I learned French at High School because I was dancing at the time and dreamed of being a ballet dancer. But also, you were considered “brainy” if you learned French and usually ended up in the top class with all the best teachers. We were lucky to have a native french teacher, Mademoiselle Favier who really got us interested in how to speak as it was quite boring learning from a textbook. She was very stylish and always spoke French to us – we just loved her as our teacher!
I then learned German at University because my sister did it at school and got good results and there was a German student called Hans in the student halls who I practiced everyday with. It was good fun as he taught me some really complex sentence patterns that made my lecturer fall off his seat from amazement!
I then learned Japanese before I went to Japan at night school but I thought the teaching was not very good and I didn’t seem to learn much. I really learned Japanese when I went to the country and HAD to use it to live! I was really motivated then and also paid for private lessons with a university student to accelerate my language.
When I returned 6 years later, I learned Maori at a University in Wellington because I needed it for my job.
So why learn a language? There are many reasons but for me, I had to be able to use it in a practical way or I really couldn’t see the sense of spending all that time studying it. What’s your reason?
