Skip to content
March 3, 2012

Are English speakers louder than others, or do I just notice English more?

I’m torn on this. I live in a country and especially a city with a LOT of English speaking residents and visitors, but where it is not (quite) an official language. (Things aren’t quite so simple, but basically it’s not.) One can certainly get by with just English, although I have no desire so to do, and don’t. I definitely notice when I hear English being spoken on the bus/street/wherever, but then I notice when I hear French too, and I’m starting to notice more when I hear Russian as well. German doesn’t seem to come up as often, but I have picked it out a time or two in the more touristy areas. (I’ve never heard Irish here, although I’m sure its possible.) I don’t tend to notice Hebrew in the same way, but then it’s the default in most areas. (When I’m in a more English-speaking context I do notice the bits of Hebrew more.)

So absolutely I feel I tune in to all the languages I know, and I do find myself eavesdropping on people’s public conversations, although I usually couldn’t and wouldn’t want to recognise the person who had the conversation five minutes later. I don’t really want to know about them; I’m just enjoying deciphering the conversation. Probably a bad habit in terms of manners, if a good one for language learning.

I do still think, however, that English comes across significantly louder to me, and that perhaps at least some English speakers are particularly loud and open about their public conversations. (Not mentioning particular nations/regions of English speakers here!)

Thoughts?

Related articles
2 Comments
March 2, 2012

Beyond the grammar basics

I’ve been having an interesting conversation (it starts in post 6, and you don’t have to register/log in to read the thread) on a relatively subtle (but still potentially reasonably common) structure in Hebrew that I can’t find specifically addressed in any of  the three grammars DH and I have looked up today, either for Biblical or Modern Hebrew. (We read and discuss both, although we only speak the modern variety.)

I’ve asked some other native speaker friends (apparently this is one of those issues of prescriptive preference versus actual practice) and plan to email my most recent teacher for her opinion. I’ve been overthinking the issue, and can’t really remember at this point either what I would naturally say, or may have been taught to say (although I’m still not convinced this was ever specifically addressed). It sounds like either way would likely be acceptable for me to use, as someone with enough of an accent that I’m obviously not a native speaker. (That’s something to work on, but not right now.) The question is, do I want to follow the prescriptive preference, or the naturally practised form of the construction? Personally I’d like to sound educated, but not archaic, and most of all, comfortable and fluent in the language. I will, therefore, be investigating further, but also trying not to overthink things when I need to use the construction.

This isn’t the only instance of variations in grammar and register I’ve come across in Hebrew. The present tense of the verb to sleep, for instance, has an older (but widely used) irregular form that is regularised by many speakers. While I normally use the ‘correct’ form, I’ve been known to use the newer form when it was used first to me by someone offering to help (with my baby). There’s no point sounding snobby!

Some questions for you my blog-readers:

  • How do you investigate grammatical structures not covered by your preferred textbook or grammar?
  • Do you choose to use the ‘preferred’ form, or the more widely used form, in your second and further languages, or do you try to use both in different contexts?

I haven’t gone into the specifics of the question I’m dealing with here, because I’m more interested in the general question, for the sake of this blog. If you have comments either way, I’d be delighted to hear them.

Related articles
5 Comments
February 28, 2012

Listening hard

Deutsche Welle

Image via Wikipedia

I saw a recommendation today of Deutsche Welle (“Germany’s International Broadcaster”) and in particular their Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten (News read slowly). While I don’t really need the slow version, I do like having a transcript of the broadcast while listening (and you can choose which version to listen to from the same page). If I’m feeling enthusiastic, this lets me look up the words I don’t know before, during or after, and even if not, it simply gives my eyes something relevant to be doing while listening. (I’m one of those kinetic learners who does a whole lot better using my hands while listening, or if not, using at least two senses at a time.)

I hadn’t come across Deutsche Welle before, but a quick look around suggests there’s plenty more for the German-learner there as well, which I shall have to investigate. It appears to me to be somewhat equivalent to the BBC World Service, offering news and information on Germany and German perspectives to people around the world in up to 30 languages.

