Becoming proficient in a so-called ‘easy’ language (for English speakers, French is relatively easy) often takes hundreds of hours; a difficult language (Mandarin anyone?) takes several thousand. That’s good for language teachers, but not so good for the learners.
Language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century
Even after putting in all those hours of following an expensive course, many people never become proficient. How can so much time and effort amount to such little progress? Language learning happens inside the brain, making the processes involved difficult to observe and understand – that’s why language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century, and why, all too often, language lessons are associated with failure.
When you reach a dead-end, it’s sometimes worth revisiting the insights of pioneers. In his treatise, The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, the 19th-century Frenchman François Gouin describes his own failures and eventual success. Keen to attend philosophy lectures in Berlin, Gouin set to work with a grammar and a dictionary to master the German language in ten days. But to his dismay, his effort turned out to have been in vain: ‘not a single word would penetrate to my understanding’.
Undaunted, he tried to pick up the language more casually by hanging around in a Hamburg hairdressing salon and attempting to engage the customers in conversation. But this method proved frustratingly unsystematic. The scraps of conversation were ‘vapid’, his progress desultory.
There remained one last approach, but it was one ‘so strange, so extraordinary, so unusual – I might say, so heroic – that I hardly dared propose it to myself.’ He decided ‘to learn off the whole dictionary’. Gouin set aside a month for this task, and, since his dictionary defined 30,000 words, strove to study a thousand a day. The effort damaged his eyesight and the doctor ordered complete rest.
Back in France with his sight restored, Gouin listened as his three-year-old nephew talking to himself while using toys to recreate what he had seen during an enjoyable visit to a corn mill. The child had witnessed an industrial process and he was using language to organise his memories sequentially: first this happened, then this, and next this.
All events, Gouin realised, could be narrated as a series of separate component steps: ‘I am walking to the door. I am standing by the door. I am opening the door.’ Context makes the meaning of each sentence in the series clear, the repetition is reassuring, memorisation easy.
Using this insight Gouin made rapid progress. He completed his studies in Berlin, went on to become a Professor of German in Paris and learned several other languages quickly and easily. Meanwhile, publication of his book made the ‘Gouin series’ method famous, schools were established to teach it and even today the series principle contributes to some language courses.
Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Gouin’s rapid progress occurred not only after observing how his nephew used language but also after all that preliminary work: the dictionary, the grammar book, the time in the hairdresser’s. It was only to be expected that it would take time for the material Gouin had studied to start feeding into proficient performance.
Gouin’s method is certainly no silver bullet – its exclusive focus on step-by-step actions greatly restricts its usefulness. But it provides some insights: the importance of making meaning clear from the outset, of memorising, of fostering fluency and providing an achievable objective. My students here in Spain, beginning to learn English, used a similar method while studying Aesop’s fables and other miniature stories of about a hundred words. With a translation to hand, they soon understood the story and began to work on their pronunciation, imitating the way a native speaker said each phrase. Then they removed every sixth word to test themselves to supply the missing words. Once they could, they removed every fifth word, then every fourth, and soon they’d memorised the whole story.
When my students could tell several stories and jokes fluently, they’d mastered a whole range of grammatical structures, as well as all the sounds of English and the 200 most frequently used words which make up well over 50 per cent of everything we say. I say ‘my students’, but perhaps I should say ‘my ex-students’. The story method has not only enabled them to make rapid progress, it’s also saved them money. Since it allows them to learn on their own, my services were no longer required.
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