MY POSITION ON THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN SCHOOLS

Lots of schools teach foreign languages these days and many people claim that it is important to speak a foreign language, which is a fair point. I know my own mother certainly thinks that; and this is someone who, besides being competent enough in French, studied some Latin and Russian at school, and who currently brushes up on her Italian and Portuguese from time to time. Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to learn a foreign language from a native speaker? (Did you know Jim Carrey’s character learned Korean from a native Korean speaker in Yes Man?) I’m sure there are plenty of people who regard language learning as like an adventure (even if they don’t put it in those words exactly), and who can pick up grammar and new vocabulary confidently yet still face frustrating challenges and obstacles when it comes to actually getting it right in practice – not so much for what they mean in their statements as for what is suggested by the very words found in said statements. Some mistakes are funny, some are not so funny; some are understandable, some are not understandable; some have only solution, some have more than one possible solution.

As long as you have access to reliable resources, both words and expressions you have heard before and those you have not are never far away – but the same cannot always be said for their exact meaning. I think it is important to remember to have one’s own meanings attributed to the words of a language grounded in dictionary definitions rather than stereotypical concepts which you may not even have experienced directly and probably never will, or any concept which owes its very existence to your own subjective personal experiences.

For example, I find that when people are described as “nice”, it’s not always the same. Just like a “nice day” tends to regarded as bright and sunny like something out of a fairy tale, I would suggest that if you go to a job interview and vehemently try to come across as a “nice guy / girl” to the interviewer, that’s a bit of a risky move because while they may well take a liking to you, it won’t do you any good if that is what makes them somewhat doubt that you are suitable for the job you are being interviewed for as a result of them finding that you lack the “grit” necessary for it (which would be quite likely if they found themselves thinking “this job is harder than this guy / girl thinks it is…”). Number 2: you may remember “evil” characters from certain kids’ cartoons, like Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Mojo Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls, and how easy you found it to laugh at them when you were much younger; but there is certainly little to no room for laughing at truly “evil” people in real life society: people who use their victims’ fear as a weapon and who have a talent for being manipulative as they encourage them to reject their best interests for their own ends having tricked them into being ashamed of the same. Number 3: when the average young heterosexual male like me hears or reads the word “sexy” they often instantly think of the allure of the likes of Megan Fox, or Cheryl Cole, or Jessica Alba, while hardly being particularly interested in showing appreciation for women’s ideas on what it means for a woman to be sexy (by the way, I blame Paris Hilton for that).

I’ve still got my Oxford-Hachette and Oxford-Duden dictionaries which I used at school. Like any good bilingual dictionary they have one section of English to a foreign language and another section of foreign language to English. You know, when you learn a new word in a foreign language, do you agree that, however you do it, it is a way which reliably lets you remember it both ways i.e. both “When I see this word in English, I know that it means this word in this foreign language” AND “When I see this word in the foreign language, I know that it means this word in English?” Many of the individual word entries in these particular dictionaries have way more than just one or two lines providing a comprehensive definition of the meaning(s) of the word that they refer to, and these dictionaries, far bigger than any book which might be good for bedtime reading, are 3 inches thick.