This brings me back to Vietnamese and learning words and phrases. A foreigner living in Vietnam or Taiwan or Turkmenistan, who believes they can speak but not listen, has managed to memorize a large number of phrases. For most of what they do during the course of the day, they are covered. They know how to order food, get a hair cut…if they are really good, like one Australian I worked with in Cambodia, they even know how to get their car fixed. But they don’t SPEAK the language. They have memorized the vocabulary that they need for specific tasks. And the second that the conversation takes any kind of unexpected turn, the moment that here is a problem or a bump in the road, they are completely out.
The test that I gave the engineer, who believed he could speak but not listen, was “Tell me in Chinese that your company is cutting back on employees and your contract may end at the end of the year, and you aren’t sure what you will do at that point.”
Is this too much to ask of a language learner? This story about the contract was something he had told me in English. And it is the sort of thing Chinese speakers tell each other. If you believe that you speak a foreign language, then you should be able to talk about these types of concepts in the foreign language.
So, if learning words and phrases is not the same as learning a language, then why do so many people do it?
Selling languages, language lessons, learning materials, and courses is a huge business. In business, you want your customers to be satisfied. The easiest and fastest way for anyone to learn anything is rote memorization, rather than understanding. Rote learning is done through repetition and through a mix of sounds, pictures, and texts. The best way to fool someone into believing they have learned something is to put questions on the test, which match exactly what they have learned in class.
This is how 90% of the methods and commercially available language learning aids work. They teach you a set of phrases and vocabulary through repetition. Then they test your ability to remember them and spit them back out on the exam. In the end, even if you earn a mark of 100%, you still can’t speak the language.
So, how do we learn Vietnamese? How do we learn any Asian language? The answer is, listening, listening, listening, listening, and eventually, reading, reading, reading. But, with Asian languages, particularly Vietnamese, you need incredible numbers of hours of listening to get the sounds right. The NLSC (National Language Service Corps) has assigned Vietnamese a category of Three (out of four) for difficulty. The Foreign Service Institute has established that it requires 88 weeks, 2,200 hours of study for an English native speaker to learn a category three language. They also prefer that at least half of this time is spent studying in the country where the language is spoken.
You can’t learn a language in twenty minutes a day. One hour a week won’t get it. To truly learn a difficult language, such as Vietnamese, will take a dedicated student two years. The more listening you do, the better and faster you will learn. Try to find hours in your day to spend with your listening. Take your Vietnamese I-Pod lessons with you to work or on the motorcycle or at the gym. Attend your classes regularly and do as much homework as you can stand.
And most of all, listen, listen, listen. Be realistic, but don’t get discouraged. The Vietnamese learned it. So can you.
