Here is a personal anecdote to show how hard it is to train qualified speakers in difficult languages.
I spent months prior to DLI teaching myself the Arabic alphabet, grammar basics, and vocabulary. At DLI I studied relentlessly, often rising at 0530 and working more or less continually on language until bedtime. My infant son had the dubious pleasure of sitting four hours at a time on my lap while I studied flashcards or read Arabic news. I rushed to finish a 63-week course in 38 weeks, passed the DLPT, and rushed to Jordan four months before starting at University so I could start working on the dialect. I enrolled in three different schools at various times, studied with two private tutors, and kept up a lot private study. In other words, I've worked extremely hard.
Today I had some business at the University. While I was filling out a complicated form in Arabic, I started chatting with a girl nearby in Arabic. Before long she switched to English (which usually happens here). Then she looked down at the form I was filling out, laughed out loud, and said, "Your Arabic is SO bad!" She couldn't hold back the giggles and said, "It's like when little kids start in Kindergarten." She swiped my pen and went to work correcting my mistakes and my penmanship.
Somebody remind me while I'm bothering trying to learn this language?
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1 comments:
There's a big difference between beginning to learn a language at birth and beginning to learn a language at 27. Even a local kindergartner already has five years of exposure under his belt. I can't help but feel that, even if your competency is still relatively limited, it makes a significant impression an certain native speakers that you have even tried. Hopefully the subjective emotional response created by your efforts will produce it own dividends to sustain as you diligently labor on.
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