Cebes Bones

On the most recent test we had to fill blanks in a dialogue. I honestly couldn't tell what she wanted me to put there, because the Catalan as well as I could read it said,

Hello, I would like 2 kilos of cebes, please.
__________
Yes, thanks.
_______________
Now I would like a half kilo of cheese, please.
__________
No, nothing else, please. How much is it?
___________
Yes, with card.
Have a nice day!
_____________

The main problem was cebes, and what he could ask me about cebes that I would reply 'yes, thanks' to after already saying what and how much I wanted. You see, I didn't know what cebes were. I thought quickly. It must be a kind of food, but what kind? And what can he ask me about them? I thought about going for something vague like 'ripe', even though it seemed silly for someone to ask if I wanted ripe fruit (shouldn't that go without saying?), but ultimately I was worried that cebes might mean eggs or meat or something (even though I already knew those words)... and ripe beef? Ewww.... So I settled on 'bones' and knew I was giving up the points.

Do you want good cebes? Yes please.

XD

But I got the test back today and she took it. I also looked up cebes - it means onions. Funny, I had learned calçots... but I guess there are several kinds of onions... and it's only reasonable for us to learn all of them before we learn silly things like the words for pants or rain. After all, food is very important to the culture, or something like that. :P Our primary textbook is almost as ridiculous as Liisa's old German book, wherein chapter two was entitled Polypen in der Nase. When we were all in the classroom last minute for this same exam, I suddenly said, in desperation, but with my tone carefully controlled to sound as if it was the most natural thing imagineable, "I hope everyone remembers the word for screwdriver!"

A long silence. Then laughter.

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Emily and Shelby and I were putting our script together and one of us asked the others, "Would you do it again? Take this class, knowing what you know now?"

Shelby said that it had been an accident from the very beginning - she thought she was signing up for a culture class until she came to class on the first day and Monica was speaking Catalan. She hadn't really planned on learning a new language for 3 humanities credits. Emily's going to study in Valencia, so she guesses it doesn't really hurt to know the little bit that she's learned.

What have we learned? I have to admit that I haven't given Catalan enough of my time or vital energy either in class or outside of class, so I feel that I keep dancing on the breaking point without actually treating Catalan like it's own language, rather than some sort of elaborate cipher for Spanish. Doesn't help that every Catalan speaker I know speaks Spanish as well as or better than Catalan, and that goes for most of the genuine Catalan speaking population as well. Another semester, perhaps, of total immersion 3 hours a week (I am fully aware of the oxymoron)... Yes, I can often follow Catalan now - as I could before. I can sort of mock it by forcing my Spanish through an awkward Catalan filter. So would I do it again?

Yes.

We've made history, in our own small way - the first Catalan Symposium at Mizzou will be held this evening, and probably the audience will consist mainly of Romance professors and our own small class, but it's something. Our class was one of the first in a general, non-linguistics focused University, and if Monica has her way, our moderate success will only help her to develop the program more fully.

And as for myself, I got my humanities credits and I could have gotten them learning even more about poetry in the Golden Age instead, and whatever you say about the usefulness of Catalan, I think you'll agree that it might be more useful than learning a bit more Lope de Vega, especially considering my future career plans.

And practicalities aside - there's something you gain from learning, always, I think... I've made friends in the class, I've laughed a dozen times at Monica's habits and antics, I've learned about the festivals, feelings, and history of a proud and wonderful people... I was surrounded by Catalan until my mind started to soften around the edges and admit it's sounds and rhythms, even if it's only a first step - even French seems less foreign to me now, by association, and if you know me you know that's no small thing. I like music in Catalan. I like the high up desperate sound of Raimon (Al Vent) and the quirky Antonia Font (Wa Yeah).

I learned something. And I don't think learning can ever be a waste, not really.

And next time I go to Catalunya, I can ask for good onions or a screwdriver. Totally worth it. Wa yeah!

High Grammar as a Second Language

I'm studying now for my grammar exam - the exam no Journalism student at the University of Missouri is allowed to go into sequence without passing. I'm not too worried - I've taken the practice exam twice and scored about 90% each time, and I've brushed up on the things that do confuse me a bit.

I have a good ear for grammar in general, and it's almost amusing to me that I don't score 100%. After all, English is my native language, I'm a better than average writer, and I study languages. But some of the examples on the test are just silly - horribly written with or without the corrections, just constructions that no native speaker would try to push through. (For example, "The thief was he."

Actually, I'm curious as to how learning foreign languages, and general linguistics, impacts my English grammar. I think it does more good than harm, ultimately, but I also think that, contrary to what any Latin teacher will tell you, it goes both ways. Learning languages teaches me the fancy words and distinctions that many of my classmates are struggling with, for example. My scores on case-identification and voice-identification sections are flawless. On the other hand, learning different languages strips away the sense of objectivity that grammarians try to cloak their subject in.

Take, for example, these two examples: The Dread Double Negative and The Dread Passive Voice. For many grammatical no-no's, Grammarians admit that "it's just the way English works", but for these two they provide more logic than usual. The say that Double Negatives simply make no sense - If you haven't got no cheese, you must have SOME cheese, right? And passive voice makes sentences wordy, weak, and dull. Sounds pretty convincing to me, except that these logical conclusions aren't cross-linguistically applicable.

In many languages, such as Spanish, double negatives are totally acceptable, sometimes even recommended.
Ex. - "No tengo ni idea - I don't have no idea."

In Latin, using passive voice was considered more refined and sophisticated than using active.
Ex. - "Liber Caesari a regina donor - The book was given to Caesar by the Queen."

While some might shift uncomfortably at the first example and scramble to think of a non-racist and non-ethnocentric way to suggest that hispanohablantes might just be a bit ignorant, most people hold Latin up as THE most perfect, most logical literary language, so it's preference for the passive voice doesn't do much to support their claim for the intrinsic superiority of the active.

But what does all this mean for students of languages and linguistics, such as myself? It could go either way, I suppose. We might get so confused by all the possibilities, struggle to remember which rules belong to which language, even be driven into apathy by the subjectivity of it all. But generally, I find, increasing our useful knowledge only gives us an edge.

