If I think about the good language learners that I have known, who exist in every language and cultural group, what they al had in common was curiosity. They were curious about another culture. They were interested in another language. That was what enabled them to accept the stress of learning and speaking a foreign language, and to overcome the obstacles.
So, for a teacher, stimulating that curiosity and maintaining it is the number one responsibility.
An old man approached an attractive young socialite at a party. "For one mil ion dol ars, would you sleep with me?‖ he asked her. ―I might consider it,‖ replied the girl. ―Wel how about for $20 then,‖ said the old man. ―What do you think I am, a prostitute?‖ exclaimed the girl, her feelings hurt. ―We have already established that,‖ said the old man. ―We are just negotiating the price.‖
I like to ask "if I gave you a million dollars to learn the language in six months, do you think you could learn?" Then the answer is yes. I guess like in the story about the old man and the pretty young socialite at the cocktail party, everyone has their price.
In the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote ―al happy families are happy in the same way but unhappy families find their own individual ways to be unhappy ," or words to that effect.
Al good language learners, of whatever national origin, are in some ways the same. What about those who struggle? Does it depend on their nationality? Here I am fol owing up on Hiroshi's comment on Swedes speaking so wel .
I know Japanese people who speak English very well. Yet it is true that most Japanese people I meet in business, or who are living and working in Canada, struggle with their English.
There is much hand-wringing in Japan over their poor average TOEIC scores and other indicators that even in Asia, the Japanese do more poorly than other countries.
In my view the Japanese face a few unique obstacles and share other problems with other larger language groups. These problems do not affect those language learners who manage to liberate themselves from these obstacles. These are the good Japanese language learners who are in the same category as the Swedes we are talking about, and al other good language learners whether from Asia, Africa, Europe or wherever.
A major problem is the "language or cultural ego" that Hiroshi referred to. ―We are unique.
Our language is unique. Our culture/language is uniquely refined, difficult, exp ressive. I do not want to lose my uniqueness.
How can I possibly become a fluent speaker of another language when I am so unique?"
This attitude is strong in Japan and East Asia, but also exists to varying degrees among other people everywhere.
If you cannot believe in, and look forward to, the idea that you wil become a natural speaker of another language; if you cannot make another language and some of the behaviour of another culture your model to imitate and emulate; if you resist this process; if you think this process is a big serious deal, rather than an entertaining adventure; you wil always be on the outside of the language looking in.
Let's look at other factors. It is certainly true that the sentence structure, vocabulary and pronunciation of Swedish are very close to English. This is not the case with Japanese.
Japanese has relatively few sounds compared to many other languages. This wil make it more difficult for Japanese learners to acquire new sounds, since they are not familiar with as many sounds as, say, the Swedes. The Japanese would have an easier time with Spanish where the vowels are similar to Japanese. They would stil face the problems of sentence structure and vocabulary and lack of confidence.
The Kana writing system is another obstacle. In the Kana phonetic systems, each symbol stands for a syl able. Many Japanese learn other languages with Kana as a phonetic guide. Most of their teachers are Japanese and not native speakers of English. This is a formula for failure.
A combination of using Kana and a Japanese teacher's pronunciation as phonetic guide would certainly put the Japanese learner at a disadvantage. With modern MP3 technology available, there is no excuse for this kind of education.
Young Swedes hear a lot of English on TV and radio, and even if they hardly ever speak English, they understand it, often repeat words and phrases from pop culture, and are ready to speak as soon as they need to. They pick up the natural phrases of English. This may include slang, but need not. It is just the natural phrasing. The Japanese seem to do more translating from Japanese, and their phrasing reflects this. They seem more reluctant to just attempt to use the phrases that they hear in English. Observing, identifying and learning phrases needs to be emphasized much more.
Japanese people general y have less personal exposure to English speaking culture, or any non-domestic culture, than Europeans. You need to have confidence to use a new language.
You need to just jump in and use what you heard, without worrying. Perhaps it is not fair to compare Japanese people with Swedes, when it comes to learning English. It would be interesting to compare Japanese and Swedes in learning unrelated third languages, or even languages like Chinese or Korean which have a lot of vocabulary in common with Japanese.
I think the differences that arise wil be individual differences of attitude and learning method, not of innate learning ability, nor differences of nationality. Everyone can be a linguist if the real y want to be, and if they treat it as an enjoyable adventure.
Leonid asked, in a comment, what my reasons were for choosing to learn a new language.
So let me give them here, working backwards from my most recent learning activities. I have always been interested in Russian literature, which I have read in translation. I read The Idiot by Dostoevsky in French, as one the first ful -length novels I ever read in French, at the age of seventeen.
But I had a more specific reason. Ever since I studied Chinese, I have believed that teaching and explaining and giving questions on grammar has a negative effect on language learning. In my view, occasional grammar explanations can be helpful, after the learner has absorbed a lot of the language. However, introducing theoretical explanations at the beginning, in an attempt to describe what the learner wil encounter in the language, spoils the fun and is counterproductive. I think we learn better if we just discover the language through input, lots of listening and efficient vocabulary accumulation. We train ourselves to become observant. I guess it is like the difference between just being the passenger in a car and doing the driving yourself. If you are the driver you notice things and you remember the route.
I was concerned that this approach only worked for "grammar light" languages like Chinese or Japanese. Even though I had, in my own mind, confirmed this truth when learning German and Italian, I wanted to test it again in a "grammar heavy" language like Russian.
Perhaps I am not objective, but I did find that I could not make sense of the grammar explanations of the cases etc. in Russian, but I was able to get used to how the language works through a lot of listening, reading, and vocabulary review.
We started the Linguist system with the local immigrant population in mind. I began buying infomercial time on local Chinese language radio stations . What made sense for the local Chinese community also made sense for the Koreans. There are a lot of Koreans in Vancouver.