Problem
How do you remember sounds, words, phrases and sentences in another language?
Let's look at how I remember the numbers one to four in Chinese.
Don't Translate Every Word
I am always saying and thinking that advanced speakers of English should not be translating word for word from their own languages because the sentence construction is different.
Pausing - Positive or Negative?
One friend of mine pauses constantly mid-sentence. Yet I am always telling people to slow down and pause.
You should pause because you want listeners to grasp an idea. You don't pause because you are seeking the translation for the next half of the sentence.
There's no good way to pause when you merely look and sound lost. If your voice lifts anxiously and hesitantly, ending like a question, the listeners think you have finished the sentence. Too many high note question-like ending make you sound confused, anxious, nervous.
You don't know where you are going. The listener doesn't know either. If I, as an English speaker find it difficult to piece together all the fragments to make whole sentences, another listener whose first language is not English will find it even harder to decipher the meaning.
On the other hand, if you come to the end, apparently, by lowering your voice, at the end of incomplete sentences, the listener has the same trouble with lots of disconnected bits. It's like a series of sentences in a traffic jam. You keep putting on the brakes. Just as the listener thinks you have finished, maybe the speech is over, you launch off again.
Following a pause with the word and does not help, but hinders. The listener doesn't know whether the 'and' clause is attached to the previous sentence, cuddling up, twinned, on the same theme.
Or is it an additional point, a different point, a more important point, like a sentence starting 'Furthermore ...!", an idea like a police car driving up behind in a slow convoy on the same theme, trying to overtake the previous idea?
The reader or listener gets tired. Otherwise the series of sentences with so many mid-sentence pauses that you cannot identify the ends of sentences is just a series of fragments.
A speech should be like a page, neatly divided up into three sections with sub-headings.
Now let's go back to learning.
When you start to learn, you hear lots of unidentifiable sounds and see lots of symbols on a page.
First, you want to learn some letters, or words, easy ones, which can link to ideas you already know.
The Chinese are good at linking sounds to objects. They links words with high tones and low tones to different words. A bit like Pitmans shorthand, where a dot in the air has a different meanting to one on the line of below it.
After you have learned two or three words, a couple of nouns, or names of people, or animals or objects, you can create a simple sentence.
Learning Vocabulary, one word at a time
Yet when I am learning a foreign language I am learning each word with its translation, one by one, seeking a link.
Is my first idea wrong? Is my second idea wrong? Or is there a time when one should transition and make the great leap forward into thinking whole phrases and sentences in another language?
Some words are 'false friends. The word for four is so similar to death in Chinese that you don't use the written number four as a house number or in a motorbike numberplate or in a gift because it is unlucky.
I used to have trouble remembering the number four in Chinese. The first three numbers were easy.
The written symbols for one and two and three are easy. They are parallel horizontal lines, like Roman numerals on their side. The same number as the numbers they describe. One two three. A single is in one, and part of the word for Monday. Two lines for two; three lines for three, like a pile of three pieces of paper, or books.
Then I remembered 'four' sounds like death. The symbol for four looks like a curtained hospital bed. The symbolic meaning is: Dying and death in hospital. The sound is similar to: Will you sue? Yes, sir. The number? The four sides of a square. Sentence to remember the four numbers, (w)e err, san(itorium), (sue), Sir. The Japanese numbers for one to four or five sound similar.
- 1: 一 (壹) yī
- 2: 二 (Traditional:貳) èr
- 3: 三 (Traditional:參) sān
- 4: 四 (肆) sì
Author
Angela Lansbury