As for myself, I find the who-whom debate to be silly. People never, or at least very rarely, use whom when speaking. It's dying, if not dead, and there's little use in weeping over it. It'll hardly be the first or the last tragedy of an ever evolving language. I use who 99.9% of the time when speaking, and my knowledge of linguistics and foreign languages has only strengthened my resolve to do so, since I realize that using whom would be useless and a bit confusing at best, and arrogant at worst.

But today I have to take a grammar test, and they're going to test me on who-whom, and they're handing out the grades, those nassstttyyy grammarians, so I'll play their game tonight. And I'll play it well, too, because I know the answers, having taught myself Grammatical English as one of my many secondary languages.

Update: I got 99% on the test. I'm pretty sure the one I got wrong was about politics - whether the word politics is singular or plural. :P

Beginning Again

In Catalan class, you hear the same words echoed again and again, "I'd forgotten how it felt to be a beginner." They're no longer used to not knowing how to say anything, to express basic concepts, to understand and reply. There isn't a person in the class who isn't at least intermediate level in Spanish or French, and now we're all beginning again. And we've forgotten how, apparently.

Except for me, right? After all, I start a new language about every 6 months, most recently Hindi. I'm a certified idiot in about 12 languages. I'm not afraid to sound stupid, I haven't forgotten how to wrestle with the basic building blocks of a language. Except that I have. Or... what? Why is this hard?

Because Catalan is an easy language. With all due respect to the lovely language and culture, it's just that, for an English speaker, especially one who speaks Spanish quite well and knows a bit of Latin and Italian as well, a Romance language, any Romance language, just isn't going to be able to compete with Japanese or Finnish.

And that's my problem right now - I look at the page and I think, "This is easy, I don't need to study this." Because it's so similar. Because I understand. Most of the time.

And then they tell me, "Well, then speak!" and suddenly I realize I don't remember if their word for speak is based on hablar or parlare or loquere, and how it ends, and how it's pronounced... I don't, in fact, know anything at all. And there's no shame in knowing nothing at all in Mandarin or Aramaic, but to know nothing at all in Catalan - it's embarassing, and it makes me nervous, sews my mouth shut.

So I have to study. Right now. I have to force myself to begin again.

Hindi Update

So, I haven't spent an extraordinary amount of time with Hindi. I had the basics of the script crammed into my head around Thanksgiving break, and then there were finals, then Christmas, then New York, and then staff training... you get the idea. However, that doesn't mean I've been totally ignoring it, either. I've really improved my control of Devanagari to the point where I'm not actively studying it by itself anymore, and I've finished the first chapter of Teach Yourself and half of the second.

When I was in Florida over break I went to a famous bookstore called Haslam's. It was big and fun to walk around, but I was somewhat disappointed by their book selection, especially in the foreign language category. I found nothing for Hindi. This was discouraging because after all, I didn't find anything for Hindi in the stores back home, either. I had taken a few things from my University library, but as much as I hate to admit it I'm spoiled and prefer more modern books, with more modern methods of learning languages. Teaching yourself a language during the course of ordinary life is enough of a challenge as it is, without having to decode old books!

My luck changed in New York. I went into an absolutely huge Borders store there and picked up both Teach Yourself Hindi and a Hindi visual dictionary. The visual dictionary must be new - it's the same brand I have in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Finnish, and I thought I knew all the languages they offered the small independent form in, so I was surprised and delighted to find it in Hindi.

I've been going through Teach Yourself and so far so good. The recordings are a bit irritating, and I have my issues with some of the methods, but the pace of the book seems pretty good, and the examples and dialogues are quite nice. Hindi doesn't seem to be too hard, really, especially in terms of grammar and vocabulary and such. I'm getting quite good at Devanagari, finally. Zahra saw my notebook the other day and seemed impressed by my handwriting. :D For someone trying to pick it up, my advice is to learn everything en bloc. It will hurt you're head, but if you don't learn all the letters - and yes, I mean all of them - you will have no idea what's going on when you start trying to read anything at all. This is because even letters or irregular letter conjuncts that you think must be unusual cases... really aren't. For example, they teach you almost as an afterward that you add a dot to kh and j to make them a hard, phlegm filled kh and a z, respectively. When I read this I got the impression that those sounds weren't extremely common in the native language - more used to write borrowed or foreign words.

I was wrong, at least sort of - Hindi seems to be like English in that it has so many borrowed words that there's really hardly any point distinguishing them. People say this is the case about Japanese, but in Japanese you can usually guess as to which words will be imports - like technology - in Hindi I'm not really sure yet what words are imports but as an example Teach Yourself has already included two words for man, and mentioned, in an offhand way, that one is 'native' and the other an Arab import - and so far they're using the Arab import far more in the examples. (It's also the word I'd learned before).

So yeah, you will use all those letters, so just buck up and learn them. I think I finally have - I'm still uncertain of how to write a few of the conjuncts properly - and I'm proud to report that I no longer feel like I'm drawing and embellishing squiggles, except for the numerals, which still bother me. Here they are:

Not a fan.

I've started learning to type recently, albeit still using the Quillpad website. It's a little bit interesting as I've sort of learned the transliteration style used in Teach Yourself, (it helped a lot to finally have a single learning source, so I could properly get a handle on one transliteration style), and that style doesn't always turn into the write Devanagari on Quillpad, so I'm trying to watch it closely and learn how it wants me to input things. I imagine this wouldn't slow a native speaker down very much but it's a bit weird for me at least initially. For example, it took me a good 20 seconds to get it to accept any spelling I offered of acchaa (okay).

Hindi Update... Again...

As soon as I'd finished thinking about how many wonderful resources there were online for learning Hindi, especially in comparison to the absolute lack of materials in the bookstores here, it hit me -

Somehow, I manage to forget time and time again that I live at a University. I can check out books from a large, research library! I am happy living on a University, feeling cultured and happy, knowing that within a twenty minute walk I have dozens of cafes and restaurants and cultural events every night and a cool independant cinema and tons of cool people to hang out with, and as a backdrop to my daily activities the sophisticated facades of Jesse Hall, the J-School, and Memorial Union... one of my advising offices is even in a 200 year old building! It's all quite impressive, even more than a year in, to this little Missouri girl. But my absolute favourite part is the library, which is why I need to kick myself - hard - for not taking greater advantage of it.

