At some point in the 1970s, I decided to learn Spanish. So I signed up for a weekly evening course at my local college, which at that time was in Livingstone in Scotland. The class was small, the set text (Teach Yourself Spanish) was awful, and the teacher was a Spaniard who grew increasingly frustrated with his students. His frustration was reasonable, because, between us, we demonstrated several ways how not to learn a foreign language.
I suspect that Spanish is probably the easiest language for an English-speaker to learn. Unlike French, spelling is phonetic - you can almost always say the word correctly if you understand the rules for pronunciation. There are few sounds that do not occur in English. The two main exceptions are the gutteral sound of the letter ‘j’ (or ‘g’ before ‘i’ or ‘e’) and the trilled ‘r’. Also unlike French (but like English), Spanish clearly stresses one syllable in each word. Once again, there are clear rules determined by which letters end a word, with exceptions indicated by an accent over the stressed syllable.
So it must have been particularly irritating for the teacher to find that several of his students utterly failed to follow these rules, however many times he explained them. Why did this happen? I observed three reasons:
1. One man pronounced every Spanish word exactly as if it was English. The idea that different languages have their own system for pronunciation was clearly one he could not adapt to.
2. Two young women pronounced Spanish exactly as if it was French. They must have learnt French at school, and decided that it was typical of all foreign languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian.
3. One very respectable middle-aged woman refused to pronounce the Spanish ‘a’ sound (like a short ‘a’ in English) and insisted in pronouncing it ‘ah’. She had obviously learnt as a child that it was vulgar to take a bath, and that you should instead take a ‘baarth’. She simply could not demean herself to sound (as she would have regarded it) common.
These students had paid their own money and devoted time to come out on a cold Scottish winter evening to learn a language. They were failing despite their own best efforts and the best efforts of their teacher. What their failure shows is that before you can learn, you must first forget. Adopting a new skill or any kind requires the abandonment of the way you carried out this task before. This is particularly difficult when learning a foreign language because the dialogue in the class is still in your mother tongue and you cannot but help thinking in that language. This is why immersion in a foreign country away from people who speak your own language is usually the most effective way of learning. You then hear nothing but your new language, and are forced to speak it to engage with daily activities like buying food and asking directions.
There is another, quite different, reason for failure to learn a foreign language: impatience. I became irritated by my fellow-students and gave up the course. I might study Spanish again one day.
I suspect that Spanish is probably the easiest language for an English-speaker to learn. Unlike French, spelling is phonetic - you can almost always say the word correctly if you understand the rules for pronunciation. There are few sounds that do not occur in English. The two main exceptions are the gutteral sound of the letter ‘j’ (or ‘g’ before ‘i’ or ‘e’) and the trilled ‘r’. Also unlike French (but like English), Spanish clearly stresses one syllable in each word. Once again, there are clear rules determined by which letters end a word, with exceptions indicated by an accent over the stressed syllable.
So it must have been particularly irritating for the teacher to find that several of his students utterly failed to follow these rules, however many times he explained them. Why did this happen? I observed three reasons:
1. One man pronounced every Spanish word exactly as if it was English. The idea that different languages have their own system for pronunciation was clearly one he could not adapt to.
2. Two young women pronounced Spanish exactly as if it was French. They must have learnt French at school, and decided that it was typical of all foreign languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian.
3. One very respectable middle-aged woman refused to pronounce the Spanish ‘a’ sound (like a short ‘a’ in English) and insisted in pronouncing it ‘ah’. She had obviously learnt as a child that it was vulgar to take a bath, and that you should instead take a ‘baarth’. She simply could not demean herself to sound (as she would have regarded it) common.
These students had paid their own money and devoted time to come out on a cold Scottish winter evening to learn a language. They were failing despite their own best efforts and the best efforts of their teacher. What their failure shows is that before you can learn, you must first forget. Adopting a new skill or any kind requires the abandonment of the way you carried out this task before. This is particularly difficult when learning a foreign language because the dialogue in the class is still in your mother tongue and you cannot but help thinking in that language. This is why immersion in a foreign country away from people who speak your own language is usually the most effective way of learning. You then hear nothing but your new language, and are forced to speak it to engage with daily activities like buying food and asking directions.
There is another, quite different, reason for failure to learn a foreign language: impatience. I became irritated by my fellow-students and gave up the course. I might study Spanish again one day.
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