By Peter Vakunta
Learning a second language entails “teaching your mouth new tricks”. You will have to suppress your inhibitions, and, like a child, try to produce all kinds of strange sounds in the target language. You may even start by standing in front of a mirror, watching your mouth as you struggle to make the new sounds. Learning a new language is akin to learning to think all over again. This implies learning to associate sounds with objects the way you did with your mother tongue when you were very young. Languages that are phonologically and morphologically close to one’s mother tongue tend to be less difficult to learn. Vocabulary building is an essential ingredient in learning a foreign language. As you progress in your second language acquisition, it is a good idea to continue enriching your lexical repertoire by creating word associations with the new words learned. The more languages you learn the easier this process becomes because the more languages you know, the more words you have to help you remember other words. Language is never learned in a void. Language functions in a cultural mold. This implies that the role of cultural awareness in learning a foreign language is critical. Learning a foreign language is a heavy undertaking but an exciting one too.
Introduction
This article is intended for those who have never learned a second language before. It would also come in handy for those who have made an attempt at learning a foreign language and who hope to do better at it this time around. I have studied several languages over the years. I am fluent in five, namely English, French, Hausa, Bamunka and Cameroonian Creole (Pidgin). I hope to pass along to language learners some of the tricks that helped me transform the travails of learning a foreign language into a blissful experience. Put differently, I have been through it all lots of times. All by themselves, these tips will not teach you a second language. However, they will enable you to learn pretty fast. For starters, let us get one thing straight. Learning a foreign language requires a lot of hard work. It also calls for self-discipline. It entails employing different paradigms that you may never have thought about before. Learning a language is akin to any other learning endeavor. If you are truly interested in accomplishing your goal and devote a fair amount of time to it daily, you will succeed (Fuller, 1987). Here are some practical tips that would expedite your language learning process:
Teach yourself new tricks
Learning a second language entails “teaching your mouth new tricks” (Fuller, op cit, 15). You will have to suppress your inhibitions, and, like a child, try to produce all kinds of strange sounds in the target language. You may even start by standing in front of a mirror, watching your mouth as you struggle to make the new sounds. Emulate native speakers of your target language—use your mouth, throat, and indeed, your entire speech mechanism to produce the required sounds in the foreign language. Bear in mind that foreign language sounds are produced differently from those in your mother tongue. Thus, the onus is on you to learn how sounds are produced in the new language you are learning. To sound authentic, you must learn to ape native speakers of your target language. Effective language learners listen a lot and imitate native speakers. As Goodith White puts it, “listening is the first skill which learners usually develop: they listen to an utterance, then they repeat it…” (Quoted in
It is evident from these remarks that listening involves combining bottom-up processing of sounds with top-down expectations for messages which draw on much wider schematic and contextual knowledge of language in use. To really learn to pronounce sounds in the target language properly, learners have to get into the habit of using their mouths in a whole new way. It may be a little embarrassing at first but it can be fun once you get over the initial shock of feeling like a child, learning to talk all over again. You are going to need a tape, cassette recorder, or iPod. Our students at the Defense Language Institute in the Presidio of Monterey, California are issued iPods, which they find extremely useful for making audio recordings of themselves speaking their target languages. “It is like flashcards in my hand”, says Marine Lance Cpl. Nick Duran, a Pashto language student (AUSA News, 2010, p.9). Staff Sgt. Alan Thomas, another Pashto student says he “creates a daily vocabulary list so he can read and play back words throughout the day” (op cit, 9). One other useful thing to do is to listen to your own voice on the tape recorder. Listen to recordings of the lessons you are studying. Compare your voice with that of a native speaker. You will never be able to pass for a native speaker of your target language. That is not the point. You just want people to understand you. And they will understand you if you make a consistent effort to substitute phonemic elements in your native-tongue for speech sounds in the target language.
Learn to think in a new way
Learning a new language is akin to learning to think all over again. This implies learning to associate sounds with objects the way you did with your mother tongue when you were very young. This whole process involves metacognition which could be defined as thinking about thinking (Anderson, 2002). Anderson posits that metacognition results in critical but healthy reflection and evaluation of thinking that may necessitate making specific changes in how learning is managed. Metacognitive skills empower language learners—when learners reflect on their learning, they become better prepared to make conscious decisions about what they could do to speed up the learning process. O’Malley and Chamot ( 1990, 8) underscore the importance of metacognition when they observe that “students without metacognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction or opportunity to plan their own learning, monitor their progress, or review their accomplishments and future learning directions. To learn a second language, you must learn to associate the new sounds you hear directly with the images in your mind.