I walked out with two books: Dreaming in Hindi, a sort of novel length rant about how much fun it is to learn languages, especially Hindi, and what it does to your brain to do so, and to live in India... It's fascinating to read, and even a bit educational. It is scattered with Hindi words, many of which I already recognize, and has a lot of information about India as well. And, as if I wasn't on enough of a high with learning a new language, it's full of quotes that I would like to think would make anyone feel the need to go out and study languages.

And I also got the even more appropriate book HINDI for Non-Hindi Speakers. Yep, that's me! I also want to see HINDI for Hindi Speakers, though, just for curiosity's sake. :P

Hindi Update - Including Some Resources

So, Zahra and my language swap is going pretty well so far. In Spanish we've covered pronunciation, extra letters and accent marks, about 12 nouns and 6 -ar verbs, as well as how to conjugate those latter in the present tense. We've discussed gender, plural, and articles, as well as using gustar to express liking something. She thinks it's very easy so far and she's right.

Hindi is going well for me too, although a bit more slowly because it's a bit harder, at least initially. At first, when I thought I knew exactly what I was looking for (lists of words written in devanagari) and had limited time in the computer lab, I felt frustrated by the lack of materials I was finding. With a bit more patience, internet time, and random wandering, I've actually found a wealth of resources.

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There's Quillpad Hindi http://quillpad.com/hindi/ which lets me type in Hindi without knowing how the Hindi keyboard words - I just write phonetically and it converts things for me. It has it's quirks and irregularities, and so does the transliteration I've learned, but nevertheless it works pretty well. Also, Quillpad lets you type in Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, and English - basically a little sample of Indian scripts, most of which are related. For comparative purposes I've sometimes selected what I've typed in Hindi and pushed the button to transliterate it into one of the other scripts. Interesting to see the similarities.

Then there's Hindi Script Tutor http://www.avashy.com/hindiscripttutor.htm which originally upset me because it's distinctly unprintable. However, it's awesome for learning Devanagari if you have internet, because it shows how to write (stroke order and all) and pronounce each letter, and shows each letter in one or two examples, which are spoken by both male and female voices. The Conjunct Engine is also nice - that's what I'll be moving onto next.

In fact, the more I look around, the more I find. There are several things I've found that will be excellent for improving my Hindi once I have a basic grip on the language.

For example, this site uses clips from real Bollywood movies to teach Hindi: http://www.cuttingchai.com/HouseFull/index.html

This website http://www.babloo.com/is great for learning all sorts of things about India (from their description: folk tales from India, nursery rhymes, significance of festivals, Indian Panorama, all about Olympics, magic tricks, safety and good manners for children, reference park, health awareness, online games for kids, puzzles, mathematical brain teasers, amazing facts... and much much more.) and is available in English and Hindi, as well as other languages of India. You have to enable pop-ups.

This website's "Kid Zone" http://www.indif.com/kids/hindi_proverbs/hindi_proverbs.aspx also has a lot of cool things in Hindi.

Although I went to the bookstore here in Columbia and was a bit disappointed to find not so much as a Hindi phrasebook, the web seems full to bursting with resources! :D What a great language to learn over the internet!

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I've almost gotten a good handle on the alphabet, which Zahra wants before she starts teaching me much grammar or vocabulary. I know all of the basic letters now, although I'm not 100% certain of my pronounciation, especially with hard and soft and aspirated and super aspirated t's and d's. (???!!) I haven't even really started with conjuncts yet, although I recognize most of them and I'm not really afraid of them - I just think I can probably get started with the language itself before I'm ready to transcribe entire novels.

Yesterday I watched two Hindi songs on Youtube, both from Bollywood films I've already seen. I actually understood a handful of words. :) Although having the English translation at the bottom helped, of course...

Adventures with Devanagari

Today I wrote my first sentences in Devanagari (in Hindi... Devanagari being the script and Hindi being the language). They were so simple that it was hard to tell, but I think I actually understood the grammar of what I was doing and knew the letters, so it wasn't just copying. Next thing I need to do is learn how to type. :P What I did today was all along the lines of "The boy writes" "I read", etc, although I stretched myself by using the verb hesitate, which literally translates to if-but-do. Clever. I also tried one more complex sentence, "The brother takes but the sister gives". These sentences barely make sense on their own and certainly not together, but just to feel accomplished I put several of them together to make a 'paragraph'. It looked very pretty.

So, Devanagari. I call it a script. It's not an alphabet because the symbols normally represent a full syllable each, not a consonant or a vowel that have to be combined to make a syllable. But it's not a syllabary, like Japanese's hiragana or katakana, because a syllabary has different syllables like "ma" "mo" "mu" "ga" "go "gu", and devanagari instead has only "ma" and "ga" and, to differentiate between different vowels, you modify these characters. So basically, it is the love child of a syllabary and an alphabet, and there's a word to describe what it is, abugida, but I usually just use the catch all word - script - when talking about it.

This is what the letters look like, although I don't think this is ALL of them:


On the top right, in that little box, it shows the matras. These are the things you add to the normal letters to change their vowel sound from the default a to something else. My feeling about this system is that it would work fine, if it was designed for a language which uses the default a a lot, other vowels slightly less often, and generally has word composed of consonant-vowel-consonant vowel, like Japanese or Hawaiian.

But that's the problem - it doesn't. Most hindi words don't end in a vowel, to start with, and they're actually reasonably fond of consonant clusters. So, to provide for this, they have a bunch of ways you can /literally/ combine two consonants, by cutting off half of the symbol. It's rather unsettling, really, because if, for example, this symbol:

makes the 'ka' sound, that doesn't mean that you can break the symbol apart into 'k' and 'a'. But, if you want to say 'kyaa', you can't have it being read as 'kayaa', so what do you do?


You take Ka...

And you take Ya...


And you sort of smash them together. Erm... okay.

The problem is that this one is relatively straightforward, you could probably even guess it and write it without ever having seen this combination, or conjunct, before. But others aren't like that. Many can be guessed when reading, but you can't really guess when you're writing. And a few seem to be completely irregular, but I'm not far enough along to speak authoritatively yet.

As for the characters themselves: I have a firm handle on about one third of them, but they seem to be used more than the ones I don't know as well, so I only need to check on every third or fourth word when reading. Still, I think it may go more slowly from here, because I'm not 100% sure of the pronunciation of some of the ones ahead, many of them don't have precise English equivalents, they're used less often, and in some cases they look a bit trickier to write.

