HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (Pt 2)

 

STEP 2:  Don’t practice your foreign language skills

 

Practice foreign language skills!  How stupid is that thought!  Sure, practicing to become a better football or tennis player, that’s okay.  Practicing to reach the ninth level of Zelda, that’s heroic.  But practicing a foreign language, never!

 

Never talk in the foreign language outside of a teacher-supervised environment.  All those people you met in your class, never try to speak to them in the foreign language outside of class – they might laugh at you.  As for the nice lady from Madrid that lives near you, just be a good native speaker and let her practice your native tongue.  You get to feel just a little bit superior while correcting her (now you know why teachers like to teach).

 

Never read foreign language material.  People say the world is getting smaller.  I have two things to refute that:  1)  Physics—enough said on this point; and 2)  All the information in books and published on the Internet.  If the world is getting smaller, why is there so much stuff to read—and in so many languages.  A good French student would never want to go to the Paris Match website.  And those stories that someone has simplified the language so you may be able to read without skipping every other word are for people who ride the short bus.

 

Never write in the foreign language.  A pen pal is for nerds.  Social websites, like Facebook, would just invite people without friends to write about folk dancing or paper mache tank models.

 

Just say NO to foreign films and music.  Gosh, if one wanted to read subtitles, then one would be a shelf stocker in a supermarket.  Also, it is just so difficult to find song lyrics on the Internet these days. To actual listen to the song and read the lyrics while there are so many better things to do would be a waste of your valuable time.

 

Self-paced teaching materials are a scam. These materials, such as teaching books, tapes and cds, software, and internet sites, are only put out there because the author(s) want to flaunt their skill and get a new car.  Just stop the insanity.

 

Step 3:  Tutors are for weak of mind and spirit

Tutors are to foreign language students what crutches are to patients.  Do you need a crutch – NO!  You are planning to limp through your foreign language training. To paraphrase Eastern philosophy, take the middle path – don’t excel and don’t fail.  Tutors would only give you individualized attention that would cause you to stray off the middle path.  Do you want that bad karma?

 

Step 4:  Do not get immersed in the language

Don’t join a language club.  Many cities have language clubs where people with ceramic frog collections or some other trivial hobby go to talk in a foreign language with other people of the same ilk.  Do you want to tell your friends you met a person with a carnival clown painting collection?  No.

 

Don’t go on a tour in the foreign country. Okay, so getting out of your double-wide trailer might sound like fun, but – as is said in West Side Story – stick with your own kind if you do it.  And do not be afraid – McDonalds are everywhere.

 

Never, NEVER, go to live in a foreign country.   Experiencing the pain and anguish of having to formulate a sentence in a second language to get a bottle of water at the ubiquitous 7-11 store is one of the levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.  It is an American company, why can’t they all speak English? 

 

Okay, so I know all about this because I was a bad French student and did all of these things-almost.  I was so bad that my French teacher told me if I signed up for French IV, he would personally see that I would spend my life talking soprano.  Then, I did take a tour of France with the school.  I did talk with the French (and I found them great, even if sometimes they answered in English or German).  I did get away from the group (which resulted in a rat-haired chaperone threatening to send me back to the States) and had to get by on my own. Those three years of resisting conjugation sublimated into a decent conversationalist.  I will live with the bad karma while getting updated on news from Paris.   

 

wriiten by D.J. meinke