My teacher looks like Greg Kasavin

Today I had a class on Japan's modern empire. The teacher looks like Gamespot's Greg Kasavin, so much it's scary even. Imagine Greg being 10/15 years older and you have my teacher. He even talks in the same, somewhat hesitant manner, picking his words carefully. Very, very funny.

Speaking of classes

In our second year we have to pick an additional course outside of the department of Japanese. While I was at first considering Chinese I decided to not take that one, looking at the huge amount of work that would pile up on my desk, taking two intensive language courses at once. Instead I settled for 'Second Language Acquisition', as it is called and I had my first class today.

It is very informative. You learn about the problems people generally experience when they are trying to tackle certain languages. You also learn how to teach those people certain languages, and in what order you have to present certain aspects of language in order to get the best results out of your students. It's heavily relying on Chomsky's 'Universal Grammar'. In this theory Chomsky is basically saying that every new born person has the ability to learn a language, no matter which one. After a year of 6 this ability fades and the person has become reliant on this gathered knowledge of that one language instead of having the innate ability to learn a language without problems.

It does not mean all the aspects of the 'Universal Grammar' have disappeared, however. People are still able to recognize certain elemants as 'natural' and are able to distinguish right sentences from wrong sentences even with little knowledge of the language they are learning, no matter how old these people are. The trick is to get people to use what's left of this 'innate ability' to master a language fairly quickly.

Also on a personal level this is interesting, as you're becoming aware of how exactly you can learn a language effectively. It is funny how in most language departments of my university the most ideal path is left unwalked. People can learn foreign languages much more effectively than the way they are doing it now, or so it seems.

I'm eager to find out how it's done. This is definately a good addition to my set of courses.