"Just Teach Them English"

In doing research on missionary Bible translator John Eliot, "the Apostle to the Indians," I happened upon this. Eliot produced the first Bible translation for native Americans in the Algonquin language. Ruth A. Tucker writes that "in 1661 the New Testament was completed, with the Old Testament following two years later. Despite this noteworthy accomplishment, he was harshly criticized for wasting his time in the Indian language when he could have been teaching the Indians English" (From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, p. 78--this is a great history of missions).

"Just teach them English" may be the most ignorant and dumb statement ever made about Bible translation. Some KJV-Only folks say this who do not know translation or linguistics--I believe I've even seen it here on the BB. Those who say this:

1. Know no foreign language themselves, not being willing to put in the incredible amount of work needed to become fluent in a foreign language.
2. Have never themselves tried to teach a foreigner English. Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) is a very difficult task, and it takes months or even years for someone to attain fluency.
3. Do not realize that English is a very difficult language to learn, with a complicated grammar, tons of grammatical exceptions, and a huge number of vocabular words, since the roots of English are in several different languages.

So enough of this idiotic idea, "just teach them English so they can read the English Bible."

P. S. Gail Riplinger claims to be a linguist because she had done a little bit of TEFL to Greek immigrants. Hogwash. She does not even know English that well.

 

Well said.

 

Chinese is probably the toughest spoken language for Americans, because of it being a tonal Asian language. It's grammar is not that hard, though--no verb tenses, SVO (subject-verb-object) syntax. Most Chinese people learn English easily because of the similar grammar.

Japanese is the toughest written language, most linguists agree. This is because it has two alphabets (count them: hiragana and katagana), and uses over 2000 Chinese characters. In Chinese there is usually only one pronunciation per character, but Japanese may pronounce one character up to 20 different way.

 

Well a big amen! I've taught Greek in Japan, and they did as well as my American students--except for the one young man who quit Bible college to go to Shikoku to gamble on Pachinko.