Continental Shift

You’ve decided where you’re going and begun to plan your organisational steps to achieve your goals. Now it’s time to look at some practicalities for when you arrive in your new country. One issue is that of learning a new language.

Arabic writing, Libya

If you are moving to a country that does not speak your language – and I am going to assume that your mother tongue is English – then I strongly advise you to learn its language.

There are a number of reasons for this advice. Obviously, and foremost, it is to be able to communicate. However, even if English is widely spoken where you are going, you should try to learn the language, and try to go beyond a few common phrases.

Benefits of doing this include:

• It helps you communicate with locals, especially when out of the major cities
• It demonstrates your interest in and commitment to your new country and community
• It gives you insight into the local culture – many historical and cultural quirks are preserved in language
• It makes your surroundings more familiar.

Don’t assume you’ll just learn the new language by magically absorbing it when you get there. You will need to put time aside to study. You should start by attending language classes in your home country at least a few months before you go, if possible. Community colleges often offer language courses quite cheaply, or you can learn via language CD or podcast. This will help you get by when you first arrive.

You should also arrange to continue the lessons after arriving in the new country. You can find a language school, or a private tutor, or find the equivalent of the community course you attended in your home country. This will help you continue to develop your vocabulary and grammar, and to learn local slang and idioms. It will also help you get a handle on your new home faster.

Don’t feel you have to be having high-level conversations about politics and religion a month after arriving, though – it’s natural for language acquisition as an adult to be a slow (painful, arduous) process.

Some tips for learning a new language, sourced and adapted from here, include:

• Study every day
  Try to allocate small blocks of time to study and review every day, rather than one large block once a week.

  You can only take in so much at one time, and small chunks are less stressful and more likely to be retained.

• Revise regularly
  Review each lesson several times, each session preferably within at least a few days of the last. This gives your brain time to digest the information, but not enough time to forget what you are trying to learn.

  Revising a few key phrases and words just before bed is also effective, as your brain can process the information while you sleep.

• Don’t rush
  Take the time to ensure you have grasped the contents of one lesson before moving on to the next. In the beginning, when you are learning basic words and phrases and the rules of pronunciation and grammar, you may be bored and frustrated because you are encountering situations all the time when you need more complex language skills – be patient. It will come.

  But you need to work up to it slowly and with solid fundamental understanding, or risk becoming stressed and overwhelmed by the difficulty inherent in the more advanced lessons.

  Think of a language as an ocean that you are learning to swim in. Stay by the shore until you’re more confident.

• Set yourself targets
  Motivate yourself by setting realistic targets which are challenging but not impossibly hard or too easy.

  This could be aiming to achieve a certain level of proficiency by a certain date (e.g. to be able to hold a simple conversation by the end of three months).

• Focus on your interests
  Once you’ve learned some basic get-by phrases and grasped the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation, choose to focus on topics that interest you. If you learn to talk, read or write about your favourite hobby or pastime, the words and new grammar you learn will be more likely to stay with you and be generalised to other areas.

  If we extend our ocean analogy, this is like swimming out from the shore between the flags. Once you’ve learnt your strokes here, you can more easily branch out to lots of other environments.

• Remain positive
  It’s a natural part of learning a language that some weeks you will make breakthroughs and giant leaps forward, and other weeks you will struggle, forget things, and feel as if you’re going backwards. There will be weeks when you’re doing great, and the very next week someone will ask how you are in your second language and you won’t remember how to respond, even though it’s the third thing you learnt (after ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’).

  Also keep in mind that while you may be well-stocked on phrases, questions, and answers from your lessons, it is much harder ‘in the field’ when you are trying to understand and respond in real-time. I’m sure my local grocery store thinks I speak neither Arabic nor English given my at-times incoherent responses to both languages – and don’t under-estimate how off-guard you can be caught when you’ve prepared yourself for a conversation in your second language and the other person starts off in English!

