Can Those Who Speak Teach?

I enjoy learning languages. Albeit Spanish was spoken by my grandmother, her sisters and my mother, it was never really directly taught to us. The Tres Marias (my lola and her spinster sisters) tried to make it their "secret language" when they didnt't want me or my cousins to know what they were discussing. I guess that was how I started learning how to decode language from context. That combined with Sesame Street worked wonders! :-)

In college, Senor Prado simply ordered us around in Spanish from day one and it was really a matter of "sink or swim". In Alliance Francaise, introductions and explanations were all done in French. In both classes, questions in English were never entertained. We merely adapted. The teachers were very passionate about the language they taught and neither tolerated mediocrity from students. What I appreciated most about them was their ability to inculcate and draw the language out of us instead of merely making us parrot things. They made us think and feel in the language. Being merely good in Spanish and French did not automatically make them good teachers. It was their gift in making us find our groove in the language that made them effective in their field.

However, when I studied Nihongo (Japanese), my classes were conducted in Tagalog. As the teacher explains the katakana and hiragana characters, he would say, "Ito naman ang hiraganang 'ka' na iba sa katakanang 'ka. Ganito ang itsura." When I clarified why he wasn't speaking to us in Nihongo, he replied, "If I speak to you in Nihongo, you will not understand anything."

That response rendered me speechless.