What do you think?
Rate this book
New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language
188 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Robert A. Hall Jr.
47 books2 followersRobert Anderson Hall Jr. (1911–1997) was an American linguist and specialist in the Romance languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_....
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 27, 2018
Despite the book's diminutive size, it took me an eternity to finish it, but it gave me months of early bedtimes, putting me to sleep within the paragraph with its sado-academic prose and its inscrutable purpose. There are, after all, not only no new ways of learning a foreign language in the book, but there are no "ways" to learn a foreign language at all.
The explanation for deeply misleading title choice is given only in the conclusion: the book does not propose new METHODS, but it advocates for a specific APPROACH to language learning, which should inform which methods are used and how. Specifically, the oral-auditory approach is the best approach, and students should be taught proper pronunciation and taught to speak and hear, and only later to read and write, after being grounded in speaking and listening.
That's fine, I suppose. Maybe it sounded more radical back in the day, but nowadays a lot of people advocate this approach. I do believe that the idea that mastering the particles of speech, the phonemes, is even today an underappreciated aspect of language learning. The basic idea put forward in the book is that language is fundamentally oral and auditory, and therefore speech and conversation ought to be the objectives of new language learners. Proper pronunciation is necessary for intelligible speech, and mastery of the phonemes is necessary to proper interpretation of what is heard, so practicing the production of sounds and learning to distinguish separate sounds in the language is one of the most essential tasks for the beginner, arguably more important than vocabulary acquisition.
This minor insight bounces this book out of the 1-star rating that I otherwise would have put it into. I've read enough barely-edited books by academics to know the genre, and even among that set of anesthetic works, this book is a bore. Oh, you know what, forget it. I'm giving it the 1-star.
The explanation for deeply misleading title choice is given only in the conclusion: the book does not propose new METHODS, but it advocates for a specific APPROACH to language learning, which should inform which methods are used and how. Specifically, the oral-auditory approach is the best approach, and students should be taught proper pronunciation and taught to speak and hear, and only later to read and write, after being grounded in speaking and listening.
That's fine, I suppose. Maybe it sounded more radical back in the day, but nowadays a lot of people advocate this approach. I do believe that the idea that mastering the particles of speech, the phonemes, is even today an underappreciated aspect of language learning. The basic idea put forward in the book is that language is fundamentally oral and auditory, and therefore speech and conversation ought to be the objectives of new language learners. Proper pronunciation is necessary for intelligible speech, and mastery of the phonemes is necessary to proper interpretation of what is heard, so practicing the production of sounds and learning to distinguish separate sounds in the language is one of the most essential tasks for the beginner, arguably more important than vocabulary acquisition.
This minor insight bounces this book out of the 1-star rating that I otherwise would have put it into. I've read enough barely-edited books by academics to know the genre, and even among that set of anesthetic works, this book is a bore. Oh, you know what, forget it. I'm giving it the 1-star.
April 12, 2016
Rather dated but sensible book about language learning, basically arguing for the style of language teaching adopted in WWII that was a compromise between grammar translation and the audiolingual method, focusing on the formation of new linguistic habits (and getting rid of old ones) through awareness of the linguistic differences between a person's first language and target language. As I mentioned in my review of "Mandarin Blue", although I'd like to believe that the linguistically aware curriculum worked better because it was better, I wonder whether the added motivation and basically being forced into putting many hours into language study was the source of improvement in outcomes.
Some particular things I'm not sure I agreed with but am willing to be open-minded about: (1) one of Hall's big things is starting off with a large set of basic sentences that the learner memorises (to the point of overlearning), without much parsing. Personally, I don't enjoy that at all, but that may just be me. (2) Relatedly, he discourages giving "puzzles" where the learner has to figure out the meanings of sentences, etc, especially in the early stages, arguing that language learning is about habit formation and not about decipherment. But I kind of enjoy figuring out patterns, and I think other people do too. I guess it just depends on the kind of learner you are and what your goals are with the language.
Some particular things I'm not sure I agreed with but am willing to be open-minded about: (1) one of Hall's big things is starting off with a large set of basic sentences that the learner memorises (to the point of overlearning), without much parsing. Personally, I don't enjoy that at all, but that may just be me. (2) Relatedly, he discourages giving "puzzles" where the learner has to figure out the meanings of sentences, etc, especially in the early stages, arguing that language learning is about habit formation and not about decipherment. But I kind of enjoy figuring out patterns, and I think other people do too. I guess it just depends on the kind of learner you are and what your goals are with the language.
May 30, 2017
A quick, and at times dry, read about what at least one "world-famous scholar" thought was the best way to learn a language in the middle of the 20th century.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews