Making the Most of Your Holiday Abroad

Make the Most of Your Time Abroad
Do you know just how many opportunities you have of acquiring more language when you go abroad on holiday?
Consider what you might learn:
1. At the petrol station.
2. In the cafeteria.
3. In the shop.
4. From the local radio
5. As you look at street signs.
6. At the tourist information office.
7. At check-in at your accommodation.
8. In the supermarket.
9. From the junk mail left on your windscreen.
10. When you talk to the native-speaker family next door.
And what about when you go on a business trip? See “The Complete Guide to Learning a Language”, Chapter 10.

The Backbone of Language

Grammar is sometimes a dirty word. A whole generation went without it, and during a fair amount of my teaching career, the Foreign Language teachers knew more about it than the English teachers. Our American cousins frequently put us to shame. That is changing, and that may be a good thing about the Literacy Strategy.
The point is, grammar is the backbone of any language. And I do mean grammar, not usage. There are five major parts to grammar – verbs, word order, parts of speech, prepositions, number and gender. Okay, “verbs” is a big section with tense, person, voice and mood to worry about. Chomsky recognises that each language has a way of expressing al those components. We fill our languae acqusition device with our mother tongue.
Master the grammar of a language, and you can do anything with that language. The cloning and adapting strategies mentions in my previous blog are good up to a point and can be used until you acquire full knowledge of the grammar. In fact, they even help you to get to that stage. In the end, though, you do need to master all of these things.
I recommend acquiring the grammar as quickly as you can. Then all you have to do is practise your skills and pick up more vocabulary. No pressure then! 
See The Complete Guide to Learning a Language Chapter 9. (How To Books Ltd) Selbstbedienung (ZigZag)

Thieving is Good for You

There are patterns of language all around you – especially when you’re in the country which speaks your language. Proactively study them and adapt them as your own. When you’re in the shops, listen to what the person in front of you in the queue says.
You can easily change one sentence into another by changing the noun. Or the adjective. Beware of genders and plurals. Verbs are a little trickier, but the pattern may be the same for the new verb.
Look at this for instance.
The cat sat on the mat.
The dog sat on the mat.
The dog sat on the sofa.
A dog sat on the sofa.
A dog slept on the sofa.
Etc. etc.
The fun comes in with “An elephant trod on the house”.
See “The Complete Guide to learning a Language” Chapter 8.

Reading Made Easy

You don’t need to struggle with reading in a foreign language. It isn’t quite the same as reading in your own language, but you can makes it easier or yourself. Here are my top tips:
1. Read the passage three times.
2. The first time, pencil in all the words you understand.
3. The second time, read it out loud, or imagine you are reading it out loud. Do some words now sound like English?
4. During the third reading, some other words will now become obvious.
5. Now, check any sentences where you don’t understand a word. Try to isolate the key word – often a noun, the subject of the sentence, or the verb. Look up just that word.
It becomes a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. The meaning of the whole gradually becomes clear as you uncover the meaning of individual words.

Talk the Hind Leg Off a Donkey

We are talking about talking, the most basic form of communication. Even the cats which wail at night are doing just that, though in a far less sophisticated way than we humans. Talking is a mixture of listening and speaking. One person speaks, the other listens, and then responds in speech. Effective communication happens when speaker and listener create the same pictures in their heads. For this to happen the listener really tunes in to what is being said, and the speaker chooses their language carefully.
This may seem really hard in your new language. But there are two things you can do which will really help:
1. Listen carefully for patterns of language that speakers are using and mimic and adapt.
2. Learn to make the most of what you do know. Some of that is to do with gesture and expression, rather than actual words.
Practice makes perfect, and if you can practise with another member of your group, great. Take a basic conversation form your course book, and go over it hundreds of times. To break the monotony, do it with different voices and in different moods. Then change a few words which are easy to change – ask for a kilo of pears instead of a pound of apples.
A problem sometimes occurs. You say something really well, so they come back at you in a torrent. Don’t let them! Insist, insist and insist again that they speak slowly and that they make their meaning clear. The Spanish, incidentally, are very good at this. See how they deal with tourists. They only use a few words of English, French, Dutch or whatever else. Then they use mime and gesture. You can request your native speaker to do that too… possibly by miming and gesturing.
All is possible of you really want to communicate.
(See The Complete Guide to Learning a Language, “Talk the Hind Leg Off a Donkey”)

Making the Most of Your Contacts

Making the Most of Your Contacts
There is no substitute for working with a native speaker of the language you are learning. Some towns are twinned with ones in other countries. This can provide a really useful way of finding a friend who shares your interests. There will be plenty of opportunities to visit the other town and play host to people from there.
When I was in full-time teaching, I often took my students on exchange visits. It was probably one of the most important aspects of my work. Even those students who didn’t go on the visit benefited form the renewed enthusiasm of this who had been. The students were so motivated to learn, I hardly had to teach them. They lapped up new language.
If you work with a native speaker, you have a constant accurate pattern of language. If you build up the right relationship, your exchange partner can correct your attempts without you feeling in adequate.
A system called tandem learning takes this a step further. You work with a native speaker who is learning your language. You work on agreed tasks and also agree how much you will correct each other’s work. You should work about 50% of the time in your on language and 50% of the time in your target language. Thus, you mix practice with learning new patterns.
These days, all of this becomes much easier and cheaper with email, Skype and mobile phones. There is no end to the possibilities.
(See The Complete Guide to Learning a Language, “Go Native”)