mentat_kgs wrote:
Steve Kaufman talks very often about this. He attributes part of his language learning success to being able to identify himself as someone from other culture.
He says, and I agree that it's different from simply liking the culture. It's more like wanting to be part of that group. Wanting to be the same as them.
I've seen people learning Portuguese that lost their accents and their pronunciation improved quickly. And I've seen people that remain with the same terrible accent.
The different that the second group, even loving Brazilian culture, are too much proud of their own countries and in someway like to be identified as foreigners: Argentinians that cannot accept that Pele is much better than Maradona ^_^.
Not that this is a problem here. Foreign accents are well received.
Thanks, you reminded me why I posted this. I think it ties in well with my feelings, once rambled about to playadom regarding music and immersion, about 'immersion' being, for me, about more than just improving linguistic ability or achieving some kind of artificial Japanese-ness in relation to my conditioned Western-ness, it's about using whatever tools I can to experience everything that the target language entails--which includes the cultural matrix whence it sprung and feeds back into--combining it with myself in a kind of counterbalancing act, and getting past all our intrinsic biases to this kind of abstract zone of perspectival/perceptual neutrality where it simply is what it is.
Even if nothing else, the very effort alone in conceiving of this in a 'meta' way and attempting it requires and articulates a kind of empathy that improves language learning at the root by giving us space to accept the differing, often contrasting nuances of the 'foreign', part of that feedback loop of the personality change that comes with learning a new language, getting fresh/refreshed insights and viewpoints not only on the new language/culture but on one's own. I guess I was thinking this article was a tentative clinical example of that relationship.
Last edited by nest0r (2009 August 14, 8:08 am)
