I've just gone through some notes of mine concerning how to acquire a foreign language. It isn't a kind of linguistic school, which I want to present, just some ideas. Maybe something like an old rutter, which may show how someone shipped from A to B, but still has lots of unanswered questions.
One might ask: why learn a foreign language? Why learn a dead language? Why not use a modern translating tool?
Google has Google Translator, which is quite helpful. We used it, when we tried to rent a car in Arkhangelsk [1]. While waiting for pregnant Larissa, Alexej hat the idea to translate some sentences from Russian into English, and we used the PC to do so the other way round, but still talking to Larissa was much better.
Let's try Tang poetry. If you type in this line:
牛渚西江夜，青天無片雲. [2]
You get:
Niuzhuxijiang night, blue sky without clouds.
And I have to admit that we didn't get far. One has to know that 牛渚 (Niuzhu) is an old place name, the name of a mountain or better a hill. 西江 (xijiang) means the westbank of the Yangtze River [correct: Chang Jiang 长江). The second part is correct.
So a readable translation could be:
Spending the night at the westbank near Mount Niuzhu, the blue sky is without a cloud.
So, internet translators are a two edged sword – don't cut yourself.
What reasons might there be? I have collected a few:
- just for the fun of it
- to talk to people in a foreign country (vacation, work, studies)
- to read texts
- to write texts
- to listen to the radio
- to watch TV or movies
- to have conversations on the phone
- to twitter
- and more
Each reason involves other requirements to your approach. Maybe you plan to have a guided tour through Italy, then relax, just learn a few words and that's it. Don't use books that try to teach you Italian in a hurry, because you'll fail. Try to learn only the very basic words. I have written several very basic guides, try the Italian one [3]. If you travel on your own, you might wish to expand your knowledge of Italian in our example. I have started to learn some Italian half a year ago, before I went to Italy. I have listened to CDs with vocabulary and radio broadcasts in Italian (Radio Colonia* is based in Cologne, my hometown, which is said to be Italy's most northern city, and has half an hour of news and interviews in the evening on five days of the week. And I try to read a page of a monthly paper each day. It isn't as difficult as you think. O.K. I am cheating as I have learned Latin, French and Spanish before, but I'll show you that you know more than you imagine.
Even if you haven't learned a foreign language before you know some words that are nearly the same in other languages. These might act a lighthouses in the darkness of a foreign text.
Radio -: it's the same in lots of languages; it doesn't surprise that Dutch, German, Yiddish use radio as well, but it's the same in Hungarian, Turkish, and Indonesian.
Industry -: not as many languages as with radio, but you find a dozen of common languages, which are written with letters, which includes cyrillic, индустрия – is Russian and pronounced industriya. So, don't panic if you see a cyrillic text. Before I learned some Russian, I chanced upon a medical report of a patient. My colleague said: „But we cannot read it, it's in Russian“. But knowing the medical terminology and the Greek letters did the trick. Of course I could not read all, but the part that told us, that they had found a gastic ulcer by means of a fiberoptic examination. So, be confident and try!
Coffee -: have you been to a café? Yes, café also means coffie as koffie, Kaffee, kávé, kahvé, or kopi, which is Indonesian, a loan word from the Dutch koffie. Indonesian is quite interesting concerning loan words. Ambulan is the word for ambulance, not difficult, isn't it. Apotik is pharmacy, which was derived from apotheek (Dutch, German has Apotheke). Grape in Indonesian is anggur. Yes, great, but I happen to know that it's anguur in Hindi and angur in Farsi; and I looked this up right now: it's also angur in Bengali and the Thai word is close to „angun“. Kafsigar is a loan word from Hindi kafsh-gar meaning shoe seller, whereas the variant kapsigar has been borrowed from kapasgar, Farsi for shoemaker [4]. O.K. I stop before I'll get carried away.
When I had been working, I noticed that I could not find the time to concentrate on whole lessons of a language text book. So I decided to do it with a low impact approach, which means in principle achieve more with doing less, which come close to: 「逐二兔不得一兔」孔子 [5]:
- going through vocabulary cards
- twitter, also reading foreign language tweets
- reading a page or an article in a foreign languge
- listen to the radio – nearly without limit on internet
- you might watch TV in a foreign language – I eschew TV (as lofty as said), which I did long ago as I have watched soap operas in Taiwan, BTW it's a good idea, you hear only slightly different variations of the same dialogue every second evening (哎，我們該怎麼辦？) [6]
- I listen to CDs while driving, not only vocabulary but also songs in foreign languages
It is the little by little approach. You train better running 6 km per day than 42 km once a week.
Have more fun during your travels. Learn the very basic words.
I learned quite a lot after having read „The Word Brain“ [7]. I agree that learning languages isn't easy, it needs some discipline and perseverance, but still it should be fun.
Get started!
Links and Annotations:
[1] http://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-renting-car-in-arkhangelsk.html
[2] It's the first line of the poem 夜泊牛渚懷古 by Li Bo/Bai (李白), which could be translated as „Nostalgic Thought from a night-mooring neat Mount Niuzhu“.
[3] The Very Basic Guide to Italian http://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-very-basic-guide-to-italian.html
[4] Russell Jones (general ed.), C.D. Grijns, J.W. de Vries (eds), Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay. Compiled by the Indonesian Etymological Project. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007, xxxix + 360 pp., map, incl. DVD with Amoy dictionary and supplement.
[5] "The man who chases two rabbits, catches neither" ~~ Confucius
[6] Ah, what should we do?
[7] The Word Brain - A short guide to fast language learning, written by Bernd Sebastian Kamps. The homepage is under reconstruction, please google „The Word Brain“ later.
[8] If ever you want to read a book, which enlightens about learning Japanese, here it is:
Jack Seward: Japanese in Action. An Unorthodox Approach to the Spoken Language and the People Who Speak It. Weatherhill Inc; Revised, Subsequent Edition (1. Oktober 1983). ISBN: 0834800330.
* The name of Radio Colonia has been changed to Cosmo Italiano recently - and regrettably. (01.02.2022)
Links for Very Basic Language Guides:
The Very Basic Guide to Catalan http://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-very-basic-guide-to-catalan.html
The Very Basic Guide to German
http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2017/02/the-very-basic-guide-to-german.html
The Very Basic Guide to Esperanto http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2017/02/the-very-basic-guide-to-esperanto.html
The Very Basic Guide to Yiddish http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2016/12/the-very-basic-guide-to-yiddish.html
The Very Basic Guide to Portuguese http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2015/10/the-very-basic-guide-to-portuguese.html
The Very Basic Guide to Italian http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2015/05/the-very-basic-guide-to-italian.html
The Very Basic Guide to Afrikaans http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2015/04/the-very-basic-guide-to-afrikaans.html
The Very Basic Guide to Turkmenian, Uzbek and Kyrgyz http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2014/10/the-very-basic-guide-to-languages-of.html
The Very Basic Guide to French http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-very-basic-guide-to-french.html
The Very Basic Guide to Russian http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2012/10/the-very-basic-guide-to-russian.html
The Very Basic Guide to Japanese http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2013/03/the-very-basic-guide-to-japanese.html
The Very Basic Guide to Mandarin Chinese http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2013/04/the-very-basic-guide-to-mandarin-chinese.html
The Very Basic Guide to Spanish http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2013/05/the-very-basic-guide-to-spanish.html
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