Dorothea wrote an interesting article about methods of foreign-language instruction which has brought my thoughts back in that direction, after a couple of years of abandonment. As my friends know, I speak, read, and write French, German, and English, not just conversationally but academically as well. Though I am somewhat out of practice, I was at one time fluent enough in French to pass for a native to someone who wasn't listening for an accent. Many of my classmates have not attained the kind of proficiency that I have, and that has always been kind of puzzling to me.
In my second semester in Hamburg, I took a course on Sprachlehrforschung (in English, second language aquisition), and now I find that when I think about the topic of language aquisition, it's hard not to use German words, even though lots of the words they use about this topic in German are originally English. It's odd that concepts in my mind are so intimately connected with the language in which I learned them.
Dorothea talks some about her language-learning experience, and her history seems to be somewhat similar to mine, in that she also learned mostly through communication with native speakers. However, she argues that there isn't one method that is best for everyone or for every purpose, and I have to admit that it had never really occurred to me that anyone might want to learn a language and only be interested in reading it, not speaking or writing.
My little-bit-of-grammar-then-dive-in approach to languages, what Dorothea and Renee the Journeyman Linguist call the communicative approach, seems to have worked for me. I do take the point that people shouldn't practice mistakes, but on the other hand I think that the fact of communication is more important than grammatical correctness. When I first arrived in France I was terrified of saying something incorrectly, especially because I had always been the best student in my French classes and always got perfect grades. I was quickly disabused of my fear of speaking, because I realized that no matter what I did, I would never be quite as good as native speakers, so there wasn't any point in trying. I just said whatever I thought would get my point across, as well as I could, and sure enough most of the time they understood me. I didn't speak perfectly all the time, but had I always worried about grammar, my overall language ability would have suffered. On the other hand, I always detested grammatical incorrectness and did whatever I could to be correct, and I mostly was, so I'm probably an exception.
Dorothea says it best:
The communicative approach merely says�correctly, in my view�that it�s not wise to wait for students to have a grasp of the totality (or even a substantial subset) of the grammar before they start trying to use the language actively. Sure, they�ll say stuff wrong, you bet, and when they do they can be (gently, please) corrected. But they gotta say stuff, not just repeat.
Amen, sister.
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