The letters are curvy and feel sort of insubstantial, sometimes it's hard to find things to grab onto. It's sometimes hard for me to write them all distinctly, because the stroke order isn't as rigid as in Japanese so people get confused when you ask them how you're supposed to write a different character. So sometimes I start to feel like I'm just drawing squiggles and then decorating them with vowel and nasalization dots, lines, and more squiggles. It looks lovely and mysterious but also chaotic. Sounds strange but it reminds me a little of the alphabet I was trying to make for my conlang so many years ago. I wanted this curvy chaotic ornamental mess, but imposing enough order on it to make it reasonable was far beyond my capability.

I have to say this: I /love/ the line. It pulls the alphabet together, sort of reforms the chaos. All the squiggles and madness sort of hang down from it. It's so unique, distinct, and beautiful. It's not always super easy to work with, since you have to line up the characters well enough to connect them all with the line after you finish the sentence, but it's well worth it. And at least for the time being, I look forward to finishing each sentence and drawing the line. Much more satisfying than a period.



This is Alexander Arguelles, a Youtube-famous polyglot, writing in Arabic, then Sanskirt (Devanagari), then Chinese.

In Devanagari he writes this: विनाशमुखमेतत्ते केनाख्यातं दुरात्मना

I am happy to report that my handwriting is a little bit better than his. However, he writes like 3x as fast as I do. :P

This site has tons of children's poems and stories in Hindi, so it's a mid-term goal for me... http://www.4to40.com/ :)

The Morning After

Oh, what a wildly exciting life I lead. :P

Movies, Movies, Movies

I knew that Ragtag had a small movie rental attachment, but I went there for the first time last night with Zahra and Allan and realized it was the same place that Mayumi went twice a week last year for her neverending supply of movies. It only cost a dollar to set up a rental account, but still we agreed it would be smarter to put the account in Zahra or my name, since Allan will be going back home soon. In the end, though, only Allan had proper ID - Zahra and I just carried our Mizzou ID's. Fail.

The selection was reasonably good. Not huge (by American standards ;)) but sufficient, and well tailored to the interests of college students. Zahra and I made pact after pact to watch various movies next semester. We're planning on Monty Python, a bunch of Indian films, a random selection of hollywood movies that only one or the other of us has seen, a few of the Scandinavian movies, the Miyazaki collection, and maybe even I, Claudius.

With Allan, Amy, and Esther leaving next semester, I think our Spring will be less crazy and fun. But it can still be nice. Maybe a nice intellectual time. :) Zahra has promised to teach me Hindi while I teach her Spanish. And we have all these movies.

The movie bonanza started with Ponyo. They were supposed to be showing Ponyo for free in Memorial Union last night, and so Amanda, Zahra, Allan and I went to see it. Unfortunately there was some sort of mix up with the rights, so we watched Howl's Moving Castle instead. That was fine - I hadn't seen the English dub of it yet, and I actually thought it was brilliant. Unusually, Studio Ghibli dubs are normally so good that I barely even care whether it's in English or Japanese, in fact, I'd like to watch both. Afterwards, though, Allan and I were talking and he was angry that I still hadn't seen Nausicaa, so that was the first movie we rented from Rag Tag.

Watching it I realized that it was the first movie I'd watched in Japanese since my trip to Japan. And wow, I understood so much of it. I would have understood less if it hadn't been for the subtitles, but it was like, the subtitles gave me an idea of what to listen for, and I continually noted the differences between what was actually said and what the subtitles said. On at least three occasions, for example, I realized that the subtitles read, "I've never ____ed before!", while a more accurate translation might have been "It's the first time I ____!". Things like that. I was pleased to be engaged in the language, however far I might have been from understanding it without the subtitles.

This made me think - I'm going to watch a lot of German movies next semester. My dad gave me the advice of listening to radio. It's good advice, it's probably very useful. But radio is just about the most difficult listening exercise there is, because the quality isn't brilliant and there are no visual cues. If I listen to the German radio, I do understand quite a bit. But a lot of times, the words I miss are the important and interesting ones - and exactly the ones that visual cues often teach you in movies or real life. And it's hard for me to continue paying attention for very long when I'm not understanding it. Listening in the car would probably be good, but I don't drive that much... Anyway, maybe for now I should listen to Spanish radio, while I'm still on the level of movies in German and Norwegian. But getting to the point where I don't need subtitles. :D That is, if I'm 100% engaged and willing to use some guesswork...

It sounds like all I do is sit around and study languages! That's so far from the truth. This semester I've probably spent an average of 10 minutes a day actively studying language. Lame, I know. But just living inside the world teaches a lot too. :P And next semester I'll be enrolled in fun language courses again.

Chinese in the Dining Hall

I was waiting for my sandwich to be cut at the deli when I heard one of the dining hall workers say to the other, "We're out of cheese." Or, that was the point, that's what we would have said in English. Because, after understanding, it came to my attention that the workers had been speaking in Chinese. I blinked. Chinese is different enough that I sometimes have trouble feeling that it is a language in the same way that German or Spanish is. I didn't really believe that I had understood. I could barely even remember the words that had been used. Mei you, I think, 'there isn't'... It struck me that I remembered the meaning more clearly than the syllables. But, I thought, I'll wait and see what happens.

One of the workers hurried off. She returned with a fresh stack of pepperjack.

Interesting.

Language Context and Rosetta Stone

I found this quote:

"If the only time you make use of your language is when you are studying, should you need to use that language you may well be stuck because you'll be in the wrong context for retrieving it."

on this site: http://gbarto.com/multilingua/confessions/

It's interesting. I hadn't thought about the situation from exactly that angle, but it does seem to make sense. For example, my spoken Spanish isn't terrible, but my written Spanish is much better. On the other hand, my written Norwegian is okay, and so is my spoken Norwegian - there is not nearly as much of a difference between them. Comparatively, my spoken Norwegian is actually better than my spoken Spanish, because I am more comfortable with it, and more rarely am frustrated because I hear my own mistakes.

I'm wondering now about whether or not Rosetta Stone gives you the right context. I tend to think it does, more than studying from a book or flash cards. Whatever I may think about the learn as a child situation, Rosetta Stone does help me to start associating the language very directly with real life. Just as I start to think of the new words when I see the RS pictures, when I go about my day later, the words echo back into my head when I see objects, actions, situations that remind me of what I learned.

