How to Learn A Foreign Language

First let me briefly explain where my qualifications for this particular article come from. Way back when I went to school, I was terrible with languages. I went to a school in Germany where English was a compulsory subject, and as a second language one could either choose Latin or French. And I was absolutely useless! In fact, I had to repeat two grades because of my miserable grades in English and Latin. I threw in the towel when I was just about to repeat another grade and run the danger of ending up in the same class with kids that were three years younger than I.

Now, at the age of 50,  I speak a total of three languages fluently. In fact, it went almost up to four, but the first foreign language I learned to speak was Greek, and that I don’t speak right now, since it was at the beginning of the eighties that I spent a couple of years in Greece. If I would go back now it would take me probably three month to speak it again, since you never forget a language. They get stored away when not used continuously, and it’s like a file that has been hidden away somewhere on your computer.

I started developing myself as a language teacher in 1989 in Mexico-City, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I work freelance, because that’s where I’m best. I don’t approve of most language teaching methods as applied by modern language schools, and it will become more transparent why in the course of this article.

Let’s start with the basics.

Image via Wikipedia

We don’t think in words, but in images or concepts. A toddler who gets too close to the kitchen stove and touches it will experience immediately the meaning of what is called in English ‘hot’. It’s through his physical pain that he learns that particular reality. And the concept of ‘heat’ has been literally burned into his mind.

A totally different, and at least in this context, secondary issue is his mother’s reaction to the approaching toddler. She cries out in panic ‘ Be careful, it’s hot!’ For the toddler the word ‘hot’ is nothing more than a sound that comes out of his mother’s mouth. Mind you, it’s not a word for him yet, he doesn’t understand at this stage what a word is. And it’s  this sound that he will henceforth associate with the physical pain he experienced. He knows what ‘hot’ means!