renaissance poisson

another recent (to me) development in language teaching seems to be that people are encouraged to not bother learning formal grammar. i understand; grammar is dead boring for many people, and i can only imagine how many people have been discouraged by boring grammar studies in school. that really sucks, and i grok why people want to get away from it. i agree that learning grammar can lead to perfectionism, and as always, perfection is the enemy of good enough.

instead of actively learning grammatical rules, people are now supposed to suck it up by exposure. i'm sure Benny Lewis and his students have loads of fun while speaking their new languages even if they do so badly for a while, and hey, more power to them. at least they're speaking. and it's true that in most countries, the natives don't mind, and will do their best to grapple for understanding, and be happy that you're bothering at all to speak their language.

to experiment with this i started to learn basic spanish on memrise, also because i wanted to look at another course to see whether it was comparable in quality to the basic french course i am taking. i didn't previously know any spanish apart from individual words i've encountered over the years, and i definitely knew absolutely no spanish grammar.

and i couldn't handle it. it drives me batty to not understand basic things. 30 words in and what the heck is it with the accents? they don't seem to change the pronunciation like they do in french, so maybe they're about stress? but how is that determined? single syllable words seem to also sometimes have accents, and some words that seem to me to need accents for stress don't. and why is it "(él) es español" but "(él) está feliz"? i guess they must be different verbs even though they're the same in English -- which is fine, but at the very beginning i don't need extra confusion, I need some certainty -- even if i get it wrong, at least i'll only get one thing wrong instead of swimming in the dark without any clues. confusion does not help me when learning; it hinders me. one big problem here is that this course starts with useful language for travellers, and such useful vocabulary is often highly colloquial and irregular, and you therefore can't derive grammar rules from it.

so it's clear that i need grammar right from the start in order to minimize confusion -- i just don't need all grammar, only some basic guidelines. that learning grammar leads to perfectionism is a slippery slope argument, and as long as i can stop myself from aiming for perfection when trying to speak, i'll be fine.

when one reads the entire article i linked to, one finds out that, surprise, Benny actually also learns grammar, and he expresses a lot more nuance about it (this is why i generally like him, and think he is a better teacher than many). I am definitely more of a technician when it comes to learning.

PS -- I found myself a student grammar for Spanish and now I know about accents, and ser vs estar. I am much happier already. ;)

lately i've been hanging out on language sites because i'm kinda desperate for things that make me feel at least semi-competent again. and languages have always been an area of strength for me.

seems there is a real upswing of language learning as something really cool and desirable, and there are now a number of sites that tout "fluent in 3 months" and similar slogans, all going against the conventional "wisdom" of languages being difficult to learn, requiring some special talent, etc.

i'm all in favour of it, though the promises are as most promises made by evangelists, somewhat optimistic. but i think helping people lose their fears of language learning, ripping down some of those myths of how incredibly difficult it is to acquire a language once you're not longer a child, that's all a really fabulous trend.

along with that comes a slew of new methods for language acquisition. since i've learned both through formal instruction and by teaching myself, i'm pretty excited about that, because frankly, most formal language instruction in my life has been ineffective in actually teaching me a living language; i've done much better on my own, and will be trying some of the stuff i'm now discovering. one thing i've always known about is that i've been too slow when it came to speaking a language, knowing how to read and write it well long before i could speak it well. that was ok when i was still in high school because it wasn't like i had anyone with whom to speak a new language. and it seemed still ok when i started learning japanese a few years ago because i wanted to learn it to read manga. but i am now reconsidering that approach. primarily because my french still sucks, and i want to pick it back up again. i used to be virtually paralyzed with fear of making mistakes when speaking, and would consequently put it off for as long as possible. and that's held me back in more than one language. so i am in principle all for speaking sooner.

but some of the loudest proponents of the "speak right away" movement are very obviously extraverts, and have -- to me -- some uncomfortable entitlement issues going on.