This really does not happen as much when I learn a language through reading. I might remember the words fine, but they don't usually just present themselves in my mind in response to visual and aural stimuli. It might take me a bit longer to mentally access them, as well.

I think Mandarin will help me understand this process more. With Japanese, I learned a lot from Rosetta Stone, and I did pretty well with Japanese when I was in Japan. But I went into Rosetta Stone with a lot of Japanese experience, however scrambled it was. Mandarin is a fresh start that will let me look more purely at the Rosetta Stone method.

Miracle of Language

What's this? Mandarin?

That's right.

I more or less flipped a coin among the Rosetta Stone languages and this is what I came up with. I have nothing at all to push me along other than my own joy and curiosity, and that, I knew, would be enough to at least match my very few phrases of Cantonese with a very few phrases of Mandarin. I have enough friends that if I want to practice, or need help, I can get it. At the same time I am accountable to no one. This is not connected with any grade or any measurement. I am free to love it for it's own sake.

And, although I am only two days in, I am loving it so far. It's the first tonal language I've done really anything with (tones in Norwegian and Japanese are optional unless you need to sound native). It's entirely foreign, and the only thing I know going in is Ni Hao. I sort of know that goodbye is something like Di Tien, and Xie Xie is thank you, but I have no idea how to pronounce Xie Xie and two minutes into Unit 1 I learn that my pronunciation of Di Tien was WAY off.

So it goes. This is the miracle of language acquisition in it's rawest form. It sends little happy tickles down my spine when I step back for a second and think, two minutes ago this sentence would have sounded like absolute gibberish. Now I know that it means "The adults are not cooking, they are eating." Miracle.

I have no plans to advertise this to anyone until I get a bit further along, if I do get a bit further along. Still, I was thinking to myself, "I wonder when the first time I'll actually understand something in Chinese will be." Now, I'm not sure whether this counts, but later the same day that I started using Rosetta Stone, so about a half hour in, I was at the dining hall and I heard Di Tien, the correct way to say it, that I had just learned, and I couldn't help turning around and feeling very pleased with myself for even understanding such a rudimentary phrase. The girls I turned to look at all noticed that I had a bit of a funny smile on my face, but I don't think they thought too much of it. If only they knew... Muahahahahahaha... XD

Words Slipping like Droplets of Sweat

"I could feel the Japanese words slipping like droplets of sweat from my brow."

- Page 7, Turning Japanese, David Mura

The Japanese words, yes, and the German, the Finnish, the Spanish, the Norwegian, the Faroese, the Italian, the Latin... isn't it startling how quickly it abandons you, especially right after a trip? When you go from living and breathing a language to forgetting it ever happened? Eventually the rate of evaporation does slow down, leaving you a sort of thick, sludge like remainder of words that, you think, you are unlikely to forget as long as you know your own language. Still, the speed of the disintegration, the helplessness of it, is striking...

A month ago I could identify close to 200 Kanji. Two months ago the number was about 100, and I could write nearly all of those. Yeah, during my three intense and in-Japan weeks, the rate was too rapid to be sustained, and even in the weeks of preparation I was half learning and half cramming.

How many Kanji can I recognize now? Perhaps one hundred. Perhaps less. How many could I write? Perhaps fifty.

So it goes.

Japanese Update

I've been playing Rosetta Stone pretty much nonstop. I'm still pleased with it for the most part, although I'm starting to wish I had done all this while I still had Mayumi around to practice with! It's a bit depressing to do it all on the computer. Still, I'll be in Japan in just a few short weeks. The frantic pace I've been moving at reminds me of a quote from the trailer of Memoirs of a Geisha - "What takes years to learn, you must learn in weeks." XD That's an exaggeration, of course. I knew random bits and pieces of Japanese before, which is definitely helping. And despite the fact that I've read that each level of Rosetta Stone should take a year to cover, I'm having a hard time believing that's true. Even assuming that you only did one of the exercises a day, you should finish in a few months.

In these three or so days, I have almost finished Unit 2 of Level 1, and here are some of the things I can say:
(About half of these are word for word from the exercises, the other half I made up, but using only words and grammar from Rosetta Stone)

What colour is your hair?
My hair is brown.
Is that your father?
No, that is my grandfather.
Is that your older sister?
No, that is my younger sister.
Nice to meet you.
What is your name?
My name is Miranda.
How many cups are there?
There are 8 cups.
Where is the ball?
The ball is under the bridge.
Where are the plates?
Two plates are on the table, two plates are in the kitchen.
My brother is watching t.v. in the living room.
My mother is cooking in the kitchen.
My children are playing in the park.
Her horse is running.
My friends’ cat is watching my fish.
What do you have?
I have a pen.
What are you eating?
I am eating rice and egg, and I am drinking juice.
I love my dog.
He loves his mother.
Our son is walking and our daughter is running.
The man is kissing his wife.
Where is the newspaper?
The newspaper is in the bathroom, on top of the sink.
Where are the sandwiches?
The sandwiches are in the kitchen, on top of the table.
How many apples are there?
There are five apples.
How many flowers do you have?
I have six flowers.
The girl and her mother are eating rice.
My mother and her friends are reading books.


I can write a lot of these as well, but I admit that I am not really studying the Kanji involved. I could already read the syllabaries, though I believe I am getting to a point where I might know them /from/ Rosetta Stone, but the Kanji aren't taught much, and not knowing the stroke order and whatnot I have contented myself with recognizing them in context, but being unable to produce them myself.

The speaking sections are getting on my nerves. They want me to speak very loudly, they almost never catch the last word that I say (sometimes I have to add nonsense syllables to the end of the phrase so that they catch it), and sometimes I can't figure out for the life of me what's wrong with my pronunciation. It is much stricter for single, long, words, than it is for sentences too. I sometimes disable them, but I do think it helps my learning to say things outloud, and if I disable them it takes away the nice space and reminder to do so. I wish they included an option where they prompt you to try your pronunciation, but pass you whenever you utter roughly the right amount of syllables. I don't need them to help me sound like a native - I'd just like to have a chance to repeat after them.