As Fuller points out, “You need to establish new thought patterns by linking over and over again a series of sounds with a mental image or an idea of an action”(op cit, 30). Learn to think in bundles of concepts or ideas that will be converted to your target language. It is crucial to endeavor to think in the foreign language you are learning. If you don’t learn to think in your target language, the chances are that you will never really be proficient at it. Learning to think in a foreign language is not that difficult. You learn to think in a foreign language by using the language over and over again, asking simple questions at even the simplest level until you feel comfortable with the process. Then you add more new words, and practice using them together with all the words you learned in the previous lessons. Gradually you build up skill in your target language. I have a half a mind to admonish you against resorting to translation as a language learning technique. As you will soon discover, it is useful to get away from the idea of translating words. Translating takes too much time and energy and can be counter-productive at times. You will never learn to really speak a foreign language if you insist on translating every word you hear into your mother tongue. Your goal should be to understand the new language without translating it into your native tongue. In brief, you will never attain high level proficiency in a foreign language unless you learn to think in the language. Learning to think in a new language amounts to associating seemingly meaningless new sounds with the idea or image of what they mean. You must practice to the point where new sounds in the target language make sense to you.
Learn to spot language families
Languages that are phonologically and morphologically close to one’s mother tongue tend to be less difficult to learn. What we are talking about here is the matter of linguistic families. A little understanding of the concept of linguistic genealogy will make one’s language learning enterprise a lot easier. All global languages are related to one another. The generality of African Languages belong in a group called Bantu languages. Bantu languages originated in the region of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for "person". The technical term “Bantu” simply means "people". By one estimate, there are 522 languages in the Bantu family. The Bantu language with the largest total number of speakers is Swahili. If you already know one of these Bantu languages you will be able to learn the others fairly easily. The same holds true for European languages.
Most European languages derive from a family called Indo-European. Indo-European languages subdivide into the following sub-families: Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Indic, Iranian, Celtic, and a few others such as Greek and Albanian (Fuller, op cit, 36). If you already know one of the following Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, you will find it relatively easy to learn another language belonging in the same group. This is because the grammars are not very different and a high proportion of words will be recognizable to speakers of each of these languages. This means that if you are a speaker of one of the Romance languages, you will, with minimal effort, be able to fairly quickly learn to read another language in the same group—and with a little more work, to speak it. In your language learning process, it is necessary to look for related words to serve as memory jogs. Examples include: confort (French) =comfort; ennemi (French) =enemy; gouvernement (French) =government; tradegie (French) =tragedy, etc. Word association is one of the most important skills in learning a foreign language. You need to think about how to relate the words you are learning to words you already know.
Vocabulary building is an essential ingredient in learning a foreign language. As you progress in your second language acquisition, it is a good idea to continue enriching your lexical repertoire by creating word associations with the new words learned. Let’s look at the Spanish word “boleta”, which means “ticket”. You may not be able to think of any word in English that relates to this word. However, the word reminds you slightly of the English word “ballet”. “Boleta” actually has nothing to do with the word “ballet” but if you can remember the idea of ballet-ticket, chances are that you will be able to remember that the word “boleta” means “ticket” (Fuller, op cit, 44). The whole point is that you have to make connections in your own mind if the memory trick is going to work. This is true even if the connections are entirely phony. Let me give you a few more examples of how you might go about trying to remember a number of Hausa words that have no obvious connections with their English equivalents—by making wild associations:
“Yaro” means “boy”: reminds of the English word “yard”.
“Gida” means “house/“home”: reminds me of the word “guide”.
“Migi” means “husband”: reminds me of the word “magi”
“Mata” means “woman/wife”: reminds me of “matter”
“Gun” means “at/with”: reminds me of “gun”
I know I am really stretching a point here. But these word associations serve to give me a way, however tortured, to remember the word the first time I see it in a word list. A word that looks meaningless at first suddenly takes on personality and character when you associate it with words existing in your lexical granary. That is what remembering words is all about. Go ahead and dream up your own associations to help you remember words in your target language. What works for you is right.
The more languages you learn the easier this process becomes because the more languages you know, the more words you have to help you remember other words. Moir and Nation argue that “new vocabulary needs to be learned both receptively and productively because it is by productive use of such vocabulary that learners signal that they have become part of their particular communities” (Quoted in Griffiths, op cit, 159). The point is that as a language learner, you must keep your eyes open for word-associations. Create mental pictures of words you have learned; add new words to the ones you already know. Use flashcards to review new words and their significations. Pay attention to lexical roots. Retention of words and their meanings happens when you use the words in a socio-cultural content.