• Relax about mistakes
  As a corollary to the above, don’t be afraid of or embarrassed by mistakes. We all make mistakes in our first language (seriously, try listening to what people actually say rather than the meaning you automatically and unconsciously assign, and you’ll hear the mistakes), so frequent mistakes in a language you haven’t been exposed to since birth are no surprise.

  Being able to get your message across is more important than using exactly the right word, grammar, gender, tense and so on. Using approximations or synonyms, hand gestures and miming are all useful adjuncts when language fails. Speaking fast also helps, as it hides the mistakes and lets the hearer fill in what they expected to hear.

  That said, some languages are more forgiving than others of mispronunciation. I can tell you right now, Arabic is one of the less flexible languages in terms of getting away with not pronouncing a word quite right; Libya is also a country where people are not used to hearing Westerners try to speak their language, so the locals are not experienced at getting past thick accents.

  Learning stock phrases – from “What is this called in your language?” to “Forgive me, I don’t speak your language very well” – is a useful tactic, as is making a habit of asking for correction from your teacher or a reliable native speaker, at first of only serious mistakes. When you have more confidence and skill, you can ask for correction of all mistakes.

• Find ways to advance
  It’s easy, once you have a decent level of fluency, to coast, to practice what you already know, but not go beyond that. But you should try to find ways to continue to improve your reading comprehension and grammar and increase your vocabulary, as an ongoing project.

  For example, you could try reading your local newspaper, starting with the front page and the headlines and building up to the whole thing – this will not only develop your skills but keep you informed about local community and cultural events. Read portions out loud, and keep a good translation dictionary to hand.

  You could also try following a news or current affairs program in your language without subtitles, or subscribe to ongoing learning programs like the audio magazines produced by Champs-Elysees.

  One technique I found particularly useful whenever I heard a new word was to think of a conversation or situation where I would naturally use it. By semi-role-playing it and putting into a context, it was easier to remember and apply.

  You can also advance with fun techniques like learning jokes or anecdotes in your new language, or reading children’s books out loud.

One caveat: Young children easily pick up new languages and can be fluent in several. But be wary of speaking only the new language at home, because if they don’t hear their native language, they won’t become fluent in it. This may or may not be important to you.

An example of this process is the child of French and German parents. Because they are not fluent in each other’s languages, they speak English at home. Their child is fluent in English, but not in either parent’s language.

CASE STUDY
We bought a language CD as soon as we knew we were going to Libya. I converted the CD files to mp3s and played the lessons as I walked between home and the train station for travel to and from work. While we would consciously sit and listen and respond to a lesson, we would also play the CD in the background while we cooked, read, or did other quiet activities. I’ve also heard of people having good success playing a language tape or CD as they fall asleep.

This gave us a good head-start in greetings, asking for directions, and other visitor-oriented phrases. However, firstly, we were not going to be visitors, but residents, and needed a more complex fluency. Secondly, the closest language we could find was Egyptian Arabic. Needless to say, while both Libya and Egypt are Arabic-speaking nations, their slang words and idioms differ widely.

Therefore, when we arrived, we started weekly lessons with an Arabic teacher, who taught us Classic Arabic, Libyan slang, and Arabic writing. We made an effort to speak Arabic to locals even when we knew they spoke good English.

ACTIVITY
What is the primary language of the country you are moving to? Even if you can ‘get away’ with English, is there an important second language it would be useful and interesting to learn? What variant or local dialect will be used in the city or area you are moving to?

Research the language options you have available to you in your home country. Are there lessons available through a local community college? Is someone advertising private lessons in the language of your choice? Can you at least get a language tape or CD? If so, which one?

Learn some basic greetings and pleasantries, and how to count to ten. Set yourself goals for learning more.

That’s it for this week. See past topics and what’s coming up next at the table of contents. Subscribe or check back for more content soon.

If you don’t want to wait, or you want the content in a nice, easy-to-read format, you can buy it in paperback from Amazon, or in paperback or electronically from Lulu.

If you’ve read it and have a spare moment, please review it at Amazon.