Related articles
Leave a Comment
February 27, 2012

New motivations

I had pretty much been thinking that German was going to get worked on pretty much solely as a language for reading for the time being, but then my little brother got engaged and decided his wedding is most likely going to be in Germany. There’s over a year to go, I believe, but presuming we’ll be able to go, both DH and I would want to get our spoken German as good as we can, for use while travelling and with local wedding guests. (From what DH has said, his is probably better than mine, although neither of us has used it regularly in several years.)

Somehow, reviving what feels right now in my nervousness like a fairly pitiful level of spoken German (although I don’t think I’m that bad at reading) is far more scary than starting from scratch with Russian, probably because I feel I should be better at German. I just have to prevent that from holding me back…

Related articles
2 Comments
February 26, 2012

Lost along the way

Ogham StoneAfter writing yesterday’s post, I remembered four more alphabet systems I half-learned as a child, but have basically forgotten through lack of use. Ogham came up several times in school, as of local and historical interest, and Arthur Ransome‘s Swallows and Amazons series inspired me to want to learn both Semaphore and the nautical flag alphabet. (I can still read mirror writing!)  Morse Code may have come up in those too, but if not, it certainly did in other stories I liked. As I said yesterday, with enough motivation for the required application it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days to get to know those better than I ever did as a child, but really I don’t need any of them at the moment.

More of a pity not to have learned more of is Irish Sign Language. Some friends arranged ten weekly lessons for us when we were in school, and although we had a very good teacher and enjoyed the classes, somehow the sessions never got renewed, probably because none of us had the opportunity to use the language with anyone but our teacher. As I was taught in my linguistics degree, sign languages meet all the same criteria as other natural languages, (this is not the fact for manually coded versions of spoken languages) and they aren’t all the same. For that reason, if I were to find an opportunity/motivation/need to learn one now, it would likely be Israeli Sign Language, or whichever one used by my expected interlocuters.

Related articles
Leave a Comment
February 25, 2012

Learning alphabets

As with most things language related, saying precisely how many alphabets I can read and write isn’t easy. I learnt the

The spreading of main alphabets in Europe and ...

Image via Wikipedia - spread of the main alphabets used in Europe.

Latin alphabet before I remember, by the age of four or five, for English and Irish. That also sufficed, with the addition of a few more accents/diacritics (modern Irish has one, the fada) for French and the ß for German. We got introduced to a few of the Greek letters in studying maths and sciences, but I still haven’t gone through and learned the whole thing properly, although I suppose I should.

Learning the Hebrew alphabet happened in fits and starts over several years. I first tried as a child, from a book that was meant for younger children in a taught class, and wasn’t really very friendly for learning alone, so I only got about half the way through. I really got it as a young adult, when I had more personal motivation, and sat down and just did it over a couple of days. That’s been the strategy which later worked for Braille (BAUK) about three years ago and Cyrillic most recently. I had a go at Cyrillic a few years before, on a two week visit to Bulgaria, but it didn’t stick until I started using it lately. (And yes, Bulgarian Cyrillic is slightly different from Russian Cyrillic, although I don’t at this moment recall exactly how.)

Venn diagram of Greek, Latin and Russian Cyril...

Image via Wikipedia - Venn diagram of Cyrillic, Latin and Greek capital letters.

So that’s the strategy I’d suggest: don’t make it a major big deal, but when you are motivated and will get the practice because you’ll be trying to read, and maybe write, regularly, simply take a few days and go over your chosen alphabet, a few letters at a time. Take advantage of the strong similarities in order and beware the sometimes false similarities in shape, and don’t worry if you make mistakes and ‘silly’ mix-ups between letters.

I haven’t yet tried learning a non-alphabetic script. How do those who have find they compare?

Related articles
4 Comments
February 24, 2012

The swift decline in fluency

Yeouch! I haven’t been getting out and speaking to people regularly in Hebrew (after five months of four hours per day intensive classes, I’m suddenly down to random and generally brief conversations a couple of times a week) and it really shows in how easily I speak. This is a lot of why I don’t define fluency as to do with how many words I know or anything like that: I still understand all that stuff I learned, and can read or listen to it just as well, as I can in French, but my production is already far more stilted and slow. Not only is that frustrating for me, but it discourages the people I do get to talk to from broadening the conversation, as they are unsure what I can cope with, which in turn means I’m getting less advanced practice.

