chronicle

[Tom Hurt]

As an undergraduate student of Russian, I would argue the basic problem in
language learning is not time, accessibility, or even the quality of the
program, but simple motivation. School is time consuming, and a Physics
major isn't going to devote a lot of discretionary brain power to a Russian
class that is more of a novelty than anything else. It seems to me that the
student's perspective has been largely absent from the discussions here.

After 2 semesters of Russian, I could almost read a newspaper. The tools
were there, but the vocabulary and idioms were mostly absent. I made up for
it one semester by ruthlessly looking up all the words I didn't know in
good dictionaries, until I could read the paper. It wasn't pretty, and it
didn't happen in class, but it got the job done.

There is a deeper lesson about learning here, but as I'm vastly
underqualified to discuss it, I'll just point it out: motivated students
learn better. If instructors expect students to achieve newspaper reading
competency after two or three semesters simply by parroting in-class
exercises, no wonder language programs are getting axed. My two cents is
that if teachers want results in higher level classes (after the basic
grammar has been laid out), they should spend more time getting students
addicted to a culture that is so fascinating, those students will eat up
everything they can find.

Tom Hurt

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