Kinyarwanda, after English and Spanish, is my third language and learning it has been a challenge. Learning one’s mother tongue is easy because it is learned unconsciously without any attention to form. One experiences little anxiety around speaking it. My English was acquired through “acquisition,” an unconscious internalization of language, while my Spanish and Kinyarwanda were painstakingly studied in school or classes.
Linguist classify all languages into larger categories and smaller subcategories. These categories group languages by rules, pronunciation and sometimes cultural norms. With English being a Germanic language and Spanish being a romance language they share much more in common than Kinyarwanda, a Great Lakes Bantu language. All languages have different structures, both culturally and linguistically. These structures have a large effect on one's ability and ease of learning a language. It is my personal belief, that the disparity between language acquisition and language learning, as well as cultural and structural linguistic deferences dramatically affects one’s ability to speak a language.
The distinction between natural language acquisition and the study of language has been the most difficult barrier in studying any foreign language. When learning to speak English, the language acquisition process was based on the neural hardwiring of my brain. I spent years listening to the English beginning in the womb listening to conversations, then I started using telegraphic speech before finally being able to form sentences. This means that every sound I make in English comes naturally.
For me, the letters R and L are not difficult to pronounce because I learned them at such an early age. I have muscle memory for producing those phonemes. One of the most persistent troubles for my students is a lack of L and R consonant in Kinyarwanda. As an English speaker, I can produce these sounds because they exist in my language. This L and R difficulty is also a problem for native Japanese speakers learning English. it is important to recognize that natural language acquisition can hinder you when learning a new language with vastly different phonemes.
To this day I struggle with Kinyarwanda phonemes. There are some discrepancies in the pronunciation of orthographs. For example, RW (as in Rwanda) is pronounced [ɾɡw]. Even more difficult for me is the dreaded amasaku, the vowel tone and length markers in written Kinyarwanda. Kinyarwanda is a tonal language, English is not. I find it very difficult to comprehend the contrast between high and low tones. For example, kuriria meaning to cry, and kurira, to climb, are pronounced completely differently. I have a hard time producing and comprehending the difference between two words because these tones do not exist in English.
Understanding the difficulties of pronunciation has driven me to focus on pronunciation in all of my classes. I focus on two techniques, drilling, and word stress. Drilling helps students with pronunciation by training the muscles in students’ tongues. Drilling makes the whole class feel safe because even if one student’s pronunciation is not perfect, they repeat it with the group and can practice safely. Word stressing is introducing the importance of correct syllable stress. This allows students to understand what sounds to produce. It also helps students who do not have the muscle memory. They can make approximate, yet comprehensible phonemes.
I believe that one can never truly master a language, after all, I learn new things about English all the time. That being said, one's comfort level with the structures of a language affects the speed in which one can master the language. The endless list of English grammar rules and irregularities were not difficult to learn because I have always known them. While Spanish was foreign to me, the language shares a verb-subject agreement structure similar to English. “He is reading” is very similar to “el esta lendo.” I found the structures in Kinyarwanda to be so alien that they just made rapid mastery difficult. Kinyarwanda uses a system of suffixes and prefixes to form sentences that visually looks like one word. ”Arasoma,” looks like one word to a speaker of European languages, but it communicates a single idea, “he is reading.”
To help bridge the knowledge gaps that students have in the structural differences between English and Kinyarwanda I employ the grammar-translation method. Grammar translation allows me to provide students with translations of new grammatical concepts and answer students’ questions about meaning. By writing side by side, the differences in English and Kinyarwanda, students are able to see what is the same and different in each language.
Another challenging structural language subject is nouns. Kinyarwanda uses 16 categories in the Bantu noun class system which I still find difficult for a variety of reasons. In Kinyarwanda, each noun is classified into a category that often doesn’t make sense to me as a non-native speaker. The word belt and rope are in noun class 3 because they are all “things that extend.” Native speakers of Kinyarwanda innately know this. Categorizing words by categories is difficult for me as an English speaker because that cultural concept does not exist in our brains and we may view nouns differently.
In English, all nouns have determiners of quantity which show how much of something there is. While this categorization makes sense to me as a native speaker, many people learning English wrestle with the concepts of our non-countable nouns. For example, bread being an uncountable noun, as in "we have some bread," is extremely confusing to many Kinyarwanda speakers because you can physically count bread. The rule of using a noun like "piece" or "loaf" is confusing because regardless of whether bread is in pieces or loaves and you can still count it. I am so culturally accustomed to the idea of bread being an uncountable noun that I don’t have to think about it.
To help students understand the complicated concept of English determiners of quantity I use visual teaching aids. In my classroom, we use a picture wall to display concepts, that way students can have a constant fixture of the correct usage of determiners of quantity. For example, when explaining how to communicate determiners of quality I will place a picture of what is “much” and what is “many.” Under “much” there might be a picture of light because we can’t count it, while under “many” there could be a picture of doctors because we can count them. Using pictures is something that I have used whilst learning Spanish and Kinyarwanda and now I am seeing my students using it to study on their own accord.
Learning something new is never easy, particularly languages. Our second language is automatically at a disadvantage when compared to our mother tongue, but with patience, careful planning and practice students can dramatically improve their target language.
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