HOW TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?

WŁODZIMIERZ ADAM WÓJCICKI
HOW TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?
TO THIS QUESTION THERE EXISTS A MYRIAD OF ANSWERS. MYSELF, I SHALL ATTEMPT TO SAY SOMETHING ON THE SUBJECT, CONSIDERING POLES AGED FROM 6 TO 96, LEARNING ENGLISH.
Are there any necessary conditions that must be met in order to learn the English language? I think that there are three such conditions: extensive reading, watching television over a long period of time (alternatively listening to the radio) and last but not least, the achievement within a comparatively short time (of several or a dozen or so months) of a level of English that enables reading and watching television, a condition which is most likely the hardest to fulfil.
Reverting to condition one and two – what I have in mind is the fact of having read many thousands of pages without resorting to a dictionary as well as of having spent hundreds of hours in front of the TV set, watching programmes, although not fully comprehending them. It ought to be said most emphatically that comprehension of a text is supposed be as full as possible, albeit not quite full. Only in such a situation will we learn to construe language messages that we will at the time understand only in part; we will learn to guess at the meaning of unknown words from the context and derive pleasure from discovering the sense.
One might ask why it should take so many pages of text, so many hours of watching television? The point is that what seems to be at work here is the law of great numbers. It is only right to quote Prof. Franciszek Grucza1 who is acknowledged as a great authority in the domain of the theory of teaching foreign languages – glottodidactics: The root cause of the failure of Polish schools in teaching foreign languages lies in the fact that the decision-makers responsible for the school syllabuses and their experts on didactics notoriously ignore the eternal truth and received wisdom that it takes at least 1,500 hours of work to acquire any foreign language to an elementary degree. It can be safely assumed without running the risk of making a grave mistake that for adults studying the language at an intermediate level it is double that figure. I mean not the hours spent in class but, generally, any time allotted for study, any contact with the language, including ...