The why of foreign language study
By YUEN REN CHAO,
Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and
Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
There are various reasons for which one has to or wishes to study a foreign language. In thefirst place, it is more profitable, and sometimes necessary, to learnthe language of the country in which one intends to travel or work. Secondly, one may have occasion to act as interpreter from onelanguage to another, a subject we shall revert to when we take uptranslation. Thirdly, one learns a foreign language in order to beable to read books in the language for their content or for literaryappreciation and be able to translate them into one's own language when desirable or necessary. Finally, a student takes a course or courses in foreign languages in order to satisfy academic requirements, with good grades if possible. Whatever the motive, it is important to realize that an adequate knowledge must begin with a speaking knowledge of the language. For purposes of travelling abroad or oral interpreting, the point is of course obvious. As for the purpose of reading foreign books or periodicals, it is also necessary to acquire fluency in speaking in order to be able to read the foreign language properly. One of the most common fallacies in connection with language learning is to claim: "I want only to acquire a reading knowledge of German", or whatever language is being considered. After two or three years of a foreign language course in school, what one calls a reading knowledge of the language usually turns out to be no more than a dictionary hunting knowledge and understanding of the language consists essentially in saying the material being read in one's own language,sotto voce, if not aloud. Now, in the normal process of reading, one does not read word by word, nor even phrase by phrase. Before finishing a sentence a reader usually anticipates how the rest of the sentence is going to go, which may take the form of innervations for articulations or attitudes of parts of the body, standing for an adverbial phrase, a relative clause or what not. To be sure, a writer may make an intentional unexpected turn of phrase or wording for a special effect. But it is because the reader does expect something, if only in a general way, that he can expect the unexpected. If every item in the linear elements of the text comes as completely new information, then the effect of surprise will be lost. If everything is a surprise, nothing will be surprising. The conclusion, then, is that to be able to read normally in a foreign language, one should also be able to speak it. And since much writing is in a style different from that of speech, one should also learn to compose in it. There used to be a certain amount of composition work in the study of Latin, which is done less nowadays, though texts like Walter Ripman and M. V. Hughes, Rapid Latin Course (E. P. Dutton Co., New York, 1923) are in the spirit of treating a dead language as a living one. As to classical Chinese, it is not even a completely dead language, since it is still being written here and there all the time, though readers speaking different dialects pronounce it differently. In my school days, we even practised speaking it for fun. All this seems to go against the modern technique of rapid visual reading which does not have the drawback of being slowed down by the articulations necessary for saying the words. But in practice, no experienced reader fully articulates what is being read: the essential thing is to carry the general tune of the grammatical structure and this takes no more time than it takes for the eye to perceive.
Foreign language teachers often urge students to learn to "think in the foreign language", and it is often assumed that after translating the foreign language for some extended period of them, the student somehow acquires the ability to understand it directly without having to go through the intermediate stage of his native language. This is what can and does happen and the psychology of it is not unlike that of visual reading, which begins with audiolingual reading and ends with partial short circuiting of the audiolingual stage. There is however an important difference, which will be of pedagogical relevance here. While visual reading follows substantially the same structural patterns of the language (except down to subsyllabic units in the case of syllabic writing such as Chinese - and nobody stops to read even syllable by syllable, not to say letter by letter), the reading of a foreign language follows quite different structural patterns from those of the reader's native language. When, therefore, a reader of a foreign language dispenses with any translation into his own language, he is not only throwing away his crutches, but actually being freed from his fetters. That is one of the main virtues of the so-called "direct method" of foreign language teaching, on which we shall have more to say later.
On the whole, then, the objective of using foreign books for the purpose of understanding their contents is best achieved through learning first to speak the language and then composing in it. Too often in the practice of graduate studies in the universities, a student starts to learn to "read" in the required languages late in his course of study, and by the time he passes his foreign language requirements by being able to translate a couple of pages, often with the permitted use of a dictionary, he is almost ready with his thesis and it is too late for him to make much use of foreign language references. For it is a fact that unless a person has a speaking knowledge of a foreign language, he has no appetite for reading reference books in it.
