Some thoughts on how to learn foreign languages
When we start learning a new language, whether we do it on our own or in a classroom, we often start by learning basic sentences such as “How are you?”, “My name is...”, “Where is the train station?”. This is obviously useful for a beginner and you need to learn how to say this at some point if you want to get around in that new language. However, I think that this method does not help understanding how the language works in itself, and we could come up with better ways of learning.
I read some articles about a thing called “the logical tree” (or l’arborescence logique in French), which basically means that each thing that you learn will help you understand the next thing that you’re going to learn. You capitalize on what you already know in order to learn more.
The thing is, we always want everything right now, so we tend not to settle down and not to take the time to actually learn things well. Instead of starting a new language by the most useful sentences, I think that we should take some time to understand how the language is constructed, how the language actually works. Then you can start to learn the language in itself, in a logical and progressive way, so that each new piece of knowledge is related to the previous one.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that we should link what we learn thanks to syntax instead of context. Most of the time, when you start learning a new language, you will learn during the same lesson some sentences like “my name is”, “I come from”, “how are you”, “i live in” etc. In the logical tree perspective, in a single lesson you would instead learn thing like “i am”, “you are”, “i am happy”, “are you happy?”. I hope you get what I mean ^^
Thanks to this logical link between the different things you’re learning, the logical tree allows us to learn faster and better. It helps us understanding how the language works so we are able to speak it better and a lot faster than with the traditional method.
When I was teaching English to Peruvian kids a few weeks ago, we actually used this method to teach them the basics of the language and it was very useful. We would teach them the verb “to be”, then the next day the verb “to have” etc. And we would associate these verbs with basic nouns and adjectives so that they would understand how to form a sentence by themselves.
It worked very well and was a lot more efficient than teaching them random sentences. They remembered things a lot better with the logical tree method, as they would understand the logical link between the different sentences we were teaching them and asking them to make by themselves. They were building mental connections, which means that there is less chance they will forget what they learnt. Also it allowed us to do a lot of games involving sentence making so the kids felt more involved it the class and were having fun while learning :)
All of this to say that learning about the logical tree has been really eye opening for me, and has made me rethink my way of learning (and teaching) languages. I wish more teachers and classbooks would use that method.
If you read these thoughts until the end, feel free to tell me what you think about it, I would love to kow other opinions on this topic :)
