The Demon of English-French dictionaries | How my mother mastered English, her second language

When my mother was in high school, she was able to read Charles Dickens novels in English, her second language. Nine years ago, when she first set foot in Canada, she was indistinguishable from a native English speaker. How did she learn English so effectively?

"Practice," she tells me in a conversation this morning, "There's no shortcut."

When she was in high school, she listened to English radio channels such as BBC and VOA "for hours daily." She read a lot of books, wrote down expressions and words she liked from the books, and copied down every use case scenario by looking up the phrases in English dictionaries.

Compare this to how we teach second languages in schools: I had never been introduced to a French dictionary that writes definitions of words in French; I had only ever seen English-French dictionaries whose job is to translate (a common one shown in schools is WordReference). A quick google search reveals some non-translation online French dictionaries such as LeRobert and CNTRL. From now on, I will default to using pure-French dictionaries when I run into an unknown word.

This is in line with my previous hypothesis that the best way to learn a second language is to mimic how you learn your first language. When learning a first language, one would never use English-French dictionaries to look up unknown words.

By using an English-French dictionary, you are restricting yourself to thinking like an amateur. You are constraining yourself to your native tongue, to the self-labelled-identity of a "second-language learner," in a demonstration that you aren't good enough at French to use the same dictionary as native speakers.

If you want to master a language like a native speaker, act like one.



It is commonly known that the best (and only) way to improve second-language-speaking-skills is to speak more. In high school, my mom didn't have many opportunities to practice her speaking, so instead, she created them for herself by journalling in English.

"I would always make sure that my sentences are gramatically correct because they're modeled off the dictionary," she tells me, "I didn't jounal for the sake of jounalling; I journalled as an excuse to practice all those phrases I had copied down from books!"