From: yochanan bitan (ButhFam@compuserve.com)
Date: Sun Dec 12 1999 - 11:52:09 EST
the following is an excerpt is taken from a book on language learning
methodolgies by (douglas ?) brown.
it may only be partially relevant for many interested in greek, but it is
humorous and humbling.
in the 'been there, done that, ate it' mode of 'mea culpa'.
randall buth
===================================
(discussing language learning methodologies:)
"Wrong Way" Francois Gouin
The first exhibit you encounter focuses on the history of language
teaching. The designers have chosen to begin that history with the amusing
but poignant story of how one of the first language teaching methods was
born, the story of Francois Gouin.
Francois Gouin (we'll call him Francois) was a teacher of Latin who
lived in France in the nineteenth century. A year or two before 1880,
Francois decided he needed to learn German. So he took a year away from his
teaching job in France and went to Hamburg. Borrowing from his methods of
teaching Latin, Francois decided that the best way to learn German would be
to memorize a German grammar book and the 248 irregular German verbs. He
isolated himself in his room for ten days, and successfully memorized the
book and the verbs. Emerging from his ten-day isolation, he wished to test
his new linguistic knowledge. He hurried to the university and went from
one class to the next. Gouin recounts his experience:
-----
But alas! In vain did I stain my ears; in vain my eye strove to
interpret the slightest movements of the lips of the professor; in vain I
passed from the first classroom to a second; not a word, not a single word
would penetrate to my understanding. Nay more than this, I did not even
distinguish a single one of the grammatical forms so newly studied; I did
not recognize even a single one of the irregular verbs just freshly learnt,
though they certainly must have fallen in crowds from the lips of the
speaker.
-----
Well, Francois wasn't about to give up. so back to his room he
went. This time, remembering how he learned Greek by tackling the Greek
roots, he decided to memorize eight hundred German roots--and of course to
rememorize the grammar book and irregular verbs. He was convinced that this
go-around would surely offer him "the foundations of the language, as well
as the laws and secret of its forms, regular and irregular." After eight
days he hurried again to the university. "But alas!" He understood not one
word.
The stubbornness of our dear Lain teacher now becomes painfully
evident. He was relatively undaunted by his first two failures to learn
German. Next he tried what should have been a successful strategy: he tried
talking with the customers in the shop below his room. But they laughed at
him, and embarrassed, sensitive Francois decided to return to the solitude
of his room. This time he tried translating Goethe and Schiller--but alas!
Next, he spent three weeks memorizing a book of dialogues--but alas! Then
he spent a full month memorizing the thirty thousand words of a
dictionary--but alas! And this time he went on to add: "...I understood not
a word--not a single word!...and I permit no one to doubt the sincerity of
this statement. Not a word!" He was still not ready to give up. He tried
reading again. He memorized the dictionary again and later a third time.
All to no avail.
Finally, his year-long stay came to an end, and Francois left
Germany without ever having learned to speak or understand German. He had,
in no uncertain terms, completely and utterly failed in his effort.
Fortunately, there was a relatively happy ending to the story. Upon
his return home Francois found that his little three-year-old nephew had
gone through that wonderful, miraculous stage of first-language acquisition
in which children, in the course of sometimes less than a year, move from
two-year-old "telegraphese" to nonstop chatterboxes of language. Francois
perceived that his nephew possessed a secret of some sort and set out to
study child language acquisition. His studies revealed many insights about
child language acquisition, from which Francois concluded that he and all
other language teachers were teaching the wrong way. He invented a method
called the Series Method, a direct, conversational approach with no
grammatical analysis, no vocabulary memorization, and no translation.
Francois Gouin's Series Method never became widely used, partly
because Gouin was not the entrepreneur that his colleague Charles Berlitz
was. Gouin's ideas and methods were the early inspiration for Berlitz,
whose famous Direct Method enjoyed popularity in the early 1900s and whose
schools are still thriving. We can nevertheless happily end the story of
"wrong-way Francois" by noting that the excruciating pain of his year-long
efforts to learn German eventually led to positive ends. Thus are some
methods born.
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