FBM wrote:Hermit wrote:True. Yet, there is a place for rote learning. Take Latin, for example. It's a beautiful and elegant language. It is also extremely consistent. Exceptions are few and far between. However, you'd waste a lot of time trying to come to grips with it if you tried to learn its conjugations and declensions just by doing and using intuition. Learning the correct endings of words by rote to begin with saves a lot of time on one's path toward fluency and competence. Even by remembering a short, rhythmical ditty as a memory bridge will soon teach you when to use the ablative. It then becomes second nature to not say "ad nauseum". I really wish I had put more of an effort in to learning it, but rote learning is anathema to anyone who is as lazy as I am.
I can't disagree with you there, but Latin is a dead language.
Modern second language acquisition theory is much more geared towards real-life communication, rather than academic work. I do tell my students to memorize what then need to for success in academics, but I emphasize to them that most (not all) of that is practically useless for achieving face-to-face fluency, which is what most of them desire most. The problem is that they don't distinguish between those two very different purposes, and thus use inefficient study methods. That is, they study in ways that will help them academically and expect that skill to automatically transfer to their real-life conversational skills. It just doesn't work that way, according to research.
That said, even modern language pedagogy recognizes that the adult has cognitive capacities that children don't, so that adults may speed up their language acquisition with conscious study. The question is a matter of emphasis. Here in Korea, the emphasis is on conscious study (memorization) of rules and vocabulary, with little regard for the learner's innate capacity for subconscious language acquisition (development of intuition). Judging from what you and Sælir describe of your early English education, the teachers were giving priority to taking advantage of your innate capacity, using conscious learning as a supplement. That's what I try to do over here, and what I try to teach my students to do when they become teachers in the future. The research and resultant theories are useless if they aren't applied.
Once again, I agree with the gist of what you are saying, but (apologies are in order here for extending our walk along aside track) for a dead language, Latin remains amazingly lifelike. Where do you think automobil, bicycle, omnibus and thousands of other words in the English vocabulary come from? Same applies to the German language. It is by no means incapable of handling modern technology either. When NSU, a car maker that was later merged with Audi came out with the first commercially produced rotary engine powered car, it took out two-page advertisements in major newspapers. The ad featured a cutaway drawing of the rotary engine in the centre and a detailed description of how it worked and how these mechanisms differed from reciprocal combustion engines - every word of it in Latin. Our Latin teacher showed us a copy.
I could not believe his claim that an ancient, dead language could handle pistons, cams, valves, ignition timing, spark plugs and whatnot, let alone the latest design in automotive (now, where did
that word come from?) technology. I purloined my father's copy of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine and laboriously translated the fucking thing with dictionary and grammar manual on hand. It was fucking true. Without taking liberties, the translation was a lucid explanation of both the rotary and the conventional engines, and how they differ. It took me all weekend. On Monday, our teacher, (Dr. Unger. I still remember his name. And his face. He had the same deathlike, skeletal appearance as Konrad Adenauer, the long-serving former German Chancellor, who had just died.) gave every student a roneoed copy of the ad, and told us that this term's project was to translate it, and that it was worth 25% of our assessment. I grinned from ear to ear. Unger noticed, and immediately suspected that I was up to no good, a reasonable assumption, in view of my record at school. Unable to wipe that grin off my face, I rummaged around inside my school bag. His jaw dropped when he realised what it was that I handed him. That was the only time I ever handed in homework on time. I got almost full marks for it, but I still managed to fail the subject overall at the end of the year. Truth be told, that may have been the
only time I actually handed in any homework for Latin that year.
Ahem. Sorry about that. Now, back to our scheduled programme.
Lately, I've been pushing subtitles to my students. I recommended TED Talks because the topics are for adults, so almost anyone can find some that are actually interesting to them. I tell them to watch it once with Korean subs, then again with English subs as many times as they want/need, then finally without any subs at all.
It was an interesting sidetrack.
