Confessions of a Language Addict

Instructor Focused Teaching, Michel Thomas & Uzbek!

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:07:00 +0000

Last week, I noted that I was thinking about what a Michel Thomas Uzbek course would look like, and promised to post some thoughts. In the intervening time, I have got hold of Solity's The Learning Revolution, and have read through the section focused specifically on the Michel Thomas courses. This has caused me to re-think a few things, and to notice a few defects in what I had put together.

Before we start, it's important to note a key element of the Michel Thomas Method: The teacher is responsible for learning. What this means is that if at the end of a Michel Thomas course, you can't communicate in the language, it's not you who has failed; it's his method that has failed. There is a striking contrast between this approach and what you hear from educators about how it's not their fault that high school graduates can't read and write because of social, or income, or other factors.

Thomas saw the rise of the Nazis and the way that Hitler won over a people that, in his view, was ignorant. He came to believe that education, as protection against this, was not just the right of free people but a necessity for a free society. In his view, it was not enough that educators have a good reason why they couldn't teach, because if their students weren't learning then their students were on the path to subjugation. This meant that finding a workable teaching method, not excuses, was the first priority.

It's not 100% clear if Thomas knew exactly what he did, or how much his theory lined up with his practice. However, there are four general points that apply to instructor-focused teaching (responsibility for learning rests with the teacher).

1. Instruction must be useful. (For language education, this means students must be able to talk from the beginning.)
2. No more than one thing at a time should be introduced. (If you introduce two things at once, the student might confuse which concept is which.)
3. Easy should proceed difficult. (This should be obvious, but educators often do things like teaching the exceptions right after the rules instead of creating a foundation of core concepts to which exceptions can be learned.)
4. Similar skills should be taught separately, so that they don't become confused. (Don't teach metaphors and similes at the same time or your students will never know which is which.)

Having a look at the above and the notes I had put together on Uzbek, I did some revisions. I'm plainly still falling short on (1) and (4), something I'll have to sort out later. That said, if you held a gun to my head and told me I had an hour to show you a little bit about how Uzbek works, here are the first fifty things I would teach you, in order. Each time something new is introduced, it is in bold. If you're curious, have a look and see if, even without my proddings and explanations, you can't get a little bit of an idea about how the language works.

1. Kofe, Choy - Coffee, Tea
2. Bu kofe. - This is coffee.
3. Bu yaxshi. This is good.
4. Bu choy yaxshi. - This tea is good.
5. Bu kofe yaxhi emas. - This tea is not good.
6. Bu kofe yomon.
7. Yaxshi-man. - I am good.
8. Yomon emas-man. I am not bad.
9. Yaxshi-siz. - You are good.
10. Bu kofe-mi? Is this coffee?
11. Ha, bu kofe. - Yes, this is coffee.
12. Yo'q, bu kofe emas. - No, this is not coffee.
13. Yaxshi-mi-siz? Are you good?
14. Bu xona. - This is a room.
15. Bu choy-xona. - This is a tea room.
16. Bu xona-da-man. - I am in this room.
17. Bu xona-da-siz. - You are in this room.
18. Bu choy-xona-da-siz. - You are in the tea room.
19. Men bu xona-da-man. - I am in this room. (emphatic)
20. Men bu xona-da emas-man. - I am not in this room. (emphatic)
21. Siz bu xona-da-siz. - You are in the room. (emphatic)
22. Siz bu xona-da-mi-siz? - Are you in this room?
23. U yaxshi. - He/she is good.
24. U yaxshi emas. - He is not good.
25. U xona-da. - He is in the room.

26. U xona-da-mi? - Is he in the room?
27. U xona-da emas. - He is not in the room.
28. Xona-ga. - To a room.
29. Bu xona-ga. - To the room.
30. Bu choy-xona-ga. - To the tea room.
31. Bor-a- - go
32. Bu xona-ga bor-a-man. - I go to the room.
33. Bu choy-xona-ga bor-a-siz. - You go to the tea room.
34. U choy-xona-ga bor-a-di. - He goes to the tea room.
35. Ishla-y- - work
36. Ishla-y-man. - I work
37. Ishla-y-siz. - You work.
38. Bu choy-xona-ga ishla-y-man. - I work in this tea room.
39. Men bu choy-xona-ga ishla-y-man. - I work in this tea room. (emphatic)
40. Siz bu choy-xona-ga ishla-y-siz. - You work in this tea room. (emphatic)
41. Ich-a-siz. - You drink.
42. Siz ich-a-siz. - You drink. (emphatic)
43. Bu choy-ni ichasiz. - You drink the tea. (direct object)
44. Men bu kofe-ni ichasiz. - I drink the coffee. (emphatic)
45. Ishla-y-di. - He works.
46. U ishla-y-di. - He works. (emphatic)
47. U bu kofe-ni ich-a-di. - He drinks the coffee. (emphatic)
48. Ishla-ma-y-di. - He does not work.
49. Ishla-ma-y-man. - I do not work.
50. Ishla-y-siz-mi? - Do you work?

As I note, there are some issues here. As can be seen, there are a lot of places where I'm not introducing new material, so much as assuring that old material still makes sense. However, following this sequence, you can learn about predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, predicate adjectives of place, direct objects, movement toward or into a place, conjugation of vowel and consonant stem verbs in the present tense, and the negative and interrogative as applied to all of the above. I'm not sure whether looking at this will make Uzbek makes sense to you, but putting this together has made it make more sense to me. So, to take a comment I made some time ago at HTLAL, if you're really serious about learning a language, figure out how you would teach it.

Can Michel Thomas still be your teacher, revisited

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:53:00 +0000

The other day, I wrote about whether Michel Thomas could still be your teacher, in a manner of speaking, if instead of trying to simply understand material, you tried to get a sense for how he would teach it. At the time, I referred to a few specific points, but as I've been thinking about this, I think it can go further. There are already some folks over at how-to-learn-any-language.com who have either taught according to what they regard as the method or even made (very) short courses for general distribution. (See here for more). This leads me to the next step for thinking things through: If you had to create a two-hour MT course for your language, what would you put in it? How about an eight-hour course?

One of the things that makes an MT course great is the sense of how much you've covered in a few hours. This is because while you learn the rules, in some sense, what you really learn is how to do stuff with the language. If you're making the notecards for what would go into your two hour course, you'd want to focus not on which conjugations or declensions you were going to teach. You'd want to focus on what the student should be able to do and look for the simplest way to achieve it without laying a totally inaccurate foundation for further learning.

I've started doing this with Uzbek, as sort of a thought experiment, and here's what I've hit upon... you should be able to:

1) Express a need
2) Express a want
3) Express what you are doing
4) Express what you did
5) Express what you are going to do
6) Say what something is... predicate noun
7) Say how something is... predicate adjective
8) Ask simple questions about all of the above

You can present this in whatever order makes things most understandable. For Uzbek, for example, the verb conjugations and the "to be" present endings are almost identical. So if you learn "I am American," you're just a step from learning "I see." The past tense endings are almost identical to the possessive, so I'd throw it in as a bonus. While the things above are not enough to make you fluent, if you could learn that much in two hours, it would be pretty cool, no? Even in four, it would be impressive, I think.

In the next week or so, I'll continue editing my cards, then post what I've come up with. I don't plan on teaching anyone else this way, but I think it will be useful for getting a better handle on what I know and what I need to work on. And if seeing how things got laid out for Uzbek helps anyone else think more clearly about where they need work on their language of choice, that will be great.

Na'vi and simpler approaches to language learning

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:04:00 +0000

Since Tolkien, I've been intrigued by conlangs, though not enough to actually learn one. I'm leaning the same way on Na'vi, the language of the blue people in the movie Avatar. However, I'm impressed by the way the thing is being marketed.

