You need to take risks to learn a language

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0c6c476-84e5-11e2-891d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2No4bHC9g

March 6, 2013 4:10 pm

By Michael Skapinker

The notion that the teacher can do all the work is nonsense – learning another tongue requires effort

Miguel Bloombito has some travel advice for his 75,000-plus Twitter followers: “Los subwayo fare hikeros esta too mucho expensivo. Take tu helicoptero to worko insteado!”
New Yorkers are having fun with their mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Spanish. The parody @ElBloombito account is one example. But Mr Bloomberg, whose Spanish announcements during last year’s Hurricane Sandy brought his heavily accented attempts to a worldwide YouTube audience, is not giving up.

He got a D in French at school and dropped plans to major in university physics because so much of the literature was then in German, he told the New York Times recently.

But he insisted he was getting better at his latest language. “I will not die until I can speak Spanish like a quasi-native,” he said.

Learning languages defeats less determined English-speakers, who reckon most business and travel conversations take place in English anyway. Even those who know that their customers would be impressed by an attempt to speak their language find it too daunting.

A few years ago, during a holiday in Spain, I put on a sample of a compact disc by Michel Thomas and immediately felt I had found something different.

I wasn’t alone. Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Emma Thompson and executives of top companies paid Thomas thousands of dollars for Spanish, French or German lessons.

Thomas died in 2005, aged 90, but his audio lessons are available, along with CDs by other instructors teaching languages such as Mandarin and Russian using his methods.
Thomas led an extraordinary life. Born Moniek Kroskof to a Jewish textile manufacturing family in Lodz, Poland, he studied in Germany and, when the Nazis tightened their grip, escaped to France. He fought with the resistance, escaped near death several times and took several noms de guerre, ending with Michel Thomas.

As the allies advanced across France, he linked up with American forces, using his perfect German to act as an interrogator, and then washed up, stateless, in the US, where he set up his language-teaching business.

The publication in 1999 of Michel Thomas: The Test of Courage, an admiring biography by Christopher Robbins, led one writer to question Thomas’s wartime account. It is impossible for an outsider to judge the doubts, which Robbins rejected in detail in an afterword to his paperback edition, and which the US army answered by decorating Thomas for bravery.
But we can, as students, evaluate his language teaching.

He promises a lot. Don’t try to memorise, he says. Don’t take notes or do any homework. Leave all the hard work to him. Whether teaching celebrities or inner-city students, Thomas insisted that failure to learn was the teacher’s fault.

Actually, Thomas is a demanding instructor. He works by building sentences with two students in his studio and you on your headphones. He says a sentence in English and then waits while you and one of the students translates into the language you are learning. He then provides the answer. One of the students is quick, the other a little dim, leaving you pleased to be better than the slow one, but struggling to keep up with the smart linguist. There is no conjugating of verbs but the attention to grammar is detailed. It is part of the process, seldom explicit. Thomas is an engaging audio presence. The hours in his company are hypnotic, and hugely enjoyable. The sense of progress is gratifying. Within hours he has you compiling long, complex sentences in your new language. After 10 hours of his Spanish foundation course, I felt I was actually speaking.

I made a trip to Colombia – and found myself way behind Mr Bloomberg. It is not that Thomas is a bad teacher. In a lifetime of learning and trying to learn languages, I have never encountered a better one.

It is just that the notion that you can leave it all to the teacher is nonsense. Learning a language requires effort, memorising vocabulary, looking over the grammar, watching television, reading newspapers and talking to real people rather than just two hired participants. The learner has to take responsibility.

Successful language acquirers do something else: they don’t worry about getting things wrong or making fools of themselves. In that sense, New York’s mayor is the perfect student.