Learning L2 in the L1 context

Most of us had to learn a second language in school, while still in our L1 setting. I had 2 years of Latin and 2 of French in high school, then more French, a year and a half of Russian and started German in college. German became my major when I felt like I couldn't excel in math and physics, so I attended German summer school 3 times, did my graduate study in Germanic linguistics, took a Danish MA in it, and taught it in Danish high schools for about 12 years.

And this doesn't account for all the other languages I "learned" in an academic setting: Gothic and Old High German, Frisian, English, & Norse; Greek, Sanskrit, & Lithuanian; Finnish & Greenlandic Eskimo. All of these languages were taught primarily in the "learn grammar, read and translate" method.

I have met numerous foreigners who learned English that way in their home country. They have no problem reading and writing, and thought that they were fluent, but they discover that spoken English is very different from classroom English.

I had a friend in Denmark, who was studying English at the university and later became a HS English teacher like me. She was so afraid that I would discover that she made errors in English that she would never speak English with me. I sometimes thought she preferred that I made a fool of myself in Danish rather than she in English. Her husband, on the other hand, was studying economics, and had no need to have perfect English. We often talked English together. Later, he lead tours to Berlin, so I assume he also spoke a fluent, but imperfect German, which got him wherever he wanted to go.

My son's wife studied English for many years in Panama, but was completely tongue-tied when she moved here, because the teachers had punished the students with ridicule and bad grades if they made mistakes. She has had to work hard to shake off her feelings of inferior English.

My high school French teacher did try to get us conversing in French, and my German summer schools (including a college-run summer school in Vienna) were attempts at immersion, so we did do a lot of "conversing" of sorts in German there and at German House in college.

But I always say that I really learned German when I arrived in Germany after 2 years of German and had to go to a drug-store to buy a tooth-brush, as well as our first experiences ordering meals in restaurants, which produced some interesting results. (Later I had a similar experience trying to buy disposable diapers for my son. I ended up putting him on the counter and pointing - entirely "context embedded!")

But I learned particularly German (and later, Danish) another way. I read. I read many German novels above and beyond what we were assigned in our courses. In this way I absorbed an enormous amount of passive vocabulary and grammatical structures. That summer in Vienna and another 2 weeks in Eastern Germany many years later were my only extended visits in German-speaking countries. Everything else I learned from books and movies. Several of my college assignments also had to be written in German, my only writing experience except for an occasional letter. In all those first books I read, the first 20 pages are well annotated with glosses. After that I quit using the dictionary, because I had acquired enough of the context to figure out the rest of the words. I could at least figure out that a word was a poitive adjective, the name of a yellow flower, some sort of activity. If I encountered a word several times without guessing its meaning, I might look it up, because I knew that it would help my understanding to know it.

As a teacher of German in Denmark, I finally got the "discrete language skills" of German down, because I had to correct numerous translations and essays, where the students were expected to write correctly. My students had had German since 7th grade, so I got them 3-4 years later. We had to work a lot on their "discrete language skills" of grammar. since their primary school classes had emphasized conversation. Since Germany was our closest neighbor, most students had traveled in Germany, and some even watched German TV. Besides grammar and essay-writing, classes were based on large amounts of reading, and classroom discussions of what they'd read. My students had a much better chance of learning a usable German (and English, which they started in 5th grade) than we ever did with 2 years of HS French. Their exams were also very different from here: Final exams consisted of an individual oral exam, where a student discussed a half a page of one of the texts we had read, as well as a written exam, where students answered short questions, translated some text and wrote an essay based on a given 2-page text. Multiple-choice is unknown in Denmark.

My experience of learning Danish (my L3) in Denmark was mostly the natural method, with a couple of classes in Danish for foreigners and then an evening HS class in Danish intended for Danes. My experience was thus somewhat like that of our students - except that I was an adult, knew a similar language (German) fluently, understood the concept of grammar, and had a great need to learn Danish quickly, so that I could get a job. I was also married to a Dane, so I spoke Danish at home and with his family, and I had children who were becoming fluent in day care and in school.