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hee!
I just checked this book called How to Learn a Foreign Language out of the library I work in. Not because I'm taking it seriously - although he's got an interesting method of how to interview a speaker of the language and produce a giant list of useful phrases to memorize - but because it was published in 1955 and has a wonderful, beautiful, hysterically funny lack of self-consciousness. An example from the opening chapter, when the author, Edwin T. Cornelius Jr, is explaining that often people think that what other cultures do and say is weird or funny and how we're nothing special because that other culture thinks the same of us, reads:
COMEDY GOLD.
And it's full of line drawings of men in suits with Brylcreamed hair smoking pipes*, and women in New Look dresses and tightly permed hair.
ETA: In this chapter, he's saying that while the one-on-one of a private teacher is good at times, you need to study in a small group for the social aspects. And there's another advantage:
Man, this material just writes itself.
* Except for the Greek guy in the example interview chapter, who has a bow tie and is smoking a cigar.
When the Britisher visits America and sees college graduates listening to jazz and reading comic books, the visitor comments: "I say, old chap, don't you have any Beethoven or Bach or, dash it all, any good things to read?" It doesn't occur to him to say, "Ah, old chap, I see that at the moment you are listening to jazz and reading comic books!"
The sociologists and the cultural anthropologists have their own label to describe this tendency of the speakers of one language to view all foreigners in relation to their own beliefs, customs, habits, and standards. The label they use is "ethnocentrism." This is a kind of egotism on a national scale.
COMEDY GOLD.
And it's full of line drawings of men in suits with Brylcreamed hair smoking pipes*, and women in New Look dresses and tightly permed hair.
ETA: In this chapter, he's saying that while the one-on-one of a private teacher is good at times, you need to study in a small group for the social aspects. And there's another advantage:
In addition, of course, it is much easier to take a chance of making glaring mistakes in the foreign language when one can be comforted with the fact that fellow-students in a group are also pulling some boners.
Man, this material just writes itself.
* Except for the Greek guy in the example interview chapter, who has a bow tie and is smoking a cigar.
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I love that way of speaking, a pity it's been mostly lost now. Though my friends do occassionally use it in LJ posts, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside :D
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(hee! I once had a japanese language learning set on LP [Vinyl! That's how old it was!] that was the most hilariously uninformed thing!)
Britisher! And if he would have said 'pip pip, old chap' he might have been called a Britishest!
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obv this is before the advent of:
(or something)
there's something about lang. books that says they MUST be inherently sexual. Homosexual mostly.
(choice icon btw)
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(Hee, thanks,
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i bet undercover CB dresses like an ol' chap
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haha i'm giggling pretty hard though
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http://www.nighthawkcomics.com/art/davis-mm.gif
Bottom panel.
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(But where's the monocle?)
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