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Sgt Killjoy
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 438
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 Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 1:48 am Post subject: |
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Sometimes people get into this line of work because they like to travel around and go many places.
My family bounced around when I was growing up. The longest we ever stayed in one place was about a year. Even in university, I bounced around in off-campus apartments. Work life? I still changed apartments every year or so.
Then came TEFL. I stayed in job and house for 2 years. Just coming off another job where I stayed for 2 years in the same place. I've moved around a lot less since I started to TEFL. |
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LIVERPOOL1
Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 5:26 pm Post subject: |
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| No wonder the pay is low and the esteem non existant when we ourselves equate backpacking with EFL teaching.......................... |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 9:10 am Post subject: |
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| If you are serious about learning and have any aptitude you can get the foundations of the foreign language without immersion. That should come later when you are around Intermediate Level. |
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denise
Joined: 23 Apr 2003
Posts: 3419
Location: finally home-ish
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| Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| scot47 wrote: |
| If you are serious about learning and have any aptitude you can get the foundations of the foreign language without immersion. That should come later when you are around Intermediate Level. |
I agree. In my personal experience, immersion at the beginner level (like, absolute total zero beginner) just resulted in confusion and a rush to find people to help translate for me. When you're still learning numbers and basic greetings, immersion does not exactly provide comprehensible input!
d |
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Justin Trullinger
Joined: 28 Jan 2005
Posts: 3110
Location: Seoul, South Korea and Myanmar for a bit
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| Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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I have to say my experience has been otherwise.
I reached an intermediate level of Spanish before living in a Spanish speaking environment, and that worked fine.
But with Catal�n and Italian, I was zero level when I moved into immersion- and didn't find that it slowed my development. If anything, these languages went faster than Spanish for me.
Maybe it had to do with being, in both cases, in villages where translators were practically impossible to come by.
Best,
Justin |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Justin Trullinger wrote: |
I have to say my experience has been otherwise.
I reached an intermediate level of Spanish before living in a Spanish speaking environment, and that worked fine.
But with Catal�n and Italian, I was zero level when I moved into immersion- and didn't find that it slowed my development. If anything, these languages went faster than Spanish for me.
Maybe it had to do with being, in both cases, in villages where translators were practically impossible to come by.
Best,
Justin |
Your knowledge of Spanish would have helped enormously for those languages, and there are quite a few cognates between English and those languages via Latin sources that also help.
If you are moving into a non-Indo-European language area, like Japan, with zero knowledge and do nothing to work at it- even just by yourself studying from texts an asking a lot of questions, then after a year you will have progressed, but not a whole lot at all. In Tokyo you sometimes find the odd foreigner who has been here three plus years and still can't do anything more complicated than "Excuse me. Do you have [X product]" when in a store and "one beer please". It's because if you want, you CAN live like that in a big city like Tokyo- there will always be people who can speak okay English. You also meet people with really good Japanese (but without particles) who are basically illiterate because they always studied it in roman characters and by speaking. |
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Justin Trullinger
Joined: 28 Jan 2005
Posts: 3110
Location: Seoul, South Korea and Myanmar for a bit
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Your knowledge of Spanish would have helped enormously for those languages |
Certainly Spanish was a help with Catal�n, though in my opinion French would have been even better- if I had acceptable French, which I don't.
The relationship between Spanish and Italian would have helped- but I didn't really know Spanish when I was in Italy. (Some time before my extended stints in Spanish speaking countries.)
Best,
Justin |
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