Language/Amharic/Culture/Guide-to-Ongoing-Language-Learning

Guide to Ongoing Amharic Learning

Introduction

The following is a collection of techniques useful to the independent language learner. It was compiled from trusted sources on language learning.

A language class is good for teaching you the basics of a language in a short period of time. You will soon be at your site and on your own. Quite possibly you will be the only one at your site who is learning the new language. Now what?

In theory this is the perfect environment for learning a foreign language. Once you are at your site, your survival depends on learning and using the language on a daily basis. You are forced by circumstances to learn.

But this is all easier said than done. How exactly does one go about learning a language on his or her own? It helps to have a collection of techniques at your disposal.

Finish this lesson and explore these related pages: Ethiopian Cuisine, Ethiopian Holidays and Festivals, Ethiopian Festivals and Celebrations & Modern Ethiopian History.

Take Charge of Your Learning – Self-Directed Learning

The most successful language learners are the ones who take charge of their own learning. As adult language learners, we like the information that we learn to be directly applicable and useful to our lives. We like to learn things that help us accomplish our daily tasks and goals. We like to know why we are learning something and what it will do for us. If we don’t see a direct benefit, we tend to lose interest and move on to other things.

The best language learning methods are self-directed approaches. You are in charge of your learning. You decide what you will learn, when you will learn it, and how to best go about learning it. By focusing on your own individual needs, this helps keep the material interesting and relevant.

You can adapt these techniques for working alone, with a tutor, or casually with your friends and community.

Set Realistic Expectations

It is natural to feel uncomfortable when learning a language. You're used to being in classes where the mode of communication -- the language of instruction -- is a given.

In language learning, however, it is the mode of communication itself that is the focus of instruction. Not understanding and making mistakes -- things that are negative learning indicators in other settings -- are a very natural part of the language learning process. Accept the fact that you will not understand everything. In fact, at the very beginning, you will not understand much at all.

Remember that during the initial period of adaptation your ear and your mind are adjusting to the sounds and the rhythm of the language. Though you will not understand all of what is being said, you will be amazed at your increasing ability to make sense of the language. Remember that the only way to learn the language is through practice, practice, and more practice; in the course of practicing you will make many errors … and you will learn from them.

Break Study Time into Smaller Chunks

Research shows that language students learn more effectively and retain more when they study frequently and for shorter periods of time than if they study infrequently for extended periods of time. Try to study each day, and whenever possible, several times a day.

In addition, there are many otherwise mentally "idle" moments during the day when you can work in some studying. For example, you can review vocabulary while eating breakfast, recite the alphabet while showering, count your steps as you walk, name as many object as you can in the target language on your to work, take your vocabulary flash cards with you on a bus trip.

There are many moments during the day when you can squeeze in a few minutes of practice time. Through the repetition of material, it will be come increasingly familiar, until it eventually becomes an automatic part of your language repertoire.

Establish Yourself as a Language Learner

With whatever strategy you decide to use for learning a language, your most important task at the beginning is to establish yourself as a language learner in your community.

Your initial efforts should be to introduce yourself to everyone you meet and tell them that you are learning their language. Talk to your neighbors, local kids, shopkeepers, co-workers, and people on the street, waiters, people on the bus, in cafes, and anyone else you come across.

A good first dialog is the following:

• Hello. My name is _____________
• I am from _____________. I want to learn _______________ and become a fluent speaker.
• That is all I can say right now. Thank you. Good bye for now.

This accomplishes three very important things.

1. It gives you a role in the community. Everyone will be watching and talking about you anyway. Now they know who you are and what you are doing here. You are the crazy foreigner who is trying to learn their language.

2. If gives the community a role. By introducing yourself to the community as someone who wants to learn their language, you are also asking the community to help you learn. They will want to be a part of your success. They will cheer you on and celebrate your progress. They will enjoy telling their friends and family how they helped you practice. They will also enjoy telling funny stories about you during dinner about your language learning attempts.

3. This process also a powerful way to integrate yourself into the community. It won’t take long before people are calling out your name, waving to you, and wanting to talk to you. You are no longer the strange new foreigner. Your language learning efforts help to break the ice. You are now THEIR strange new foreigner who is working hard to learn their language.

Use “The Daily Learning Cycle”

The Daily Learning Cycle is a daily strategy for learning a foreign languages originally developed by Peace Corps volunteers serving in the South Pacific. It is a flexible process that can be used anywhere regardless of whether there are any dictionaries or language textbooks available. It focuses on developing conversational fluency in small daily steps. The Daily Learning Cycle consists of five steps.