Rosetta Stone Version 3

My review of Rosetta Stone 2 wasn't very positive. I thought it was a reasonably well designed program, yes, but nowhere near worth the hype or the price tag. Now I have tried out Rosetta Stone 3, and I feel quite differently about it. While it still follows the somewhat controversial total immersion method (no English), I would liken the experience of Rosetta Stone 2 to being dropped into a foreign country and trying to figure things out, albeit with ideal context clues. Rosetta Stone 3 is like being dropped into the same situation, but with a native speaker, who, although they don't speak any English, is trying to help you and teach you the language. No, the program doesn't actually use role-playing like that, but that's sort of how it feels. In Rosetta Stone 2, you were on your own. In Rosetta Stone 3, the software is teaching you.

In addition, Version 3 teaches the written language, and is much better at testing pronunciation (although it's still a computer program... so... :() and tasks other than listening comprehension. The variety of exercises is much better.

Above: This exercise teaches you to spell using the Japanese syllabary, Hiragana.

While there is still no cultural content to speak of, Version 3 at least seems to acknowledge that languages are different. While so far I have only tried the Japanese version, many aspects of it seem tailored to teaching Japanese, as opposed to any language (and by that we mean, ideal for Germanic/Romance languages, less good for others).


Above: This exercise, which asks you to differentiate between the three writing systems used in Japanese, is clearly unique to the Japanese Version.

One area in which this differentiation between languages has actually regressed from Version 2 -3 is in the pictures. Version 2 had at least two different photo sets for Asian and Western languages, so most of the pictures in the Japanese version were taken in Japan. In Version 3, Japanese pictures are enough of a minority that I suspect they use the same photos for all languages. Still, I can't bring myself to complain much about this. While there is only one set of pictures, they are much nicer than in Version 2. The quality is high enough that you never find yourself wondering whether a character is a boy or a girl, and the variety is impressive. At times, Version 2 looked like it was creatively picking pictures from stock photos to represent the words - Version 3 very obviously planned and took many of the pictures expressly for the purpose of teaching the language.

Above: Version 2 might have contented itself with showing bigger and smaller flowers in stock-like photographs. The magnifying glass over the 'small flowers' and the girl standing behind the 'big flowers' makes it obvious that Version 3 took each picture precisely for it's function in the software.


Above: Version 2 showed different colours of cars. Version 3 shows close ups so tight that you know they're talking about the colour itself.

The user can also moderate the difficulty to a greater extent than in Version 2. You can determine how strictly your pronunciation is graded, and you can pick between using Romanji (Japanese spelled with our alphabet: much easier, but less authentic), Hiragana, Kanji, and Kanji with Furigana. Including Kanji with Furigana was a nice thought on the part of the designers, but in actuality it makes everything so small that it's not worth bothering with.

Above: In this exercise, you can read the Kanji, or click on the green speaker icon to hear how the sentence is sounded out, depending on whether you want to learn to read the language, or just understand it.

In conclusion, I find Rosetta Stone 3 to be a very well made computer based language learning program - perhaps approaching the best such a program can possibly be. Version 3 addresses many of the shortcomings of Version 2, making it worthy of the hype and the price tag. However, the fact that it is a computer program, and that it follows the 'total immersion' learning philosophy, means it is still quite a challenge for those who, without any linguistic background, would learn a language using ONLY Rosetta Stone software. Ideally, users would have a teacher, or a dictionary and a grammar book, as supplements.

More About Rosetta Stone

I read the Wikipedia article on Rosetta Stone today and found a lot of interesting things. First of all, because it is so successful and expensive, I had assumed that most (consumers and experts alike) approved of the software. I was surprised to see that there is a great variety of opinions on it's efficacy, in particular one scalding review by a user of the Russian version, and a much better review by a user of the German version. Both of them reviewed older versions, so some of the issues may have been corrected, but what the Russian reviewer had said went fairly well with what I have mentioned about the Japanese program. He wrote that the program introduced many complex cases early on, in the section on prepositions, which would overwhelm a beginning learner, that the words were clearly too centered on what was important in English, and that the pictures didn't fit well with Russian subjects. The German reviewer was much kinder - perhaps because German isn't as grammatically distant from English? This might indicate that Rosetta Stone is quite good for Germanic languages, or perhaps even Romance languages as well, and not as good for languages that aren't as closely related to English.

Apparently the same phrases, in the same order, are used for every language except for Latin. At least they had the sense to realize that learners of a dead language have different needs than those of a living language! Another interesting quote from Wikipedia: "He called the company regarding the picture sets, and was told that four are in use, one for Western languages, another for Asian, and two sets unique to Swahili and Latin."

Finally, this quote sounds a lot like what I began to mention in my last post, about adults learning languages as adults: "In 2008, author Tim Ferriss, who is fluent in multiple languages, reviewed Rosetta Stone. He said that it was faster to learn languages as an adult instead of a child and the aim toward learning as a child did not lead to producing the best results."

Since I have the software, I have continued and will continue to use the Japanese program for the time being. I enjoy the challenge of learning from context, and it's good to have the listening practice. However, I'm not sure I can recommend the software wholeheartedly to the average learner, especially for more exotic languages.

Before I completely write it off, however, I would like to sometime try out Version 3, which according to Wikipedia has a somewhat different approach.

"Instruction takes the form of four units per language level. Each unit is then subdivided into four core lessons. Each core lesson is approximately 30 minutes followed by sublessons. Sublessons take the form of Pronunciation, Writing, Vocabulary, Grammar, Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Reviews. At the end of each unit is a Milestone, which reviews the material covered in that unit in an interactive activity."

http://www.rosettastone.com/personal/demo
You can try out a bit of Version 3 here. It's no accident that they chose the first lesson of Swedish - Swedish is probably one of the easiest languages they offer, and I think the method probably works best earlier on in the process. But it does look nice, and it teaches you a bit more than Version 2, which is a lot of trial and error.


This is a screen shot from my progress so far in the Japanese Version 2 program. It says aloud, "Is the pink car new? No, it is not new.", and displays it either in Kanji/Hiragana, Hiragana, or normal English letters. For this screenshot, I set it to display in English characters.

Japanese is very different from English - you can't translate word for word. Word for word, the translation would be something like, "Pink colour of car (subject) new is (question)? No, that (subject) new(not) (subject) not-is!" It's somewhat of a challenge to figure these things out from the program alone.

