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Saturday, March 28, 2015

Speech! Speech!

Though I was born too late to take advantage of the importance of learning Latin and Greek for a well-rounded education, I understand that there was one component of learning those so-called Dead Languages that has been eliminated from today's methods for learning 'modern' languages.  I'm referring to exercises of composition.  Until I suppose around the 1950s or so, every education person was expected to have at least a superficial understanding of written Latin or Greek and many instructors assigned writing exercises that involved using what the student has learned to create short essays or stories in the target language. 

It seems to me that this is a custom that could do with a revival, with modifications of course.  One of the hindrances I've often spoken of in regard to being confident when speaking Italian is the issue of avoiding long pauses and the anxiety and discomfort that such hesitancy produces.  It seems to me that one way to avoid this stumbling block is to fortify one's memory with a repository of stock phrases and sentences that can be used to fill in those periods when you can't think of anything to say or when you know what you want to express, but the words either won't come or you're not sure of the word order and vocabulary needed to get your point across.  After all, when we having a conversation in our native language, for the most part the words just flow; we spend very little time carefully selecting every word and thinking about syntax.  If we practiced writing out typical conversations regularly, such fluency just might come over time. 

Of course, another approach toward making our conversations flow along smoothly is to practice orally, either with ourselves or with a partner.  But it seems to me that writing out the conversation first with focused composition exercises would be a good supplement to oral practice.  Writing helps us to get our thoughts organized before we speak.  Textbook translation exercises are fine, but the process of composing your own dialogue and using your current knowledge of the language to form your own sentences and paragraphs gives the exercise and immediacy and an interactiveness that you don't get by simply working with examples other people have given you.  I presume composition exercises are not provided in self-instruction books because it would be impossible to supply a key, since everyone would write something different.  After all, though, when a person seeking public office has to give a speech, very often the first thing she does is write an outline and then the speech in its entirety.   Perhaps its not a bad idea to treat future conversations in Italian as if they were political speeches that we had to prepare for days ahead.  That way we won't need notes or a teleprompter, because the words are right there--on the tip of our tongues, as the saying goes. 

Certainly, it's impossible to predict everything that could possibly pop up during a spontaneous conversation in Italian, but having those stock phrases and sentences available for easy retrieval could relieve some of the stress and awkwardness of face-to-face conversations.  In fact, a pet peeve of mine is when textbooks and other learning materials use vocabulary and sentences in their lessons that I am unlikely to ever need to use.  I doubt I'll need to say 'Koalas rarely eat anything but eucalyptus leaves when they are in their natural habitat.'  At least anytime soon.

Alla prossima...

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