Saturday, April 12, 2014

Languages

Describe your experience learning another language. What were the challenges you faced?

In high school we were only given two options, German or Spanish. I chose German and took it for four years knowing that I would attend college and needed all four years even though my school only had two years set up so I had to take the last two years through an Independent Study class. I learned to read and write and German but I couldn't speak it very well. We also never completed an overseas trip so I've never been able to use the language in its natural environment.

When I graduated and switched to the university level I found that they taught languages very differently and even though I had four years of a foreign language on paper, my skills were not nearly high enough for the advanced classes. I was very disappointed in myself and in my small town high school for not properly preparing me for basic college courses. I worked through the lower levels and tried to take the upper level courses a year later but I ended up dropping it altogether.

It is strange now because two of my best friends from college ended up taking French and continued to take French throughout college. Both of them were able to spend a semester in France and using their skills to live abroad. One friend ended up teaching French at the high school level and the other friend lived in France for two years after her divorce teaching English to college students and they thought she didn't know any French at all. When she came back to the States she got a job teaching French at a Plano middle school and I think she still teaches there today.

I also tried to take Japanese during college when I needed an elective and had no idea what else I wanted to take, I was almost finished with my classwork and ready to graduate. I decided to take a Japanese class for fun since I had taken many Chinese and Japanese history classes. (I was burnt out on English/American history.) Turns out I was the only white girl in the class. All of the white boys in the class had Japanese girlfriends and the rest of the class was from Thailand. We had a guest speaker one day and she started with an introduction and the rest of the class laughed along with her. I was the only one who didn't understand her and clearly out of my element. It was a little depressing.

I ended up with a decent grade and I like the teacher and teaching methods. The teacher even approached me about teaching English in Japan and if I hadn't been engaged I probably would have gone. However, I don't like seafood so if I think about practical matters involved in the trip I'm not quite sure how I would have managed, I always assumed I would have been eating noodles the entire trip. The teacher had taught us some Japanese by having us sign children's lullabies and if I remembered the words I'm sure they wouldn't actually make sense to me since English nursery rhymes don't logically make sense either, but they were fun to sign and it felt like I was learning something successfully.

So I've given up on foreign languages. I have a cousin that can learn a little bit of many languages with different base languages but I've never been able to catch on. Once I can see the word in my mind, my tongue freezes up and I'm trying to pronoun the word phonetically. I understand the sentence structure and verb tenses but putting it all altogether in one coherent sentence is a huge challenge. Or my sentences are too long.

I do wish English had more structure in some areas though. I remember hearing about Harry Potter characters when the books were still being written and translated. Every so often we would learn more about a character because translators needed to know if the characters are male or female for their language structures. English does not have these rules and it seems like we are missing something, to me. I suppose to it good to avoid gender bias, as an academic, but within my free time reading I think it would add a little more dimension to some characters and their voice, and how I'd hear it in my head. I love the Harry Potter on audio CD for the American versions, the speaker uses different voices for all the characters and adds so much energy and humor to the story. I also like how J.K. Rowling stopped translating the English into American so we would learn new small words common to Great Britain although I have to admit that tripe does not good to me for some reason and I have no idea what it is. 

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