INTO WHICH THEY HAD FALLEN.

The linguistic pit into which they had fallen is simply that state of confusion when you are trying to learn a foreign language and nothing seems to make sense.  You find yourself at your wits end and don't really know what to do.  You are taking a class at the university and are are dependent upon a grade in order to move on.  If you are lucky, you will have a friend like me.  This was the state of Greg Clark, student at UCLA with a major in Art History.  He was enrolled in a German language class.

We were talking one day and he told me about his problem.  I said, "No problem.  I'll come over to your house and we will work together."

I bought two copies of a German-English dual language books which contained famous German short stories.  On one page was the text in German and on the facing page was the same text in English.  We began to read the stories together.  First we would read the first sentence of the English text.  After that I would read aloud the first sentence of the German text and made Greg read it out loud after me.  I corrected his reading and made sure he could read out loud the entire sentence from beginning to end .  We then went on to the second sentence, and the third sentence  until we had read the entire  story.  Whenever he would ask "Why?", I would always answer, "No questions; that is just the way it is.  Learn it."  We worked like this for a few weeks.  One day he told me that he was having no more problems in German and that he had bought the German translation of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy which he loved so much.  He was now reading that work in German with the English by its side just as we had been doing.

He graduated from UCLA, has traveled to Europe many times doing research for the J. Paul Getty Museum and is now a tenured professor of Art History at a university Tennessee.  When he found the need to learn Dutch, he bough the Dutch translation of the Ring Trilogy and read as he did with the German.  I believe he has also done that with Italian..

A classmate in Russian was, like Greg, having trouble.  I worked with him with the dual language sentences which were in the Russian text.  Another classmate who sat next to me in a Latin  was also having problems.  We talked about studying together.  We did.  He got an A in Latin.

In my experience this simple way of working produces wonders.  I have tried to communicate this with the stories we are creating for Quintessential Language and believe that whoever follows this procedure, will have great success.

                                                                                              Tom Curtis   10/25/2007

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