Rosetta Stone

I've heard of this language learning software, and it's hefty price tag, so often that they've become almost mythical in my mind. Routinely, I have people ask me whether I use it. I'm finally trying it out. I'm working through Japanese, starting yesterday, and a friend is working through Farsi. We've been comparing notes. I also got on the Danish version for a few minutes for yet a third opinion. So far I have mixed feelings.

Rosetta Stone is supposed to be the best, period. Hence the price tag. It's supposed to be complete immersion, and bringing you back to the experience of being a child learning it's first language. When I see things like this, I can't help but think of two things. Firstly, that the way a child acquires a new language is in many ways mysterious, and we seem to lose much of our ability to do this past a certain age (around ten). Secondly, Barry Farber (who wrote a book on language learning, which I own), said that adults should learn languages as adult learners, with the disadvantages and the advantages that this presents.

So while, in theory, I like the whole 'natural method', 'any background', 'total immersion' idea, I can't help but feel that it's a bit of a gimmick. Also, while I sort of enjoy the challenge of puzzling out the different meanings on my own, I doubt the average language learner cares about a challenge... and didn't they just pay obscene amounts of money to have the language made easier for them? The trickiest parts so far have been a picture of man falling off a bull (I learned which gibberish went with it, but I still don't know what the gibberish is supposed to mean - the rabbit, or the scurrying), and a counting exercise that showed hands, but was counting fingers... this was before they had taught you any numbers over 10, and suddenly you see six hands full of fingers.

Still, once you accept this method, they do a pretty good job with it. The pictures that they use are very creative, and there is never room for ambivalence, once you figure out what it wants you to do. There is a good deal of variety for every subject. So far I've gone through a very few basic nouns, prepositions, verbs, and adjectives, as well as the colour section, and am midway through the number section, including telling time. For the numbers, they have pictures of the numbers on football fields, refrigerators, go-karts, etc. Numbers has you counting plates, balls, children, and more. The variety really is impressive, and I did find myself learning.

Now let's do some cross comparison. This is where I started to be disappointed. The Farsi version, from comparing my notes to those of my friends, seemed eerily similar. And that's just the problem. There are some things that should come early on or later on in any language. For example, pronouns should be introduced fairly early, whereas the names of different Marsupials can probably wait a bit. But that doesn't mean that all languages are the same. The Norwegian version, for example, would waste time in having a section devoted to conjugating verbs by person, whereas such a section would be quite useful in the Spanish version. There's no reason to go into noun gender in the English version, but it might be helpful in the German version.

We're in counting now, and counting is one of the trickier things about Japanese. You see, different words take different counters, which you can make sound easy or hard. If you want to make it sound hard, you can say, truthfully, that you use a different set of numbers to count different objects, depending on things like how they are shaped. You can also make it sound easy by reassuring the learner that these attach to the number stems, and aren't so different from counting bottles in English, instead of 'waters'. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are at least two full sets of number 'stems' that prefix these counters, and some of the counters are irregular. So when Rosetta Stone has you counting plates, and then windows, it seems to expect you to know that three (plates) is (sara ga) sammai, while three (windows) is mittsu (no mado). I'd love to see a learner, completely new to Japanese, work through this chapter and give me their impressions. I got through because I already knew about counters, and had a vague idea about the two sets of stems and even some of the most common irregulars. I knew, going into it, and it was still tricky. I admit it, tricky to explain without breaking the whole 'immersion' theme, but you could give the Japanese learners more time on a section that will be far more difficult for them than for say, Danish learners.

That's a real, practical example of when it might hurt the program to have it be so similar from one language to the next, but there's also just the idea of it. Rosetta Stone markets itself as the best of the best, and has a price tag to support it. So it's a little bit bothersome that the different languages seem so copied from each other. Did they expect that 99% of their users would simply use one language, and never ask questions? Well, probably. But it's still annoying.

Speaking of reusing content, I mentioned to my friend that, even if the subjects (and sentences, and even picture layouts) were the same, at least the pictures were Japanese themed. There were too many Kanji in the background, too many Japanese faces for it to be chance. The first non-Japanese used in a picture was introduced as a wakai, young, woman - I immediately guessed that wakai meant foreigner, or even white. When I told him this, my friend seemed surprise. He said that in the Persian version, the people didn't seem Middle Eastern at all. For comparison purposes, he asked if I had a little boy under a picnic table. I had a Japanese boy, he had a black one. I fired up the Danish version for another perspective. The pictures were different from the Japanese one, and from the Persian one too, I think. They weren't as strongly Danish as the Japanese ones had been Japanese, but it seems as though there was a good deal of effort made to customize the pictures, which I appreciate.

The best thing I have to say about Rosetta Stone is this - it's somewhat addicting. I'll be playing with this more before I leave for Japan - mostly Japanese, of course, but I'll probably try out a few other languages just to check it out.

Update on My New Floridian Life

We moved out of the hotel and into the new home. Dad returned from Paris. The house is full of our furniture and the number of boxes obstructing our passage is quickly diminishing. The music and several T.V.s are up and running, and the large black dachshunds next door have discovered Tidbit and vice versa, so it's goodbye to the quiet we had before!

The dock is very different from the one we have at Lake of the Ozarks - it's on piles, instead of floating, so it doesn't go up and down with the tides, and doesn't rock in the wake of boats or dolphins. When the tide is low it's several feet under the dock, and reveals a mass of white-grey-green barnacle/shellfish-stuff encrusting the wooden pilings. I need to catch up on my vocabulary to describe such things - I've just spent too much of my life far from the sea. I am nearly as surprised as Tidbit by the salty taste of the water.

Yesterday we worked. I pulled the tape off of so many boxes that the tips of my fingers ached and felt carpet burned. I also set up the home computer and everything, and it's all running very well now! The house begins to feel a bit like a home. Our furniture is all here and some rooms, such as the Master Bedroom, are even respectably nice. Both bathrooms and the kitchen, however, are still miserable - probably will be until we make some fundamental changes to the house. But ah well. The big piles of book boxes from my room and the office are gone, as are most of the random boxes in the family/dining room and my parents' closet.

