"Have you the philology monograph of my aunt, Madam Professor?"

The BBQ Pit
1

An overeducated rant, directed against one Michael Heim, author of Contemporary Czech:

I don’t know what things are like on your planet, but most Earthlings who learn a foreign language want to speak it. Not recite paradigms in it, not change masculine pronouns to feminine ones and vice versa, and not learn grammatical rules and counter-rules to the point where they’d be terrified to carry on a conversation even if they had the vocabulary. We do not need to learn all the cases, verb tenses, and pronouns in the first month. The idea is to practice the basic stuff until you can actually use it in conversation. There’ll be time for the hard bits later. Right now we must talk.

Oh, you say, but I did include some sample conversations in the book. Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?

In lesson four, we learn how to say “How many novels by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy do you have?”

In lesson five, we learn “They say that this book deals with interesting problems of both Czech and Russian literature,” and “A symbol interests us not only for what it represents, but also for what it is.”

In lesson seven: “‘People’ is mainly an ethnographic term, but for certain philosophers it also has a political meaning.”

In lesson eight: “I invited several of my students who are interested in the French nouveau roman and modern French literature in general.”

In lesson ten: “Although several of her heroes are aware of the tragic quality of life as a whole, even in these instances there can be no talk of the author’s paying special attention to their psychology.”

In lesson eleven, we learn how to tell time and make small talk about the weather.

At no point do your students learn how to order food in a restaurant, go shopping, talk about what they do for fun, make a doctor’s appointment, ask for directions, check into a hotel, read a train timetable, or call the fire department. Apparently, they have research assistants to do these things for them. (How the research assistants will learn enough Czech to pull this off is another question, but it certainly won’t be from your book.)

OK, I guess you probably thought you were writing for academics, but have you ever met an academic? Do you know they have lives, like everyone else? Hath not an academic senses, organs, dimensions, hobbies, interests, addictions? Do you realize how important it is for an academic to be able to form one of the following sentences:

“I would like a cup of coffee.”
“May I please have a cup of coffee?”

Your book doesn’t give me the slightest clue how to say either of these things in Czech, but I just might be able to manage:

“I shall be obliged to relocate your literary institute to a nouveau site within your posterior orifice if I do not instantaneously receive a portion of caffeinated liquid. With milk.”

That’ll do.

2

Oh, my.

I had no idea there were language texts like this. You have my condolences on trying to learn from this book. Remind me to avoid anything by that author.

–Scribble.

3

what a wanker!

4

what a wanker!

5

Waiter! Czech, please.

Sorry.

I bought a book on Spanish before going on a holiday to Mexico. I should have saved my money. The pamphlet from the travel agent was much more helpful.

6

Funny you should mention that – for most of the first month of the class, I was using the two-page glossary in Let’s Go: Eastern Europe as a supplementary text, and actually learning more from it than I was from Mr. Heim. Sigh.

7

I dunno…

Folks learn in different ways, and for different purposes. Perhaps this text is useful to some students, who are perhaps helped by arcane grammatical rules or are attempting the language in order to absorb obscure academic treatises.

Rather than blaming the author of the book, I’d be upset with the professor who chose it. It’s HIS job to teach your class (and choose effective teaching materials) not the author of the textbook.

8

From what I’ve heard, Czech is hard enough to learn, no matter who’s teaching it. One of my friends who lived in the Czech Republic for a while said that the Czechs had such a hard time understanding foreign accents that it took her a long time before she could pronounce the name of the city she was in, Hradec Kralove*, well enough for the native speakers even to understand what she was saying.
[sub]*Pronounced “Roderick’s Crawlaway”[/sub]

9

I dunno. I try to learn a lot of languages primarily to be able to read them. I happen to enjoy learning grammar, so the sooner I learn the rudiments of tense, mood, voice, number, case, etc, the happier I am. Also, many people learn languages just to be able to read specialized publications. I wish I had been exposed to this kind of stuff early in rapid reading and translation classes. I’d rather start right on symbolism and such than worry about the names of objects in a classroom.

But if conversation and general knowledge is the point of your course, then I’d say your professor is using the wrong textbook. It sounds like it belongs in a rapid reading & translation class.

10

Having done like Maeglin and studied several languages simply to be able to read and speak them, I gotta side with him in blaming the professor for choosing what is obviously the wrong book for the course. It sounds like more of a specialized text for translators and/or scholars than it does a book for people who want to learn Czech for conversational and travel purposes.