When you search for information on Tolkien's languages, most of it is pretty in depth. I've never had an interest in learning Klingon, but it seems to me to be something for pretty serious hobbyists. Na'vi, though complex and idiosyncratic - infixes and lenition? - is being presented as something fun to learn and chat in. The curious can visit a site, learnnavi.org, where there are downloadable guides, and even a workbook. It is suggested that you print out two copies of the workbook, do it once to sort of learn and do it again to review and solidify your learning. And when you open the workbook, it's full of word-searches, crossword puzzles and fill-in-the-blank exercises, not baffling grammar tables.

I bring up the Na'vi matter for two reasons. First of all, if you've always wanted to learn a conlang but weren't sure where to begin, here's what looks to be an easy one to get started in. The second thing that interests me, though, is this workbook approach. Have we been going about language learning all wrong? We know that with Iverson lists, SRSs and Pimsleur's Graduated Interval Recall, learning, forgetting and relearning is key. What if the answer is not to find the perfect course, but to find a good enough course, rush through it to get the main idea and do it again? I recently got Unforgettable Language's Spanish vocab program and that's what they suggested - listen to the program in a weekend, then listen again the next weekend.

I've had out the Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages again, and made myself a simplified version of the vocabulary section to put in for Uzbek. And my thought has been to fill it in once with research, review for a week, then see how much I can fill in from memory and how much I have to look back for. Rinse and repeat till I know 90%. But this has also set me to thinking about how far one might get by, for example, learning the contents of a simple phrasebook, learning enough grammar to see how the phrases work, then relearning those contents. I'm now thinking about better ways to make an Uzbek book - for myself - along the lines of the Na'vi workbook. After all, why spend your time just learning languages when you can spend it looking for easier ways to learn languages, eh? ;)

Fumbling Toward Polyglottery

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:43:00 +0000

This week, I've been sort of scattered, language learning wise. Part of this ties into language learning goals. And part of it, let's be frank, ties into ego.

I've always enjoyed dabbling with a number of languages. But I've always been stuck at two - English and French - where I have solid competence. On the other hand, I've let my Spanish and Italian wax and wane. The other day, I was updating my profile at how-to-learn-any-language.com and I noticed the criteria for basic fluency. Modestly estimating my abilities, I'm just a little bit short for Spanish. And so, while this is Italian month, I've wanted to dig in with the Spanish enough to maybe count myself a weak triglot. (My Spanish is far enough ahead of my Italian that this is the way to go, and, besides, I talk to Spanish speakers in Spanish all the time so ramping it up a bit will just make it easier to do something I'm already doing.)

This week, then, I've slogged through a bit more Michel Thomas Italian. I'm partway into disc 6. And I've worked through lessons 1-4 of the DLI's 200 Hour Uzbek course (though I don't have the audio, so my work consists of working through the written exercises and making sure I know all the vocabulary). Finally, I'm midway through lesson 1 of the DLI's Spanish Head Start course, which doesn't teach a ton, but what it covers it drills you on well. If you're a corporal, I know exactly what to say if we're introduced!

There's the background for our title: Fumbling Toward Polyglottery.

If you're going to be a polyglot, there's the question: How? Do you learn all your languages at once? Do you learn them all to fluency? Does it make more sense to learn them one at a time?

One of the challenges that comes up in becoming a polyglot is that you wind up a serial bilingual or serial trilingual instead. If you're going to be a true polyglot, you have to be able to have a bunch of languages running around in your head at the same time. So in a way, it's reassuring to see my learning go a little bit willy-nilly again. Keeping Spanish and Italian at the same time poses its particular set of challenges with respect to interference. I'm starting to discover, though, that if I study them both the same day, even during the same hour, instead of mixing them up, my brain catches on that I've switched. It's when I let one go dormant for a while that the interference starts, with me filling in the gaps in the weak language with guesses from the stronger one.

Want to be a polyglot? If you do, it's not just about learning multiple languages. It's about keeping them and letting them co-exist in your mind. So if you find yourself drifting between languages, instead of sticking to your schedule for learning them, don't worry. It's just practice for the day when you speak them all at a higher level.

Michel Thomas - Can he still be your teacher?

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:14:00 +0000

I'm about halfway through the my Michel Thomas Italian review, and have noticed a few things. For one thing, he doesn't irritate me nearly as much as he used to. I remember the first time I did the Spanish course, his "push down on the PREsent tense" and "hit the ending" on the future about drove me batty. Ten years later, and with a sense that I still wasn't always stressing the right syllable, I understood what he was doing. I'm finding the same thing with the Italian course: It's the things that before I wished he'd let go and move on from that are still weak points for me - my brain knows but my mouth can't keep up - and I'm glad for the practice. Likewise, his tracks for verbs and other stuff like that, useful when you're learning, are fantastic when you're reviewing a language you'd just been mumbling along in for a few years. So in this sense, Michel Thomas is still a valuable teacher for me. But there's another sense too...

In my last post, on Assimil-ating a language, I mentioned that I was working through a Uighur text. I mentioned there that memory tricks are good for making language comprehensible in the short term, but that what I don't actually make use of I lose. I think this is part of the thing with Michel Thomas - the trick allows you to remember while he's teaching you, but it's the drilling that allows you to remember and automatically produce later. There's another thing I mentioned, though, that ties into this: Thomas' observation that what you understand, you know, and what you know you don't forget. I think there's more to this than I realized.

Since I've been studying Uighur, I decided to review my Uzbek a little bit. However, reviewing my Uzbek while doing a Michel Thomas course has me thinking in a different way than usual. Specifically, I've found myself asking, How would Michel Thomas teach this? It's given me some useful stuff. The present tense endings are almost identical to the pronouns; ditto for the "to be" suffixes:

I come : Men kelaman
I am American : Men Amerikalikman

But what's more, the past tense endings are very similar to the possessive suffixes:

My book : Kitobim
I came : Men keldim

So Michel Thomas might say that "You are what you do and you do what you are - the pronouns, the present tense endings and the endings for 'to be' are almost the same." But then, and this is the place where a thought popped into my brain and I thought Thomas had possessed me: "What you have done, you own, so to make the past, add a 'd' for done, then the possessive ending."

I don't know whether looking at the examples will be enough for it to make sense to readers who don't know anything about Turkic languages, but trust me, the way they go together it would be sweet to see Michel Thomas style courses for them. Unfortunately, Thomas is gone, his heirs haven't always measured up and Hodder and Stoughton isn't planning to make any more courses. But that doesn't mean you can't try to think of how your best teacher would have explained something. So if you're at odds with an idea or concept, stop trying to understand it for yourself. Try to understand it for someone else, imagining what your favorite teacher might have said to explain at least the part you get so far. You might be surprised at how things fall together.

Assimil-ating non-Assimil materials

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:17:00 +0000

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd been playing around with an idea similar for getting similar benefits to the Assimil programs out of non-Assimil books. Today, I'd like to look at what I've been doing and how it works. This starts by considering just what it is that makes Assimil work, so let's start there.

Assimil books, as those who have used them know, work with facing page translations and extensive notes. The basic idea is that while working with the target language text, you can use your own language as a guide to what's going on. At a more advanced level, this can be problematic - the further you get into a language, the more you need to make it your own, not just a translation of a language you already speak. However, by the time people get to the advanced Assimil courses, they're mostly reading the target language text and glancing at their own language to double-check that they've understood, not to figure out what is being said. So what Assimil does is to give beginners a clear idea what's going on in the target language and advanced learners lots of good reading content. Cue the Michel Thomas quote:

What you understand, you know. And what you know, you do not forget.

There are lots of language textbooks out there that give you dialogs with translations. And there are others that eschew translations but have extensive notes, grammar explanations, etc. What happens in both cases, however, is that the learner has trouble assimilating the language because either it is unclear which words connect with which in the translations, or it is difficult to read the dialogs without turning it into a decoding exercise in flipping between the vocabulary, grammar explanations and the text.

