obvious to us!
As for us, we may mistakenly want to learn to talk in categories unknown to the Monkolés. To take an easy example, it's no good asking them whether they describe ginger hair as “orange”, “red” or whether they have a specific word like “ginger”. None of the Monkolés have ginger hair, so there is no “normal” way to talk about it! There are sure to be less striking examples where it is more important to us to listen to what is said rather than asking for Monkolé translations of our way of thinking or speaking in English or French. I can't help but think that the old saying about having two ears and only one mouth applies to language learning too!
First of all, this method prefers not to talk about “language learners” – since in theory at least you could learn a language alone in a room with book – but “growing participants” – people becoming more and more involved in a language community.
The idea is that you can learn more quickly, and more naturally, by first understanding and responding to language input, and then allowing this passive knowledge to “surface” as active knowledge. This means that at first you don't concentrate on speaking, or on understanding grammar, but on responding appropriately to what someone says to you.
When you do start learning the language, it's important to realise that you will speak it badly. Adults often hate the idea of speaking with grammatical “mistakes” or sounding like a child or someone of limited intelligence, but unfortunately this is inevitable if you are going to communicate your own thoughts and not just memorized expressions.
Those of us who feel we are visual learners don't always like the idea of learning without writing anything down. But the only way to improve listening comprehension is to learn to understand spoken language – insisting on seeing the words won't actually help in the long run! (Few people in the real world speak with subtitles!) Since we are learning a language which is written phonetically, if we learn to hear and speak it accurately, we will automatically be able to read and write it pretty well too!
In a way, using a method like this is liberating when learning a language like Monkolé for which there are no formal courses, very little literature (the New Testament in Monkolé and a few literacy primers), few audio recordings (some sermons recorded for the radio) and for which no systematic grammatical analysis exists.
As parents of small children, we have the advantage of already having a good stock of toy animals for learning to talk about animals, plastic bricks for learning colours and positioning (left, right, next to, etc.), story books to look at with our language helper and so on! Compared to formal language lessons, this format is much more “kid-friendly”, as the children can wander in and out of the room where we are, and can take part in the activities if they want to.
The challenge for us is to discover what we need to learn. We realise that there are a lot of things we don't need to know how to talk about, because they are unknown to the Monkolé people, such as seaside holidays, mountain life, central heating, waltzing, MacDonalds – to name a random few! So what do people talk about? What is important to them? What are the everyday concepts that any small child is aware of, and which we need to know about? Our language helper can help us with this, but we can't just put the question to him, as these things are so obvious to him that he may not realise that they aren't obvious to us!
As for us, we may mistakenly want to learn to talk in categories unknown to the Monkolés. To take an easy example, it's no good asking them whether they describe ginger hair as “orange”, “red” or whether they have a specific word like “ginger”. None of the Monkolés have ginger hair, so there is no “normal” way to talk about it! There are sure to be less striking examples where it is more important to us to listen to what is said rather than asking for Monkolé translations of our way of thinking or speaking in English or French. I can't help but think that the old saying about having two ears and only one mouth applies to language learning too!
Here's Marc learning animals with Pastor Samuel:
