When you teach something like a language, as I did for five years intensively in Japan (English) and now Japanese to beginning Japanese speakers, either you're a colossal dolt or you quickly figure out what works with students and what doesn't.
I don't know -- and I don't particuarly want to know -- what it is like to teach recalcitrant students in mathematics, but I can imagine it's quite a chore. Knowing how resistant I was to learning mathematics, and now to consider that at age 13 I was beginning calculus yet still couldn't long divide, nor tell you what anything times nine was after seven -- and still can't -- but teaching language must be like teaching no other discipline.
You are working with what might be called a different set of rules, but for a game we all play. It would be as if we all know what chess was, and could play it with others of our group who had grown up with the same rules we did -- but when we tried to play it with a group who had learned how to play chess with a completely different set of rules -- say, the object was not how many pieces your opponent lost, but how many YOU lost -- well, things would be rather hairy. Although the board would be the familiar checkerboard pattern, and all the pieces would be exactly the same, perhaps in one group's game there would only be two pawns and six queens. And on Tuesdays at precisely 5 p.m. G.M.T. you could arbitrarily move all your opponents pieces around the board without him being able to watch -- well, that's what I call akin to learning someone else's language.
We're all playing with the same tools and the same abilities, but . . . but . . . but . . . the rules are utterly alien to us but completely familiar to them.
So I liken teaching language to teaching someone how to play a familiar game except by rules they have never encountered before. In order for two to really have a "real" game, you would both need to know what the rules were -- otherwise you would keep saying "Why did you do that? You're not allowed to do that!" And they would say "Of course I'm allowed to do that! How else are you supposed to play?
The common denominator between these two scenarios is that you need to learn a completely new way of thinking about something all of humans do every day, and most of us very well.
So, for anyone to try to come up with a particular method of teaching you the rules of THEIR version of chess -- well, they can try, they can paint it in pink and put a feathered boa around it and call it "The easy way to learn X" but it may or may not work like they would like it to.
Thus, I am always leery of any method that promises to teach you a language any faster than any other method. It's very similar to telling you you can work at home doing something totally unskilled and pull in $2,000 a week, when Fred the neighbour has to trudge out every morning and work a 12-hour day being a lawyer. Now if somehow someone showed Fred how to make $2,000 a week working from home with little or no effort, don't you think that everywhere you looked there would be an army of Freds staying home all day, maybe licking stamps? Well, cooking crack is more like it.
Point being, there is NO easy way to learn a language. There is NO easy system in which you can work less hard than someone else and learn faster. You may have a predilection for language -- a gift, if you will -- born of a lucky childhood growing up in a foreign country or born of two different-language parents or just in general be remarkably talented at picking up langauges (a parrot-like sense of mimicry definitely helps) but if you're like most ordinary schlubs, you're just going to have to do it the hard way.
And it's my job as a teacher to make the Hard Way to be the least painful that I can, and that, believe it or not, takes years and years of trial and error -- mostly error, and lots of trials.
When I taught English in Japan, I had never taught a single human being anything before. Maybe a friend how to make a major seventh chord on the guitar a few times, but never sitting someone down for substantial periods of time and trying to impart to them knowledge that is in your head, but not yet theirs.
And I found that in Japan, as an English teacher, the beginning was actually quite easy. Since I could hardly speak any Japanese, I was forced to speak English most of the time. But my school's approved learning texts were appalling, even for me to read. I thought to myself, "There is NO WAY that if I teach any student from this book the way it tells me I should that they will improve at all." Why did I say that to myself? Because if I put myself in their place and had to learn those books in order to learn Japanese I could tell that it would have taken centuries.
Likewise, when I came back to Montreal after five years teaching English in japan, I decided to actually take classes in Japanese -- but I did it the hard way, somehow managing to worm my way into a regular course being taught at McGill that was not for "Older learners" or "Special studies," but for regular young students who were taking Japanese courses as part of their degree -- who knows -- maybe social studies, or East Asian studies -- it doesn't matter. What mattered is that I was just a regular guy, learning with all the other kids -- except I was actually auditing the classes -- I would take the same tests as everyone else, but woul not end up with any sort of certificate or degree at the end of it, unlike them.
And I must admit, I went in there at first with a sense of superiority -- after all, I had just spent FIVE YEARS in Japan -- probably the most "intensive" way to learn Japanese that there is. So I figured that these young punks -- I was twice the age of most of them -- wouldn't have a clue and I'd be acing the class every time.
I was quickly disabused of this notion early on, especially when I realised that after my initial interview with the Japanese head honcho of the departmet (of East Asian Studies) she had put me in the "intermediate" classes. All well and good, except at the Intermediate level, your written Japanese had to be equal to, if not better than, your spoken and listening abilities.
I was hopelessly outclassed by these young punks. While I could talk circles around them, they could read and write circles around ME.
I dropped out in disgust after only one semester, and the Japanese treacher, to say nothing of my classmates, to whom I had taken a certain liking, were extremely puzzled and a bit shocked. I was good at Japanese, they all told me, but I knew that I was not.
However, what I took away from that experience was that I was hopelessly out of my depth from the beginning because of my lack of reading skills -- meaning kanji and styles of Japanese that were only written and of which I had no knowledge. I had basically learned my Japanese "on the street" and could not cope with their academic approach to teaching. But I also realised that there was no way the teacher could pay me any special attention -- it simply wasn't possible. There were too many students.
And what she used for texts -- "Ann Landers" columns from Japanese newspapers -- were so utterly banal that I just could not summon the interest to actually try to study them. Why would I ever need half the vocabulary involved in my daily dealings with Japanese people? There are not many conversations about spousal abuse and vengeful mothers-in-law in normal daily conversation; it was, therefore, a complete waste of time.
Just as I do not, and will not, EVER have to use calculus in any way, shape or form during my dealings with the world, I viewed it (and still do) as a complete misapplication of precious brain power which could have been used to better effect elsewhere, if you see what I mean.
So, as a teacher of Japanese, I have to decide what is going to be the most important things my students are going to need in the real world, and not waste precious time learning things they will never, ever need, like the proper way to count large animals as opposed to, say, the proper way to count money.
So, after almost two years of teaching Japanese, I believe I am on the cusp of a revolution -- or revelation -- in my teaching methods. I truly believe I have discovered the magic formula, and what's even better, this formula works with students of all levels and commitment-allocations.
Using it, I have personally witnessed several students, who in their first lesson could not even say "This is a pen" now be able to create fairly long sentences with quite a substantial vocabulary in only three or four lessons.
I have dubbed it The Kamakiri Method™ and I firmly believe this will be the new standard for the teaching of Japanese to anyone with a pen, paper and thirty bucks.
