How to get rid of "Lithuanian English"?

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Vytenis
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How to get rid of "Lithuanian English"?

Post by Vytenis » Mon Nov 10, 2003 6:40 pm

The question that's bugging me is how to speak natural English. My problems is that after all these years I still tend to have this "grammatical accent". I mean, I speak English allright, but all too often it is Lithuanian sentences with English words. How to get rid of this? I have been racking my brain over this most of the time. I came to the conclusion that I am the victim of a traditional grammar-based language teaching. This is what they taught me at school and largely at the university too. Therefore this may have left the imprint on my mind, which I still cannot erase. I mean, now I am learning German, for example, and I notice that my German is becoming much more natural, because I just do not bother my brain with any grammar and stuff. I just listen to the language, try to understand it and then try to speak it myself. And this way seems to work! No more mental jugglery with the terrifying German grammar plzzz! :lol: While English is so perverted in my brain, that whenever I speak it, most often I fall back on this grammatical accent, i.e. I tend to speak with English words and Lithuanian sentence structure. Can anyone give some advice how to get rid of this? Listen more? Read more? Well, I do read a lot... I am an English teacher and I really want to speak as natural English as possible. I am already sick and tired of this "grammatical accent". Is it as difficult to eradicate as the phonetic accent?

Al
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Post by Al » Mon Nov 10, 2003 10:25 pm

Hi Vytenis

You set yourself very high standards. It's not such a common thing for teachers - never mind anyone else - to grasp the difference between learner-teacher English and the so-called real thing. That's one of the things that always amazed me about my (Polish) wife: where possible she always goes for the more natural approach - partly because she's a 'holistic' learner by natural inclination, but also because she's very sociable, I think.

Sociability might be the key. I guess the thing to do is hang out with people who aren't teachers and who may be English native speakers - but needn't be: proficient Brazilians, for example, are good company, too :D . However, I don't know you well enough to advise you to marry one :roll: Anyway, it worked for my Polish...

Anyway, you write great English, if I may say so, and I like your distinction between 'grammatical accent' and 'phonetic accent' - forgive me if I borrow it for my advanced classes!


By the way, send my regards to Wilno - it's about time I came back and visited...

Laba, naktis

Al

dduck
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Post by dduck » Tue Nov 11, 2003 10:25 am

I agree with Al. The more time you spend among native speakers, of whatever language, the more you're going to absorb. Another thing I consider important is to feel the language when you speak it. Languages are a way of thinking, there are different ways of expressing the same ideas in each language. What you want to do is switch between your native language and English (or perhaps German). I've noticed that when I think in English and translate into a second language it comes out wrong, however, if I try to speak spontaneously, it comes out much more authentic sounding.

I imagine there's a part of ones brain that does a last minute check before the words appear on your lips. Its used to capture those 'seemed like a good idea, but now I think about it it sounds pretty stupid'. We naturally prescan language before it leaves the body. I think that internally, especially if you've been reading English for many years, you're brain will have made lots of synaptic connections, so your (passive) language competence is already there.

My personal theory is that the brain is made up of several sub-brains. Language passes through a number of areas before it is produced at your mouth. Clearly, one part of your brain translates sounds into ideas (the listening process), or thoughts, and another part translates ideas into sounds (the speaking process). To me the brain is like an office block with many different, but inter-related departments. Bear with me. As language passes through the brain, from department to department different things are compared and checked. Modern neurology believes there's a section of brain responsible for nouns, just nouns. Some aphasics are known to have great difficulty with names (they usually resort to using pronouns only). In all other respects, they are completely functional. Thus, as ideas pass through these departments, verbs are conjugated, nouns are declined and phrases are formed. Gradually, sentence structures are constructed ready for shipment to the areas of brain responsible for the diaphragm, lungs, throat, mouth and lips.

Now, if you accept the basic idea of departments, then it's becomes really important in which department a thought began. A piece of language that begins in English and gets later translated into Spanish, isn't going to follow the same path as something that started in Spanish. Which language you think in determines the path of the idea and the eventual end product.

