Oh, how I love teaching! I'm not getting many chances this year, but I had one on Monday. As I mentioned way back when, a group of us are learning Pitjantjatjara, an Aboriginal language from the center of Australia. Or at least we meet occasionally to compare notes - two or three times a month. Alas only one person's been able to come every time. (I missed many weeks because of my travels.) Worse, this is without a proper textbook and without a teacher who speaks the language, so we don't even know how to pronounce things! In short, we were going nowhere, and are not much farther along than when I first went in October or November.
Until this week! We'd decided a few sessions ago to take turns designing some kind of learning game, so someone brought in a big drawing of a person with the names of various body parts, someone else offered a tree of family names (which became impossibly complicated, kinship structures being very involved), and another devised hand-signals for practicing the nine pronouns for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular, dual and plural. This week was my turn, and I tried to recreate the drills I found most useful when teaching English in Japan.
So I drew four sets of pictures, which we had to ask each other questions about, forming and using sentences and changing them one word at a time: Rosemary, do you see a man eating food? - No I don't see a man eating food. I see a woman eating food. Karina, you see a woman eating food? - No, I don't see a woman eating food, I see two women eating food. Anthony, do you see two women eating food? - No, I don't see two women eating food... It was the first time we'd put sentences together, the first time anyone spoke more than once every ten minutes, and the first time we really had fun! The hour was over before you knew it, and people stayed on!
Now I certainly can't take credit for inventing drills. But I suppose I can take credit for one thing. You learn more if you're having fun, and you have fun if you get to say silly things. (You also can test if people really understand the way a language works better if you give them nonsense sentences to translate.) It sounded like we were having party by the time my drawing led to these exchanges: Susan, do you see Bruce (someone added this name, not me) drinking coffee? - No, I don't see Bruce drinking coffee. I see two women drinking coffee. Debbie, do you see two women drinking coffee? - No, I don't see two women drinking coffee. I see two kangaroos drinking coffee! (Indeed, they were clearly enjoying flat whites under a sign saying KANG- KOFF-, doubtless on Lygon Street.)
And then I pointed at the joey in the pouch of one of the kangaroos and all hell broke loose!