There are perhaps minor exceptions where the use of writing does not require a full control of the language. On one occasion I had to consult an article on mathematics in Italian before I had any contact with the language. By guessing from Latin and French, by using a dictionary, and by studying the mathematical symbols, I was able to "read" the article without too much difficulty. The article had so much mathematical symbolism that was already "in English", so to speak, that it hardly needed to be translated. Another exception is the lazy practice, almost universal among Chinese students of Japanese, of pronouncing the Chinese characters,or kanji, in a Japanese text with Chinese pronunciation.
If the primary interest is in literary appreciation, a speaking knowledge is of course all the more important. Even if ancient literature is the subject of study, reading it in modern pronunciation, as one usually does Chaucer or Shakespeare, will still render most of the original qualities. To be sure, the T'ang (618-906) poems read in modern Mandarin, as they usually are, will lose the rhymes in many cases, but most of the sound effects are still there. As the saying goes, if you have learned well the Three Hundred T'ang Poems, even an unversed person will become well versed. It is often claimed that only a passive knowledge is needed for reading literature. But as we have indicated above, there is no such thing as a purely passive knowledge. Without an active knowledge there is no adequate passive knowledge and this is all the more true for literary appreciation.
For purposes of translation it is often assumed that only a passive knowledge - the so-called reading knowledge - of the source language is required. But even here, though there may besome difference of degree, a good command of both languages is still needed. Yen Fu (1853-1921) the first translator of Darwin's Origin of Species into Chinese, used to set up three requirements for translation: fidelity, fluency, and elegance. But the last cannot really count, since suppose, say at a court trial, a person is accused of having said, in a foreign language, something like: You are a damn fool, and an interpreter renders it as: You are an extremely unwise person, the translation has gained in elegance but will certainly not be a faithful translation of the original and might even affect the legal outcome. As for fluency, it is generally a desirable quality, as when an interpreter translates for the doctor the inarticulate or incoherent speech of a sick or injured person. But here, again, if a novelist is depicting differences in personality by the differences in expressiveness in the speech of his characters, it will certainly not do to translate all the dialogues into crystal clear direct, expressive speech.
There are two ways of testing the fidelity of a translation. One is to ask whether there is another expression in the source language which fits the translation even better. If, for example, after one has translated Dummkopf as unwise man, another expression in German unkluger Mann is found to be closer to the translation, then the English is not the best fit for the original. The other test is to ask whether there is another translation which is more like English, for example, blockhead. The second test is really a test forfluency, and in this instance it happens that a more idiomatic translation also has a higher degree of fidelity. Whichever test one chooses to follow, the presupposition in either case is that the translator has full control of both languages, since he will have to have within recall a constellation of all the near synonyms of what is being translated and of all the near synonyms of possible translations.
Taking up now the study of languages for the purpose of acquiring credit or satisfying requirements, which may not seem a worthy motive to consider, the desirability of studying the language as language is still valid. I remember when I took my second-year German, which was taught by a professor from Germany, we hardly heard a complete sentence of German for a whole semester. He simply followed the then almost universal practice in American colleges and let the students translate the text into English, sometimes not even reading aloud or making the student read aloud before translating. When the translation was inaccurate or wrong, he would correct us and explain the grammar or idiom in English. But I didn't care too much about what was going on and just went ahead, in my homework, with reading aloud over and over again the German text. I did not do it on any modern principle of language learning but simply as a carry-over of the old traditional habit in reading the Chinese classics, which happened also to be the way I was taught and learned English. When the final examination came, which also took the form of translation from German into English, I did the best I could to translate my third into my second language and my grade turned out to be no worse (it was an A) than those of the other students who were translating from their second into their first language.
Photo by Plamen Ivanov©
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