How to learn Korean? I wish I knew. I teach students how to learn English as a second language, but I am not at all sure I can apply what I teach to learning Korean myself. So for now I turn to a different expert .Kato Lomb supposedly was proficient in 17 different languages. She began learning languages as an adult and took up her last language, Hebrew, at age 86. Wow - she even impressed Stephen Krashen, who was inspired by her to take up a new language at age 54. How did SHE do it? The main thing - she taught herself! The drive, the methodology, the persistence, came from her own invention. So that's the main thing I picked up:
- It's not really HOW, it's the inner drive to learn, to question, to figure out, to try, to communicate that makes language learning successful.
I also picked up this:
- Lomb is supremely confident. She KNOWS she can learn. She isn't daunted by the difficulties. So CONFIDENCE really helps.
- Lomb suggests jumping into hard stuff right off the bat. Start reading a book even if you can't understand much of it. If you take a class, try to get into a class more advanced than the one you placed into. Start with a full, thick (even monolingual!) dictionary. Then actively try to figure out what is going on; make your own discoveries about how the language works.
For most of us, this goes against the grain. We want to start at the beginning, go step by step. We want "comprehensible input." We are overwhelmed and frustrated when the material is too hard. But perhaps for the student with enough MOTIVATION and CONFIDENCE, this is a shortcut to faster learning. It worked for Lomb. (Should we give our ESL students who want to take a higher class than they placed into a chance to do this too?)
For me, I do not yet seem to have sufficient motivation and confidence to make this work in learning Korean. But perhaps when I get there...
Colleague Scott Alkire is the one who managed to get this book translated and published in the US, and he wrote a wonderful preface to the book comparing Lomb's experiences to modern Second Language Acquisition theory. The book is available online at TESL-EJ.
Testing
ReplyDeleteSwell Blog!
ReplyDeleteHmm... very interesting perspective, tips, and advice! Perhaps they apply to other things we try to learn in life too (beyond language study). I'll try to keep this in mind. Thanks for the book review!
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective on language learning. I suspect that in order to make this method work, one must have some natural ability to mimic in addition to the motivation and confidence mentioned. And what a surprise to learn that Scott wrote the preface for it! Thanks for sharing this book review.
ReplyDeleteSue W.
Wow- thanks for the comments Margery and Sue (and yours too Patty and Harold!)
ReplyDeleteThe author herself has a whole chapter (called "The LInguistic Gift" ) in which she adamantly rejects the notion of natural ability. To her, motivation and confidence are by far the main factors accounting for the differences in language learners. If A and B show different learning results, Lomb claims:
A has more time to devote to dealing with the language than B has
A is inspired to diligence by a more direct goal than B is
A uses smarter methods of learning than B does
and she goes on and on. Of course, she is only writing from personal experience and observation; someone who has an innate "gift" for languages may not even be able to imagine the brain of someone without one.
Lomb also claims that indeed, the same factors are at play in other learning. She uses the example of learning to swim: "I heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world." That's at least the confidence part.
Thanks again for the comments.