I’ve studied languages virtually my entire life. The grade school I attended required mandatory, albeit simplistic, French lessons for two years. I studied German in high school, followed by three years of Russian in undergrad. The common denominator in these curricula, and all like them to my knowledge, is that they don’t teach what’s useful, they teach what is easy to grade. Let me restate that: testability is the goal, not communication.
That’s why so much of what is taught is centered around activities like…
memorizing vocabulary lists;
memorizing grammar rules;
conjugating verbs;
repeating aloud sentences from the textbook;
transcribing sentences said by the teacher or recordings;
and so on. The bottom line is, it’s simple for instructors to make students regurgitate all this during quizzes and tests and provides an unambiguous rubric by which to assign a grade. 90% correct on your vocab test? That’s an “A.” Only 62% right on your verb conjugations? That’s a “D.”
But what does this get you? The first time I met actual Russians (in China, of all places), I could barely express myself even after 30 credits with a 4.0 average. I had great knowledge about the language (vocab, grammar rules, pronunciation, etc.), but I didn’t know the language. Theory, not practice.
Moreover, for many people the academic focus on testability teaches fear: fear of making mistakes, because after all, if you make a mistake, you’ll get a poor grade. This can paralyze some people from ever trying to speak in their target language, which is completely antithetical to the goal of being able to communicate. If someone said to you, “stomach empty food place where?” you would surely understand the message, even though it’s far from perfectly phrased.
So what’s the point? If you only want to be tested on memorized words and grammar rules, by all means, please sign up for an academic class, but if you want to be able to actually communicate with people in your target language, you need a different strategy. In the posts that follow, I will be outlining components of the strategy that has worked for me.