Foreign Perspectives

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.

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