Eriku wrote:I very much agree with you. As I've previously mentioned I've had German in school for five years, wheras I had a short stint in South America which forced me to try my hand at Spanish and Portuguese... The difference in how quickly I learnt when I was just immersed and trying to make sense of things like a child would (though I of course also utilised dictionaries and asking people in English, at times) was absolutely incredible... six months nearly trumped five years of schooling.
My university students have the same experience. They get to their freshman year with at least 10 years of "English education", beginning in elementary school. Can't make a sentence. Many of them take a semester off school and spend it in an English-speaking country, come back and perform like champs. Can't beat immersion.
Ronja wrote:And that pedantry is spot on. Especially if one has a tolerably solid knowledge of one or two languages in a language family, reading and listening to their "sister" or "cousin" languages can be surprisingly easy (minus puns and idioms, of course). Like I learned both Swedish (at home) and Norwegian (in the yard) before I turned 10, and studied Swedish in secondary school for seven years before getting a nursing degree in a Swedish-speaking school. Because of this, reading Danish (which I have never studied for a day and of which don't even own a dictionary) is fairly easy.
As I also learned English (at kindergarten and in the yard) and German (at my aunt's) before I turned 12, and later studied English for 12 years in primary and secondary school and German for two years in college, reading Dutch is not that hard.
But I would not dream of claiming I really know Danish or Dutch - I cannot speak them, even less write. I can get the general gist of a discussion (live or movie) and understand people who are speaking directly to me slowly, and I can find my way around e.g. at airports and on web sites in those languages, but that is all.
As long as my pedantry is being endured...
...Sounds like home, the schoolyard and your aunt's place taught you more than the classrooms, eh? One of the key elements that Krashen introduced was that the target material and the acqusition activity must be personally meaningful to the student, as well as applicable to practical needs. That means creating a learning environment that mimics real life as much as possible. The old teacher-focused classroom is seen as an obstacle to acqusition more than anything else.
Deersbee wrote:I couldn't agree more. I obtained a Master's in English Philology without having set foot in an English-speaking country, learned English through reading and writing only, sat for exams in Old English and English literature, wrote academic papers, etc. What happened when I finally did set foot in the UK: I did not feel language-competent at all; worse still, I did not understand well the spoken language. My, was that an awful feeling! I wanted to tear up my diploma! Only when I went to Devon to stay with a family with small kids and dogs did things improve, and improve they did quickly. But I'm still better at reading and writing than at speaking.
Case in point. In the Natural Approach (and Krashen's Second Language Acqusition Theory in general), you would begin with developing your listening skills, just as an infant does. (The foetus is listening!!
) In accordance with the way our brain's language centers evolved, Krashen's approach would have the students' listening comprehension develop first, followed by speaking. Of course, reading and writing developed much later, so those come from environment, not evolution. However, that receptive skills are honed before productive skills is not only hard-wired, but pretty difficult to conceive of in reverse.
Naturally, one's reading comprehension should out-pace one's writing ability. The natural order of skill development and proficiency, in descending order, is listening-speaking-reading-writing.
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
. And then when they come back, they can 