What I have been doing with a Uighur textbook, Greetings from the Teklimakan, is to create a sort of passive phase Assimil course without an Assimil book. Here's what I do:

1) Learn the vocabulary list by whatever means necessary: link words, associations with words from other languages, etc. The technique is not important, because you only need to remember for five to ten minutes

2) Read the dialogs as best you can. Don't worry about understanding how everything goes together, about grammar rules, or whatever. Just try to make some basic sense of what's interacting with what.

3) Skim the grammar summaries, paying attention only to the sections with charts or endings. The idea is not to learn the endings, just to recognize what letter combinations are endings and whether they go with nouns, adjectives or verbs.

4) Re-read the dialog, seeing if you now recognize words you previously didn't since you've got a better idea what's the root and what's an ending.

5) Re-read the dialog once more and see if anything new falls into place.

6) Re-read the dialog the next day. If you think you mostly understand it, you can move on to the next one. If you've got doubts, repeat steps 1-5.

At no point should you actually try to learn anything. This is the passive phase. The idea, rather, is to get to where you're reading text in your target language and sort of understand what's going on.

A last thing: Every five lessons, you should probably skim the last five lessons and make sure they make at least as much sense as when you worked through them the first time.

I did the above with the Uyghur text for the first five lessons, including the re-read of all five lessons' dialogs. What I found is that my understanding of lesson 1-4 was actually pretty solid. Lesson 5 was weaker, but after a second reading, it started falling into place.

Note that if you want to, you can also put the words into Anki or somesuch. I did this, but I find that my recall is far better seeing the words in the context of the dialogs I know them from than in isolation.

When I have read all fifteen chapters this way, I will go back and work through the course - I haven't found a good version of Assimil's active phase to effectively apply yet. The nice thing about this system so far, though, is that I've built a passive vocabulary of around 300 words and I've learned a half-dozen structures without actively trying to learn any. And, I expect, working through the lessons when I'm done with this should be a breeze, since by then I'll be a false-beginner, not a neophyte.

The main thing we're looking at here, as is so often the case on this blog, is creating comprehensible input. New to a language and having trouble finding good materials for beginners? Apply this method to your materials as best you can and work a little ways into your text. Then, when you start to work in earnest, you'll have already assimilated hundreds of words of vocabulary and a few basic sentence types and you can get started with the "whys" of a language you already speak a little bit of, instead of everything being brand new.

Keeping Resolutions, and an update

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:50:00 +0000

Making resolutions/setting intentions is easy at New Year's. Especially if you've had enough bubbly and are feeling really good about the world. But the follow-through is harder. The most common resolutions revolve around diets and getting fit. J.D. Johannes and Nita Marquez did a series of posts about just this, but with good advice for all "resolutioneers," starting with this:

It is better to set a lower, attainable and more realistic goal. When you reach it, you can set a new goal or easily maintain it.

Nita, over the years, has found that people who set an un-realistic goal are actually sabotaging themselves. When they ‘discover’ they cannot reach the goal they have a justification to quit.

She has also found that people will work harder to achieve a lesser goal and usually surpass it.

Looking at my intentions and jump-off points, if I simply listen to CDs 8 hours a month for four months, I'll be well over half-way through the jump-off points. I did this on purpose: I wanted easy ways to make a strong start where I could pat myself on the back.

But what if you fall of the wagon? Again from Johannes and Marquez, but here:

“I think the one thing that people have realize is that small changes can lead to big results,” says Dr. Helen Smith, a Knoxville, TN psychologist and exercise enthusiast. “A person should set goals having to do with action.”

Smith says it is better to break it down into individual actions. Small steps, small daily decisions like eating a grilled chicken breast instead of a breaded, fried chicken breast, as noted above, can make a significant difference.

“It is better to break it down and then check off that you did it,” Smith says.
And if you slip once, do not let it snowball. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t throw it all away. A few hours later you will have another decision and try to get it right that time.

Diets don’t work because people make one mistake and decide to quit. Diets don’t work because some people keep making the wrong decisions.

So if you look up and realize you didn't study yesterday, what can you do? Study now! And if you look up and realize you didn't do anything all last week? Do something now! Even if you're doing a really intense self-study program, say 4 hours a day, that's still 20 hours a day that you're not studying. So don't focus on what you're not doing or when you're not doing it. Focus on the things you actually do, and pat yourself on the back for them. A day of studying missed can be followed by another day of not studying because you'll never find time to learn anyway. Or it can be followed by a day when you do study and pat yourself on the back for having the good sense to get back on track.

(By the way, if you want to be a toned, trim, fantastic looking polyglot, check out JD Johannes' site and get the book.)

* * *

Update

Now that I've looked at resolutions in general, how am I doing so far this year?

My intentions and jump-off points, again, are here.

For the month of January, I ran through Michel Thomas Spanish again. So that's one thing I can check off. And I did the first 18 lessons of Assimil Latin. That's not exactly a lesson a day, but it's a start.

And a final update: The other day, I mentioned stumbling into a different approach to using link-learning for vocabulary with a more traditionally formatted textbook. As I've played with this, I've found some new ideas for what you might call "Assimil-ating" an old-style book. My next post will include some ideas on this and a progress update on how that's going.

Sad News for Language Program Junkies

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:50:00 +0000

A bit of sad news for language lovers out there. After years in business, AudioForum is shutting down February 10th. Prior to the internet and amazon.com, the audio-forum catalog was a wonder to behold, offering a surprising range of courses for languages both familiar and unheard of. Unfortunately, excepting the Language/30 courses, most of their offerings were beyond what a hobbyist could reasonably spend on the off-chance that learning Russian, Estonian, Ojibwe or Kannada might one day seem like a good idea.

The only course I ever bought from them was their Colloquial Uzbek pack (sadly not nearly as good as the Routledge Colloquial series) and at the time it was a stretch - $85 for a spiral bound book and 4 CDs for a language I was interested in but had no practical reason to learn. (Still don't, but I'm still studying it, and its sister language, Uyghur.)

Anyway, their inventories are low, but what's left is 65% off. This still leaves a lot of stuff at $100 or so, but it may be the last shot you'll get at some of it. The store is here.

Reviewing with Michel Thomas; Haitian Creole

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:04:00 +0000

Readers of this site know that I've been running through Michel Thomas Spanish for the second time. In fact, I'm halfway through disc 8 now and will finish it tomorrow. I hadn't done Michel Thomas Spanish since 1998 or 1999, however, so while the content wasn't new I didn't have the script running through my head (I'd certainly forgotten how hard he harps on stress placement, for example). However, next month, I'm doing Italian. This promises to be trickier because I ran through the first six or seven discs only two years ago and while I'd like the review, I also want something more interesting. Here's what I came up with:

Oh the joys of technology! Once you put a playlist on your iPod, you can listen to it in order or you can put it on shuffle and it will play the tracks in random order. If you're learning with Michel Thomas (or any other progressive course) for the first time, of course you need to do the lessons in order. But what I'm looking for is a survey to make sure there's nothing I've forgotten. Mixing it up is a plus. So I've created a playlist for the discs I've already listened to. I'll listen on shuffle. That way instead of the five-six minute lesson blocks building up, bit by bit, they'll function more as pop quizzes - if I recognize a track as one where the content was easy, I'll skip it; if I remember getting caught on a point or two (or don't remember it that well), I'll listen. I already did this with the first two discs of Spanish since I had taken a few days off and found the variety made it much less tedious than playing the course straight forward and trying to pick out the best places to skip ahead a little.

If you've got a 30 lesson program, you can also do this with Pimsleur, picking up a language you did a while ago and only doing the lessons where the opening dialog doesn't immediately sound familiar.

