Lesson 7
Section 1
Task 1 Learning a foreign language.
Professor Ernest Watson was answering questions on a radio phone-in program on the subject of learning a foreign language.
Hello, professor, can you hear me？
Yes, we can hear you fine.
My name is Humphries, Albert Humphries, and I live in Balham, in London.
Yes, good evening, Mr Humphries.
What is your question?
I've been studying Spanish for some years.
I go to Spain on holiday sometimes.
I've learnt quite a lot of grammar and vocabulary.
But I find it very difficult to speak, and when I went to Spain this summer, I couldn't understand the Spanish people at all.
I got really disheartened.
Yes, it is a problem.
How long have you been studying Spanish?
About four years.
Yes, how exactly? Going to an evening class, using tapes...?
I've been going to an evening class and I've watched quite a lot of the BBC television programmes.
Oh, yes, They're very good.
Did you buy the BBC book?
No, we use a different book in the class, but I watched the programmes.
Yes, I see...Mr Humphries, I always think that learing a language is rather like learning to drive.
Now, you couldn't learn to drive a car by sitting in a classroom or watching television.
I think what you need is a lot of practice in using the language.
That's all very well if you live in the country where they speak the language but I don't.
Yes, I understand the problem.
Though even if you live in the country where the language is spoken,
you have to reach a certain standard before you are able to have conversions with the natives.
I was thinking perhaps you might arrange with another student or students to have regular conversation practice.
But the other students make the same mistakes as I do. I...I..I think you're confusing learning with practising.
Remember what I said about driving a car,
learning to speak means being able to put together the right groups of words and to say them in a reasonably accurate way.
And what about learning to understand real Spanish?
Well, again, you need practice in hearing the Spanish language spoken by Spanish speakers.
There are Spanish speakers in London. Get one of them to read some extracts from a Spanish newspaper onto a cassette.
Have you got a cassette recorder?
Yes. Then you want to listen and listen and listen to the recording until you almost know them by heart, just as if you were learning to drive.
you'd practise parking the car over and over again till you could do it perfectly.
Learning to speak a language is a very hard business.
You don't need a huge vocabulary, you need a small vocabulary that you can use really efficiently, and to be able to do that, you need lots and lots of practice.