1. Choose a topic

Pick something that will be immediately useful to you, such as negotiating for the best price at the market, buying a new shirt, asking for directions, or paying your electric bill. One useful technique is to brainstorm a list of 100 different topics in as short a time as possible. For this brainstorming technique to work, it is important to do it as fast as possible and to complete the full list of 100 topics. The speed forces you to stop self-editing. The quantity forces you to get creative as you quickly exhaust the easy and obvious topics. You can then use this list as a plan or inspiration for future practice sessions.

2. Develop a short dialog.

Using a mentor or other native speaker, develop a short 3-4 line dialog on your chosen topic. Explain to your helper that you want to learn common everyday language as it is really spoken, not formal academic language.

3. Practice with your mentor Practice the dialog over and over again with your mentor until you can deliver it like a trained stage actor. Pay careful attention to your mentor’s pronunciation and speaking rhythm. Try to duplicate him/her exactly.

4. Practice with the community

When you are ready, the next step is to take the show on the road. Walk around your community and practice saying your dialog to as many people as possible. Try to speak with 10-20 different people. Don’t worry about making mistakes or making a fool of yourself. This is part of the process.

The community will begin to expect and look forward to your regular visits as your make your practice rounds about the town. You will get a lot of practice and they will get a lot of funny stories to tell their families over dinner. The pressure of these “real life” practice sessions will really help accelerate your learning and make it stick.

While you are walking around practicing, avoid the main roads as much as possible. Take the smaller, less congested paths. You’ll notice a big difference in how you are received by people. The people on the main roads are generally there to sell you something or get something from you. But the people on the side roads, in the smaller, quieter neighborhoods will not be so used to foreigners. They will be excited and charmed by your presence. They will also be much more welcoming and eager to talk to you.

As always, pay attention to your safety. It is not uncommon to receive random invitations into people’s houses. Be careful about where you go and who you are seen with. If you are invited in for coffee, you might take them up on their offer, but you might consider sitting with them out in their courtyard and staying visible.

5. Evaluation

Finally, at the end of your practice, evaluate how the session went. You can do this mentally or in a journal. Think about what went well and what you need more practice on.

Think about who you’d like to speak with again and who you’d like to avoid. Also, think about what you wanted to be able to say but couldn’t. Use this information to plan future practice sessions.

Speak, Speak, Speak!

The Daily Learning Cycle and other language learning techniques emphasize speaking. After all, the purpose of learning a language is to communicate. The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it. Reading and studying grammar only improves your ability to read and understand grammar. If you want to learn to speak a language, you have to practice speaking it.

The ability to speak a language is an entirely separate muscle from what you use for studying and memorization. It needs to be exercised regularly along with everything else if you want to become fluent. Just as no one ever learned how to swim by reading a book, no one ever learned to speak a language without speaking it. At some point you have to jump in and start swimming in the language.

Whenever possible, speak the language aloud rather than reciting it silently to yourself. Say vocabulary words out loud, read passages in the text aloud, do pronunciation activities orally and not just mentally. Write out the answers to activities rather than gliding through them in your mind. Read aloud entire sentences in an activity rather than just reading a fill-in response. Transferring language from your mind to your mouth is a skill that requires a great deal of practice.

Even if you have learned your dialogs, memorized tons of vocabulary, and studied grammar, if you can’t pronounce it correctly nobody will be able to understand you. All you’ll get is a lot of confused looks.

One method for learning correct pronunciation is called language shadowing. In the language shadowing technique, you practice repeating sentences over and over again after a native speaker. Pay attention to their pronunciation, tone, pitch, speed, and rhythm and try to duplicate it exactly.

Train Your Ears - Immerse Yourself in The Sounds of the Language

Besides speaking, it is also important to train your ears to the sounds of the language. If you are living in a small community with few English speakers, this will be easy. If you have an Englishspeaking roommate or lots of English speaking friends, this will take more work. Try to spend as much time during the day listening to the language around you. Immerse yourself as completely as possible in the sounds of the language.

At first everything will sound unintelligible. But after a while you will begin to discern reoccurring patterns and sounds. Later, these patterns will resolve into recognizable words and phrases. Finally, you will begin to sense the meaning. Just like speaking, you have to devote regular practice to developing your abilities in this area.

If you are sitting in a café or are riding on a bus, you can listen to the conversations going on around you. Focus on picking out words and phrases that you recognize. The more you do this, the more you’ll be able to recognize.