Speaking of the shuffling, you can also use this for certain types of vocabulary review. For example, if you go to the DLI field support site, you can download the audio for a lot of their phrasebooks. If you make a playlist for each section, then you can review the same lists without driving yourself bonkers repeating the same things in the same sequence 100 times. (I think I've talked about this before).

The basic lesson for today then: If repetition is the mother of learning and variety is the spice of life, using shuffle and playlists will give you a bit of both.

(By the way, I wrote about some of this here quite some time ago. And for those who are really serious about their playlists, here's an old John Biesnecker article that's well worth reading if you haven't seen it before.)

* * *

One other note: With the sad events in Haiti, Haitian Creole resources are popping up. Whether you're planning to go there, think you might work with Haitian refugees resettled in your area or simply think it would show a little cultural solidarity to have a few words of their language on your tongue, let me point out two resources: First of all, there's the DLI field support site that I linked above. The link on the front page didn't work for me, but if you download the PDF and the Basic LSK from the downloads page, these should work. And, if you go to audible.com, you can download the first ten Pimsleur lessons for free (you do have to register for the site if you don't already have an account).

Intentions Update and a new approach for comprehensible input

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:54:00 +0000

We're a little over halfway through the month, so why not take a look at whether it's possible to stick to one's intentions for at least two weeks...

This January, I have actually dug into Spanish, which comes as a tremendous surprise to me. Spanish is usually the language I study because I know a bunch of native speakers and feel as though I ought to learn it - not one of the languages I study just for the fun of it. But getting the Spanish for Travelers book I mentioned the other day got me started with it, and so I have subsequently also done discs 1-6 of Michel Thomas Spanish. If I have to PUSH DOWN on the PREsent tense and surface on the ending one more time, I may go over the edge (those who have done the program will know how he goes a bit far in emphasizing stress placement) but I have to confess that my Spanish is flowing more smoothly again.

So I have actually worked fairly solidly on one of the jump off points for my intentions. I'm pleased about that. Next month, I'll be doing Italian.

* * *

The other day, I found this at HTLAL - a short collection of tips for language learning. I put together two of them:

[W]ork your way through [your] lessons as fast as you can manage. Don’t worry about memorising it all at the moment. You are just acquainting yourself with the language for now. Don’t let yourself be bogged down by stuff you don’t understand.

* * *

[U]se the linking method to enable us to learn a useful vocabulary in record time.

Here's how I applied it with a Uyghur textbook (just experimenting). First I used the linking method to memorize the vocabulary list for the chapter. Then I skimmed through the dialogs while the vocabulary was still fresh. Then I read through the main points of the chapter. In the morning, I read through the dialogs again. All the words were still in my memory and the dialogs were easy to understand.

I've never had a lot of luck learning vocabulary from link lists - not for long term memory, anyway. But this is a little different - it's just getting the words into short-term memory long enough you can make use of them. In a sense, using this (or any other memory technique) before working on dialogs or other content in a new language provides a way to turn texts that would otherwise be a struggle into comprehensible input. If you've got one of those textbooks that is based on texts and cumbersome vocabulary lists, you might try this to lighten the load.

Phrasebooks, stock phrases and intermediate language learning

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 07:37:00 +0000

... plus a hypnosis follow-up

A while ago, on HTLAL, I ran across a reference to Spanish for Travelers by Lewis Robins. Apparently, the for Travelers books are just about impossible to find. I got one on Amazon marketplace for $2.50, but the next cheapest one on offer was $25 or $30. Anyway, these books have about 360 phrases on a variety of topics, laid out in a special format for you to give yourself vocabulary tests with them.

The thing that struck me with Spanish for Travelers is the range of structures in it. For a beginner, I'm not sure what would happen trying to keep some of them straight. You could learn them by rote, but it would be hard to make sense of how they work. However, for me, it was very handy to have a handful of ready sentences with the subjunctive and a number of others with formal imperatives. It occurs to me that phrasebooks pose some of the same problems for people new to a language. But again, the range of structures (Could you please..., Would you be able to..., I would like to have... - a buffet of Michel Thomas "handles") provide a great quick review for someone who knows the basic structures but would like to see them in context. So perhaps an odd exercise is worth considering: Instead of using a phrasebook to learn a language, use it to review and find gaps in your everyday vocabulary after you're at an intermediate level.

* * *

The hypnosis article from last week drew some interesting responses. If you're interested in hypnosis and language learning, check out the comments for different perspectives. And if you've had success with hypnosis and language learning, I'd love to hear about that in the comments.

Hypnosis and Language Learning - A Different Twist

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:49:00 +0000

A little while ago, there was a post at HTLAL about hypnosis and language learning called A Relaxing Approach to Language Learning. Notes the author:

[I]t suddenly occurred to me that listening to some hypnosis audios would be a charming way to improve your listening skills while getting some much needed relaxation in.

I think this is a nice idea, but I have one caveat based on both my (limited) knowledge of hypnosis and personal experience: If you're using hypnosis audio to improve your listening skills, you run the risk that the engagement that comes with active listening will interfere with the hypnotic effect you sought.

I've always been dubious of using hypnosis to learn language and still am. It's fine to use to improve behavioral patterns that impact language learning. And I think it can be helpful to get into a frame of mind where you can work with comprehensible input without feeling the need to be consciously analytical. But to put it the way I should have to begin with, hypnosis is for getting in the right state to learn, not for learning per se.

Listening to hypnosis audio in your target language is a different animal. Here, the idea is not to figure out the language, but to let the language carry you away. That means you need to understand enough that you won't be frustrated by the content. The question is: then what? Curious, I downloaded a few hypnosis tracks in French and got a Spanish meditation CD (one I already had in English). Here's what I have found:

I don't know whether the subconscious, on hearing language it doesn't understand, will store it away for later processing or disregard it as it does any other noise that isn't of use for it. I suspect it's the latter. Certainly, if I fail to understand a word while in hypnosis, I have a very hard time remembering what it was to look it up when I come out of hypnosis, and the few I have remembered are words I had seen before or that were simple enough that I had no trouble imagining how they would be spelled. What's more, with Spanish (in which my skills are weaker), I have to listen to the same session a couple times before my brain gets used to the script and I can ignore, rather than fretting about, words that I might have missed. And I get the most benefit from audio with binaural beats, which induce hypnosis whether the words themselves hypnotize you or not. Given my experience, I don't think this is for learning a new language or for taking in "future comprehensible input" that your brain will sort out after you've learned more.

I do think, however, that hypnosis can be very useful for an activity near and dear to language learners: Dreaming in a foreign language. When you're in hypnosis, you're usually in the theta state - half-awake, half-asleep. Contrary to the name, it's the awake part that makes it useful; all the sleep part does is lower your filters. Two of the clear signs that you're in hypnosis are softer breathing and REM - just like with the early stages of dreaming - but as a general rule you still have some awareness of your physical environment, and if something makes you decide you want to leave hypnosis you usually come out of it on your own, unlike with bad dreams. That said, hypnosis feels a lot like dreaming. And I've found that when I'm doing visualization exercises under hypnosis in French, any place where I'm asked for a verbal response (think of a question that has been bothering you...) the response comes in French. Furthermore, when I come out of hypnosis, I feel the way I feel when I wake up from dreaming in a foreign language. My Spanish isn't any better, but it's more fluid. And my French flows more naturally - there's less temptation to switch to English as opposed to paraphrasing if the the word I'm looking for isn't coming. For French, it really feels like I could get back to the same naturalness - if not level - that I'd have if I stayed there a week or two (though nothing comparable to living there, sorry).

So, if you're a beginner in a language and looking for a shortcut or a way to get in touch with your language... sorry, I don't think there's much for you here. But if you're a reasonably advanced speaker - advanced enough to understand the images in visualizations and commands about regulating your breath and concentrating on the sensations in the different parts of the body - then hypnosis audio provides a way to "dream" in your target language any time you want.

