Business approach to languages

Our businesses and educational system largely do not successfully teach language. Business exists to make money. As a result, they will focus on rich people, who generally receive the best education. As a result, rich people in other countries more likely speak English than other local people do. The business message is not intended for everyone, but for those who can pay; most often it’s only secondarily for poor, uneducated people.

When business enters a country, therefore, the people look for those who can speak English. Rather than the Americans expending time and money learning the local language before and during the time they are in the country, they count on the fact that the locals already expended the resources to learn English.

Let’s say, for example, I want to sell a new cell phone in Vietnam. I need to sell to the people with money. I can’t just start knocking on doors. If I did just knock on doors, the people I find most likely won’t speak English, and probably won’t have enough money for expensive cell phones Fortunately, I will probably find some well-educated English-speaking Vietnamese advertisers who can help me. For a little money, I can hire them to communicate my message targeting potential customers with enough money.

US public education tends to support this model. They train kids to succeed in this business environment, to produce the one who can invent the cell phone or who can sell it in Vietnam. Therefore, our system focuses way more resources on math and English than other subjects. Our educational system is a long way from teaching Vietnamese.

LDS Church diverges from business model

Members of the LDS Church believe themselves primarily as messengers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (I’m not endorsing this idea; I’m just trying to reflect LDS theology. If I’ve mis-represented it, please correct me in the comments.) This message teaches about love and service towards the weaker neighbor. Any human, rich or poor, is capable of receiving it. Language should not be a barrier.

The LDS Church could follow the same model as the cell-phone vendor, above. Go to the country, find local English-speakers who want to spread your idea in the local language. Many US churches actually follow that model. Other churches focus on training local bilinguals in their church’s theology, to then teach it to the local non-English speakers. It probably costs much less money and time than teaching the language to every missionary who goes to the country.

Fulfilling the calling of messenger offers its own rewards because it is (or should be, at least) based on loving service. The LDS missionary conceives of his or her job principally as loving service, whether serving in New York City or the mountains of Peru. The president of the Missionary Training Center (MTC) wrote, “There is great joy as you participate in this most important work, and we know that you will reap great blessings as you serve.” An earlier president likewise wrote, “If you serve a mission faithfully and well, you will be a better husband, you will be a better father, you will be a better student, a better worker in your chosen vocation. Love is of the essence of this missionary work. Selflessness is of its very nature.” In the end, the missionary gains by becoming a more loving, service-oriented person.

Learning the language is itself and act of loving service because it enables the missionary to speak to and connect with any local person in this act of loving service. The local person’s education or economic status does not matter. Practicing loving service in other countries as a missionary requires knowing the local language in order to connect, and working on connecting makes the missionary a better person.

Language and love

Connecting with others in their own language expresses love. If we have an important thing to say, we want to say it in the language the hearer understands. (Remember Henry V’s attempt to speak French to Katherine of Valois?) We take on the burden of communication; we don’t “outsource.” Rather than make someone learn our language, we learn theirs.

The difference between succeeding and failing in language education is motivation. Many people have started learning a language, and then stopped as motivation ran out. The LDS missionaries succeed where no one else does because serving and loving others is baked into the motivation. The missionaries are always working to be sure that this service stands at the fore of their minds as they work on their language.

This rule can apply to any of us. When any of us take actions of love, we become better at loving actions. Our loving actions make us loving people. When we extend ourselves through language, our love makes us better people.

Please help me understand this question: Why is learning someone else’s language an act of love or service? Help me understand why the system works the way it does.

Photo Credit: Philip Newton (pne) from Flickr. Some rights reserved.

A foreign experience while still in class!

With the right teacher, you can learn languages quickly and with seemingly little effort. In my last post, I discussed how language learning progresses best outside the classroom. Yet some of my best, quickest, most pleasant progress in learning languages took place in classes with fantastic teachers. Others learners and teachers I know experienced the same. From my anecdotal evidence, awesome teachers do not focus on grammar but use immersion to emphasize that students listen to and read real speech, and that they talk a lot in the language.

Classes have to focus on communication, not perfection

In my experience, bad classes get bogged down in extraneous details in two common ways. First, one spends most of one’s time on grammar and paradigms. I remember praying for sleep in my French class while we were learning the umpteenth irregular verb (voir, I think); staying conscious only produced pain. In Russian class, we spent literally weeks on declining nouns, and I memorized the same Modern Hebrew verb tables at least 5 times.

Second, teachers grade students according to a native speaker baseline. For French class, that’s one point off for each article gender missed. In German, that’s a point off for forgetting the final “n” for the masculine dative, and in Russian it’s missing full credit because you used the wrong variation on the irregular genitive plural.