Yes, I know what I need to do to overcome this: find some people (preferably face-to-face people) to get to know and speak to in Hebrew on a regular basis, at least once a week. I’m thinking about looking for a mother-and-toddler group locally, as that would help to integrate me and the baby into the area (I’ve been here 2.5 years, but I don’t know that many people, and most of those are English speakers – I’m not very good at this), expose her to other children and the language, and give me more opportunity to make friends and speak to actual adults other than my husband on more occasions. (He’s wonderful, of course, but I do need to be more sociable for myself.) Depending on the group, this might just mean discussing childcare, but that’s useful too, and hopefully it’d be more extensive.

So, now I’m making the plan public I have to follow through with it, right? You can all keep me accountable!

Related articles
4 Comments
February 22, 2012

Family language learning challenge

Deb over on Sixtine and the Little Things just today linked to the Language Challenge 180 on Multilingual Living, which looks intriguing enough that I’ve signed up pretty much sight unseen. The six-month whole family language learning challenge starts on March 1st, and will hopefully include inspiration and practical experience on sharing one’s languages with one’s children.

Deb and I had pretty similar posts yesterday too, but that’s coincidental – mine went up first and she didn’t know I had this one.

I should have more time tomorrow and can get back to more thoughtful posts, but I thought this would be of interest to some of you, too.

 

Leave a Comment
February 21, 2012

Limits?

Just some quick links to a story of interest today: the BBC reports today that a 20 year old has won a competition to find the most polyglot student in the UK:

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings has won a national competition to find the UK’s most multi-lingual student.

The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages – English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

Entrants in the competition run by the publishers Collins had to be aged between 16 and 22 and conversant in multiple languages.

They also have a longer article on other “hyperpolyglot” people, the most interesting part of which, in my personal opinion, is the suggestion that 11 languages is a significant watershed, with those who speak more languages than this being particularly rare. This is apparently the opinion of the author of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard, which sounds like it might be an interesting book.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the videos attached to the two articles to display, so can’t comment on those. I also haven’t found the announcement from Collins itself.

Related articles
2 Comments
February 20, 2012

How do you approach grammar?

English: illustration from Leech's comic latin...

Image via Wikipedia

Working on Russian as I have been for the last week or two, using Memrise and one or two other online resources, as well as a textbook that is meant for those working alone, I realise that I’ve been pushed to try to make sense of grammatical forms I haven’t officially learned about yet, pretty much right from the beginning. I don’t know that I’d have planned to do it this way, but it seems to be suiting me down to the ground!

I’m coming across word forms and having to try to work out out, without explanations, why they are spelt/pronounced in certain ways and in certain combinations, and then go to my book and learn the rule. Doing it this way forces me to think about what is going on far more that I would if first presented with the rule and gobs of examples, and thus I tend to understand those rules and examples far better than I do if presented with them passively, even if my suppositions had been slightly incorrect and had to be amended.

It’s possible that I am somewhat unusual in this interest in working out grammar for myself – I studied linguistics at university, specialising in syntax (not morphology, although it came up in the more general classes) and strongly considered staying in the academic field before trying other things instead (I still wonder about going back to it some day) – and yet it would seem to me pedagogically obvious that complex structures are going to be learnt more easily actively than passively.

So why do I feel like none of my language teachers ever asked me to attack grammatical tables, or better yet true life examples, this way and try to make sense of them, rather than just learning the charts off by rote? (My linguistics tutors/lecturers certainly did, often with languages we weren’t learning at all.) Some have got closer to that when reviewing structures we were supposed to have learned already, and it often helped, but by then many times people (including me, on occasion) would be feeling overwhelmed and for some it seemed simply too late.

I’m certainly neither the first nor the last to decry grammar education in all our languages; what I want is to work out the best way(s) for me to familiarise myself with how to speak Russian well, and if I get to share thoughts on the topic with others along the way then so much the better!

Related articles
2 Comments
« Older Entries
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started