Re: Tatari Faran update

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 12:12:52PM -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> My recent adventures into Russian have made me wonder about what's the
> best way to present a language to a new learner. I first started
> learning Russian by learning common conversational phrases, and later on
> I bought a book, which launches into a full-fledged dialogue in chapter
> 1, and doesn't actually explain all the elements of the language used in
> that conversation until much later. In the TF tutorial, I've taken a
> different approach, which is to present material slowly, in chunks that
> the reader can fully understand from the beginning.
>
> What do y'all think is the best approach?
I suppose that the conversational method must be best for normal people.
Indeed, in a classroom setting it's definitely good to be using the
language for meta-operations like the instructor giving simple commands
such as "repeat after me" even prior to actually understanding *why* that
means "repeat after me" - in other words, using the language to learn
the language.

However, I know that I myself have always wanted an old-fashioned
grammar-first approach to language learning :)  I suspect many other
conlangers feel the same.  So to some extent it depends on your audience!

Amanda
Who failed to announce the birth of Peter 5/10/2006, for lack of time to
write a birth announcement in merechi!