Doing My Head In ...In a Dozen Different Ways....

The timing of things is aways interesting….for example…why did it have to happen that I decided to learn a foreign language at almost the same time that I was asked to be on the JDE team?

Talk about having your head done in in a dozen different ways…and that is just JDE!

Then…my first attempt at learning my chosen language was at traditional classes.... professionally run. Within a few weeks…things were going pretty well…I started dating my teacher!

I have to say that this was not a really clever move….although it seemed like a really great idea at the time....but I will not even attempt to expand on that story…….just now….except to ask…have you ever sat in any class at all…knowing that within about two hours…you and the teacher up the front of the class…would be lathed up in a hot tub …a glass of wine in hand…doing unspeakable things to each other??? Not a good learning environment!

That tragic relationship over….I had to move school…but at the new school....I got the same teaching methods….but I didn’t date the teacher…..it was okay and a bit of fun….although it was not as much fun as the hot tub… It was hard going…but trying to learn a language outside of the country it is spoken always is very difficult…and I knew that….as did the rest of my class.

Class members came and went….some stayed…some were better than others…some more serious that others…some went off to Italy…others just kept up the classes….the bottom line…..at completion of level 5….which took about 18 months….all of us had learnt a lot of words…memorised dozens of verb conjugations….. learned about past and present tense.... and could pretty much say nothing of any use at all ….and certainly none of us could construct our own sentences with any confidence.

Then …for me at least …came the learning revolution. I stumbled upon a teaching method that was totally revolutionary. It didn’t teach vocabulary much at all…but relied on English vocabulary and just taught structure and concentrated on verbs and their use…verbs being the backbone of any language….this seems to make a lot of sense if you actually want to speak and understand it.

After a few weeks of this…and remember…I was building on what I had already learnt outside the hot tub…secondo me…adesso posso farmi capire in italiano. (I thought that now I can make myself understood in Italian)

Months down the track…I am doing pretty well when I find myself on a train with a couple of dozen Italian tourists….out in Australia for the Pope thing. So…I start talking to them…I was reasonably confident…but soon found myself struggling to answer the most basic of questions….at least I understood the questions…and was able to answer most of them…but it made me realise just how far away from fluency I really am…and just when I thought I was making some real progress.

Then!!!! ….if you have read the library thing…you will know that I have a new set of lesson…lesson One….I could not understand a single word! I know it is a pretty advanced course…but please….start me off easily!

Then I read in the course notes that they expect that you have to spend about 10 hours per lesson! Does this learning a language process never stop? I suppose not…I am still learning English after all these years….

So…here I go….diving into another set of courses…but if I can learn something from this one ....then I think I can really say that I have advanced.

It might be easier…and I might learn a lot more…to just to go to Italy and speak to people…because I know that is what I really need…to use the language…but …since I now have this amazing TV…that is not likely to happen any time soon. Cosa ci posso fare?

What I thought would take about 3 or 4 years…is on track at least…after about 2 ½ years..I can at least hold a basic conversation and I have come to know that my spelling and knowledge of correct grammar is somewhat better than friends I know who learned to speak the language because of their parents…so it has not been a total waste of time…I also now see English in a different light.

And to think...in about 2 weeks…the French course starts!!!