Phonetic Hurdles before Yoruba-Nigerian Learners of German

Abstract

The Yoruba learner of German, unlike his Japanese counterpart, for instance, necessarily approaches German through the English language. The implications of this for the learning situation are quite remarkable. When a learner directly learns a foreign language without having to go through another language, he has only two levels of problems to deal with, namely the contrastive problems and the problems relating to the complexity of the foreign language. The complication of the mediated distant language acquisition lies in the fact that the Yoruba learner of German finds himself in the English-German language contact situation rather than in the Yoruba-German language contact situation. He finds himself in a kind of disoriented language learning situation. His success in learning German is a function of his mastery of English.