Another way to develop an ear for the language is to immerse yourself in audio and video recordings of the local language. Listen to a lot of music in the local language. Watch a lot of TV. Again, don’t worry about understanding everything. Just try to listen for words and phrases that you recognize. You will get better and better over time.

A fun technique is to find a copy of your favorite movie dubbed in the local language. English subtitles can be helpful but are not necessary. If you can find one of your favorite movies, then you will already know what the dialog is about. Watch the movie over and over again and try to learn the dialog. Learn to recite some of your favorite lines along with the actors. Have fun acting out and saying these lines as dramatically as possible. If you pick a movie that you enjoy, you will already have a built-in emotional connection to the movie and to the language. This will help improve your learning and retention.

Use Reading to Maximize Your Learning

Reading (along with speaking, listening, and memorizing) is the fourth major language skill that you need to develop. Many people discount the value of learning to read the language. After all, speaking the language is the priority for most volunteers.

However, reading is an important and effective way of learning about a language. Just like listening practice, it is another way to immerse yourself in the language.

Choose a popular magazine, newspaper, or sports magazine. Select an article that looks interesting. It helps if you already know something about the article’s subject. It also helps if there are pictures attached. Choose something that looks interesting.

Then, with a dictionary close at hand, try to work through the first few paragraphs. Try to figure out the meaning first without looking things up. Highlight the words that seem important and that you’d like to learn.

Look up the words in your dictionary, then go back and re-read the passage again. See if you can understand more of the meaning this time.

Find a Way to Remember Vocabulary

In your mind, make a crazy scene based on the sound of the word and its meaning. Try to combine multiple senses into your association. Make sure that when you think of it, you should see a picture, hear a sound, and feel a feeling. Make it crazy, ridiculous, offensive, unusual, violent, extraordinary, cartoonish, nonsensical – after all, these are the things that get remembered, are they not? Make the scene so unique that it could never happen in real life. The only rule is: if it’s boring, it’s wrong.

Many volunteers create stacks of flash cards and lists of vocabulary words. This is a great idea for learning and reviewing new material. Purchase a set of 3 x 5 index cards and cut them in half (or use recycled pieces of paper cut into small cards). Write a vocabulary word on the front and its English definition on the back. As you learn more information about each word (e.g. plural forms of nouns, principle parts of verbs), you can add these to the cards.

There are many ways you can use flash cards as a learning tool. When studying, organize words in meaningful groups (e.g., by part of speech, in thematic categories, regular verbs vs. irregular verbs). Shuffle the cards or groups, so that you use the stack(s) in a different order each time. Use the cards in both directions: first look at the foreign language words and try to recall the English definition. Then shuffle and look at the English definitions and attempt to remember the foreign language words

Hire a Tutor

The following are ideas from former volunteers, concerning who and how to hire a tutor, and how often to meet.

• “I have a two to three hour language class once a week with an older man who is a schoolteacher. Two shorter classes in a week would be better but my teacher only has Saturdays free right now. But, if you're working like you should be during the week, there isn't a lot of time for a bunch of classes. I chose my teacher because he is a teacher and works at a private school so has more of a salary and less stressful workload than the public teachers. He is the father of a good friend of mine, which allows me to communicate through my friend if it's necessary (for example changing times or canceling classes) but also the ability to have some distance. It will always be possible to ask your friends about language (without payment) and they will even enjoy the conversations as they can ask about English too. So personally, I think making a good friend your tutor is not a good decision.”
• “I spent the first three months at sight scoping out someone who I might want to employ as my tutor rather than asking around for someone who already does it. I felt like if I had someone who had never tutored before they would learn a few skills and class would be more flexible. I found a girl who had graduated in English from a local foreign language school, she is a student and could definitely use the extra money tutoring me would bring in. I asked if she was interested and then we decided when to begin and how many days per week. We settled on 3 days per week for an hour each time. I find that if we cover too much material I don't have the time or brainpower to study all of it before the next lesson.”
• “It doesn’t matter too much who your tutor is. Find someone you like and get along with. Even if he/she isn't the very best teacher, having a tutor means devoting time each day or week to studying Amharic. Having a responsibility to meet someone will make sure that you actually sit down and study something.”
• “For finding a tutor, it seems the compound that I live on is the best place to start. You are living with the group and interacting every day anyway. I tried going through my counterpart, but he knew little of the community himself. I have switched tutors as well when they don't work out (found by someone else in the office).”
• “Many volunteers quickly recruit a professional language teacher at their site. They also start off paying that maximum allowed tuition rate, which is an hourly rate far in excess of the typical community standards. As I see it, there are several reasons why you should not do this. First, you will perpetuate the stereotype of a rich foreigner who can throw around money at a time when you want to be integrating into the community and teaching everyone that you came to transfer your skills not your money. Also most of your community will not make anywhere the Peace Corps allowed hourly rate even on a daily basis. I would suggest that you find out what the average local minimum wage is and start around there. Hire a student or perhaps a beneficiary of one of the community organizations that you work with to help you out. You can also ask your landlord or coworkers for recommendations for someone with a good reputation in the community. Starting low will let you afford more hours of assistance. You can always raise the rates later on if you are satisfied with their performance or would like to give them extra incentive to improve.”
• “Give some attention to who you hire and where you hold your sessions. This is especially true if you hire a tutor of the opposite sex. Intentions can be misconstrued which can lead to awkward situations. Also, people will talk. Even if the gossip doesn’t affect you, it may be damaging to your tutor’s standing in the community.”

