The Cunning Linguist

Not many of us have fond school-day memories of those tricky Mandarin lessons, or firm-but-fair Japanese teachers. Most UK school pupils experience modern foreign languages (MFL) as synonymous with French. Timetable constraints undoubtedly play a strong part in this, as does the necessity of standardizing subjects so pupils can move between schools relatively painlessly.

Even the introduction of a second language such as German can present difficulty; during my education I moved from an area where German lessons started in ‘Year 9’ (the year before starting GCSEs or old O-levels) to a school where lessons began in ‘Year 8’ – the year I had already done! I still have vivid memories of our enthusiastic German teacher talking to the class for the best part of an hour in German before he happened to direct a question at one of the handful of new students who shared my predicament. It wasn’t the best start, and set the tone for the rest of the year (which I hated with a passion)!

Given the enthusiasm I have since discovered for languages, I wonder how many of our young minds are driven away from subjects and skills in which they might otherwise excel by the presentation of languages in schools.

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A few weeks back, I actually managed to complete my language goals ahead of the scheduled date for the first time this year. It was a pretty satisfying moment, and its taken a while to tune the approach and get the right balance between progress and excessive graft.

Italian didn't feel the way I'd thought it would; it is a really beautiful language but somehow it just didn't feel as relevant as I'd hoped, and from time to time I would respond to the recording in Spanish - which is pretty remarkable given I've not touched Spanish since 2003! So I'd still like to learn Italian, but it is a little further down the list for now.

Having become so absorbed of late in Korean melodrama, I have been listening to quite a bit of Korean. What an interesting language! I'd still like to do a bit more research to see if my experience of it was coloured heavily by the context in which it was being used (haven't listened to very much romantic Japanese!) - but it has the "sing-song" and gentleness of Thai, a reassuring absence of tones and a consistent grammar as with Japanese, and a strong cultural synthesis with China from its closer proximity.

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Last week Aaron Kuroiwa posed the common question of whether it was counterproductive to try to learn more than one language at once, in his blog LeTutor's Guide to Languages. He makes some very good points supported by his own experience, and concludes that it is more productive under some circumstances than others but is ultimately down to personal choice. Its difficult to argue with his conclusions, but I think its a shame that so little is written about how one might actually go about studying more than one language at a time, should this be the chosen route.

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