Looking Back on The Whole Experience

 

Reflection on Multilingual Café experience and Review of Language Learning Project

I couldn’t be happier to get a taste of language immersion from the Taipei Multilingual Café experience. On October 10^th, barely knowing Multilingual Café, I directly went to He Coffee, where held a multilingual event, as teacher required. There were plenty of NCCU students joining the event that day, so few vacancies were left when I got into the cafe. Fortunately, I still got a place at German table. 

I supposed that the experience would be uncomfortable and awkward, but it turned out to be interesting. At first, I was frustrated in my lack of knowledge about German. My classmates and I couldn’t understand a word. At German table, others might consider us as fools. However, I suddenly realized the point in joining Multilingual Café after ten minutes staying there. It didn’t matter which language to use, because we were there to experience language immersion. Since then, I had become more involved in the atmosphere.

Without knowing German, I paid much attention to speakers’ body language. Through the speakers’ expression, gesture, or drawings, I tried to figure out what they were talking about. I could sense that the topic of our conversation was jumping from one to another, including animation, politics, cultural difference between Taiwan and German, and so on. If the table leader had drawn pictures on the whiteboard, it would be easier for me to understand what she meant. I found that body language was a helpful tool for beginners to learn a new language.

Although remembering only two vocabularies during the two hours experience, I still considered it meaningful. I started to think about the advantage and disadvantage of language immersion. On the one hand, immersion allowed people to immerse in the target language. A sound environment was created for us to practice listening and speaking. Immersion was especially helpful for those who lacked the opportunity to speak a language. On the other hand, I thought that immersion was not friendly to language beginners. Without any basic knowledge of a language, strong frustration must be felt by learners. Learners might easily lose their interest in learning a language they couldn’t even understand. Thus, learners with basic language skills would be better target for conducting the teaching method.

As for my Spanish learning project, my group members and I are learning Spanish steadily. We are now learning the vocabularies of family member and the grammatical gender in Spanish. I find that grammatical gender in Spanish is complicated but interesting. There is no grammatical gender in Chinese and English, so the grammar rule is new to me. Owing to the grammar, more vocabularies should be memorized. For example, according to the gender of subject, the verb, speak, will be translated in Spanish as either hablo or habla. Therefore, I should memorize two vocabularies for one meaning. Fortunately, sometimes it is obvious which gender a word is, such as the words for man and woman. The inflection of a word is usually based on logical rules, so I can still try hard to handle the grammar.

To sum up, it’s worthwhile to give everything a go, because we could never expect what we can get after a try! My experiments to learn Spanish and join Multilingual Café are good examples.