Figure Out What You Need to Learn

There is a list of potential topics for language learning at the end of this Unit. Here is what former students had to say about the topics they studied when they first arrived at site:

• “In terms of lessons, much of the beginning was reading the Amharic script and then a little writing. While learning to read, you learn more vocabulary. Practicing everyday situations, especially in the context of your town's culture was very helpful, such as bargaining. You can ask what people say for new births, weddings, and deaths as well that people will respect you for. Phrases that people in your area say a lot are very good to learn because the community will take you more serious, such as 'god willing, ' 'with truth,' etc. Conjugating verbs is also a topic that I'm working on now because I want to be able to form comple
• and meaningful sentences on the spot while talking to someone.”
• “Waiting 3 months allowed me to pick up the basics and the 'common' way of saying things and provided me with plenty of questions for my new tutor. In our lessons, I basically ask my tutor any questions I have and then we decide on a rough subject like clothing, travel, health etc. I usually learn a verb or two in the present tense and some vocab. I make flashcards after the lesson and my tutor uses these to quiz me at the beginning of the next lesson. I haven't started learning the alphabet yet, but had I started from the beginning, it would have been helpful, although it would have made my progress much slower.”
• “For daily practice, I listen to tapes/MP3s I got off the web from https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/fsi-amharic-basic-course/ which includes textbooks. I also got from the States an AmharicEnglish dictionary and a learning-Amharic book. All this took till about IST to get.”
• “The Wolf Leslau Amharic Textbook has been tremendously helpful for me. It's dense and grammar-intensive, but really good. There are photocopies floating around Peace Corps.”

Use Other Tips from Former Volunteers

“Practice at every opportunity. If your colleagues and friends speak good English or want to practice English with you, set aside some devoted time for practicing Amharic: ‘at tea-break, we will speak only Amharic.’ “

“One way that my experience has been different than the other volunteers’ is that I did all the information collection for my Community Needs Assessment. My counterpart received a regional promotion just after I got to site. I think this was very good to helping me assimilate. There was no one I could count on except myself. I conducted all of my interviews, PACA tools and other meetings by myself. For that I can vouch for how important the things taught in our PST would prove to be at site.”

“Don't be afraid to make a fool of yourself. People are going to laugh at you when you attempt to speak Amharic. But they're also going to appreciate your efforts.” “Keep a vocabulary notebook. Carry a small notebook with you at all times. If you hear a new word, ask for a definition, and write it down.”

“Kids are great teachers: they won't pity you with simplified language--they'll just go for it. Play with your neighbors. Teach kids English and you'll learn Amharic at the same time.”

“Find someone you like (a woman at the market, someone from work, or on your compound) who doesn't speak any English at all, and make an effort to befriend them. It will be awkward at first, but it pays off, both in terms of the friendship, and in terms of language learning.”

Sources

https://www.livelingua.com/peace-corps/Amharic/Amharic%20Peace%20Corps%20Language%20Manual-2015.pdf

Special thanks to David Aldacushion, and Group 1 & 2 Volunteers for contributing to this section. Additional materials were adapted from

• Language Acquisition Made Easy, by E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth S. Brewster,
• The Whole World Guide to Language Learning, by Terry Marshall and the American Council on the Testing of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)

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• At the restaurant in Ethiopia
• Threatening Safety Tips for Female Volunteers
• yähïzb bä’alat Public Holidays in Ethiopia
• Invitations in Ethiopia
• Sexual Harassment in Ethiopia
• Time
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• Borrow household items