i’d just come from benny lewis’s fluent in 3 months site. benny is overflowing with "just walk up to some random person and start talking" advice. then i stumbled onto social risk takers are better language learners by donovan nagel. he relayed a story about asking a little, old shopkeep lady in south korea for her name, which was apparently quite the faux pas. and somebody accused him of being rude after he invited himself into a group of strangers in a pub. so he wrote this article while on the defensive, justifying any potential rudeness and offense with the idea that without risk taking you won't learn a language.

i agree that one won't get anywhere without some amount of risk taking, and that one will acquire spoken language faster the sooner and the more frequently one engages with native speakers. but he makes it sound like the only way to get there is to push oneself on people, which in my experience isn't true. as a strong introvert wary of imposing, that's not my way. fortunately there is a huge area between offending somebody, and playing the wallflower, and i believe from experience that people who want to avoid offending can still take plenty of risks. luckily introverts are often excellent observers and researchers, and a bit of research on social mores of a new culture goes a long way. i don't want to be a dolt in a new culture, not because i am afraid to look foolish (way too old to mind that anymore, and it’s basically unavoidable), but because it can come across as disrespectful. just because i am learning their language does not mean i feel in any way entitled to their attention and their forgiveness for my uncouth foreigner mistakes. i think that's what bothered me most about donovan's intrusions on other people -- he seemed to me to act from a position of entitlement, and if they were offended, oh well, he just moved on to other people. *meh*.

one doesn't need to ask a little, old shopkeeper lady for her name to push one's korean, after all; one can introduce oneself and then ask some questions pertinent to shopping that go beyond the phrase book. one can ask one's younger acquaintances (in korean) how one would go about conversing with an elder politely. one doesn’t need to intrude on a random group in a pub, one can ask the barkeep whether he might introduce one to people who'd love to help a newcomer speak gaeilge.

that’s the advice introverts and shy people and those with social anxiety need to hear — there is lots of room for friendly, non-threatening, inoffensive communication with strangers. find a few native speakers on one of the sites that are specifically meant for that purpose. use those for feedback on how to behave in their culture. that will push your language skills way beyond your comfort envelope at the start. go to events where you have something in common with the people there; safe subjects are pretty much a given then. i really liked the challenge at the end of donovan's article: push every conversation just a little further. there is a lot of room before one gets to offensive when one starts with everyday, neutral subjects.

i need to look whether there are any sites not run by extraverts. if not, maybe that's something i could write about myself, since i do have a lot of experience with foreign language acquisition as a shy introvert.

i think of myself as generally observant, but now and then i realize -- yeah, not so much.

this morning persis was pestering me while i wanted to read, and she got quite obnoxiously noisy, and i finally shoved her off my chest and said "oh, go meow at one of the other cats".

and then i stopped and thought. and the more i thought the more examples came to mind (i've taken care of many cats over the years). and none of them ever meow at each other. they make all sorts of other sounds; they purr, chirrup, click, hiss, chirp, growl, scream, shriek, snarl, yowl, caterwaul, but they do not meow.

small kittens make meow-like sounds at their mothers, but even those don't quite sound like what our cats direct at us. and they stop making those sounds as they're weaned.

so have adult domesticated cats developed a specialized language for humans? quite possibly even customized to individual humans? most of ours don't talk a lot, but persis is a good example of a very vocal cat. she uses some of the same meow-style sounds for both, the paramour and myself, but additional different ones for me (probably because i am willing to share my sausage, while the paramour isn't).

