In the last ten or twelve years I have had an interesting relationship with languages. I was reminded of this journey when I arrived home and found my in-laws watching a movie in French. It was the first language I studied, but my comprehension of it is very limited.
I remember telling my mom that I wanted to learn Norwegian - the first language I was interested in learning. To this day I have only learned how to say Thank you, I have to use the bathroom, and I have to fart. You can see the influence of the high school kids who taught me these phrases.
The next language in my life was French - a high school requirement from my mom. I didn't really want to learn French, but I enjoyed the studies and worked hard, probably harder than I studied on anything else at that time. I was actually disappointed when we learned that the curriculum we used required families to pay a decent sum for additional students watching the language lessons. This was a ridiculous requirement for a home school video curriculum, in my opinion, but mom and dad couldn't afford to pay for Ginnie and me to learn with Laura, so Laura continued studying French without companions.
At some point in my high school days my parents bought Rosetta Stone software - this time a language of my choosing. I learned German in the next several months and my brothers also tagged along. I progressed quickly, but realized after some years that I really had never become conversational and understood very little of the language when actually interacting with it. This revelation was given to me by my German roommate when I went to Romania as a young adult. Her father and a friend of his visited her for a few days and I realized that my German was inadequate.
It was because of this revelation that I decided to learn Romanian to the point of conversational proficiency. When my college financial aid was lost and my work had little for me to do I found myself with plenty of spare time on my hands. I decided to use the time for learning Romanian and working on my art. Because I had not gotten very far using typical classroom approaches in previous languages and because little was readily available for Romanian language curriculum, I devised my own approach - an approach I later realized did not work as well for learning Chinese as used in Taiwan. It was fun to take the big fancy Latin borrow words we use in English and change the pronunciation to be more like Romanian and find that I could be understood. I even fooled a few Romanians that I am Romanian - something I wish I could do here in Taiwan but can't because of my physical appearance and limited language ability.
After I became proficient in Romanian (a process of about two years) I began to pick up bits and pieces of languages of those around me at my work. There was Russian from my Ukrainian coworker and Spanish from my Hispanic coworkers. I suppose I am just nerdy, but I picked up Russian phrases like "I want coffee" "How are you?" "I'm fine, thank you" and "goodbye". In Spanish I picked up little things like how to say towels, bedrooms, and "What do you want, man?" "I don't want anything" "I want you to hurry up" and even "My sister is here with her baby." It was easier to pick up on Spanish after learning so much Romanian which is much more similar to Spanish than English. People often say that English is a lot like Spanish, but I feel that English has a much closer relationship to German - a fact backed up by linguists.
Then, of course, Chinese. Why Chinese when I had never been interested in the language, in the people, or ever visiting Asia? Well I was dating (long distance) a Taiwanese guy and we were talking about getting married - what would we need to do in order to make family relationships work well if we get married? In order to talk with his parents and family I would want to speak Chinese and one day when we have a family we want our kids to be bilingual so they can speak Chinese with Rex's family and English with my family. It would just have to be a normal part of our life.
After learning Romanian where I felt I could communicate (poorly and with many errors and misunderstandings) after about 8 or 9 months, learning Chinese has felt like such a slow process. I couldn't read the language and sound out the words to learn without extensive copying and pasting into Google Translate. Google Translate used weird translations for many words. Most apps and language learning curriculum is designed for Mainland China usage - i.e. simplified characters rather than traditional, as well as words that are not commonly used in Taiwan. I also didn't have the time to dedicate to study the language like I had when I learned Romanian. I was, after all, working (whether in missions or my work back in the States), in school, working on knowing thoroughly a guy I intended to marry, eventually planning our wedding, and finally moving three times in one year. The time to dedicate to Chinese studies just wasn't there.
Now that I am in Taiwan, I have begun to see a lot more growth because I have the opportunity for immersion, I am being given instruction and corrections by a teacher, and I am being taught piece by piece the most commonly used Chinese characters for typical conversation and communication.
Perhaps I'll write sometime about my strategies and methods for learning language that have worked or not worked for me. It could be of use for someone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment