I first started learning a different language in the last year of primary school. I was quite excited by the promise of these lessons whereas some of my classmates probably groaned. I took to French quite quickly and became very good at recognising the vocabulary and being able to translate from one language to another. This lasted well into my secondary school years where I had nice and encouraging French teachers. It all went a bit awry in the fifth year (year 11) of secondary school. In this year we had a teacher who thought the best way for his pupils to learn French was by shouting at them if they made a mistake. My learning tapered off a little then. Luckily this experience didn’t discourage my love of language learning and many years later, I find it reasonably easy to read French texts. I also had German lessons at school, but I’m not sure if our teacher was suited to provide lessons as she didn’t always have an understanding of the language. An example of her teaching method is given below.
Teacher: Tomorrow, we will have a test on Unit 4. If you do not pass, you will have detention.
Student: But Miss, we haven’t studied Unit 4.
Teacher: That is no excuse.
So you can see, language learning can be difficult for other reasons. I always found the grammar of German difficult, but was quite good at remembering the vocabulary. It amused me that the number of letters in some words were two or three times more in their English equivalent.
If I go on holiday, I always like to have a phrase book so I can try to use phrases on the native speakers of the country. I’m not sure I’m always understood but hope that my efforts are appreciated. For many years, it was seen as a stereotype that English people would not learn another language as they expected everybody to speak English, regardless of which area of the world they were in. I worked for a few Arabic speaking banks and had an attempt at learning the language. In those days, BBC Radio had a programme on Saturday afternoons called, ‘Get by in…’ Here they would have a weekly thirty-minute lesson in a specific language. The course would be about six lessons and could be supported by a book and cassette tapes. I picked up some Arabic, Chinese and Russian from these programmes.
On successfully being appointed to one job, my manager told me that it would be useful to have a knowledge of basic Spanish as some of the documentation that I needed to use would be written in that language. I didn’t really have much knowledge of Spanish so went out and bought a ‘Teach Yourself Spanish’ textbook and cassette tape. Having a basic knowledge of French helped me to learn Spanish. Many years later I worked for a Danish bank and studied the Danish language for six years and it became my second language. On my first time visiting Denmark and in my first encounter with a native speaker, my part of the conversation was in Danish while the other speaker’s part was in English. We both understood each other, but it was probably a very strange conversation for any passer-by.
Having solely worked with Japanese staff, trainees and students since 2015, I’m trying to learn the language. It’s a slow process, but I’m happy with each element of the language I achieve-especially if I recognise a hiragana or kanji character.
