Khmer student wrote to me and asked me to YouTube, videos, how to produce newspapers are read in English.
“I would urge you to get videos and read newspapers translated from English into Khmer. Khmer me and I have a problem in order to understand sentences in English.” Write the student.
Language learners often write to me on some topics or areas of their lives when they have problems understanding and ask me to learn a trick or a guide to them.
As I said in many other articles of language learning, there are no tricks no. The more hours you invest, the more you get. And if your goal to read at a level of language, then you should read what a native speaker reads. If you are a 22-year-old college graduate, then you need to play at this level in the foreign language. And you will not get there by reading the manuals for the language. You get there through books, articles and textbooks, rather than on the tongue.
If we analyze this last e-mail, the student says he has trouble reading and expressly distinguished newspapers.
Obviously, read the reading. On one level, with a newspaper is no different than reading a novel or read a short story.
If you are reading novels and short stories, you should be able to read newspapers. When I asked these students, but it is not likely to read a novel monthly in English. If it were so, reading the newspapers recently.
So the problem is not reading the newspaper or by itself. The problem is the lack of practice.
I’ve never had a course called “newspaper read” in English. I’ve just started to read in the newspapers. And at first I had to learn to deal with language, structure and organization of writing paper, but nobody told me or you. It is time for us. The same was true for German and Spanish newspapers that I read almost as well as English. No one has learned or taught Gunther m or Pablo, it is only through practice.
One point that I have is many times in articles, is that when you begin to learn a foreign language, you are not an idiot. You must not start with an empty brain. One reason it takes babies from 3 years to learn their native language, because they have the language and how language learning. You know all this and more. Babies do not know that there is something called a grammar. Each part of the vocabulary must be learned. A seven year old child can not know the words “population, economy, government, referendum, the money” in his native language. So, reading a foreign newspaper would be difficult for him, because reading a newspaper in his language is difficult for him.
If you are an adult, which consists of a developed country, with at least a high school or university education, you should already be able to read newspapers in their native language. At this point, you read a newspaper in a foreign language is simply a question of vocabulary.
Certainly there are different uses of language and writing styles. Newspapers and style that is different from other kinds of writing. But you read and read and understand.
The problem with most students is that they do not read novels and short stories. Most students simply have to accept that they must practice. You must read and read, stumble and fall and, and read again until they get it.
I did not develop a fondness for reading the newspaper in English until I was in my twenties. But then, I had read countless books in English, and completed 16 years schooling. I began to read in the newspapers, because I had read foreign newspapers at the university. Then I learned to read newspapers first in English to help me understand foreign newspapers.
One of the problems, especially with the Khmer learners that there is so little written material available in Khmer. American students have contact with newspapers, magazines, novels, reference books, poems, plays, encyclopedias, newspapers, biographies, books, comic books … Most Khmer did not have this exposure.
If you have not read in their native language as they could be read in a foreign language?
And I’m not just going after the Khmer. During the spellings are not in Khmer, but also in the teaching of Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese, as these styles are writing, students had no exposure to them. For example, Taiwanese students said that during the 12 years of primary school, she never wrote a single scholarly work.
But then they were asked to do so in English in their ESL classes.
Currently I have a Thai friend named Em, who is studying in the United States. He was there for three years, the English in full-time, and still can not score high enough to pass the TOEFL exam at the American Community Colleges. In Thailand there is a college graduate, but education in Thailand far behind western education. And in the developed world, the U.S. community colleges are easier to comprehend simple universities.
When Em finally goes to the TOEFL and is found in a community college in the first two years of the basic requirements for a bachelor’s U.S. tasks such as “Read George Orwell’s 1984 will be given, and explain how it is an allegory communism and how it relates to the Homeland Security Act in the United States. “
If the student on a mission like this, they always blame their English stumbles. But I am confident that the average graduate from most Asian countries could not this work in his native language. Your program simply do not have to post this kind of analytical reports.
When I was a teacher in Korea, there was a famous story circulating around the sober ESL community. A young Korean woman, a wealthy family, he won a national competition in English. She had been taught by the teacher at home a lot, almost since birth, and her English was exceptional. The prize was a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school in the United States, Ph.D., from which almost guarantees admission to a school in the Ivy League.
Apparently one of the first missions was, it was given to his new school in America, read a poem and write an original analysis, then a presentation in class. When it came time for his presentation, the student stood up and dutifully recited the poem, word for word, it has also regurgitated exactly what the speaker said about the poem in class. And it failed.
In Korea, his incredible memory and had the ability to repeat what the teacher said, said, held at the height of his class. But in America, she was asked to do much more than that, think and analyze, create, present and defend.
The majority of learners feel that their difficulties in dealing with study abroad, books, newspapers or calls to their lack of vocabulary or speech problems lies. But if they have a relatively large vocabulary, the real problem is a combination of culture and practice.
Going back to the student and his Khmer problem reading English newspapers: To the English papers, you also know, to understand all the new concepts and in the newspaper. The best way is with the foreign press at the beginning of much first read a story in your own language. Then you read the same message in the newspaper in a foreign language. You can also post messages in your own language, the language in which you examine and compare.
Translation is to know not just words. You should know the concepts. The first rule of translation is to convey the written word has the same meaning in the target language, as it has in the source language. Although the formulation is in the end not even remotely like the original. No matter how good your language skills are, you can not convey the feeling that you do not know in your native language.
Recently, newspapers were running stories in Asia over the Y2K crisis in Taiwan.
To understand the newspaper, you must first understand the origin, the global Y2K crisis. The Y2K issue was a little world that Cambodia is not yet involved heavily in computers, because there are so few in Cambodia in 1999. It was probably less than a hundred internet connections in Cambodia at that time. Then you have to know and understand that Taiwan has its own calendar, based on the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1911. Government and banks in Taiwan are characterized, events after the People’s Republic of China calendar, if you withdraw money from an ATM machine today means will be the year of 99.
Once you know and understand these facts, then you know that Taiwan is about to make his first century in the year 2011, and is facing a mini-Y2K crisis, because the party years from the date of the computer is only two numerals.
Most of my readers do not live in Asia, and still can not have known about the history of Taiwan, or the date of Taiwan. But anyone with a normal reading level should have understood my explanation. This is not necessarily a requirement that before knowing the exact situation that you have read, but you can on other things you know to join, otherY2K for example, calendars and other problems.
If you look at the above explanation, the vocabulary is fairly simple. There are probably only a handful of words, perhaps five or six, that an intermediate learners do not know. These could be searched for words in a dictionary. And for European students with a broad base of education and experience, it would be all the help he needs. But for students from the educational systems in Asia, particularly in the form of Cambodia now involved in global events like the Olympic Games for the first time, it would be difficult or impossible to understand this or similar articles in newspapers.
The key lies in education, not English class. Students need to constantly read and simple to build their general education in their own language and in English, or they will never understand the English newspapers or television.