Iain

Vytenis
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Post by Vytenis » Tue Nov 11, 2003 2:16 pm

Thanks for your thoughts. Without getting too much into the neuro-linguistics (that stuff is above my head anyway :wink: ), I tend to agree with what you guys say. I have realised this truth long ago that I speak English best, when I THINK in it. But the problem is that sometimes it is very difficult for me to think in English. I remember when I started to teach English, for some strange psychological reasons, it was soooo difficult for me to speak English in front of the Lithuanian audience. Maybe because I was not used to that. I was having hard time doing inner translation trying to say something in English to them... Boy it was so exhausting! :x Now after a few years of teaching I am doing much better, I have become more confident, but time and again I still keep finding myself speaking "Lithuanian English". And also (for the above reasons perhaps) I too find translating into English particularly exhausting.

Regarding your compliments about my good writing, thanks a lot Al :D I think that's because I have been reading a lot. When you have a large reading experience, then you just hear whether or not something "sounds right". The trick is to expose yourself to enough input of natural language I think. I like phonetic accent and grammatic accent too:) But I think more precise and scientific terms, which you can use in your advanced classes, would be "interference of the mother tongue on the syntactic level (so-called 'grammatical accent')" and "interference of the mother tongue on the phonetic level (that's what most people mean by saying "foreign accent")".

Thanks for saying goodnight in Lithuanian. Actually it is "Labanaktis" :wink: I live in Siauliai, 200+ kilometers away from Vilnius. I have not been there for ages myself...

Metamorfose
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Post by Metamorfose » Tue Nov 11, 2003 2:29 pm

dduck wrote: Now, if you accept the basic idea of departments, then it's becomes really important in which department a thought began. A piece of language that begins in English and gets later translated into Spanish, isn't going to follow the same path as something that started in Spanish. Which language you think in determines the path of the idea and the eventual end product.

Iain
Kind of interesting your theories Iain, but I think that there would be a point where everything comes, for example, let's imagine someone who speaks Portuguese as mother tongue and English as a second language. and before a state our hypothetical speaker wants to say "I am a teacher":

(1) Eu sou professor (Portuguese)
(2) I am a teacher (English)

As one can see the structure is the same S V O (with few differences and being Portuguese more flexible to variations in the placement of the subject), so in a strict analyses don't you think that there are some part of speech which have the same origin and in that case whathever the department being of the Spanish or Englisg language, that sentence will happen to pass through some of both languages departments?

José

dduck
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Post by dduck » Tue Nov 11, 2003 6:27 pm

Metamorfose wrote:As one can see the structure is the same S V O (with few differences and being Portuguese more flexible to variations in the placement of the subject), so in a strict analyses don't you think that there are some part of speech which have the same origin and in that case whathever the department being of the Spanish or Englisg language, that sentence will happen to pass through some of both languages departments?
English and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages, thus they both have inherent structural and lexical similarities. José, you'll know better than me what exactly these similarities are. That means after learning the natural sentence structure of our native language we should find other related languages easier to learn than non-related languages. Because the brain has more work or rewiring to do, when going from a head-first language, like Portuguese to a head-last language, like Korean. Or as I put it earlier, more new departments are required for unrelated languages.

Iain

john martin
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Post by john martin » Wed Nov 12, 2003 10:48 am

Hi all..just interested in how the comment "thinking in English" could be explained in practical terms. I would love my students to "think" this way, but just what does it mean in practical terms?
Regards to all,
John.

Metamorfose
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Location: Brazil

Post by Metamorfose » Wed Nov 12, 2003 12:14 pm

dduck wrote: English and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages, thus they both have inherent structural and lexical similarities. José, you'll know better than me what exactly these similarities are. That means after learning the natural sentence structure of our native language we should find other related languages easier to learn than non-related languages. Because the brain has more work or rewiring to do, when going from a head-first language, like Portuguese to a head-last language, like Korean. Or as I put it earlier, more new departments are required for unrelated languages.

Iain
And yet it's still a paradoxal, I can say it for I am learning Spanish now; Portuguese and Spanish are so similar that the difficult lies when we think that we are speaking in Spanish but in reallity it's just a mixture of both languages, I feel this in English, mainly with prepositions (congratulations ON...is an example that just popped up on my mind) or worse, structures that is accpetable in English but akward or too pompous in English that is largely used in Portuguese -althought sometimes not grammatically accepted ('It's I' in English and 'É eu' in Portuguese.)

