Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

oldfort,
it is good you do not contadict scot47 about grammar or about conjugation; however, your point about not speaking the lingo often enough, and the school's failure to help you overcome your lack of confidence remind me of the mantra of English teaching in China, which stresses oral practice at the expense of oratorial refinement and accuracy. Maybe 3 decades of Chomsky and subsequent linguistic theoreticians have brainwashed entire generations into accepting the notion that speaking is absolutely necessary.
Not my view, and in my experience, it's not true. Confience comes from being accepted by the community whose language you are speaking - whether as a L 1 or a L 2, but speaking it means speaking it in the established, regulated manner in which it is accepted as the lingua franca of the native speakers.
How to best arrive there if you are born outside the community of the target language?
It's by internalising the thought processes proper to the native speakers, and this you arrive best at by being more passive than active initially - listening and reading rather tahn talking.
Studying French, you won't have to memorise half as much as many do if you only do your grammar well.
THis is even more true of Latin! Memorisation is not what my teachers required of us save for very few absolutely necessary rules and vocables.
A considerable number of words you can master without memorising - by inferring from a context, guessing, using your imagination!

[oldfort]

Hi Roger,

That makes sense, actually--that being immersed in the language/culture works best, even (especially) if one doesn't contribute at first, until one has observed it sufficiently.

Thanks, I hadn't thought about it that way before. I think the process you've described is the sort of thing I felt lacking in my French studies. True, the memorization and conjugation is probably a decent foundation, but they could have done more with the class, even the odd French field trip, maybe? Quebec was just across the river, and yet it was so removed from those classes, it might have been Mars.

Anyway, thanks for the different view.