To be blunt, my mate Perry, (from Portugal a native Portuguese speaker), learnt his English most effectively whilst in a slight state of inebriation. As a soft spoken overweight male, Perry lacked confidence with the ladies. Ergo his professor in London, England taught him English while drinking in pubs. This facilitated speaking in a manner more effective than that of any classroom environment where a student is surrounded by peers and needs to protect his pride, devoid of real world communication nuances.
When I was in Shanghai, China, I was often on the prowl with my language learning peers mucking about and putting ourselves in somewhat precarious situations. After one late night, the boys and I were famished, ergo we were seeking nourishment. In the end, the only shop we came across was a sketchy street vendor. A sketchy vendor catalyzing our nasty premonitions of food poisoning. A fate suffered by the younger brother of Antonio. His food poisoning was so bad that the remainder of his 2 week trip was spent in the lavatory. As we approached the vendor we saw an older woman and her grandson. We appointed Antonio to do our ordering as he was currently the most proficient in Mandarin under our current inebriated conditions, i.e. he was was the one slurring his words the least. Inside this dingy tungsten lit backstall, Antonio started picking and choosing the foods. The criteria for picking the foods being those least likely to give us food poisoning. Antonio proceeded to pick out various unrecognizable foods by utilizing his limited Mandarin at the time, repeating, “ι£δΈͺ”, meaning “that one”, while pointing at each of the ingredients. After sitting down with our food we thought we were out of the woods, but the garrulity of the proprietors prompted conservation between us and them. Now we were in a conversation with them with limited Mandarin. The conversation progressed with an abundance of trial and error as we were making a lot of mistakes because of the tonal language that is Chinese. Provoking our rapid fire attempts trying to match proper tones, the proprietors asked a steady stream of in context questions such as “Where are you from?” “Where do you go to school” , “How do you like your stay” and other questions, forcing us to use our brains and recall our studies. We all enjoyed ourselves and each chipped in to the conversation whether it helped or not.
It ends up that this episode was a very effective teaching method, mostly because it put us on the spot and got us to attach our Mandarin learning to a compulsory real world conversation, with all the mistakes and misunderstandings inevitable in real world communication. The classroom tries to imitate this real world experience. Unfortunately, the classroom cannot work as well as the real world since it is much more nuanced in ways that can’t be replicated. Some problems of a formal setting include classrooms filled with concerns of pride, G.P.A, and certainly less incentive to try and fail a multitude of times. When we were conversing with the proprietors of the street shop we were laughing and coming up with creative ways of communicating as a team. We would do whatever was necessary to be commutative because we had a strong incentive to fill our drunken bellies and eschew to test our intestinal fortitude. We failed as much as it took to finally succeed. In a classroom environment there are no retakes and time constraints preclude language learners from mastering practical speech. Yes, a typical language class does try to promote street conversations, but until you do it in the actual street it doesn’t sink in and there is a lack of contextual clues.
In Perry’s case he not only became a fluent English speaker, but also became a fashion expert in British designs. How he became a fluent English speaker through the pub going method, I don’t know exactly, but maybe it’s because he had to learn to disguitish between the multitude of English lagers and ales, or maybe he had to be wary of the strange English pub food such as haggis or kidney pies. Somehow after all that mess, he become a fluent English speaker. In any case, the unstructured learning environment forced Perry to adapt to a quick thinking natural English speaking pace. Perry had to be creative in his recall of his English just as we had to be creative in our Chinese communication. The small bit of real world success, led to genuine desire for learning. In Perry’s case, he learned about English fashion. In our case, by conversing with the Chinese proprietors, we gained confidence to use more of our Chinese. In addition, we now understand that although we may still get food poisoning, at least our proprietors are not trying to kill us on purpose.
A little inebriation and socializing in the real world, helps promote the less inhibited and creative interactive language skills that are the core to communicating as well as providing the desire to be able to communicate evermore effectively. Ergo all language classes should be conducted in pubs.
[I welcome your comments and suggestions]
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