20100406

The first day of my language school. It appears that teachers at the school don’t speak English. That is why their orientation was not understandable completely… Additionally, I understood almost nothing of the test for class allocation. As expected eeeeasily, I was allocated to the lowest class whose students were all Japanese.

Lectures are given entirely in French, which I think is ineffective. Declarative knowledge like meanings of words or grammar systems should be discussed in a language students understand, I believe. We, beginners, don’t fluently understand French, so it takes much time to explain things in French. The only way is to show many examples and let student find grammatical rules.

But an interesting point is that discovering grammar rules can make language learning more enjoyable. When we take to something, it is a strong factor that we ourselves find them and have affection to them. Similarly, if we find grammar rules by ourselves from given examples, we may take to them.

Another ineffective teaching method is listening. At the very beginning of French learning, we don’t know almost all the words of listening materials. What could we understand of materials full of new words? It was completely ineffective!

Having said that, I will just adapt to their method. One of my beliefs is “Circumstances are not what we struggle to change, but what we adapt to.”