Is learning on the job the best way to master a language?

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/31/is-learning-on-job-best-way-to-master-language

Version 0 of 1.

What’s the best way to learn a foreign language? While every student is different, the promise of travel and adventure has led some to ditch traditional, academic methods in favour of moving to a country where they can be fully immersed in the language they are trying to acquire. For many people wanting to stay for longer periods, that includes getting a job.

Roles that require little or no language skills, such as au pairing or bartending, are often popular with language learners living abroad, not just as a means of paying the bills, but because work is also an opportunity to improve fluency. Other less obvious options include volunteering and even working on a farm to learn a language.

Apart from the monetary benefits, what is the value of learning a language, literally, on the job? According to Lizzie Fane, founder of Third Year Abroad, the biggest attraction is that you push yourself in a way that you may not as an ordinary traveller.

“When you are a tourist, you are not risking anything when you try to speak. It’s ok if you make mistakes. If you get a job, you are risking your professional reputation,” she explains. “The positives are that you will be learning much more useful vocabulary and technical language and you are forced to speak it.”

We spoke to three people who have found working while learning invaluable to mastering a foreign tongue:

Au pairing

After finishing an undergraduate degree in Tibetan studies, Mary Rodeghier Martin found herself at a career crossroads. While she knew she didn’t want to pursue academia, the 22-year-old American had no idea what to do next. She had already caught the travel bug while studying in the far east, so becoming an au pair in France seemed to offer the best of both worlds - the chance to live abroad again and also learn a new language.

Her job was to help care for a family’s five-year-old child in the Normandy city of Rouen. In return she was given her own apartment, a car and French lessons twice weekly at the university. Not a bad deal. The impact on her language skills was, however, priceless. Within just one year, she went from knowing almost nothing to being capable of studying a masters degree at a French university in Paris. Au pairing meant she ate, slept and breathed the French language daily.

“Learning from a child has opened my eyes to the innocence to which you should approach studying a language,” she explains. “Just starting off really simply and acquiring the words for different things in your immediate environment, not being afraid to make grammar mistakes, which of course you will, and unabashedly going forward, using the words that you know and trying to construct sentences.”

The drawback of learning French from a five-year-old and her entourage, she warns, was that the words she was using to speak to children didn’t always sit well with adults who tend not to enjoy being spoken to like, well, a child. Opening a conversation with: “What’s your most favourite yummy yum snack?” and ending it with “I’ve got to go bye-bye now” was not always a success with the grown-ups. Rodeghier Martin admits it took a while to recognise which words and phrases were specific to the child lexicon as opposed to being of general use.

Teaching

Sophia Smith Galer agrees and assumed that spending all day in conversation with children would hinder rather than help a language learner progress. However, the Londoner was surprised that teaching Syrian refugee children in Beirut, Lebanon, stretched her Arabic language skills.

The language student has been learning Arabic at Durham University for two years now and is currently on a year abroad in the middle-eastern country where she volunteers at the school every weekend. She admits it is very hard to understand a child in another language. The listening exercises that language students are used to in class are normally of other young adults or adults - not high-pitched, often incoherent, children. The conversations you do have, however, are refreshingly imaginative. The fact that the children are as much interested in you and your life, as you are in theirs, means your grasp of vocabulary and grammar are consistently tested and pushed.

“What’s quite funny is that we’re at roughly the same standard when it comes to reading Arabic out loud,” she explains. “The language is especially difficult because of the vowels that normally don’t appear on text; you just have to know them from your understanding of Arabic grammar.

“So when I read parts of the classic story A Thousand and One Nights in the original Arabic to the class, they come over and help me out. I, in turn, help them out with some of the determining factors between things like nominative and accusative.”

Working with children who have no knowledge of your own language means there is plenty of uninterrupted time to flex your linguistic muscles. It’s a huge plus, Smith Galer says, in a country where English and French are widely spoken among adults.

Hospitality

For Vanessa Onwuemezi, getting a paid job was initially more important than the opportunity to develop her language skills. After arriving in Paris with little money but bags of ambition to master French, she worked for a short spell as a babysitter before her contract ended and she was faced with the choice of finding new employment or taking the next Eurostar back to Britain.

After distributing her CV to as many cafes, bars and bakeries as possible, she eventually found herself working for an ice-cream parlour in the city centre. She admits that being a native English speaker helped her get a foot in the door of a business which, during peak times of the summer, is swamped by foreign tourists speaking little or no French.

The practical nature of the job - serving sweet-toothed customers - meant a high language proficiency wasn’t necessary. There was, however, enough interaction with some of the chattier clientele to practice the limited French she did know and improve the vocabulary and grammar she didn’t.

It was the opportunity to socialise which working offered that was the biggest catalyst to Onwuemezi’s language-learning success. She says: “My speaking ability really shot up in the first two months of working there because, if I wanted to make friends with my colleagues, I had to be able to talk to them. They were all my age and we got on very well, so we also spent a lot of time together after work. That meant I had, for the first time in Paris, a set of friends who didn’t speak any English.”

Think outside the box

Or you could try something totally different. Language learners can and should look beyond the usual suspects for employment opportunities, according to Fane. For example, she claims a more professional office-based role will not only stretch your language skills, it will boost your CV and career.

Have you worked abroad while trying to master a foreign language? Share your experiences in the comments below.