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Learn A Language Like A Secret Agent
by Nathalie Fairbanks
When you learn to speak a new language, you usually do what comes naturally--transfer words and structures from the language you speak every day and hope it will be equivalent in your new language.
That's why you'll hear German or French tourists tell the waiter "I take the chicken" when they're ordering in a restaurant. What they really mean is "I'll have the chicken." They swipe the German/French sentence and transfer it over to English, word by word. It's similar enough that most waiters will know what is meant and not expect the guest to take off with a chicken tucked under his arm!
While this is a harmless example, these nuances make all the difference. If you don't learn to bypass this "transferring-over" stage from the very beginning, you'll spend a lot of time learning and then un-learning expressions and their translations.
Let me explain what I mean by taking an example out of the SpeakEZ Spanish course. If Spanish is not the language you're learning, don't worry. You'll get just as much out of it as your Spanish-learning buddies.
In the story, Carlos and Marisa practice memorizing people's names in a role-play. Here's what Carlos says to Marisa:
"Qué le parece si lo practicamos en un juego de roles? Yo hago el papel de Rafael, un amigo mío."
In a traditional textbook, you'll be lucky to have any translation. If there is one, it might look like this:
"What do you think of practicing this in a role play: I'll play the part of a friend of mine, Rafael."
The meaning is the same, but you still don't understand how the Spanish is put together. If you attempted to translate back from English to Spanish, you'd be trying to find words for "think," and "practicing," and that's what throws you off and gets so frustrating.
What Ms. Birkenbihl came up with as a solution, and what we've adopted in our SpeakEZ courses, is to have a word by word translation under the original text:
Qué le parece si lo practicamos en un juego de roles?
What You seems if it [we-]practice in a play of roles?
Yo hago el papel de Rafael, un amigo mío.
I take the paper of Rafael, a friend mine.
Here are a few of the advantages this "decoding" has over a "regular" translation:
1. You can see which words are really used in Spanish. No more trying to transfer the English words back to Spanish. For example, instead of looking for the word "role," you'll see that they talk about the "paper." Why doesn't really matter, as long as you're aware of it.
2. You become aware of the actual word order. Just for fun, read through the English word by word translation. It sounds like someone is using a random word order generator! The more familiar with that particular "broken" English you become, the easier it'll be to remember how the Spanish is put together.
3. If you don't start connecting the Spanish sentence to the same sentence in correct English but instead translate word by word, you save yourself a big source of trouble down the road. You won't be looking for words that don't exist in Spanish, nor copy and paste English structures into Spanish.
4. What about expressions and idioms? Learning them literally is still your best bet at remembering them. Anything you perceive as funny or weird has a better chance at registering in your brain.
If you take "un amigo mío," "a friend mine," it strikes you as odd. Yet after saying it out loud, you'll never be tempted again to say something like "un amigo DE mío," just because you keep trying to translate "a friend OF mine."
The same goes for "un juego de roles." If you were trying to shove "role play" into Spanish by translating, you'd end up with something way different. By reading "a play of roles," you'll remember how it's actually said in Spanish.
That's why vocabulary lists aren't the top game for learning a language. You end up un-doing and un-learning what you diligently went through so much effort memorizing. There's no need to go there. Put on your "Secret Agent" hat and decode your lesson texts. I promise, you'll save a lot of time!
© 2008 Nathalie V. Fairbanks
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