Update and new thoughts on grammar

Well, what with summer holidays and the like it's been a while since my last post, so I'm just writing this as a quick update as to what's going on.

I've got a lot of topics that I want to blog about language learning lined up, it's just that I've come to the conclusion that I'm spending too much time blogging about it and not enough time studying, so I've decided to concentrate on the study a bit for the time being.

I'm using the Oxford Chinese site that I mentioned before, and I'm really beginning to appreciate the benefit of grammar exercises. I think I had been lulled into thinking it was not necessary by some quarters of the language learning world, and this has been detrimental to my progress. Looking back at this blog, I am not sure I would support everything I wrote here or here anymore (although think balance is probably the best way forward, and certainly there is room for both techniques).

It is an atractive proposal not to have to bother with grammar, but I'm finding that studying the grammar really gives you a better understanding of the language and helps to give you a firm foundation from where to build your sentences, and this in turn helps to raise confidence.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make my way through all these exercises over the next month or two, and then perhaps scout around for some new material.

In the meantime, I'll try to find some time for a blog post or two. If you have any thoughts on the benefits of grammar study please let me know in the comments below, or of course if you have any comments on my blog or language learning in general, feel free to drop me a line...

Functioning

I had a really good language-exchange session today, and came up with a new and easy way to make the sessions interesting and productive.

When I meet up with my language-exchange partner, we usually go through an English lesson in a textbook from the company I work for during her study time, and then switch roles so I become the student and she is the teacher for the remainder of the time. However, I have never really settled on a good resource to use for my half of the session.

Most of the Japanese texts I have are very grammar based and it can become pretty dull pretty quickly for my friend, and me, once we get bogged down in some grammar point. I've tried using newspaper clippings and the like as conversation topics, but that can be time consuming to prepare, and can prove difficult if the subject matter contains a lot of tricky vocab. The English texts on the other hand are very communication focused and are designed to teach one function of language usage at a time: for example, today's function was starting a conversation with a stranger, so the student gets to practice saying things like, "I see you're wearing a Redskins jersey, are you a fan?", so the whole time is spent practicing, what really is the main aim of language learning, communication.

Anyway, at the end of the English half of the exchange today I was feeling pretty tired and wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, when it occurred to me to try out the English texts in Japanese—why this didn't occur to me earlier, I don't know. Basically, we just translated all the activities into Japanese—not really that challenging when the language is only lower-intermediate level—and repeated the lesson in the other language.

It was great!! It was the first time I'd really had the chance to be a student using the method that my company promotes, and it does work. I really feel like I can retain the language I used as it is all contained within this one language function, and next time I feel the urge to start a conversation with a stranger, the language, topics and questions we covered today will all be ready and waiting in my head.

I'm really pleased to have confirmed to myself that this method of teaching works, and I'm looking forward to my next language-exchange to try out another function.