Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The English language course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being one of the hardest of all the courses that the university do.

Yet, although I’m getting consistently in the 90% mark for assignments, I’m starting to find that it’s one of the most boring courses that I’ve every done. If nothing else, that knocks down my theory that I always got good marks in subjects that I liked!

Having said that, it’s boring because of a peculiarity of the way in which the degree programme that I’m following is constructed. It’s a modern languages degree which most people would take to mean that it’s about foreign languages. Well, it is, mostly but you have to do one English language course to meet the degree requirements. The snag with that is that the French and Spanish programmes which I’ve already completed covered a good deal of the topics that are now being covered in the English course, albeit in different words.

So, for example, the current section of the English course is about learning English as a foreign language. I’ve covered learning Spanish as a foreign language (ie how to learn it as a foreign language rather than just learning it as a foreign language) already and although there are obviously differences in how English is learnt as a foreign language, it feels very much as a repeat of the Spanish segment.

Similarly, there was a section of the course on marketing English. I’ve already done that in the MBA.

Anyway, net effect of that repetition is that it looks likely that I’ll have completed the course by the end of June rather than the official end-date of September.

Somehow or other I seem to be about to run off the end of my modern languages degree and have started to think about what I’ll do next.

I’m not quite sure how I got to this point as all I really wanted to do was to be able to speak French better and six years down the line it looks like I’m on the home run with the modern languages degree.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about several different plans as to what I might do after this one is out of the way of which the major options are

1. sit back and relax (there’s a lot to be said for this option!);
2. get going on German (out of curiosity as to whether a Germanic language would be easier to learn than the Romance ones);
3. do the creative writing course (always useful for blogging!);
4. carry on with the English courses and do the degree in English (not too keen on the literature choices with this though);
5. get going on the science degree that I always meant to get around to.

I really don’t know which one I’ll go for at the moment. Technically, I am already signed up for both the English and science degrees at the moment in that I’ve already done one course for each but there’s not commitment to complete either. The creative writing option seems quite scary to be honest and as it’s a full credit course it would be awkward to schedule in with the graduation ceremony as indeed would other full credit English course options. There’s a half credit science course which would do quite nicely though and the German would be a relatively easy fit too.

My thinking at the moment is that perhaps the science half credit course would be an idea as it would give me a fairly easy year and let me choose a full credit option in either English or science the following year.

Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective.

For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a little peculiar being able to speak about English using French or Spanish words!

It’s taught quite differently to the foreign language components too and seems, to me, much easier than they were even though, in principle, this course is at the same educational level as the foreign language ones. One very noticeable aspect of this is that I find that I can work on the English well into the evening whereas I couldn’t do that with either the French or the Spanish until towards the end of those segments.

The course starts off with something of a potted history of the English language itself and in particular it homes in one how very old English words and expressions live on in many of the dialects that are spoken around the UK today. Interestingly, some of these are now strongly associated with particular regions whereas they’d have been used throughout what is now the UK several centuries ago. For example, “wee” is very much seen as a Scottish term for “small” but it’s actually an Old English word dating back over 1000 years and one of many where the Scots even retain the phraseology of Old English in their use of it.

After well over 10 years attempting to learn French, Spanish and even a little Greek I can confidently tell you that the answer is: “it depends”.

Consider Greek for instance. I did a six week class on that about 15 or so years ago and that was enough to be able to understand a good deal of what the shop assistants were saying between themselves, to read the direction signs on the roads and even to communicate a little in the language too. It worked for Greek because it doesn’t have anything like the number of irregular verbs and exceptions to rules that the languages which came afterwards added. Also, because a large part of our own language is taken from Greek anyway and they take modern terms from us, there’s a large common pool of language to draw on.

For French, I made a series of abortive attempts to learn with the likes of Berlitz and it just didn’t work. Why? Well, when you’re learning a language on your own it’s easy to grind to a halt when you get to a difficult topic or one which you simply don’t understand at all. In a class-room environment you just can’t do that as the class moves on and besides in a language course, you’ll always come back to a topic that you didn’t understand the first time around. Ultimately what sorted me out with that was the combination of a conversation class plus a distance learning course.

Spanish is fundamentally easier to learn than French as they tend to take words straight from the English whereas French tends to make up a new French word in similar circumstances. However, having reached fluency in French I found that I was able to reach fluency in Spanish with, largely, only the distance learning course.

If it’s your first foreign language, I think that you’re going to need a class room environment at least to begin with. You can get the basics from an online course and you should try to do that as it’ll help you later on but to get to a reasonable level of fluency you need a class or course to drive you on past those initial difficult parts – essentially to get you into the habit of saying “OK, I don’t understand that right now, but I will later”.

For your second foreign language it’s a different matter though. You’ll know how language learning works and therefore you won’t necessarily need a course schedule to drive you onwards. Whether you can do completely without the schedule of a course depends largely on you.

As it happens, I’m toying with the idea of going back to one of the teach yourself methods with another language: German this time. I think that it’ll work for me this time around because 1) I’ve been through the process of learning a foreign language three times now and 2) German is more similar in structure to English than any of the three languages that I’ve tried to learn up to now.

Whilst almost all places listing opportunities for sponsored reviews say something to the effect that they’re expecting good quality English spelling and grammar, it’s becoming increasingly common to see absolutely dreadful grammar being produced by the advertisers themselves.

Consider just a few examples from one recent opportunity which I rejected simply because the English was so bad that I couldn’t work out what their product actually did… “After install and run it on the computer which connecting to projector” which presumably means “After installing the software on the computer, run it whilst it the computer is connected to the projector” and it goes downhill from there. I still haven’t worked out what “Normally, the projector in a meeting room is connected with a computer in default.” actually means nor “Anyone attend the meeting need download a pre-customized client from the company server.” for that matter.

This is from an opportunity currently listed by ReviewMe who usually are pretty good grammar-wise on the adverts.

Now, I accept that it’s written by a Chinese client of theirs but surely the ReviewMe people could take the time to tidy up the English for them? After all, this is a high paying opportunity so they’re going to make quite a bit of money from it.