Yesterday, Adriana over at Indigo Spells wrote about the nine languages that she's studied. Yes, you read that correctly, NINE. Bulgarian, Russian, English, French, Albanian, Greek, Romanian, Italian and Spanish. Yowzah. That's a lot. She's not fluent in all 9 but I commend her for at least tackling all of them.
Recently, I have been listening to Michel Thomas' Method French for Beginners
plan in my car on my morning commutes to work. I picked up this 8-CD course at a Barnes & Noble back in 2000 when I worked there. It was at first to prepare for a trip to Paris which never happened but then over the past 10 years of owning the set I've picked it up with the intention of becoming fluent. But I haven't been learning French off and on for 10 years. Oh no. It's been more like 20+ years. It all started with a big loveable alien named Muzzy.
The Muzzy Language Learning Program for Children is an educational cartoon developed by the BBC in 1986 to teach English-as-a-Second-Language and then adapted by Early Advantage to teach other languages as well. The cartoon has a plot which is very slow and is interrupted by interstitials which take a moment to teach children more vocabulary words. Muzzy, the main character, is an alien from outerspace who visits the Kingdom of Gondoland. Gondoland is run by the King (la rei), the Queen (la reine) and Princess Sylvie (or Sylvia). Sylvie is in love with Jean (or Bob) the gardener (Jean le jardinier) but the King and Queen want her to marry the evil scientist Corvax. Both Jean and Muzzy get in trouble and get thrown in jail. Can Muzzy get back to his spaceship and can Jean rescue Sylvie from marrying the evil Corvax?
Starting at the age of 8 or so, I watched Muzzy over and over and over again and I learned a lot of French by doing so. Repetition is key to learning and there was a lot of repetition in the program and it begged for repeat viewings.
I learned some important words and phrases:
- j'ai (I have)
- j t'aime or j'aime (i love you or i love)
- on y va (off we go)
- bon jour (good day), bon apres-midi (good afternoon), bon soir (good evening), bonne nuite (good night)
- Arrete (stop)
- comment allez vous? (how are you?)
- merci, s'il vous plait (thank you, please)
- grand (big), petit (small)
- voila (look!)
- la (there) ici (here)
- months of the year
- how to count from 1 to 10
- letters of the alphabet
- seasons
- colors
I learned some silly stuff too:
- j'aime les parcmetres (i love parking meters. Muzzy likes eating clocks and parking meters!)
- j'ai un hamburger (I have a hamburger)
- je suis mal a la tete (I have a headache or literally I am ill of the head)
- les raisin et le prune (the grapes and the plums)
- j'ai un ordinateur (I have a computer)
- Je suis Jean, je suis le jardinier (I am Jean, I am the gardener)
- je suis le grand Muzzy (I am the big Muzzy)
Building upon those basics as well as my own understandings of English (which comes from French and German) and Spanish and Portuguese (which are both Romance languages as is French), I am very confident that I could learn to become fluent in French. What helps my confidence is that Michel Thomas' Method of teaching is so natural and fluid that he has you spouting full sentences in French within a few minutes of starting the lesson. There is no vocabulary to memorize, no workbooks, no charts, no nothing. The lesson plan comes only with the CDs and you basically listen and talk your way into learning French. You are learning along with a male and female student (which is important because of gender specific words that men would use versus women and vice versa) and if you pretend you are student #3 you can learn right along with them. This is why the CD set is perfect to listen to in the car (by yourself) because you can say the words, phrases and sentences out loud and perfect your pronounciation without worrying about bothering anyone else.
I am a veritable Michel Thomas fan girl. I love the man. He passed away in 2005 at the age of 90 and had a very long career as a polyglot. He even taught Princess Grace Kelly how to speak French when she needed to learn quickly before marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco. He left us with many recordings in which he teaches students French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and other languages. I'm hoping that with the help of Michel Thomas that I will become fluent in French, regain my fluency in Portuguese and perfect my Spanish.
The art of speaking multiple tongues is highly valued by many. There is a lot of resistance in the United States to speak anything other than English which I think is utterly ridiculous. Being raised by Spanish and Portuguese speaking parents, I understand the value of speaking multiple languages, being able to help out those learning English and broadening my horizons. I can visit any Spanish or Portuguese speaking country with no problem and can visit a French speaking country just barely get by. Yet there are people who travel who don't even try to learn a few basics. Instead they speak English super slow as though that way people can understand them.
Are you learning a language? Do you speak multiple ones? Is there a language you've always wanted to speak but haven't tackled learning it yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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5 comments:
Raquelle, I think you're giving me way too much credit for what is basically mood swings and a lack of discipline on my part :) But thank you anyway!
I might have to check out the Michel Thomas program -- it sounds great (although I have to say Muzzy looks a lot cuter :))! But I'm more of a visual learner, and it sounds like his program is strictly auditory? I downloaded a free Spanish podcast from iTunes, and while it's been helpful with the pronunciation, I find that it's harder for me to remember words if I haven't seen them on a page. But it sounds like you learn faster from listening and talking? I'm always fascinated by how different people absorb knowledge differently!
Adriana - I watch movies with captions on because my auditory skills are very weak. It's difficult for me to pick up every word in a conversation and I have a difficult time with accents. So the fact taht I can learn purely by listening to Michel Thomas is a miracle in itself. He's basically having a conversation with his pupils and getting them to speak in French. He does a lot of repetition and forbids people to stop and memorize thing rather to reason and think it out. It's flippin' amazing!
You give yourself too little credit. You have an extra brain somewhere, I'm sure of it.
Have you been to Transparent Language's website? They do word/sentence of the day in lots of languages and they have great language blogs. I highly recommend it.
I really enjoyed this post and I admire you for learning French. I must confess my languages are limited. I am extremely fluent in English (Old English, Middle English, and, the language of both Shakespeare and Mark Twain, Modern English). I can halfway read German and make out words when it is spoken. The same is true with my Spanish. I can somewhat read French, but it's very difficult for me to do so!
I do have one correction to make as a scholar of English. Modern English stems not from French and German, but from Old English, which itself stems from proto-Germanic (from which High German, Low German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, et. al. all stem). Latin would have a huge impact through the Church and science. Surprisingly, though it is often claimed it did, the Norman Conquest had little impact on English. Most of the Norman French terms which made it into the language either deal with law or cooking!
Here in Sweden we're more or less forced to learn at least a second language to get around. There are only about nine million Swedish speaking people worldwide, 99% of them are living in Sweden.
We learn English at school for about 10 years, so most Swedes understand and speaks English fairly well. In high-school we usually pick up a third language, usually French or German. In recent years German has lost popularity to Spanish as Spanish is a much more useful language. I had French.
In collage there are posibilities to pick up a fourth language which I naturally did. I went for Russian because it was so funky back in the 80's. I can't say I master it very well though. I think the best languages to study are the ones spoken by a lot of people, I don't really see the point in learning small languages like Swedish or Albanian if you don't have family there or a deep interest in those countries and cultures.
The way I see it, languages are first and foremost tools for communication. If you know English, Spanish, Arab, French, Mandarin and Russian you pretty much cover it all.
Hi Raquelle, have you tried some of the Pimsleur courses?
I like Michel Thomas' method, but I find that it's much easier for me to start with a new language with 30 minutes a day of Pimsleur than "do as much as you like" approach of MT.
Another reason why I like to start with Pimsleur is that it has a much better pronunciation than MT. MT's French has a very strong (German?!) accent.
That being said, I still think that MT is great, but I would go with it after Pimsleur.
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