Re: Learning languages

Merhaba!

(Sorry for the length of this post.)

Chris Bates wrote:

"DON'T BUY "TEACH YOURSELF" BOOKS/PACKS. Sorry, but I've listened to a few
of them, and I always found their grammar explanations to be extremely poor,
to the point where the only reason I could figure out the grammatical
details is because I know some things about linguistics already. Anyone with
an average knowledge of linguistics, or foreign languages (average amongst
general population here = knowing practically nothing even about english
grammar (well... I mean not knowing it innately, but...)) would just end up
memorizing little phrases and things, and picking up a very incomplete
knowledge of the grammar necessary to build your own sentences for
situations which aren't taught in the book. Maybe I just got bad ones
though. For spanish, an introductory (but very basic) pack I found good was
"Oxford Take Off in Spanish". It takes until near the end to get to the past
tense, and I abandoned it before I listened to all four CDs because I found
the pace was a little too slow for me (I listened to the first 3 CDs, later
along with lessons with a spanish tutor, and I have several CDs from more
advanced courses I've listened to), but I truly believe that for the
beginning with an average knowledge of linguistics, its far better at giving
you a (very) basic grounding in the language than "Teach Yourself Spanish".
I've seen a little of the suenos spanish course (sorry about the missing
tilde), and I think its... okay would be the best word. It certainly goes
farther than the basic "Take Off in Spanish" I mentioned before, but I think
the grammar explanations could be better. "Pasos" is good for listening
practice, but the book is useless.

I remember getting a pack of cassettes from the library, and they were quite
good. Lots of vocab and good grammar explanations. It had four cassettes I
think, and a book with a dictionary. I quite liked it! You forgot to mention
this excellent resource: http://www.studyspanish.com.

"Erm.... Don't try any "Colloquial..... " books if you're a true beginner,
because they go too far the other way and generally dump so much vocabulary
and grammar on you in each chapter that you just give up in despair.

LOL. I got "Colloquial Estonian" from the library and quite liked it. It was
a bit too fast, but that was OK for me. I never finished it tho because I
lost interest and my dad (who was reading it to me - thank God for his
German-language high school education with his <o:> and <u:>, otherwise
I'd've had to correct him all the time - he's the typical American Danny
spoke about)... I'm going to take it out again tho, and try my scanner on
it.

"Okay... given that I've critised just about every spanish course that
popped into my head... take my advice and get yourself a good tutor or join
a good course. Books and tapes and CDs can take you so far, but a language
is meant for communication, and you need other people to communicate with to
truly feel comfortable with the language. The other option is to go and live
wherever the language is spoken for a year of course....

I agree with both this and the long anti-learn-Latin-book rant :) .

Danny wrote:

"I'm also old-school in that I don't like cutting corners and skipping over
rote memorization of things like noun declensions and verb conjugations.

I agree. When I get the Estonian book from the library again, I'm going to
write all that stuff down... I was meaning to but never did...

"I'm also a real stickler for correct pronunciation -- this is what I HATED
the most about the way French was taught at my high school. We all sounded
like Americans speaking French in a lazy, ignorant manner; a Frenchman,
Quebequois or even a Cajun would probably have been offended.

At mine, people *still* say [nuzpaRlO~] and [Z@n@Empa], or even (from one
student) [vERt]... There are worse examples, I just can't remember them.

"And this is by teacher who supposedly travelled frequently to Paris!"

That's sad, really sad. Reminds me of my professeure, who took French in
college (and is Swiss) but didn't tell us that <Je vais manger> means "I am
about to eat" (among other mistakes) - she said it means "I'm going to
eat" - and who doesn't know exactly what transitivity is! And I can't
understand why we have to wait till next year to learn things like <Je
mangerai>!

"The textbook did cover the particulars"

Up here in Canada, we learn French as a second language at school (and if
you speak French as your mother tongue, you learn English). So we're stuck
learning French - not that anything is wrong with that - but I would like to
learn Inuit myself... If I could choose, I'd choose that. Odd we don't learn
Inuit, since we live in igloos. But anyway, people in my class haven't been
explicitly told about liaison and the like. We've been told vague things
like "It's [nEmpa] and not [n@Empa]", but I wish they'd just give us a
lesson on liaison itself. I think it'd clear up some misunderstandings. And
I also wish people wouldn't be lazy and mispronounce things that are obvious
(in my humble opinion) and that we should know already.

Roger wrote:

"Though it's often difficult/impossible to find resources for self-teaching,
my advice would be-- learn a non-western language, or failing that, one of
the less common European ones. At least for conlanging purposes, the one
thing one wants to do is jog the brain cells out of their familiar
grooves/ruts."

I totally agree. That's why I'd rather be stuck learning Inuit than French
(or have a choice to learn both -- even better)! :)

"If one is near a largish college/university, it might be possible for a
"civilian" simply to ask the instructor for permission to sit in on a
language course.  (It probably contravenes all sorts of regulations, but
frankly, if the "Beginning Armenian" or "Tagalog" course has 9 official
students, a 10th unofficial one isn't going to bother _the instructor_,
IMHO)"

Hmm, good idea! I wonder if universities near me would allow me, a
thirteen-year-old, to participate in their classes for less commonly taught
languages - maybe in the summer or sometime. I'll check it out!

Joe wrote:

"I disagree.  I'd say Farsi is now the more common name.  Unhistorical,
perhaps, but not analogous to calling German "Deutsch"."

I agree.

Chris Bates:

"Just as an aside, I've been (supposedly) learning a bit of swahili and I
find it fascinating and different. I haven't found much time for it recently
mainly because I kept slipping swahili words into spanish (I'm afraid I need
to learn to separate things, I keep saying "gracias" to bus drivers when I
get off the bus too), but the grammar is *very* interesting and very
different from english. Learning a new language really changes the way you
think.... Its really a good thing to experience.

I totally agree.

[snip Philippe and H. S. Teoh's thots]: LOL! to both posts.

[snip J Y S Czhang and Danny's thots]: Interesting ideas. As an aside,
Christophe informed me that the Belgian Flemish political right likes to
think that Flemish is a separate language relative to Dutch, but that this
isn't true; hence my pun: I always knew something was wrong with the right!
(And Christophe also said, in response to my question if the Belgian Waloon
political right thinks Waloon is a separate language relative to French -
which it isn't - that unfortunately, no, it doesn't think such a thing.)

I wrote:

"Speaking of politeness, I was told that calling a person from Iran an
Iranian would not go down well with them (this idiom means "not offend",
right?), and that I should call them a Persian. Is this true?"

Correction! This should actually be: "... would not go down well with them
(this idiom means "would be offensive", right?) ..."

--Trebor