I'm currently taking a course in Second Language Acquisition. It's all about how people learn foreign languages. One of the tasks we've been assigned is to keep a journal. We are to relate the course material with experiences from our own lives. All of us are currently studying a foreign language, and many of us, including myself, have studied several others at some point in the past. I'm going to use this blog (at least in part) for the journaling process. Some of the things that will be mentioned may seem devoid of context. That's because you're not in my class. I'll try to make everything as clear as possible. I have already written the first few journal entries, and will be posting them here in order. Starting now:

2/2/04
I have been studying foreign languages since I was in eighth grade. That was nineteen years ago. I have definitely seen a change in the way languages are taught. I started German in 1985. My teacher was Estonian, her father had been in the SS. I’m not sure if she told us that just by way of general background, or if she was hoping to instill fear. In any case, her teaching methods, and the methods of most of my German teachers throughout high school and college, were very firmly grounded in the Grammar-Translation method. I think there may have been a little effort to update the method and stress conversational skills a bit, but I still remember many of the drills we had to perform. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the dative prepositions in German, or the declension of the definite articles, weak and strong adjective endings, or the basic patterns of strong, weak, and mixed verbs. I have table upon table of German grammar in my head, and you know, I like it that way.

I appreciate the need for conversational skills in a foreign language, but I do believe that there’s a place for Grammar-Translation style drills and memorization. Particularly in highly synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Latin, where you have multiple cases with different articles and endings. While memorizing these things may not help you get your point across, it will certainly make the experience of conversation easier for the person with whom you’re trying to communicate, and in the case of Russian or Latin, where word order is more flexible, mincing your cases can pretty quickly turn a sentence into something really crazy.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been studying Japanese at San Francisco City College. The first semester I went in very excited, and found it to be very challenging for a few weeks. Once I got the hang of it though, the challenge faded, and I started to lose patience with the pace of the class. The second and third semesters were much more difficult, and more than satisfied my need to be challenged. I’m always very excited at the beginning of a semester. I really want to be good at Japanese. I want to be able to read and write as well as speak, and I know that will be very difficult. I have a friend who has lived in Japan for three years now and still doesn’t consider himself to be literate.

I like and respect most of my classmates. Many of them have been in the same class with me for at least one semester, so I have a good idea of their abilities. I’m used to being one of the best students in any given language class, and to be fair, languages come pretty easily to me compared to many other people, but the people who are in my Japanese class are very smart, and very dedicated. I might be among the best in terms of grade, but there are several people who have better speaking skills (many have Japanese spouses), and at least a couple who are just really, mindbogglingly good at languages. I prefer to be in this sort of environment. It’s a bit of a kick in the ego, but I deserve it. The best part is that people are engaged. It’s very difficult to learn in a classroom full of morons. They ask stupid questions or are afraid to ask anything at all. The people in my Japanese class care about what they’re doing. They participate actively in class, ask good questions, and have good attitudes.

The teacher is aggressive and very difficult. She’s not out to get anyone and she seems to have a very good attitude towards her students, but she makes us work. The class is conducted primarily in Japanese, except when important grammar points would be missed without English explanation. People who have not had her as a teacher before seem to find her difficult, but once you’re used to her, she’s great. She doesn’t always understand the nuances of the questions being asked her. I’ve found this to be fairly common among my Japanese teachers, all of whom are native speakers of Japanese, and sometimes not so good at English. This can sometimes lead to tense situations with a student asking the same question over and over again and always getting the same response from the teacher and yet never really getting a satisfying answer.

The approach to teaching Japanese at CCSF seems to be informed by a bit of the cognitive school and a lot of the constructivist. There’s a splash of memorization here and there, but it’s not really stressed. The goal seems to be to get us talking: genuine, spontaneous communication. This is fairly challenging for me. Although I love foreign languages and have a self professed talent for them, I’m very shy about speaking them. I’m much better at memorizing tables and things and passing tests. I’m glad that I’m pushed to speak more, but I don’t always enjoy it. There are definitely places where I feel like the old school choral drills would be helpful to me. I want to go through all the verbs I know and recite the forms in order: ikanai, ikimasu, iku, ikeba; kakanai, kakimasu, kaku, kakeba; etc. I want to do it with the voice of the whole class behind me. I want to do it a hundred times. That way when I have to use one of these verbs, I’ll remember what it sounds like in the form I want. We don’t do that sort of thing though. The tests are about writing full sentences, answering questions about scenarios, or often questions about ourselves and inserting the appropriate relational (postposition) into a given sentence (the most difficult thing you can do in Japanese in my opinion). I could go through on my own and memorize the relational for each verb, but we’re not really given the tools to do that. Even most Japanese dictionaries don’t have the most commonly used relational in the entry for the verb. So to memorize this would be an incredible amount of work, as I would have to track down example sentences for every verb I know showing the relational. I don’t want to do that, and I can’t understand why something so straightforward isn’t presented in our textbook, or at least in the dictionary. My guess is that although the relational is specific to the verb, it is tied to the noun and is therefore considered to be a property of the noun. This isn’t the place to analyze the analysis of Japanese grammar though.