Recommended Reading
The Fun of the 'Delphic Oracle'
A goatherd on the banks of the River Dordogne asked me then aged 8 why I did not understand her and that started my love of languages. I was fortunate to have a wonderful education and some truly great teachers and professors, leading European authorities on Horace, Lamb, Balzac, Voltaire, Milton, Goethe, Lessing and Linguistics. You never forget your 'teacher', whatever the subject, cooking, translating or learning to drive a car.
The reason is that at some stage a teacher is integral to your understanding not only of a subject but of yourself: any problem, triumph or challenge you face and how you handle it. The learning curve is a living rationale, conveyed so aptly by the Delphic Oracle . "know thyself". From studying at the Sorbonne, to chartering supply vessels in the Red Sea and being on the Board of Examiners for liaison interpreting in Bavaria, communicating has been both illuminating and fun. It truly is a privilege to help others.
Our mother tongues take years to learn and the absorption of another communication system needs time, patience, application, respect and repetition. An anecdote can illustrate a phonetic problem as I experienced:- "So sorry, did you say your name was Tomato?", class in complete hysteria, "No. Donato" from an Italian student in Germany learning English. Vocabulary issues can be very revealing too, such as filling up a dental registration from under the Xray permission section: do you take the pill? was translated by "and do you take hormones?" , a good try, and possibly better than leaving a blank. An American speaking executive, so loathe to master that directions chapter in French, reported gaily on return from his travels that "it really worked I just said a droiteee and a gosh and the driver took me right there!" A student's success lingers.
Sometimes showing students how to get their tongues around the written sign is all that is required: when marking papers one night I came across 'Yuhawalkam' from an intelligent, conscientious Polish student and then I understood the problem of oral versus written communication, it is "you are welcome" the standard English response to "thank you". What we see and hear affect our syllabic grasp and can make a 'foreign' language sound fast and dialectal issues have seen me get off public transport at the wrong stop, which resulted in a long walk back with time to ponder the mystery. All great fun and truly enriching.
Passing on some of the skills required to attain the desired competence can take the form of notes such as I devised for "Tips to Close Reading" for the GCSE English Higher paper, such as "The answer is in the question", "answer in your own words where possible" can mean finding a synonym and polarity of perspective can be helpful in pinpointing both the synonym and the tonal depth, i.e. look at the opposite of the word in question. One may know an alphabet be it Russian or Roman but that does not mean we are Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, what matters is that a student attains their desired linguistic competence.
