Misguided use of learning resources

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mrwarper
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Misguided use of learning resources

Postby mrwarper » Sun May 01, 2022 8:04 pm

The thread in our Spanish subforum I don't know about you, but I think children's books are TERRIBLE for learning (translated title) reminded me when I first met a Russian family that wanted to live in Spain --it didn't work out in the end--, and I witnessed once again how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The parents, who still struggled a lot with Spanish themselves, basically intended to make their children use a monolingual dictionary to look up stuff, believing it was the fastest and best way to make them assimilate the language "because that's what natives use." Needless to say, looking up basic vocabulary always derived into a torture session for the poor kids, and they were immensely relieved when I gave them my bilingual, bidirectional Russian/Spanish dictionary as a gift.

Have you witnessed / lived any other situations in which "no language learning" happened because whatever was being used was actually intended for a different purpose? Please share your stories!
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Le Baron
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Re: Misguided use of learning resources

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 01, 2022 8:56 pm

One of the worst things I've seen was an ex-girlfriend's mother trying to learn Greek, because they spent most of their holidays there, from a very technical reprint of a rather old grammar book. It was pretty much useless for what she needed: to talk to the waiters, order food, speak to the guest-house staff and patrons, maybe chat in some way with locals. Instead she was sweating over written spelling and fine points of grammar and doing endless written exercises.

I said she should probably do a course that taught some speaking, but the whole family were of a bent that all 'proper' learning happened only through books and preferably old-school textbooks. My suggestion of using a phrasebook was akin to telling them they should boil their cat in oil. So she didn't learn Greek and spoke English to the Greeks on holiday. She probably still hasn't learned Greek.
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