Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
* Did you learn French by speaking it? The foreign languages I've been taught have all started with reading, then writing, then speaking. And as far as I know, most people find it easier to read than to write or speak foreign languages.
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Yes, I too have heard that most people find reading easier. I am an anomaly that way, I guess
I learned French by the old-fashioned grammar/translation method (lots of things like 'today we are talking about the past tenses of the verb avoir' and then a worksheet). But we don't really teach that way now. For example, I have never EVER had a lesson with my students about how to say the days of the week and had them do worksheets. What I do is, I have a page a day calendar with stickers and I bring it in and every day we spend two minutes looking at it. After several weeks of every Monday being lundi, every Tuesday being mardi etc. they get it.
My JK students got their first exposure to the calendar just after Christmas holidays and had them nailed by March break, no worksheets involved They actually enjoy it because every day the colour of the page changes and they like to guess and predict what the next one will be. It is a much more natural and context-based way of learning.
I think the way I learned, with the focus on grammar and such, was based more on assessment via trickery---they would be sure to put in ALL the irregular stuff just to say HA! GOT YA! as it were.
So maybe this has carried over into my reading. I'll be reading and it'll be going well and I am not looking up words or anything, and then I'll kind of realize what I'm doing and my brain will just freeze up and go 'Okay, but look at this one...' and start fixating on the little verb issues. For example if I see something like 'il avait parlé' I recognize the verb parler, recognize that this is clearly a past tense, so I should be able to just go on but then I will start doubting maybe it is a plus-que-parfait or maybe it is some other subtle difference, and then I freeze up...
I know this probably all sounds very silly
I can't think of a better way to explain it. I *think* the problem is that as others have said, translating on one's head is not the best approach and if I just went with it and trusted myself, I would actually be much more fine than I think I would be (i.e. this is a confidence issue, not an ability issue). I definitely want to keep reading and work at it.