Foreign Language

There is a bit of a problem with learning foreign languages. We are taught to memorize words, phrases, grammar usage. But what are we learning really? If I gave a Chinese person who touts their "English proficiency" proudly a book such as Great Expectations or some other really densely worded book, chances are they'd have a death day trying to read it. Chinese language students face a similar problem. There's some guy who figured out that Chinese people read in chunks, not word by word and is trying to develop a teaching method to teach foreigners to read at that proficiency level using that method. I know what 云 means, but in a phrase full of words that I know, thrown together in a way I don't understand, I can't read it. Chinese people see a word, for instance "got," but it's surrounded by all this stuff, all they can do is pronounce it. If you go to the lower levels where they're still just starting to learn, they don't even know how to pronounce words they've never seen because they've never been taught how to look at words in portions and learn to develop speaking fluency, even if they have no idea what they're saying. So rather than shove a bunch of words and phrases and how to use those specific words and phrases, I think it's best we learn what exactly those words mean. Every word or phrase's components so you know how to string everything together.

There must be better ways of teaching foreign languages.