How Long Till You Were Comfortable With Your Second Language?

This pretty much mirrors most of my bad habits as well. And I am much too poor at Greek to even begin calling myself comfortable, except at the pathetic stage I am at now. Time to improve. I look forward to three months of Sunday School in Acts, but frankly, I could be helping myself by using Brenton’s old diglot in Genesis if I weren’t the incarnation of sloth.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever been "comfortable" with any language other than my first, but the way that I have been taught classical languages has certainly inhibited my learning. Being encouraged to speak the language, listen to the language, translate from English into the target language and write in the target language were all very important in my becoming reasonably comfortable with German, which I studied for five years at school. When I learned Greek, Hebrew and Coptic, we did very little other than read in the target language and translate from the target language into English, and I found getting them to "stick" was very much harder. And yes, teaching helped me learn.

My second language was English, which I gained confidence in fairly easily. It was a rapid and seamless transition.

The secret of my success, of course, was complete immersion. Nothing works like the sink or swim method :).

The first language that I learned to speak and to read and to write was Spanish. Beyond that, I took a couple of years of French in HS, and though it is well-rusty, wouldn’t take that long to reawaken . . . then . . . and a year of Japanese in college, which is just plain difficult to learn because of all of the peculiarities of the language that are irregular.

My study of Christian origins led me to muster the courage to learn some Koine Greek, and I do OK recognizing some verses when referencing and suchlike, but I do not find my cursory knowledge useful in any other way beyond that. It’s certainly not a conversational language for me. I think your advice to work from two different textbooks and to read some material outside of our usual focus, so that we don’t inadvertently play the pre-guessing game, are good suggestions for the study of *any* language.

How’s 1Clement coming along, btw? I’d be curious to read some impressions.

You just read the Protevangelion.

Any thoughts? Reviews? Questions?

peace

Ó

It took me a long time to get comfortable with classical languages. I’d now say I’m comfortable with Greek and Latin, I can read a text with fluency, and only unusual vocabulary and grammar will slow me down.

It took me roughly 4 years of Greek, and the thing that took me over the line was a huge investment in vocabulary. However, I wouldn’t replicate the time I spent in pure vocabulary rote learning.

It took longer for Latin, because I started Latin earlier, but didn’t learn the self-reflective pedagogic principles I needed to until I was really getting somewhere in Greek. Then I started being very disciplined about vocab in Latin.

What changed everything, though, was starting to listen to teachers, Latin teachers in particular, and to start thinking about Language Acquisition and Modern Languages. Then I gave up translation, and focused almost all my attention on extensive reading, and some oral and aural work.

Sure, by ‘the self-reflective pedagogic principles I needed’ I mean that part of the process of learning a language, whatever we might mean by that, involves a process of learning about ourselves as language-learners, what works, what doesn’t, and what practices create certain outcomes. This is why, for example, people who have learnt one language tend to do better at learning another - they’ve learnt something about how they learn.

Some of these principles are generalisable and abstractable, and that’s why the become the basis of things like Second Language Acquisition theory in Linguistics. Others are far more personal, and it’s really up to a learner to understand “X works for me, but Y doesn’t”.

One of the most interesting ways I learned vocabulary, for example, was using the Mnemonic system that I learned many years ago. The Mnemonic system is revolutionary. Since the mind "thinks" in pictures, everything is converted to pictures and then stored FOR retrieval. When I teach the seminar, I guarantee every participant’s memory will increase over 400% or their money back. I’ve never had to refund a penny.

For the fun of it, I remembered the first 100 numbers in Pi in 35 minutes. I was able to give those numbers back... forward or backward, and I could tell you what was, for example, the 63rd number in the sequence. I don’t generally waste my time with such useless information, but it is fun a social parties.

The memory has two main functions: Storage and Retrieval. Learning how to store and retrieve information makes all the difference. I agree with Seumas that "X works for me, but Y doesn’t," but I’ve never met someone that Mnemonics does not work for.

Mnemonics does not work by association. Association is not an effective method. The system takes a little time to construct, but there is no paper work involved :o )

You’ve probably seen some mnemonics in Greek with those picture cards of vocabulary words with strange and funny pictures used to learn vocabulary. That is very effective if you understand that you don’t need to retain the picture forever; you have to learn the method to retention. After the word is retained, you don’t need the picture anymore. The picture is just to help you during the short-term memory phase. Long-term memory primarily comes from usage, and usage at the right times.

J. Mark Dufner taught me Mnemonics in the mid 80s. I don’t know if his material is still available, but you can use Kevin Trudeau’s Mega Memory book/CD. It is basically the same thing. Learning this method, and then doing some additional research on memory should get you on your way.