Gaudi’s Parc Guell in Barcelona
Does the picture next to you look like an animation movie to you? If you have visited Spain or learnt Spanish, you will be more likely to know that this place exists: it’s Parc Guell in Barcelona, designed by the famous architect Antonio Gaudi.
It’s technically possible to learn a language without learning about the culture of the countries in which it is spoken. I refer to “culture” in its broadest sense here, including customs, values, traditions, history, current society etc. But even if you’re learning a language strictly for career reasons, it helps to take note of the culture.
All languages are rooted in the culture of the country or area they originate from, so learning language and culture at the same time makes a lot of sense.
So how do you do that?
You can learn Spanish in Singapore, no problem at all, but if you have a chance to visit Spain or Latin America at some point (or even learn Spanish there), it will add fuel to the fire of motivation, which needs to be kept burning.
Failing a real-life visit, which of course requires time and money, there are lots of other things you can do to expose yourself to the culture:
- Passionate teachers will instinctively introduce bits of culture throughout their lessons. Aoba’s blog about Japan and Japanese is a great example of that.
- Failing that, you can do it yourself! Read up on the country’s history, read books by famous authors of the country (translated, if need be), see if there are any events going on related to the country. The site of the Singapore Film Society, for example, will alert you on the films being screened during the European Film Festival and the Japanese Film Festival (to date, 2011 festival websites aren’t up yet).
So all in all, don’t limit yourself to just learning culture without learning anything about the language. Knowing the language of a country will put the culture in a new light. And vice versa. You could learn a country’s language without caring about its culture, but it’d be boring and futile. So learn about both language and culture at the same time!
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
Another long comment, please indulge me.
Logically speaking, we would have to learn the language first so as to be able to access (or, as academics like to say rather inelegantly, ‘expose ourselves to’) the culture. Equally logical (as much as a reality check), a bit of the culture nearly always rubs off on us while we’re learning the language.
Let me give you a personal observation here. Most European teachers (of any subject) tend to be ‘culturists’: their aim is to imbibe students with the culture/perspective/’Weltanschauung’ (worldview) of the subject. Broadly speaking, Asian teachers tend to be ‘technicians’: to bring up students’ proficiency in the ‘inner technology’ of the subject in the shortest time possible.
The European vs. Asian difference is most easily seen in mathematics: Asian-taught mathies are technically a helluva lot more superior to European-taught mathies, but they never rise beyond the more techy tiers in professional life. Euro/Ameri-mathies are much more creative in making use of their maths.
(Some people disagree with this view of mine, explaining that there is discrimination, etc, etc – true enough, but I personally have found the Euro vs. Asian taught viewpoint relatively more in keeping with reality than any other viewpoint.)
Just for the mental exercise, if we accept the Euro vs. Asian taught viewpoint for the moment, we can see how the culture vs. proficiency/language effect influences the way learners interact with the ‘source’ culture of the language.
Example: Many (thankfully not most) Chinese learners of English (especially those in mainland China) have a habit of saying [ridiculous] things like, “Oh, my English has not reached native fluency yet.” That is a dead giveaway that the learner is a proficiency learner rather than a culture learner. Stuff like that is especially hateful and detestable to an English-speaking ear (I don’t know why but it does). Seriously, it’s crazy funny for me to hear something like that in passive voice, lack of contractions, use of ‘fluency’ and ‘native’ in the same breadth when talking about language ability. But that’s just me.
In comparison, a Singaporean learner is much more likely to say “My English isn’t good enough yet” mainly because the Singapore government had taken great pains to transform Singapore into a more English-speaking country from a Chinese-speaking one. There’s also a great deal of mental/sympathetic connectivity between Singapore and the UK language-wise also because of that.
Likewise, a Japanese learner would make no reference to his/her English being “native” or otherwise since, as a matter of fact, the ‘pull’ of Japanese culture is very strong on the Japanese themselves and they are well aware of how this ‘pull’ must also exist in other cultures as well. (I know this to be true, having worked in Tokyo for 2/3 years there.)
In other words, I have found learners are more likely to learn the language better with Western-born teachers (or Western-bred Asian ones) because most (say) English learners are actually quite proficient, but their ‘output’ often comes out comically wonky because the missing link is culture. Culture provides context for proficiency.
Thanks Rob. This actually sheds light on a few things to me:
- Why many language schools here do not go much beyond the technicalities. If Westerners come here to learn a language, they want to experience it in a cultural context [what's the point of making the trip otherwise?]. The one language school that does this well in Beijing is Hutong School, which was founded by a mixed group of Chinese and Westerners.
- Why not more schools keep a blog like French Toast’s to share the passion and stir up interest for the language
That said, I can see that among many language learners, and not only the Westerners, there is an interest in picking up the cultural parts as well.
That’s the point. Why go through the hullabaloo of enrolling on a course, spending time, money and effort learning the stuff, and not want to experience the cultural context? Defeats the purpose of learning anything!
I reckon there are a couple of reasons for the more technical focus of most schools:
1. Most students are impatient and working students are more impatient because they have family, professional and personal lives to balance. Technical focus is quick to bring visible results because drills are static exercises that requires static conditioning to do well.
2. There are more proficiency teachers than are cultural teachers. This is a byproduct of point 1 above. They are products of the system, so they are more likely to train out more of the same later.
3. Cultural teachers, while not born as such, aren’t made by the system either. They are hellishly hard to find and hire, and hellishly difficult to stay hired. These people have the experience and talent to work in things they like, and many I know just don’t want to work as teachers.
4. Most language schools (in fact, all schools) are founded on the premise of producing students with visibly identifiable proficiency (i.e. exam credentials, etc). The higher the degree of credentialism the society has (e.g. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan), the greater the number of ‘technical’ schools.
5. It’s just plain hard to link (say) European culture with that European language when (say) you’re in Singapore or Hong Kong or Tokyo and so far removed physically from the source country.
6. Most Asian students today are children of 1960s/70s-born parents. These people from the Sixties or Seventies have relatively weak exposure to the West, not like the modern-day crop of people with their Internet connections, Facebook, etc. Family life for most is still primed on an Asian worldview, so the motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of other cultures is still less than (say) the average European. So learning remains primed on technicalities, to which the language schools obviously must fulfil profit-wise.
Yep. Though I realise there is another side to it, too. When you’re a beginner, you do want a more technical focus. I had this teacher that was really well read and passionate about Latin, but what he was telling us was so much over our head. He should have focused on getting some vocab and grammar into us first and saved the stories for later.
I hear you. Sometimes passion overrides realisation of the capabilities of one’s students. Again, mathematics is a classic example. I was reared on books like Raymond Anderson’s “Romping Through Mathematics” (Faber & Faber, 1952): he wrote a line about maths teachers needing to make a fine balancing act between giving too little and giving too much, and where to draw the line. I’m just recalling from memory, but basically Anderson wrote that most maths teachers tend to be passionate about their subject and that results in usually erring on giving out too much, which explains why most people are so bad in maths. The reality, he wrote, is maths is actually quite a simple and easily learnt subject – if only maths teachers realise their part of the problem and not the solution.