3 Ancient Foreign Language Teaching Methods that Still Work Today

Teaching a language can be said to be a modern concept. Perhaps you are curious about how ancient people learn foreign languages or you want to know if there are any similarities or differences between ancient time methods and modern methods, your search is over as you are on the right page.

How people in ancient Roman learn?

Learning the language of a foreign land was a necessity mostly for the traders in the ancient Rome. Many Romans admired Greek and Latin. Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean and more Greek was probably spoken in Rome than the local lingo. There were manuscripts which consist of vocabulary lists, basic grammars, and texts. The texts appear in two columns, similar to the texts used today to teach modern foreign languages. With these texts, learners were introduced to the foreign language culture like how to use the public bath, how to greet a friend, and so on. The learner then writes and master them in order to practice them in their day to day conversations. This is similar to the grammar-translation method today.

Ancient merchants also learn foreign languages by guessing and matching the meanings. Embracing guessing actively is something that helped them in mastering the foreign languages. When the ancient Romans guess, they go back to the vocabulary lists and cross-check whether they were right or not, therefore an opening way to intuition and thereby enhancing their intuitive powers.

How did people in China learn?

After China suffered successive severe setbacks in its relationship with other nations, the Qhing Dynasty of China was awakened to the Western civilization. The last emperor of China, Pu Yi, is widely regarded as the only one with any reasonably high level of English-language proficiency. But he was not the only emperors of Qing Dynasty who had learned English in their lifetimes. Qianlong and Guang’xu are another two ancient kings of China that were known for their passion in learning English.

Hundreds of years ago, the English learners in China started using the Chinese characters to help them pronounce the English language. According to an old textbook owned by a collector in Chengdu, southwestern Sichuan province, the English sentences have the traditional Chinese words as phonetic notations which is not a good way to learn English.

In addition, the book also instructs learners to read from left to right which is against the direction of reading ancient Chinese texts. Among the many books translated into Chinese are The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Henry Huxley. The traditional Chinese characters put the English pronunciation as “Lei Si, Wang, Ha Fu, Ya Fu, You, Pu Luan Si”.