Language Learning Lessons

Most of us has had to take a language class at some point in our lives. For us, Ben took Spanish while in high school, and I took Spanish in high school and French in college. French was certainly my hardest class during college. It was so challenging to learn a language well while only being immersed in it for several hours every week. From my time in these classes, I knew that learning a language overseas would have it's challenges for me. Thankfully I have a good short-term memory. But I'm a perfectionist and hate saying things when I can't say them perfect. I also am social and hate not being able to communicate.

Our last class at the MTC was a class that taught us about language and culture learning, and I learned a new method of language learning that was completely fascinating and encouraging to me (and Ben) called TPR (Total Physical Response). 

In this class, we would have several objects in front of us... maybe around 15. We would start by pointing to three and having the teacher say what they were. We learned Russian in our class. We would not say the words, we would just hear them and point to the right object. After we felt confident we knew the first three, we would add a few more in. We would continue this until we were able to confidently and quickly point to all 15 items. It was amazing how quickly we learned the items, and we were learning how to say them much better than a textbook could have taught us! After a couple of weeks of learning Russian, we had the opportunity to speak it, and I was amazed at how much I was able to remember and say. While I know my perfectionist tendencies will still be difficult in language learning, this way of learning language has been encouraging to me, and I feel more confident about doing so!

[Our Russian teacher explains a picture, and we point to the right one]

[Photo Credit: Jill McCormick]

[This is me responding to commands about what to do with a ball... this was after just one hour of going over these commands!]

Sidenote: Many people ask if we are language learning yet. We are not. Because all of the people in our training center are going to different countries, we will wait to learn the language until we are in the country we will minister in (which is the best way to learn language because we will be able to learn language and culture together!). While in training, we are learning many helpful tips for language and culture learning though, such as in this class.