For free hypnosis audio, I'd start here:
French: PasseportSanté.net
Spanish: Youtube search - you'll have to strip out the audio or convert them to iPod videos

If you're curious about Latin...

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:38:00 +0000

... but just want a little idea what it's all about, here's a three-step program that can be done in less than a month:

1) Do this C J Cherryh Latin course - 8 lessons, all rather short - and learn how basic sentences go together in the present tense.

2) Get a look at Medieval Latin in Britain with the UK National Archive's Beginners' Course.

3) Strengthen your Medieval Latin with the UK National Archive's Advanced Course.

This program won't have you reading Vergil or Cicero, of course. But it will give you the tools to pick apart Medieval Latin prose, as well as giving you a good head start on textbooks for Classical Latin like Wheelock's.

2010 Intentions/Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:24:00 +0000

Last year, I set New Year's Intentions, rather than resolutions. This year, I'm sticking with that, but with one added element: Jumping off points.

The problem with New Year's Resolutions, of course, is that a lot can happen in a year. Setting a goal that will take a year to achieve is just asking for trouble. What's needed, then, is a general idea of what you want to achieve, the direction it will point you in, and how to get started.

Over on the right hand side is a link to my long-term language goals. They boil down to basically two elements: 1) building familiarity with modern languages from the Indo-European and Turkic families, thus opening up a large stretch of Eurasia to basic understanding and 2) getting a better sense of the Indo-European part of that equation in looking at the older languages that underline what is today spoken from Portugal in the West to Tajikistan in the East. This is a big project that will take years.

Here's what I'm looking at to get started this year:

Modern Indo-European:

I intend to maintain and build on my Spanish.
Jumping off point: Review Michel Thomas Spanish, do Michel Thomas Advanced Spanish

I intend to maintain and build on my Italian.
Jumping off point: Review Michel Thomas Italian, do Michel Thomas Advanced Italian.

I intend to resurrect my (limited) German.
Jumping off point: Review Michel Thomas German.

Early Indo-European:

I intend to improve my Latin and make it more natural.
Jumping off point: Work through the Assimil Latin course passively.

I intend to revive and build on my NT Greek.
Jumping off point: Complete the EIEOL NT Greek course.

I intend to acquaint myself with Gothic in the Germanic family.
Jumping off point: Complete the EIEOL Gothic course (which has several readings in common with the NT Greek course).

Turkic:
I intend to revive my limited Turkish.
Jumping off point: Redo the Pimsleur Conversational Turkish course.

This is not, of course, everything I'll do this year. There's nothing about the Iranian languages, the Celtic languages, the Turkic languages to the East or French, for example. Given my tendency to drift hither and thither, I'll come to them in time. But this gives me seven concrete things to do in building toward larger goals whose specific nature I can adjust depending on what the New Year brings.

Irritated by Sanskrit Translators/Beginning to see Thomson's Point

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:08:00 +0000

A while back, I wrote about Karen Thomson's quest to rescue Vedic Sanskrit from the Indologists. This week, I got hold of the lyrics to Rasa's "Prabhupada-padam." It turns out they are from a poem in Sanskrit. Not knowing much in the way of Sanskrit, I next needed a translation.

I still don't know enough to speak to Thomson's thoughts on the Penguin translation of the Rig Veda, etc. But if what I've found for "Prabhupada-padam" is indicative, I think I see her point.

As I mentioned, I don't know that much Sanskrit myself. But here's the line that ends all four verses of the song (and all 11 verses of the poem):

pranamami sada prabhupada-padam

At this site, this line is translated:

I eternally offer my respects unto that charming effulgence that shines from the radiant lotus toe-tips of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura Prabhupada.

The line is not again translated until the final verse.

Now, let's have a look at this site. Here, it is given a different translation each time! The first three are:

I make my obeisance unto the lotus feet of that illustrious great soul, worshippable by one and all - perpetually do I make my obeisance unto the radiance emanating from the toenails of the holy feet of my Lord. (1)

I make my obeisance unto his lotus feet - perpetually do I make my obeisance unto the radiance emanating from the toenails of the holy feet of my Lord. (2)

Perpetually do I make my obeisance unto that effulgence emanating from the toenails of the holy feet of my Lord. (3)

Call me old school, but when every verse of a poem ends with the same line, the translation ought to come pretty close to doing this - there might be variations in tense, or aspect, or mood or number that the language translated from distinguishes differently, but lexical items should not leap about taking on new forms willy-nilly. While we're at it, did you see how many words it took to translate these four from Sanskrit (comprising about six lexemes from what I can see, by the way)?

If you did this with New Testament Greek... [shudder]

Here's are my suggestions, following notes on the lexical items:

pranamami (I bend myself) sada (always, ever) prabhupada (prabhu=lord; pad=foot - a suffix like "-ship" in English) - padam (foot)

Ever I bow to my lordship's feet.
(most concise)

I always bow before my lordship's feet.
(tottering iambic pentamenter; the third beat is off)

Ever I do bend down before my lordship's feet.
(12 syllables, mimicking the verse form, jagati (term found here), in which it was composed)

I'm not saying you can't go for the elegant choice here and there when translating, or try to unpack some of the meaning that would be lost by a too literal translation. But "effulgence emanating from the toenails of the holy feet of my Lord"? It's not even close to all being in the text. And even if you want to find it there, then it ought not be "radiance" in one verse, "brilliance" in another and "effulgence" in still another. The original author used an ancient verse form and packed in meaning by making use of Classical Sanskrit's love of compound words. And he rounded it off with a repeating refrain, a point to be drummed home. A proper translation ought to reflect this.

Now, I am far from being able to do a full translation of this, and I don't intend to learn enough to get super close anytime soon. But if you follow classic advice for learning a language - find a song you like and get the lyrics and a translation - then if this is the norm in Sanskrit translation I can only wish you the best of luck!

Wanting to Speak / Wanting to Learn

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:45:00 +0000

In my last post, I commented:

Now might be an amusing time to review last year’s resolutions...

I decided to do just that. Now, last year I set intentions, not resolutions, and I think I'm sticking with that. So, here are last year's intentions, with updates on how I did in [square brackets]:

I set the intention to regularly use and rebuild my French toward regaining fluency.

[I took a course at the Alliance française, read quite a bit and made a point of speaking more French with the Francophones I work with.]

I set the intention to regularly study Spanish and build toward conversational competence.

[I did Pimsleur Spanish I & II, listened to some Michel Thomas and encouraged a Spanish teacher at our school to correct me more often. There's one other thing below...]

I set the intention to regularly study Italian and rebuild toward basic conversational competence.

[I did Pimsleur Italian I and the Michel Thomas course, and listened to a lot of Italian music. I should have done more, but my Italian is better now than it was last year.]

I set the intention to rebuild and regain basic skills in spoken Mandarin.

[Oops.]

I should note that in the middle of the year, I did a Language Goals page where I refined my plans. But it's the intentions I want to focus on for the moment because they highlight a dichotomy I've touched on before but not in quite a while and not in this way. It goes like this:

Which languages do you want to learn?

Which languages do you wish you could speak?

Earlier this week, I got David Brodsky's Spanish Vocabulary. In it, he shows how Latin roots gave rise to words in Spanish and to similar words, via Old French, in English. Just as I love tracing Indo-European roots to see connections between Latin, Greek and other languages, this is right up my alley. It's a place where I love learning language and I love learning about language. If you told me I could either wave a magic wand and instantly speak great French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, or I could spend years figuring out how they derived from Latin and finding the connections between them, I'd ask if I could use the wand for the budget to buy books and figure out the Romance languages on my own. In short, the process of learning the Romance languages has rewards in its own right. One of my favorite classes in grad school was History of the French Language, and there are still few things that delight me more than making the connection between words in French, Spanish and Italian that I hadn't seen before.

So, what languages do I want to learn or learn better? French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and Uzbek come to mind.