In the end we foreigner speakers will always have our mother tongue's grammar flavour, even though I know much English and even if I happen to spend a period in any English speaking country I know and I accept the fact that my 'Brazilianish' will be there, it can be by preferring using Latin origins words against the Germanic ones or whatever, native speakers are the 'model' the 'ideal' (and I am not citing political issues like the degree which dialects are accepted- how long will I keep suing such a word?) are like an engine which the ideal would be one that wouldn't pollute, engineers and designers can develop the best explosition engine, but it will still produce polluent agents, that's the way I perceive how I have to deal with my foreigner aspect.

José

Roger
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Post by Roger » Wed Nov 12, 2003 12:33 pm

Hello, Vytenis,

you do have a marvellous command of English - considering that this lingo came to your country only a little over one decade ago! I travelled through the Baltic republics, and was amazed at the tremendous changes taking place then after these countries gained their independence from the former SU. I suppose, your first foreign tongue is Russian, and so you speak it perfectly. Now, you are virtually perfectly trilingual.
I wonder if that antipathy to "grammar-based" learning is but the product of some brainwash? What's "natural", what's "grammar-base" teaching? The only "natural" way I can imagine is the communication between a mother and her baby. Surely you don't want to spend the next twenty years acquiring English the way native English speakers acquire it until they reach maturity? That's why studying grammar helps cut corners.
My advice to you is not new to you: read more, get the feel of the lingo, internalise the language's structures this way. Speaking? Good - if there are opportunities, but how many do you have in your country? Besides that - English may be "international", but most native English speakers are kind of parochial, narcisstically-nationalistic, introverted - only their own accent is acceptable to them.
My advice then is: don't feel ashamed of your accent! Eventually, you will speak English as fast as any native speaker, and, possibly, even more correctly than many of them.

Vytenis
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Post by Vytenis » Fri Nov 14, 2003 6:51 pm

Hello Roger!

Thanks for your compliments:) Actually, English was being taught in out schools all the time - even in the times when we were part of the Soviet Empire. But what was the use of this teaching? Nobody could get away behind the Iron Curtain anyway (of course, there were rare exceptions), we were living in a North Korean type police state. So in spite of the fact that English was taught in most schools, nobody actually learned it as it is. It was kind of like you guys sometimes study Latin or ancient Greek at high schools... I think what it takes is to hear the language AS IT IS on a daily basis and feel a practical need to communicate in it. Then there will be no problems with language learning any more. This was the case with Russian back in those days. Everybody learned it without the slightest effort, just because it was around all the time: many movies were in Russian, most of TV was in Russian, many ethnic Russians came to live here and did not bother to learn the local language etc. And of course Russian was being taught as a second language in all the Lithuanian schools. But I guess that even if this teaching was not there, most Lithuanians would still have learned it in the real life. However, the funniest thing is that I never actually learned to speak Russian very well :roll: It's not to say that I cannot speak it , it's just that while I was growing up, we were living in the area with relatively few ethnic Russians and our family had almost no Russian friends (maybe this could partly be attributed to the deep-seated Lithuanian nationalism, I don't know...) So while I learned to understand it almost perfectly, I did not develop speaking skills and even now I while I can speak quite fluently, sometimes I keep getting stuck, forgeting words, mixing up the grammatical forms etc. So this I think just once more proves the idea that in order to learn to speak a language it is not enough just massive input - you also need to speak.

Answering the other point you've made, I also do believe that grammar should help to "cut the corners" and I am by no means opposed to grammar as such. It's just that more often than not it becomes grammar-for-the-sake-of-grammar game in our schools. Sort of like maths exercises (which is of course not a bad thing in itself). And again, this is no wonder - back in the Sovioet days there was not much chance of getting away to the English speaking world, so all we did at school was studying these grammar rules and translating texts. Again, remember the high school Latin example I gave earlier.

