hee!

[telophase]

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:

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.