So, Fretful - what’s your deal? If you’ll tell us why you’re learning Czech, I bet a couple of us could come up with better texts you can use on the side to enhance your learning.

11

I’d agree that this is the wrong book for the course, but unfortunately it’s the only mass-market Czech textbook available in the US. Or rather, there are two of them, and the prof claims the other one is even worse.

Maeglin, you’re a classics major, right? The grammar-translation approach works for dead languages, after a fashion; I can’t see a single benefit to using it for a living one. Even if you do want to learn the language for strictly academic purposes (which the majority of people in introductory language classes don’t), you can look up the specialized vocabulary later. The poor traveler who’s trying to catch a train doesn’t have that luxury.

Also, reading is a passive activity. Speaking and writing are active – they require more real knowledge and effort on the student’s part. Anybody who learns how to produce sentences in a language can also read it. It doesn’t work nearly as well the other way round.

I’ve got no problem with laying out the grammatical rules in the appendix, for people who want them all in one place, but students need serious practice and repetition to get comfortable with this material. Giving it all in the first seven weeks of class – with no time to absorb the material or put it into use – just doesn’t work for most students, even those who learn rapidly.

12

Yeah, my degree is in classics, but that hasn’t exactly stopped me from studying living languages as well. [sub]I’ll persist in the unhelpful dead-living distinction just for sake of argument…[/sub] I got extremely frustrated in all of my college-level German classes because I felt that we were learning too much useless crap and not enough grammar. Dammit, I want to learn how the articles decline before I start having to use them. I don’t want to repeat and imitate the teacher and the textbook hoping I get some construction right until I actually learn the system.

Furthermore, learning grammar in only dribs and drabs at a time limits range of expression. I find that 95% of the work I do when speaking in a foreign language is simply translating my thoughts in English, in which I have a relatively free range of constructions and idioms to employ, into simpler sentences in French or German. It’s the bottleneck that’s the hard part. Hence I like courses that frontload grammar: once I understand the basic systems, I can proceed to the vocabuary, idioms, and other useful stuff with a lot more ease.

This is not actually true. Reading academic German is not merely a matter of looking up Gesamtkunstwerk or Natureingang in the dictionary while translating some article. Mastering indirect speech and indirect question in German is fairly difficult, and usually it takes a few years of practice in normal speaking classes before such topics are even broached.

I would also disagree. Knowledge and effort? Not necessarily. I have to expend a lot more effort reading a scholarly article in German than I do asking for directions, ordering in a restaurant, or in the case of French, having a fairly involved conversation. Speaking requires more practice if your training is more textual.

<shrug>

I suppose I can’t really argue there. I have no frame of reference to judge. Grammar works for me and for most of my friends in similar fields, but that is perhaps why we chose to pursue what fields we did. I think something of a compromise might work best in general then. I just can never escape the feeling that I am wasting my time learning another language unless I get a regular dose of grammar.

13

I have found that, the Czechs apparently notwithstanding, most people who do not entirely share a language with you will go out of their way to pronounce things slowly and clearly and will understand your attempts to do the same in their language. Spanish speakers don’t require a Castillian accent and will understand you if you speak Spanish like Peggy Hill, just like I will understand English even if it is pronounced with a New York or Australian—or Spanish—accent. However, it is easier to learn a language if it is presented in a flat accent without stylistic frills like trills and rolled Rs.

Most language classes, especially those on tape, attempt to teach the language with local, like Parisian French, accents and some even bounce around the entire, say, French-speaking world to present you with a wealth of accents. This would be a nice thing once the student has gained some familiarity with the language but makes basic comprehension difficult.

To address this, I would like to create a language tape program that presents the beginning lessons in a flat, Midwestern Murrcan accent. It would introduce the sounds, grammar, and vocabulary in a way that does not add the burden of accent. Yeah, you’d end up speaking Spanish like an American, BUT YOU ARE GOING TO, ANYWAY! Face it; most of us will never pass for members of the Spanish royal family, but maybe we could communicate better with our co-workers.

“Please pass the wrench.”

“Pase por favor la llave.”

14

I’m using the Polish Now! software from Transparent Language. You may want to check out transparent.com to see if they have a Czech course.

They use native speakers and give you several different ways to approach the learning process. Graphic feedback lets you compare your pronounciation with the native speakers’. Comes with a microphone, but I use my headset.

Might be a good complement to the grammar text you have.