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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 1. 1964.

Language Learning Pitfalls

Language Learning Pitfalls

Despite the fact that it had taken him 18 years to gain an "instinctive" use of English, Mr Lojkine told NZUSA Congress that he felt it was possible to learn to understand a language in about six months.

Mr Lojkine, French-born lecturer in Russian at the University of Canterbury, made it clear that his talk, entitled "Thoughts on Language Theory and Language Learning", only applied to understanding the written and spoken word. He did not talk about learning to reproduce the lanauaae.

The essence of learning languages quickly, said Mr. Lojkine, was to concentrate on the things that could be acquired quickly, and neglect the others.

Two important aspects in the learning of a second language were mentioned. The first was similarity, whether a word or sound was similar to one in the native language. It also included such things as the rules by which sounds change from one language to another, the importance of similar sounds and the effect they had on the meanings of words. The similarities in the structure of languages should also be brought out to the student, Mr Lojkine suggested.

The concept of necessity included such factors as grammatical and stylistic necessity, the knowledge of grammar necessary for understanding.

Commenting on synthetic languages, such as Esperanto, Mr Lojkine said that he did not support them because they were generally word orientated. He maintained that they had a tendency to load into the words functions normally transmitted by the phrases or structure of other languages. This led to overloading of words, with a consequent increase in difficulty in the language. Analytical language was, in his opinion, much to be preferred.

Mr Lojkine insisted that a learner must not try to read things which would be full of technical matter. For instance it would be madness to read psychology in German if you knew no psychology.