Returning to the magic wand, though, which languages do I wish I spoke? If you let me pick a language that I could instantly know and without effort, it would be Mandarin. I've done the "learn Mandarin" thing off and on for a while, and what I find is that I like the idea of knowing Mandarin much better than the idea of learning it. It would be neat to go into the shops and restaurants in Cupertino and show off my Mandarin. It would be neat to meet Mandarin speakers and be able to have a conversation with them. But when I imagine the thrill of poring over character charts, and mastering tones, etc, that thrill just isn't there.

I think the Wanting to Speak/Wanting to Learn distinction is an important one. And let's break it down to this test:

If you had a magic wand and could choose, would you:

Have all the resources you could possibly want to learn the language?
Instantly know the language?

If your answer is number two, and you don't have a really strong external motivation to learn the language, it's probably not the one you want to take up for self-study. And if you want to be a polyglot, languages for which you answer 2 are probably going to be the ones that hold you back and drag you down. So before you make that resolution that this year you're going to learn German, really, try this little test. Because if you really want to learn a new language, it's likely not going to be something that you "do," then check off your list. Rather, it's something you're going to be working at and coming back to for a long time to come.

Last words: The picture I painted at the end there could sound a little grim. But actually, it's an immensely positive thing. If you really are interested in a language, the further in you get the more you'll discover there is to know, and the more there is left to learn. And that means that unlike a really great book or movie, once you get into a really great language for you it never ends.

Getting Language Back

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:01:00 +0000

The other day, I needed a flashlight. Sure enough, the batteries in my regular one were dead. I did have another flashlight, one of those models where you turn a crank to charge the built in battery. I tend to avoid this one because you have to turn the crank a full two minutes to get it to do anything if you haven’t used it in a while. But in this case, it’s all that was to hand so I cranked it up and after a few minutes I had a weak beam, but enough for my purpose. Two minutes later, the light had faded so I had to crank it up again. But after the third crank, it gave pretty decent light and it lasted until my work was done.

There’s a lesson here in terms of language skills. If you let a language lie dormant, it’s not going to come back all at once. But that doesn’t mean there’s no point. Sometimes it takes a while to recharge your skills. But if you do enough to activate them, take it as far as you can and then push on, you’ll be amazed to discover how much is not in fact forgotten, but is just waiting to come to light again.

For the past few months, I’ve been idly traipsing among the various Indo-European families, trying to get a sense of how some of the languages I’ve studied fit together. It’s no great surprise that French, Spanish and Italian come easily – I’m always speaking and working with them. On the other hand, I’ve been astonished to see my Latin pop back in little time. And looking at New Testament Greek, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much of my Classical Greek vocabulary still lingers.

Right now, I believe, people are focused on the holiday season with Christmas just around the corner. But we’re almost to the new year, and resolution season again. Now might be an amusing time to review last year’s resolutions and maybe use time on the airplane or time in the car to re-awaken that language you were going to learn this year for sure. Or you could fall asleep listening to Michel Thomas instead of the big game on a Sunday afternoon. Whatever the case, as long as you’re breathing, language skills you’ve once acquired are never truly dead. So if you had language learning plans that didn’t work out, don’t despair. Use any free time you can spare this holiday season to reawaken that language you really meant to learn last year and come January 1st you can feel good about resolving to continue your studies.

Tell me a story...

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:47:00 +0000

The other day, I wrote about using bilingual texts to get to know bits of a language the same way a child comes to know the content of a story book. There's another possibility, of course, and that's getting your iPod to read you the same story over and over. I've been doing this with the first ten lessons or so of Lingva Latina. First I follow along as the text is read to me, understanding what I understand and not understanding what I don't. Then I go through the text more carefully (though not what you'd call an intensive reading) to make sure I understand fairly well what's going on. After that, in spare moments, I put on a lesson and listen. If I'm not understanding, I'll go back and look up the text, but usually that's not the case.

What I'm talking about here is, of course, nothing new. But I'd like to think I have one thing to contribute here: I'm being completely unscientific about it! No log book, no documented number of hours listening, no careful shadowing of the phrases. The idea is to get to where I follow (extremely simple) Latin in the background, as though someone else were listening to it on the radio and I caught a snippet, for example.

We all need exposure to comprehensible input. What could be better, then, than content you've already worked out? You just need a way to get exposure without being bored to tears.

I'd like to tip my hat to Steve the Linguist a little bit here. In the past, I've been agitated that there aren't a lot of good resources for learning to speak languages likes Latin, Ancient Greek and Old English. I'd add Sanskrit (resources exist but I'm largely unimpressed; suggestions in the comments?) and Old Irish to that list (though they're working on Gothic!). And in the long run, I still think it would be neat to be able to chat in them. But right now, that's not where I am. In fact, at the moment I'm delighted to be able to pick up some Latin and get a sense of what's going on. And the other day, after painstakingly working through a Sanskrit lesson at EIEOL I was thrilled to feel a bit of the Rig Veda seeing the ways words related to Savitar's name echoed through the text. Seeing as I have no plans to be a Vedic or Latin scholar and no Romans or Ancient Indo-Aryans are due in town next week, these are not languages I need to start producing speech in and so I'm really just enjoying the content and the fun of language learning.

Reading and listening a set number of hours can be good things. First and most important, it's a good motivational tool - it lets you document that you're doing something and it drives you to do something during the slow periods. Learning to speak is also a good thing - the active side of language knowledge is important. That said, language learning burnout is pretty common, and one of the reasons is that people forget they're doing it for fun. As the holidays approach, a lot of people will be busy traveling, preparing for guests, squeezing in all the stuff at work that needs to be done before year-end, etc. It's a rough time for steady work at a hobby. So if things start to slip, don't worry about it. Instead, find yourself some audio or simple text, listen and read when you can, and make sure you're enjoying your time with the language(s) you're learning.

Gothic for Goths!

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:49:00 +0000

If you've ever wanted to learn a little Gothic, but wading though Wulfilas' Bible translations wasn't where you wanted to start, boy is there a site for you!

Gothic for Goths is a handful of youtube lessons (so far) with copies of the scripts, vocabularies (with grammar information) and even a video-style alphabet book for the little ones. It was created by a student of Germanic linguists who with his neighbor was making fun of "goths" - that specimen of pale, made-up teen that runs about all in black - by using the real Gothic language for things they imagined "goths" might say - "My black underwear is chafing," "Do you want fries with that?" and so forth. If you've ever wanted to say, "Where's my chupacabra?" in an medieval language now's your chance!

Click here for the lessons and lesson info.

(To get more in-depth, albeit with Wulfilas, visit EIEOL)

Michel Thomas programs without Michel Thomas?

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:35:00 +0000

We're all familiar by now with the range of "Michel Thomas Method" programs out there that have come out since his death: Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Dutch...

Unfortunately, the quality of these programs has varied somewhat. This is due in part to confusion over just what the Michel Thomas Method is. First of all, there's what the method is legally: The patent is for a system in which a teacher instructs two live students on audio and a home student is asked to participate by hitting the pause button and give responses as a third student. Then there is the Michel Thomas magic, which is different for everybody who enjoyed his courses.

Only people with the right paperwork can present a course the way the Michel Thomas Method audio courses are presented. His grab bag of tricks for making language learning easy, on the other hand, succeeds largely by its mix of pre-existing teaching and knowledge management techniques, not by one unique thing that would likely be patentable.

Some of the folks hanging out at the How To Learn Any Language forum have been talking about this, and at least one of them has made a course:

Michel Thomas Style Free Norwegian Course

If you go to the page, you'll find some rapidshare download links on the first and second pages. Sadly, the author had to quit after six lessons as he has a life of his own to live. This is probably the biggest problem with making your own MT, Pimsleur or other style lessons. Indeed, it can be hard enough to maintain your own studies, never mind prepare materials for others, if you don't have a full-time job in language curriculum development.

