I have here before me a little book,
Live Action English, which is in essence a manual for teaching English through Total Physical Response (TPR). Flipping through the book, one's first thought is how simple the content seems. Then one mentally translates a few of the exercises from L1 -the native language - into L2 - the second language - and realizes how hard language is! And here's the thing: It's the verbs that are the killers.
What are the component steps in unlocking a door? Unwrapping a hunk of cheese, cutting off a corner and nibbling at that corner? Yes, it's easy enough to express the ideas, but with
le mot juste? Going from English to a Romance language, this is an especially messy business. You "take off," "take out" "take away," "take back" and on and on. You "put down," "put back, "put away" and more. So how do you "take a bite out of" something and "put down" the rest? And where do you put it? These are things that you have to think about in going from English to French, and it makes you realize how many shades of meaning you can express in L1, when here you'd been thinking that for the
linguistic tasks you can accomplish in L2 you're in pretty good shape. Of course, part of the problem is translation: You don't approach the world in L2 the same way and, more importantly, your L2 doesn't approach the world the way your L1 does. Especially with the verbs.
I'm thinking about verbs, of course, because I'm looking at
Live Action English, and action is what verbs are all about. (Or mostly about, if you listen to the Michel Thomas rant about linking verbs - those who don't do MT courses, don't worry about this.)
Live Action English is an early TPR manual, but the focus on action goes back further than this, back at least to a man named François Gouin. You can read a bit about Gouin
here, and a shorter but better bit
here. Let's
take a look at what the second one has to say:
[Gouin] found himself in conversation with his nephew, who, when he had left had been unable to speak, but who, six months later, was able to hold his own in a conversation. This convinced him of the inefficiency of his own methods, and he decided to watch the child, to see how he picked up his language. One day, the little boy was taken on a visit to a mill. He continually asked questions, climbed all over the place, and watched what the workers were doing. Back at home, the child reflected on his experience, and then recited it to his listeners, ten times over, with variations, attempting to produce a logical sequence of activities. After thus expressing himself, the child became active; with the aid of the adults, he constructs a miniature water-mill, fills sacks with sand, and plays out to his own satisfaction the scenes that he had observed during the day. What he had done, according to Gouin, was to construct the series of events, structured according to a logical progression, and accompanied, at each stage, with the appropriate language.
Prior to Gouin, or so says the article, people thought of language as being about
naming things. After his experience with his nephew, Gouin concluded that language was about describing how things
happen. The methodology Gouin produced to focus on verbs stayed rooted in the spoken language -he did not invent TPR. But his sequencing of material is well suited to TPR, as it treats language as a tool for describing what is lived across time, not cataloging archetypes in a seemingly static world. To put it another way, is the essence of the squirrel to be found in the bushy tail and the cute little face and "hands" one sees in the children's picture dictionary, or is it experienced in life as the fuzzy blur that runs up a tree when you get too close? It sounds like Gouin's nephew would have noted the latter, and his uncle would have approved.
Where do you go with this stuff as a language learner? Well there's one thing you can do, and it's a challenge: When you're out and about and collecting language you need, you can think about the verbs. When I see construction workers, I try and remember to look up "jackhammer" because the item is missing from my French vocabulary. I am far less likely to look up the verb that goes with using one. I know that in English I can either "turn off" or "shut down" the computer. But I cannot "shut down" my car, nor my television set. Is there a similar situation with your L2?
Want to be fluent in your L2? Have a look at the verbs. Find out which birds tweet, which ones chirp, which ones caw and which ones cheep. Find out what you say when you're mashing the potatoes, straining the beets and dicing the onions. But before you go overboard, see if you can find a Live Action or similar book for the language you're learning. No need to act it out, but do give it a careful read. Because if you think you need a lot of vocabulary to read Flaubert, just try baking a cake!