(yes, of course i will duckduckgo [*] right after posting this. ;)

[*] when creating a search engine, i don't think it'd be presumptuous for the creator to contemplate how people might be verbing their searching if they used it a lot. "google" works when verbing; "duckduckgo" does most emphatically not.

pseudo-inuksuit at nanaimo harbour. i've noticed that since the 2010 winter olympics incorporated an inunnguaq in their logo these things have proliferated. i like them in that location, because some people go to great length to construct them well, and at least at the harbour they're not actually misleading as a waymark.

language notes:

"inuksuk" means "substituting for a human" in the inuit language; "inuksuit" is the plural. peoples of the arctic use these monuments of unworked stones for communication and survival. traditionally they indicate a food cache, a reference point, or a navigation marker. they can be constructed from a single upturned stone to large cairns with many stones carefully balanced.

an "inunnguaq" is a subcategory of inuksuit, a structure in a stylized human shape, with legs and arms, which has been coming to mean friendship and welcome, and seems to be mogrifying into an international canadian symbol.

papersky has an interesting thread about it here, and i am gonna pull my comment and rewrite it some, since this is the second time i've come across the subject and i don't think i've ever written anything about it.

papersky asked Translations are always inherently reinterpretations of the text. But do they really have to be betrayals?

somebody else linked to this article about jules verne in translation, which reports: She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as "...said Isaac Hakkabut" with idioms such as "...said the repulsive old Jew." And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) - quite a long one, too - presumably because she or he wasn't interested in, or couldn't be bothered to, turn it into English.

i consider that example to be a betrayal indeed, because it strikes me as conscious, willful distortion.

generally i don't view translations as betrayal, because translators don't generally set out to break an implicit promise to be faithful to the original. i might still feel let down, and i might feel the translator didn't do the work justice. it could be that there is still an element of wrong-doing, even if not on purpose -- if a translator actually did not really understand salient points of the work, that's a serious problem. i think all professional translators should consult with the author of the work, if possible, because that might avoid this kind of thing.

i prefer to read fiction in the original, but there are many languages i don't read well enough, and it would be sad to limit myself to not read books written in those languages at all. but i am worried that a bad translation (where i don't actively know it's bad) will turn me off an author completely. i know this has happened with manga, and i am consciously trying to counteract it now -- but i first needed to have a feel for japanese before i would even notice. i realize very well that Translation Is Hard. languages differ, cultures differ. even cultures speaking the same language differ -- and i don't mean just dutch/flemish/afrikaans, or british/US/canadian english, but a work written in 1850 in canada is embedded in a different culture than a work written in 2007 in canada. i want cultural notes with my fiction. :)

and as a reader, i might want more than one thing from a translation as well -- i might want it to be a thing of similar beauty to the original work, i might want it to have similar resonance, or i might want to get a feel for the different culture. those seem mostly mutually exclusive, and therefore one translation will not serve for all three purposes. i might even want it to be very literal (if i am using it to learn the original's language). is either of them a betrayal though? i don't think so. if you can't serve all masters it's better to pick one and serve zir well.

i decided some years ago to view movies adapted from fiction as "alternate history" of the work, because i was forever getting pissed off that they were "misinterpreting" my favourites. and worse, once i have watched a movie, i can't get its imagery out of my head, it has driven my own out and that feels like a loss because i _liked_ my own interpretation. for example, snape will forever look and sound like alan rickman in my head now. and i am not happy about that. nothing against alan rickman, he's a fine actor and mmmh, hot. but the snape in my head wasn't rickman before i saw the first movie. he wasn't hot. and i prefer my snape over rickman's; he fits better with my own interpretation of the books. i still avoid movies of books i like a great deal because i am too afraid they'll spoil my memories.

this problem isn't as marked with translations because words remain malleable for me, and so i am less likely to feel a translation has ruined the original. but it still helps me to read any translation as an alternate history of the original, and to seek out other interpretations. who knows what the unseen animal really looks like, but reading descriptions from 7 different people who've touched it will likely give a better overall impression than just hearing from one.

whenever i think about this, i shy away from ever sharing my translations of manga. *gah*, how dare i? even if it's just smut; my japanese is so fledgling that i feel very insecure about doing any honour to the original work.

begging the question.

objectgraph instant dictionary displays words as you type. there's also a thesaurus, an english-japanese dictionary, and a couple of other goodies. requires javascript.

fun.