Had the pleasure of watching Nancy Llewellyn begin learning Afrikaans over lunch. She uses a method pioneered by Evan Gardner known as “language hunting.” She asks, in English, how to say “what is that?” in the target language. Once she had it, she then used the phrase over and over again to learn the words she wanted to learn. So she pointed to a fork on the table at lunch and asked, “Wat is det?” “Dat is a verk [furk],” came the response, and then she had another word. Soon she learned how to ask “War is de verk?” putting it on the table. “De verk is ob de taffel.” (You must forgive my spelling of Afrikaans, as we were learning the language without seeing it written.) Then she would put it under the table: “Nu war is de verk?” “De verk is onder de taffel.” You can thus create all kinds of setups in order to isolate certain concepts and formulations – singular and plural, hot and cold, under and over, inside and outside, etc. She was learning Afrikaans entirely at her own pace, in a way that was entirely memorable, and the pedagogical method was in the student, not the teacher. Talk about teaching students how to learn – Gardner’s method really is that.
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The classic, and universal way, to learn a new language. Old as the hills.
There is a long-standing argument about how to define the difference between a language and a dialect. The rough and ready way: if you can understand some or most of it, it is a different dialect; if you understand almost nothing, it is a different language. English and Dutch (Afrikaans) stand to each other at the far end of dialect. They are considered different languages because they are used by different political communities. (A language is a dialect with an army…)
Nancy should try her “method” with Xosa or some San language. The going would be far rougher, since grammatical categories would be far more different, and far more difficult to analyze, to say nothing about the different phonetics involved.
It is a real pity that contemporary Western peoples think that a “foreign” language is French or Spanish, which are really dialects closely related to all of the other “dialects” of Europe. Get outside of Indo-European if you want to see how different languages can be. It’s a mind-blowing experience to confront and analyze a language which has developed on its own, for millennia, without contact with any familiar language. The world, and human sensations and experiences, look far different when viewed from the perspective of a radically different linguistic system. Everyone should have that experience.
We did that! We were at a dinner with some Shona speakers from Zimbabwe, and did some language hunting there – and it was definitely a lot more difficult. There are stem-changes which are indeed quite mind-blowing to deal with at first. I remember having some trouble doing Arabic using Rosetta Stone, which is also an immersion method, because I didn’t realize at first there was a dual. They show you a picture of one plate and you say the word, then multiple plates and you say the word, but of course there are three separate forms: for one, for two, and for multiple. Took awhile to figure out what I was doing wrong. Shona was even harder.