I listened to the first three of the six tracks last night, at any rate, and I'd say that Mads has done some nice stuff. In particular, he hit on the thing I liked best about MT courses: the use of building blocks so that you can make your own sentences with guidance, rather than just parroting other people's sentences. If you're interested in Norwegian, have a look. And if you're interested in something else, assuming you like the MT courses, why not think about how he would have taught the material? In particular, look for the building blocks you'd use to explain how to make pretty good sentences if you were trying to teach someone else what you'd learned so far. It's a good clarifying exercise, especially if you're at that phase where you understand all the readings but are having trouble saying things on your own.

Children with Picture Books, Adults with Facing Translations

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:03:00 +0000

Via languagefixation, I stumbed across this bit at HTLAL from Iverson of Iverson list fame:

Reading something in a language where you have to look up several words in each sentence feels frustrating, and doing something that makes you feel frustrated also makes you feel tired, and then it is 'hard' in my book. But I still do it in order to 'crack the code' in a new language.

If it's a matter of missing a few words here and here in order to get the meaning then it isn't too bad, and only then I would use the term "comprehensible input". And if I can read all of it without having any doubts then it isn't hard at all - even if I haven't really learnt the language or the dialect in question - but then I also wouldn't learn much from it.
(end of quote)

The idea of using bilingual texts to overcome this problem is not new, but with the advent of the internet it has become much easier to find short bilingual texts to use in intensive reading (finding transcripts/translations of texts is not quite as easy, but still better than in the evil old days).

Iverson talks about the difference between intensive reading - puzzling every word and how it works in a short text - versus extensive reading - going through longer passages for the gist. He makes the point that beginners need more intensive reading, while more advanced students need more extensive reading to maximize their exposure.

Of late, I've taken a look at texts in Old Irish, Latin and Ancient Sanskrit at Early Indo-European Online. While my Latin is so-so, for Old Irish and Ancient Sanksrit, I'm definitely at a low level. And for this, I've found the EIEOL lessons to be ideal. They're an invitation to intensive reading where the work has been done for you. To wit, first you get a passage of one sentence or three or four lines of poetry. Then you get a word by word breakdown with meaning and grammar explained. Then you get the whole text with a semi-literal translation. I've gone the next step by copying text and translation into a little notebook - my own parallel translation - then returning to the texts at a later time to see how much I can come up with on my own and how much I can piece together once I've glanced again at the translation.

When little children "read" their favorite books, they're often going on memory. The words aren't coming from "reading" but from their memory of what a grown-up said when the book was turned to that page. And yet, bit by bit, they start to make the associations. This, I think, is what's happening with my facing translation notebook. The prompt is the translation, rather than the pictures, but the point is the same, namely to start to associate chunks of words with a particular sense or meaning. Using a facing page translation for extensive reading is, of course, useful. It lets you keep moving without suddenly discovering you have no idea what's going on. For intensive reading, though, there's a different purpose: encouraging you to mentally fit together the words in the text to recapture what you've forgotten from your intensive reading.

What I've found with my re-"reading" of texts I've studied intensively is that there's another moment that ought be given more attention in language learning. We all know about the epiphany, the ah-ha moment when a language starts to fall into place. But there's also the "oh yeah" moment when something half-forgotten comes back. Much of the process of learning comes in remembering something just before you'd otherwise forget it. This is the point of the Pimsleur method with graduated interval recall, not to mention SRSs like Anki. So when something comes back to us that we were stumbling on, we ought to celebrate in the knowledge that we've strengthened our "memory muscles" through exercising them. Celebrate your "oh yeahs"!

We often think of small children as sponges, soaking up language. But if we recall the fifty-thousand times we made our parents re-re-re-re-read our favorite books to us, correcting them if they got a word wrong, it's clear that we got a lot of repetitive content that made some chunks of language so much a part of us that even twenty or thirty years later we can fill in the next line to "Green Eggs and Ham." Krashen emphasizes the importance of comprehensible input that tests our abilities. Maybe one form this input might take is difficult texts we've already worked, the struggle being to re-make tenuous connections till they become more solid. So, here's the method:

1) find a challenging text
2) analyze the hell out of it
3) find (or make) a quasi-literal translation - something designed to help you remember what's going on in the text
4) come back to the text in a day and see how much you can get on your own, how much you can get with the translation and how much sends you back to your detailed notes
5) repeat until the text is either an old friend or someone you're sick of listening to

I've found that after the fifth or sixth time through, I'm having my "oh yeah" moments before I've gotten back to the translation. And that prepares me for new "oh yeah" moments when I encounter the word again and instead of forgetting that I ever learned it, I recall where I've seen it before when I see it defined again.

This method won't be for everyone or every language. But if you're working with a difficult language (ie one with a very different grammar and vocabulary than any other that you speak), it's a great way to start feeling comfortable with the language, especially if a dearth of resources to play with enhances the value of getting the most you can out of what you have. Give it a try!

Jack of All Language Trades?

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:16:00 +0000

The other day, Street Smart Language Learning was writing about serial language learning and its temptations. As he puts it:

As you progress farther and farther into the language, finding those discrete units that you don't already know takes more and more time. Thus, going from 90% to 99% proficiency will take a heckuva lot longer than going from 0% to 10%, or probably even 0% to 50%. The point of debate this brings up is whether it's better to get a bunch of languages up to 90% proficiency, or one or two up to 99% proficiency.

And that gets us to linguistic wanderlust, i.e., the desire to work on getting a new language up to 90% before the previous one is up to 99%. As Language Fixation describes, the speed at which you can do this always make it attractive to the serial language learner.

I think there's another element here, though: How much good does that last 9% do? I spent some time in grad school for French literature. As a result, I know a fair bit about how to discuss poetry in French. However, I don't know the word for monkey wrench. A few years ago, I sought to remedy this by asking a native French speaker. She didn't know the French word either, though she knew the English. For me, "monkey wrench" represents a gap in my French vocabulary. For her, it's a word she doesn't really need to use, so "Give me the wrench... no, the other one" is good enough for a native speaker. I think this is one of the really problematic parts of getting from 90% to 99% - you have to know more than a native speaker, because the language learning process tends to leave you with different lacunae in your vocabulary than the process of growing up in the culture. If your goal is to be grade-A fluent, that's something you have to deal with. But do you need to be at 99% to enjoy a language and its culture? Some people do, especially if the work or hobby that brings them to the language is really involved. But deciding to get acquainted with another language and culture, instead of developing a native's sensibilities for the one you're currently studying, is not an error. It's a choice.

* * *

I'm enjoying a four day vacation right now. I thought about using the time to burrow further into Old Irish. But something told me I ought consider a different direction. So I'm reviewing my Latin. Over the last few days, I've gone through 8 of 12 lessons in the Cambridge Latin Course (Unit 1), 5 of 35 lessons in Lingva Latina (Part 1) and I've been reading at random from the 3rd year Oxford Latin Course. It's amazing how quickly it comes back.

There was a time when I was a serial language learner. I'd learned beginner stuff for 20+ languages and had only a tenuous grasp on more than one or two. (Hence the blog title.) But where the question used to be, "What new language are you studying?" it's now, "What language are you back to?" French, Italian and Spanish are always with me, of course. But generally, the other languages I study are languages I've looked at before. And each time I return to a language, I find that what I've learned about language learning and related languages since the last time makes the experience richer and makes points that formerly baffled me seem obvious. It's an approach that works for me because I'm not on a deadline and my real world use of language is mainly in coaching other learners and offering the necessary pleasantries to help people feel more at home - breadth of language experience serves me better than depth would anyway.