The third point, talking about accents. Well, this "parochial" or "nationalistic" attitude does not bother me at all. I don't feel it and I don't care a bout it. And I do not care so much about the phonetic accent either. In fact, sometimes they take me for a native speaker :D (just sometimes;)) However, what I started this whole discussion about was not how to get rid of a phonetic accent, but how to get rid of the grammatical accent: how to make you speech more natural, more like native speakers. How to say things just the way the native speakers say, use the natural expressions, idioms, phrases, just the way that sounds natural for a native ear. And this is I think where grammar helps you the least. You just have to learn by heart all these idioms, word partnerships, fixed expressions and other ways of saying things. There is no other way around it. I think dduck has elaborated on this subject pretty well... By the way, I made a mistake in my previous message using the idiom "above my head". It had to be "much of that stuff is over my head" :)

Have a nice weekend

V.

PS

BTW, where are you located?

Roger
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Post by Roger » Sat Nov 15, 2003 10:30 am

Your posts are a pleasure to read, thank you for your latest instalment.
I am much surprised to learn English was taught before your country gained its independence. COme to think of it, I travelled there in 1992, and was struck by the good English a girl spoke in a railway station. It was true too though that few others spoke the language, which I can understand under these circumstances. The border guard on the frontier with Russia spoke - German of all languages (for historic reasons, this makes sense, of course, while English makes a lot less sense). So, my overall impression of Baltic people was: linguistically gifted! I just met three guys from Tallinn here in China - since you asked where I am based. They spoke a very good English albeit with an accent I have never before heard.

I am still a little puzzled as to what constitutes "grammar-based" teaching, and what exactly is wrong with it. The reaso0n why I am puzzled is because I feel here in China grammar is NOT taught adequately, and yet, everybody claims they are being taught too much of it. It may be true that their teachers 'teach" them "grammar", but I question the wisdom of how they are doing it. FOr example, students "know" the rule pertaining to SVA (the rule that says verbs end in -S if the subject is a third person, and the verb is in the present tense). Fact is that hardly anybody applies what they have "learnt" at school. Maybe they don't 'study" or "learn" so much - they simply memorise these rules, but that's not acquiring the skill that is required for speaking the language well.
In your part of the world, I am sure they taught and teach grammar differently. I lived in France for many years, and my French partner had a daughter that studied English and German; she often had to write exercises, conjugating verbs:
"I AM a girl/you ARE a girl/she IS a girl (example made up, but there were many similar examples). I can't imagine how anybody can learn German without doing exercises like this:
"Ich BIN ein Maedchen/du BIST ein Maedchen/sie IST ein Maedchen

Anybody who confuses the different verb forms inevitably fails in their attempts at communicating with native German speakers. Ditto for Italian (where personal pronouns are not always used as the verb endings clearly identify the person: Sono ragazza/es ragazza/e ragazza).

But this is the age of the so-called 'communicateive approach', and involving learners in the oral production of the target language is apparently the first duty of language teachers. Once the learner does really want to do it himself/herself (which I doubt students who take compulsory English really do) a teacher should facilitate this.
In your case, there is an excellent English basis that does not need bulding on it anymore; it needs polishing and refining. So, unless you get a chance at immersing yourself in the culture of native speakers,you will have to make do with crutches such as listening to radio and TV programmes.
Still, I feel literature can be a suitable guide. Those idioms that you are after crop up in many good novels. The question is: which idioms do you want to incorporate in your standard English? This is a question about national preferences, of course.
Even journalistic publications are nowadays full of non-standard expressions - the American ones, perhaps, more so than British ones.
The advantage of HEARING them between native speakers is that you can pick up the MOOD in which they are uttered, whereas coming across WRITTEN idiomatic expressions offers you the chance to look them up in a dictionary, and so learn them for good. I don't know how many new phrases one can commit to one's memory just by paying attention to what native speakers say to each other.

szwagier
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Grammar

Post by szwagier » Sat Nov 15, 2003 11:11 am

I've never been a fan of teaching grammar, because other than killing time and helping learners to pass grammar tests I don't really see what the purpose is. The fact that people can learn languages (be it first, second or tenth language) without studying the grammar shows, I think, that it is not a necessary condition.

