Learning German
I took Toronto's Goethe Institut's Level I German course and now have a basic understanding of German grammer, syntax and sentence structure. With a rudimentary vocabulary, I landed in Berlin and was able to interact with most of the locals... "Ich bin Auslander und spreche nicht gut Deutsch"!!!
But learning a language really is a process of listening and using it at every given opportunity. In Berlin, it is really easy to get away with English. Buying coffee and groceries does not require conversational skills. So picking up the language has to require an extra effort on my part.
In a few hours watching German TV news and listening for words and phrases I recognised, I started to develop an ear for hearing the words in the sentence. My German/English dictionary was at hand for words that I did not recognise. This is a surprisingly effective method of picking up some basic German skills as you are doing some active work while listening to what is assumably a formal German accent - so it's easier to make out words.
I used to be intimidated by languages, but the more research I did on computer and human languages, the more I realised that language was just a function of our expression. I actually read "Syntactic Structure", Chomsky's initial research on the topic and it's fascinating in itself, but more for what it meant to linguistics at the time. The field used to believe that language was catagorical, in that different languages in different regions were separated into their own groups. Chomsky asserted and proved that human language is an innate facility of all humans and thus has the same structure across all languages. The research and proofs for his thoeries are really cool.
Anyways, if you want to pick up a language, I can recommend starting with a basic course, then travelling to a place that uses the language, watching their TV, and trying to get into basic conversations with people on the street (cafes, parks, etc). So ich kenne bissen Deutsch, aber danach 1 Woche, genug für Verständnis!!!
Posted by Timothy Washington on 2005.05.13| Original post
#archive #frye #thebox