Scamming Language Programs
Every day, I get a text or email or run across a "reel" on Facebook that says something like, "Quit saying 'Sto bene,' (or any one of dozens of everyday phrases, and then offers what real Italians say."
Advice for all thesw scamming language "experts" with a gimmick: Stop saying things like "Stop Saying This in Italian or French or German." What they want you to do is to replace standard vocabulary and expressions with teen slang or gutter speak that will make educated people despise you. I once got some French tapes, rather demanding actually, which promised to improve your colloquial French. I was having lunch one day in Paris with my good friend Claude Polin, a professor at the Sorbonne, and I trotted out one of the phrases I learned. Claude screwed up his face and asked, "Where did you learn to say that--you sound like one of my students." On another occasion, I was with an American friend whose sone was at the Science Po, and we had lunch with the son and a few French friends, and it was all student slang. The son, apparently, could only talk that way. I asked his well brought-up friends, if they would talk that way to parents or serious adults. Of course not, they replied. Well, then, I asked, why are you teaching your friend to talk like an illiterate jerk?
The problem with even good language series like Pimsleur is that they promise far too much and trick the suckers into thinking you can master a language without studying grammar and vocabulary in the tedious old-fashioned way languages used to be taught in schools. I have even run across otherwise sensible people who believe you can become proficient in Greek or Latin by using an oral method. On the occasions I have worked with a teacher or student following this method, their deficiencies become plain immediately. They know what they know but that is too little. If you learn grammatical rules, it saves thousands of hours. Pimsleur Italian, for example, never uses the word subjunctive. This means that every single usage of subjunctive they present is a unique phenomenon.
Once, visiting the Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma, I met a Latin teacher at a party. He exclusively used the oral method on the grounds that Thomas Aquinas never studied grammar or vocabulary. How could be possibly know that? But let us suppose it is true. One does have to consider, first that Thomas's Latin is not exactly classical and with it the student will have a lot of trouble reading Horace or Tacitus. Second, Thomas grew up speaking Medieval Italian, which is quite close to Latin. Third, Thomas spent an enormous time in Church, where Latin was the only language. If you want an immersion method, he had it. So I asked the teacher how many hours a day did he have the students. The answer was fifty minutes three times a week. In other words two and a half hours out of 112 waking hours in the week. That is not a baptism into Latin by immersion. It is barely a sprinkle.
Many of the tape courses are very good for unloosing the tongue and training the ear, but none of them--especially those that tie you to a computer--will teach you a language. But the language scammers would not make money except in a country where everyone is looking for the fast buck or cheap shortcut. Condensed books, TV series on history, instant coffee, fast food for the mind.
All this is very true. I’ve seen those people on social media and ignore them on the assumption that they are gutter dog speakers of whatever language they claim to be experts on. Pimsleur is good mostly for oral drills and that’s about it. I look for something else first and get Pimsleur when nothing else is available in that language. It’s expensive and usually oriented mostly toward business travelers.
I have learned to to trust almost no language study books published after about 1995 and remain suspicious of all of them until I get as far back as the late seventies at least, preferably the sixties. There are videos on you tube that compare later editions of language learning books with their predecessor editions. They always get dumber beginning in the seventies or eighties, perhaps earlier in some cases.
I wonder if it would be feasible to use a grammar book from the 19th century and then figure out how the written language has changed during the century and a half since the book was published and change your usage accordingly when appropriate.
Thank you for this.
It is frustrating to have children in highschool ostensibly learning Latin by the oral method described. It is such an incredible waste of time.
They spend excessive amounts of time struggling through their homework assignments, which have directions purely in Latin and which were explained in the classroom purely in Latin. I will take a look at the lesson and explain to them in plain English – even making use of (gasp) attendant tables – what the lesson is all about. Invariably, after about 15 minutes of this they are able to whip through the exercises.
Oral method instruction, except in the case of a true immersion school, is lazy and criminally deficient.