January 22, 2008

• Language Programming

  As some of you may already know, I’m learning Français.  I Signed up for an intensive course at Alliance Française de Dacca.  The course crams French 101 and 102 into a short 3 month course.  Not surprisingly, I was expecting notes & vocabulary by the buttloads.  Much to my pleasant surprise, there wasn’t any.

  As our instructor explained, Alliance Française uses a different method.  Rather than starting with all the technical bits such as  vocabulary, grammer & such, and then moving on to conversations; we began by speaking a few lines, en Français, over and over.  When the instructor asked “Tu parles français?” we were to reply “Je parle français.”

  I mean, if someone asked you “Do you speak English?”, you don’t exactly break down the question into grammer & vocabulary, translate it into another language, consider an answer, re-translate the words of your answer into English, make grammatical adjustments, and then reply… do you?

  Well, neither do speakers of French.  So why should someone be forced to do all the unnecessary thinking?  While it might be a good idea from a logical point of view, your average everyday language usage involve very little grammatical construction.

  So, from day one, we were instructed to not question what we were taught.  If someone asks “Comment tu t’appelles?” I should reply “Je m’appelle Saad.”  That’s it.  No verb conjugation.  No vocabulary memorization.  Just “Je m’appelle Saad.”  Further more, once you memorize a couple of lines, you start seeing similarities & connections by yourself.  It makes learning French a hell of a lot less intimidating than most people think it is.

  Does it work?  Well, after three weeks we’re writing a short paragraph introducing ourselves.  (Mind you, some of the students in my class don’t even speak/understand English.)

  That’s about it.  And as we learned to say in class… Au revoir…

  =^^=

  • 3:20 am
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