You don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car, which is a much less "natural" skill than learning a language. In fact, to pursue this analogy a little further, if you think abut what the engine is doing while trying to drive, you'll probably have an accident. Same with speaking a foreign tongue.

Then again, it depends what you mean by grammar. Things like irregular plurals and past tense forms could be considered as matters of grammatical fact which can usefully be learned and remembered, and native speakers of a particular language have to go through this same process. Other areas, such as choice of tense and aspect, depend on the meaning the speaker/writer wishes to convey and might more properly be considered as questions of semantics, which require context as well as co-text.

A final thought - it seems to me that grammatical accuracy is the last piece of the jigsaw to be put in place. I know learners and users of English as a foreign language whose vocabulary is in the tens of thousands of words (if not hundreds of thousands), who can function in any English-speaking environment you care to name, but who still occasionally produce errors like forgetting 3rd person -s, a syntactic form which was pointed out to them right at the very beginning of their English learning experience. They "know" it's "wrong", but does that knowledge help them? Not a bit.

Just my two bits - 0 and 1 :wink:

Vytenis
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Post by Vytenis » Sat Nov 15, 2003 5:57 pm

Sounds like a classical case of opinion polarization :lol:

Well, to briefly summarize my standpoint on this issue, I can just say that I tend to learn and teach grammar from the real language (and not language from grammar). My credo could be the words of Michael Lewis: "Language is grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar"

Vytenis
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Post by Vytenis » Tue Nov 18, 2003 7:49 pm

Well, in any case I did not start this thread to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of grammar-based or lexically-based language learning/teaching. :wink: What I wanted to sort out for myself here was how do I learn to speak a language without this persisting "grammatical accent", i.e. falling back on the native language grammatical patterns while speaking a foreign language. This was the original topic. I just mentioned this "grammar-based" teaching method in the beginning, because I believed (and still believe) that too much concentratuion on grammar in the beginning stages of a language learning (especially for a 10-year old child that I was) will do more harm than good. Your language will be unnatural, because you will construct these sentences from the grammar rules you've learned, but you will inevitably construct them on the basis of your native language patterns, however hard you try not to. I have ample evidevce for that over here, believe me. While if you learn the "natural way" (the way that the native speaking child learns his mother tongue), you language will sound much more fluently and much more naturally, albeit with mistakes in the beginning. So, here we are again: fluency or accuracy dilemma. I do petrsonally favor fluency, because I am sick and tired of those Lithuanian students who study language for years and years at school and still cannot understand elemeentary things or to speak in the most elementary situations. Or when they dare to speak (or are forced to), their language is just not English! (in spite of all the grammar they have studied at school) I have just had about enough of that! In my humble opinion, grammar is most effective when the studenst already DOES try to speak and wants to say things correctly. This is precisely the place where we should help him with grammar. He will like it, he will appreciate it and it will not be boring to him - he will see the enormous practical value of grammar to him. Doesn't that make much more sense? Grammar is like a map of a langugae - it helps you to find you way much quicker when you are still not acquainted with the new terrain. It's supposed to make things easier for you, not more difficult! But how can you be interested in a map, if you have not yet arrived to that area!? Only when you arrive and try to find your way around, only then do you realized how badly you need a map to help you!

LarryLatham
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Post by LarryLatham » Tue Nov 18, 2003 11:49 pm

Well, Vytenis, you have certainly impressed me!!! The only thing I'd like to express some (slight) concern about is that we not allow our thinking to become too polarized until we start to be grammar bashers. :( I'm wholeheartedly with your feelings about forcing rules upon rules upon rules upon uncomprehending and ungrateful students until the English class they started with so much eager excitment becomes their albatross. Almost without exception, people (both kids and adults) start to study English aroused and energized with great expectations. A few weeks or a few months later, they drag themselves to classes which they consider boring and irrelevant. We teachers must stop deluding ourselves that we're doing things right. We can't be. But the problems may not be as simple as favoring fluency over accuracy. Alas, I have more questions here than answers, I'm afraid. But I'm convinced, as are you too, apparently, that we can do way better than we are with language teaching. :)

Larry Latham
P.S. Your clear appreciation of Michael Lewis's ideas shines through brightly. :D I like him too.

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