I found when learning other languages, I started to learn more about my own language. Certainly when you start to train for teaching a language, the constant analysing opens your eyes about the structure of your own. In my school English language lessons, we learnt about the main parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and the rest. We were not taught about relative pronouns or active and passive tenses. We used them without thinking about why we were using the language in this way. It just seemed natural. I learnt more about those terms when learning other languages.
I have taught students who have insisted on an explanation and translation of every word in a sentence or phrase when in fact that would not be very helpful to their language knowledge. It would only serve to confuse matters. You generally do not need to know every word, just the meaning of the phrase or sentence as a whole. I’m a great fan of ‘chunking’ when teaching vocabulary.
I have helped train Japanese teachers who need to teach Japanese to non-native speakers. These teachers need to know how to present and give instructions to English speaking learners. As a non-Japanese speaker and a teacher/trainer of Japanese teachers, I see the view form both sides. The trainees are quite pleased to have me to practise on and I can them guide them and help them with their planning. Lots of students often translate directly from their own language or into their own language. This doesn’t always have the desired result. With the Japanese language I discovered finding an English language equivalent is a little more complex.
Sometimes, what appears to be a simple Japanese word or phrase does not have a direct translation as it is a concept rather than a word. I remember helping one Japanese teacher work out an explanation of a phrase to explain in her next lesson. Fortunately for me, I’d recently seen a documentary on Japan and this had helped me understand. The Japanese phrase in question was ‘wabi-sabi’ and basically describes ‘imperfect beauty’ in nature. That’s the short version anyway. It did take us both about an hour to reach a satisfactory explanation for the students.