Last night while we were trying to set up the home gym, the weight machine fell over on me. It only fell about forty five degrees, and while it hurt, I knew right away I wasn't seriously injured. Took a while to convince my parents of that, though, and they ran over and started patting me everywhere and asking what hurt. I was more worried about my laptop, which was also involved in the accident - it has a good scratch in the screen, almost penetrating. But it doesn't affect how it works at all, so I'm grateful for that.

Immediately following this incident Teddy and Maxine arrived. They are, or Teddy is, if you want to be specific, our only blood relatives in Florida. Teddy is my grandmother's brother, and Maxine is his wife. We visited them in Florida once growing up, and of course we've seen them at numerous family functions across the States (okay, so overwhelmingly in Missouri), so they are a slice of home, family, normality, if those can be associated.

They are very Floridian. Maxine is from Tennessee and speaks and cooks with a decidedly southern style. I volunteered to help her cook for Thanksgiving, as we'll be spending this Thanksgiving with them, and I've heard she makes cornbread stuffing and sometimes deep-fries the turkey. Teddy has such a strong something accent that he can be difficult to understand at times. He is bald and almost a caricature of himself, but very nice, underneath the bravado ;), and a 'hoot', as my mom puts it. He goes freshwater fishing on a fast motorboat in gator infested, inland waters.

We went out with them to a restaurant in John's Pass called Gators. I had this massive appetite, I dunno where from. I helped with the peel and eat shrimp and gator appetizers, and then ate every bite of my blackened Mahi Mahi with yellow rice, and then got a dessert - Key Lime Pie - to split with my sister. It was all good, especially the Key Lime Pie. What's very strange is that I never, ever order dessert - I'm usually so full that I bring half my entree home and still feel abused. And afterward I was contented, but not so full as I usually am - I could have helped out with another few desserts, or another round of appetizers, had there been more to come!

The sunset was unbearably lovely. Pictures later, I'm planning to post a few from the move.

My 'room' consists of a bookshelf filled with books, two crates with clothes, one crate of debris, one crate labeled sentimental, an alarm clock, and an air bed, all in the home gym. It's cozy. No, really. Well, there's nowhere to sit down on, or anything to eat. (/tolkienfandom) Tidbit and I slept there last night and it worked out pretty well. This house is wired really poorly, and all the light switches and knobs are on the outsides of the rooms they belong to, meaning that I have to decide whether I want my light on or off /before/ I go into my room and shut the door. Luckily my closet has it's own light, and a pretty nice one, which I have been reading by.

Today I woke up when Tidbit wanted to go outside. It was about half an hour earlier than I would have liked. She went out and hunted for geckos and I got out Liebe Total and read about five pages, underlining, but not looking up, the words I didn't know. I can never decide whether it is better to read, ignoring or figuring out from context the words I don't know, or go through making a notice of them, maybe looking them up if I have the computer handy, and that's it, or to go through and study every new word. It's hard to say, so I sort of play it by ear each day. Liebe Total is pretty easy, and from the subject matter I think it's written for teenagers, which would explain that. German prose, such as in a newspaper, can be very difficult - making it one of the few languages that I'm almost as confident listening in as reading it! But Liebe Total (actually, Immer Cool Bleiben, the first novel of two in the book) is very reasonable.

Then we did a bit more work, and then I went to the grocery store, Winn Dixie. At first I worried because they didn't seem to have anything I sought. Organic 1% milk, for example. I found the ordinary milk, a small enough section, and beside it saw several organic varieties. There were three kinds each of organic whole, and skim milk, and two kinds of organic 2%, and one kind of organic 1% chocolate milk! Finally I asked someone and it turns out they keep it in a different area of the store. ?? Similar thing happened with the feta cheese, all the flavoured and low fat kinds are at one end, and the ordinary varieties at the other.

I've been attempting to cook with the new kitchen and sometimes it has me pining for my 'kitchen' in the dorm. The drawers don't pull out well, the stove and oven are old and hardly trustworthy, we have no microwave, etc... but we brought the knives and pans, etc, from home, and they are quite nice. :D I can cut through onion and garlic like butter! Right now the smell of Greek chicken and jasmine rice are permeating the room.

My main complaint here is the sun. It takes me down. I was sensitive enough to the heat in St. Louis, but I dunno... here it's a drier heat, which most people prefer, but not me, for some reason. A wet heat exhausts, sure, and may even feel hotter in the mouth and nose, but this dry heat makes my skin burn and itch. Or maybe it's that the sun's rays are so much stronger closer to the equator? It's thoroughly unpleasant and I can't even describe it in a way that does it justice. I realize suddenly that before this I never really went to Florida in summer, usually in Winter, and found it balmy enough then! I'm just not built to survive this climate, or this latitude, or somethign!

Japanese Flash Cards

Here's the thing about Flash Cards.

They well... have two sides.

And ideally, you want them to go both ways.

Normally this works well for languages. You can put "Hello" on one side and "Hola" on the other and when you've mastered remembering that Hola means Hello you can reverse it and see if you can produce Hola when presented with Hello.

But it's not always that easy. There are sometimes multiple translations, for example.

And sometimes it's even harder. Take Japanese.

I want to learn the phrase "This Week". Simple enough, right? Write "This Week" on one side, and "Konshuu" on the other? Sort of. But I want to learn the Kanji for "This Week" as well. (今週）

Maybe you can already see the problem. If I just put the Kanji, then how will I know if I have remembered the sound of the word properly? (And which is more important - can I put the card in the 'I know it' pile if I remember /just/ the Kanji or /just/ the sound? Or do I make four columns - 'know it completely' 'know the Kanji' 'know the sound' 'don't know it'?) Likewise, if I read from the Kanji side, I won't be able to test myself on the reading.

There's also the debate about whether I should write in Romaji or in Hiragana. I know Hiragana is better for me but I learn /so/ much faster in Romaji, and I'm on a schedule here. But this last question provides a reasonable solution.

I have decided to put the Kanji (large) on one side, and the English (large) on the other, and on each side, smallish and in the corner, the sound in Hiragana (こんしゅう）. I read the English alphabet so automatically that I wouldn't be able to test myself if it was written there, but I can avoid looking at the Hiragana, and I don't yet read it without thinking, so it essentially hides it from my view if I have any willpower at all. That way I can test myself Kanji - Meaning or Meaning - Kanji, and try to read the Kanji right, and if I have any doubt, I have the reading on both sides.