Missions for Everyone, 7 Sep 2024
Speakers: David & Sharon
Learning a language can be a difficult process. There is a whole new set of grammar rules and vocabulary to learn, not to mention the confidence required to speak the language. If it is already difficult to pick up a ‘known’ language, how much more difficult it is to learn an ‘unknown’ language! Where does one begin? In this workshop, David and Sharon gave us a sense of how one can grow to learn and understand another language—whether known or unknown.
Drawing from their experiences translating an unknown language on the mission field, they went through several language learning principles:
Start with your motivation. Why do you want to learn this language? When will you get to use it, and how will it help yourself or others?
Learn like a child. A child is able to learn language intuitively from his or her parents – so pay attention to how he or she does so! Essentially, you should listen a lot first before trying to speak.
Focus on meaning association. Rather than thinking of an English word and translating that, connect the object in your mind to the word directly.
Learn culture. Learning a language also entails learning more about the culture that uses it.
Listen more than you speak. Don’t jump straight into speaking. Make sure you’re practising the right thing!
Do extreme mimicry. Focus on getting the pronunciation, tones (if any) and intonation right!
Know your learning style. Make use of your natural learning style, whether visual, auditory, or the like.
Practice makes perfect. Learning a language isn’t complicated, but it is hard work and it takes time. So keep at it!
Use Google and technology. Hardly any language is totally ‘unknown’ nowadays, and there will usually be information about similar or related languages available. There are also various language learning apps available.
We went through some helpful techniques. One thing that struck me was how it should not be dry academic activity, but rather an embodied, contextualised process. We tried Total Physical Response (TPR), in which we acted out the words David spoke in a different language. By the end, we understood what word referred to what action—even without him translating it for us! He also demonstrated how to make use of flashcard and language learning apps such as Vocabulary Manager to accelerate learning words and utterances.
In a similar vein, working with Language Helpers—native speakers who are willing to help you learn their language—should be a highly involved process. Rather than simply sitting down and drilling the information into us, we can learn more effectively by engaging with experiences and real-life scenarios. Or, as he put it, we need to engage both our creative ‘right brains’ as well as our analytical ‘left brains’.
In so doing, we got a small taste of language learning, a precursor to translation work—intensified as Sharon shared some of the more technical linguistic elements! One trap new speakers of a language tend to fall into is pronouncing words as they would in their native language. By paying close attention instead to the kind of sounds a language uses, we can more accurately speak another language in that language, and not in our native tongues.
At the end, David shared the heart of learning a new language, particularly for Bible translators: that all may hear the good news of Jesus in their heart language. He read from Revelation 7:9–10:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
May this vision drive us in our endeavours to learn other languages, and may we strive to do so with excellence!
About the speakers:
David and Sharon started a translation project among an unreached people group. David has a background in Physics and Maths, and Sharon in Law and Librarianship. Neither were linguists before joining Wycliffe!
Link to Vocabulary Manager: https://software.sil.org/vocabulary-manager/
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