Develop cultural sensitivity
Language is never learned in a void. Language functions in a cultural mold. This implies that the role of cultural awareness in learning a foreign language is critical. Your language learning venture has to be culture-based because you cannot learn a language without learning the culture of the people who speak it. Linguists have noted that the forms and uses of language reflect the cultural values of the society in which it is spoken. You may be wondering what the term ‘culture’ represents. What exactly is culture? This is not an idle question, particularly in the context of increasing globalization. On a general level, culture has been referred to as the whole way of life of a people or group. Our definition of culture in this article is similar to Snell-Hornsby’s, when she points out that culture should not be understood “in the narrow sense of man’s advanced intellectual development as reflected in the arts, but in the broader anthropological sense to refer to all socially conditioned aspects of human life”(39).
Culture is the way of life of a people and its manifestations peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression. It is the learned and shared patterns of behavior characteristic of a given group of people. It permeates all facets of social life, including creative writing. This view incorporates both material manifestations of culture that are easily seen and non-material ones that are more difficult to observe. It is that facet of human life learned by people as a result of belonging to some particular linguistic community. Not only does this concept include a group’s way of thinking, feeling, and acting, but also the internalized patterns of doing certain things in certain ways. This concept of culture includes the physical manifestations of a group as exhibited in their achievements and contributions to civilization. In sum, culture could be defined as a shared set of attributes peculiar to a group of people. As you can see, linguistic competence alone is not enough for learners to be proficient in a language.
As a language learner, you should be aware of culturally acceptable ways of addressing people, expressing gratitude, making requests, turning down offers, etc. If you were learning French, for instance, it would be absolutely necessary to comprehend when it is appropriate to use the informal subject pronoun (tu=you) and its formal equivalent (vous=you)—a distinction that is not obvious in English. Understanding the cultural context of spoken discourse such as greetings, giving and receiving compliments carries as much weight as being able to make grammatically correct sentences in your target language.
In brief, as a language learner, you will master a language by learning both its linguistic and extra-linguistic canons. To gain cultural knowledge as an integral part of the language learning process, students must expose themselves to authentic cultural artifacts from the target language community. Then must look out for cultural resources, learn nonverbal cues, and pay attention to cultural diversity. At the Defense Language Institute (DLI), our students gain cultural competency by undergoing immersion. We have two immersion programs that enable our students to practice target languages full-time and get acquainted with the cultures behind the languages they are learning. The first of these programs is called the Outside Continental United States (OCONUS) immersion program which gives students the chance to visit the country where their target languages are spoken. The other program is the Field Training Exercise (FTX) which takes students out of the classroom to facilities nearby where they are given scenarios to role play. For most students, the FTX is their first exposure to the target-language culture. The essence of the FTX is to get students speaking their target languages. This calls for motivation.
Let motivation be grist for the linguistic mill
Effective language learners are highly motivated .The term ‘motivation’ derives from the Latin verb movere—which could be translated as “to move”. Motivation is the ingredient that moves a person to make certain choices, to engage in action, and to persist in action (Ushioda, 2008). Motivation is very important in second language acquisition. It is listed by Rubin (1975) among the three essential variables on which good language learning depends. Gardner and Lambert (1972, speculate that “learners’ underlying attitudes to the target language culture and people would have a significant influence on their motivation, and thus, their success in learning the language (135). This speculation gives rise to the classic distinction between integrative and instrumental motivation. The former reflects a sincere and personal interest in the target language, people, and culture. The latter describes the practical value and advantages derived from learning the language. Ushioda observes that “the optimal kind of motivation from within is identified as intrinsic motivation—that is, doing something as an end in itself, for its own self-sustaining pleasurable rewards of enjoyment, interest, challenge, or skill and knowledge development”(op cit, 21). Intrinsic motivation is contrasted with extrinsic motivation—that of doing something as a means to some separate outcome. Language learners need extra help in maintaining motivation. Fuller (op cit, 99) suggests recourse to foreign language films, foods, music, books, comics, radio broadcasts and TV channels as motivational support.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, second language learners need to be mindful of the fact that they will never be accomplished language learners without making sustained effort. Learning a foreign language is a heavy undertaking but an exciting one too. No cogent points have been made by a researcher to sustain the argument that one cannot learn a language in adulthood. Adult language learners seem to know exactly what they are doing. They also know why they are doing what they are doing. Besides, they tend to be their own harshest critics—and that can make the rewards of success all the more satisfying.
Dr. Peter W. Vakunta
Assistant Professor, Defense Language Institute
Presidio of Monterey, California
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Interesting!!! I feel more moved to continue my language lessons.
Posted by: Chah kenneth walandji | August 09, 2010 at 12:14 PM