If you want to be - or your circumstances require you to be - a polyglot, I think the old thing about how much to learn before moving on, etc., can be a canard. At some point, you're going to become not a serial language learner but a circular language learner. If you're a serious student of language, you're probably still learning words in your native tongue. If that's not done with all the practice you've got in it, what chance is there that your German is done so that you're ready to move on to French? The other thing is that if you want to be a polyglot, you can't learn German, then forget it to focus on French. Sooner or later, you're going to have to find a way for the two of them to co-exist in your head.

Street Smart Language Learning was pivoting off a post by Language Fixation which included the following observation:

Another horrible side effect of this perceptual problem [of it taking to long to move from intermediate to advanced], is language wanderlust. I’ve personally studied probably 15 languages or so, and in most of them i’m still at a beginner stage. I think one of the reasons that i flip around so much is that when i’m starting to lose track of my progress in one language, and i’m unable to see the constant motion that’s happening, i start to itch for that thrill that comes with the seemingly rapid increase at the start of another language.

The answer to the problem, for me, is to replace the thrill of learning a new language with the thrill of rediscovering an old one. In this way, you can build a core of languages that you get progressively more comfortable with, rather than feeling like, I'm thinking about French today, but I have to do my German.

Some people, I know, are very smart, very disciplined, very intelligent in their execution of learning languages. If you're one of those people, I salute you in learning a language to 99% before flitting off to another one, if that's what you want to do. But if your long term interest is in having a strong foundation in a number of languages, the circular model is something you're going to wind up following if you want to maintain multiple languages. So if you've got that Wanderlust, don't fight it. Channel it, and over time you'll see your understanding of multiple languages grow.

Covering some etymology

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:59:00 +0000

A few odds and ends on where words come from:

Let's take a look at an Indo-European root, *(s)tego-. It means "to cover." Here are some derivatives:
> *tog > Germanic *thakjan, which gives us thatch, as in a thatch roof.

>*tog-a > you guessed it, Latin toga!

> Latin tegere, to cover > Latin tectum (roof) > Sp. techo, It. tetto and Fr. toit - roof

But we haven't covered everything yet. There's also:

> proto-Celtic *tegos > Old Irish tech > Irish teach - all meaning house (it's ti in Breton)

Finally, you'll note that the root was *(s)tego-. That "(s)" does get used sometimes, specifically in the Greek stegos (covered): a stegosaurus is a "covered lizard," so called because it is almost fully covered in armor.

The real meaning of Ancient Sanskrit?

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:16:00 +0000

This weekend, I took a look at the Sanskrit lessons at Early Indo-European Online. It's a funny thing: these languages can be so old, and yet with a lot still unsettled. As an aside, I've been hanging around a forum for Gaulish where much is yet uncertain, and skimming various Old Irish resources, all of which have to leave plenty of blanks for unattested words and word forms, so I'm getting used to the idea that Indo-European studies is still a field with much to work out, if only the funds were there to do it. Which brings me back to Sanskrit. The EIEOL lessons take a different tack than what I've seen elsewhere, asserting that most of what we know about Ancient Sanskrit is wrong. The problem: The people who started the scholarly tradition were baffled themselves about how to interpret some of the oldest texts, and did their best with a mix of speculation, folk etymology and the conviction that the texts somehow related to the religious practices they had developed in the 400 or 500 years between the composition of the songs in the Rig Veda and those songs actually being written down. The authors of the lessons assert that sometimes the scholarly traditions can take you off the trail rather than keeping you on it. So, instead, they approach Sanskrit the way they would approach any other Indo-European language for which they had a few texts but little outside information, in essence doing with Sanskrit what we, of necessity, had to do with Hittite and Tocharian.

If you're into Sanskrit, but the Vedas have always given you trouble compared with texts from the classical period, have a look. For my own part, I don't know enough to know whether the authors, Slocum (and especially) Thomson are tilting at windmills or on to something. But it looks like there are some interesting insights into Ancient Sanskrit worthy of consideration here.

* * *

Speaking of Old Irish (wasn't I?), I've been digging into Stifter again, and looking at the forms for proto-Celtic and primitive Irish that he thoughtfully provides, and it seems like each time I look through, another element of the grammar seems to make sense in light of Latin, or Greek, or whatever. Who knows? Maybe some of my conjectures are even correct; but at the least they work for me. So a parting thought: if you're a budding polyglot, use anything you've got from any aspect of your language background that you can, if it helps, and keep an eye out for things that help you get a handle on how languages or language families work. There are a lot of associations to be made that are founded on actual knowledge, not just the silly tricks you find in the "you can remember anything" books.

The "Indo-European Family"

noreply@blogger.com (gbarto) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:30:00 +0000

The other day, I wrote:

For at least fifteen years now, I've taken an interest in the Indo-European family and the relationship between older languages. Sometimes, this is just for curiosity's sake. Sometimes, it helps me better understand modern languages.

Typically, when you’re given a list of Indo-European cognates, the name of the game is to show the obvious interrelation between the languages with transparently similar words. Today, I’d like to take a different tack, showing where different words come from and how an understanding of the Indo-European background can offer better understanding and help you make connections you might otherwise miss. The topic is family vocabulary; the languages we’re looking at are Irish, Italian and Dari. To make the connections for Italian and Irish, I’ll be going by way of Latin and Old Irish. I don’t happen to know anything about Avestan, Old Persian, etc, so we’ll have to make some logical leaps on the Dari.

Father
Proto-Indo-European pəter > Latin pater > Italian padre (note that the “ə” denotes a laryngeal, i.e. a sound in the throat that developed into a vowel later)
PIE pəter > Old Irish athair > athair (initial “p” in PIE and proto-Celtic dropped by the time of Classical Old Irish)
PIE pəter > Dari padar

Mother
PIE mater > Lt. mater > It. madre (works just the same as pəter)
PIE mater > Oir. máthair > Ir. máthair (same)
PIE mater > Dari madar

Mother and father are pretty easy. There’s a third word in the same family:

Brother
PIE bhrater > Lt. frater > It. fratello (diminuitive suffix to mark a little “frater”)
PIE bhrater > OIr. derb (certain) + bratháir > derbh-bhratháir > Ir. deartháir (imagine if in English we said “dear brother” so often that we started running it together as “dearother” and you can sort of see what happened.)
PIE bhrater > Dari bradar

The next word has a rather different base form, but notice how Italian and Irish make the same transformations to it as with brother:

Sister
PIE swesor > Lt. soror > It. sorella
PIE swesor > OIr. derb (certain) + siur > derb-ṡiur > Ir. deirfiúr
PIE swesor > Dari khahar (cf. Middle Iranian khwahar, with PIE s > h/kh; this also happens with Greek, hence Grk. helios, Lt. sol as in solar)

Our last two words teach us a different lesson, namely that even when modern Indo-European languages diverge in vocabulary, knowing the background of the words can help us make new connections.

Son
PIE dhei- (to suckle) > Lt. filius > It. figlio (think of filial devotion)
PIE maghu (youngster) > OIr. macc > Ir. mac (maghu is also the source of maiden)
The Dari is pisar, cf. Farsi pesar, Lat. pes, Grk. paidos; not sure of the PIE root

Daughter
PIE dhei- (to suckle) > Lt. filia > It. figlia (feminine of figlio)
Proto-Celtic eni-gena > OIr. ingen > Ir. iníon (presumably, a daughter is “born into” a clan)
PIE dhugeter > Dari dukhtar (that one was pretty easy!)

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to do this kind of research with every word you ever intend to learn! On the other hand, trying to come up with a mnemonic for every word can get pretty tedious too. The important thing is to find devices for better remembering and understanding what you learn so that it will stay with you. And sometimes etymology is just what you need to make a connection (a real connection!) that you might have missed. This is especially the case if you use it often, as you will start to develop an intuition for connections between languages and language families so that as you learn new words, they come alive on the basis of old patterns you’ve already figured out.

By the way, if you suspect a relationship between an English word and a word from another Indo-European language, a great place for etymologies is etymonline.