I found that these minute details do not hinder communication when I saw that native speakers make the same mistakes. For example, French children miss genders all the time. When I was in Kiev, my friend corrected her 10-year old niece for using the incorrect genitive plural ending. My children went to Russian school weekly when they were 4-7 years old. When they used all sorts of funky verb endings, I mentioned it to their teacher, who simply shrugged–that’s normal for Russian kids, as well.

Native speakers have years to perfect the minutiae of grammar, while we had weeks. Yet the native speakers could naturally carry on a much better conversation than my classmates could. Their success came because they focused on natural input and forcing themselves to speak when they were little. (Any parent will tell you about the wonder when their baby started saying what they wanted rather than just cry.) My classes were focused on getting it right first, before we could actually communicate.

My awesome experiences: Constant speaking in class

As much as I talk about studying languages on one’s own, some awesome teachers taught me a lot quickly. When I lived in Kiev, I had an awesome teacher for Ukrainian, Lyudmila. She was short with big glasses and a high voice and the patience of a kindergarten teacher. Even though she spoke no languages other than Russian and Ukrainian, she taught Russian and Ukrainian successfully to Americans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Germans, and others. As a result, my entire lesson was in Ukrainian, and I was forced to speak Ukrainian the whole time. She proved infinitely patient with no sign of boredom. She could bring up a new word, and if I couldn’t understand it from context, she could bring up 10 more examples and contexts until I understood. I came from every lesson with a headache from thinking so hard, and a list of new words that I had learned. There were no tests. In the end, I learned to speak Ukrainian such that Ukrainians thought that I was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the US.

During the summer between 9th and 10th grades, I had an awesome teacher for German, Dr. Coates. It was a 3-week intensive course at an academic camp. Dr. Coates insisted on everyone speaking on a regular basis, which he accomplish old-school, through recitation. The first week we spent on pronunciation. In one common exercise, we had to stand up and recite the German alphabet and vowels/diphthongs “blitzschnell” during class. The next two weeks he forbade us from speaking English in class. Each week we learned a couple poems and songs, and we spent a fair amount of time reading and summarizing aloud in German. At the end of three weeks he had us perform in the camp talent show by acting out the classic 19th century poem, “Der Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For grammar, we only used the basic book(let) he wrote himself (no exercises). We only had a couple of quizzes/tests, but no final tally was made that I remember. To this day I can speak German with very little accent, and I can still recite a couple strophes of “Der Erlkönig.”

Others’ awesome experiences: No English and lots of native input

Speaking German only in German class makes you learn quickly and intensely. Melissa Bradford taught German at the Latter-Day Saints’ Missionary Training Center (MTC). (I’ve long jealously admired the resources and expertise the LDS church has put into language-learning.). In her blog post, How To Raise a Multilingual Child- MUSTS, BESTS & BOOSTS, Melissa wrote,

The MTC was closer to a total immersion experience. As of the first week, our classes of young volunteers were challenged to SYL – Speak Your Language (or speak nothing at all) – although they’d only had 76 ours of instruction. It got very quiet right about then. And our students got headaches! It is hard work to pry out the mother tongue (let’s say it’s English) and replace it with another (there are 52 language taught at the MTC).

We should recognize that 76 hours of instruction is a little more than one standard college semester of a basic language class. (In the universities I know, the first years of a language met about 5 hours per week for about 12-13 weeks.) I can only dream of no English spoken after that amount of time. The LDS missionaries I’ve met around the world speak local languages at a high level because of their focus on speaking with natives many hours per day.

Awesome classroom instruction also includes lots of native input. A commenter on my blog, mm172001, wrote this comment:

In the full immersion classes we were introduced to culture; ex in Spanish class in high school we would listen to Mexican radio stations and watch Spanish tv with no subtitles. In ASL our teacher would tell us stories about her weekend, when we only knew partial vocab and had to infer the rest to pick up signs.

As he described, they had to navigate through native input right away. Radio, TV, and story telling required them to work actively in the language from the beginning.

Switching off English and switching on the other language full blast offers a classroom experience in which students really learn quickly and effectively.

Awesome instruction comes from imitating a native environment

Active speaking and listening make awesome language learning possible. In my best experiences, conversation only in the foreign language and speaking the language through talking and recitation produced my best learning. For two others I mentioned, only allowing the language in class and encouraging students to engage in active listening produced awesome learning experiences. In conjunction with my point in my last post, the most important point is to speak constantly and grapple with native input all the time, whether inside or outside the classroom. Only classes based on communication exclusively in the target language will produce awesome results.