Language Delight

I love this article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

Stephanie linked to it on Facebook, and it's basically - yeah, Sapir-Whorf was an idiot, but languages really can affect thought. And here I thought I knew all the basic cool language facts randomly mentioned in general audience newspaper articles... well, this is a good one! Some awesome quotes:

"Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about."

"Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so."

"In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed."

"In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory."

"Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t."

"Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”"

"In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions."

"If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films."

"But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant."

"For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense."

Catalan Class 2010 is in the news!

Monica's crazy Catalan project was by and large a great success, and now there's an article about our class in the Diario de Mallorca, the biggest newspaper in the Balearic Islands. Check it out: http://www.diariodemallorca.es/mallorca/2010/08/21/missouri-habla-catalan/596601.html

There was a photo of our entire classroom, from the back of the room, and this one of Emily's Ensaimada:




Some excerpts:

¿Por qué un chico norteamericano se interesa por una lengua que se habla en regiones situadas a más de 7.000 kilómetros de distancia? "Tienen mucha curiosidad por las lenguas minoritarias", explicaba Marcos en una reciente visita a la isla: "Muchos han estudiado español y les llama la atención, otros vienen de cursos de otra lengua románica, algunos tienen ganas de ir a Barcelona o tienen que ir allí a hacer sus prácticas".

Basically: Why would a North American kid be interested in a language that they speak more than 7,000 kilometers away? "They are curious about minority languages," Monica explaied on a recent visit to the island. "Many have studied Spanish and it calls their attention, others come from other romance language courses, some want to go to Barcelona or have to go for their studies."

"e incluso investigaron sobre la valenciana fiesta de la Tomatina, adónde se han animado a viajar tres de sus alumnos."

And they learned about the Valencian Tomatina festival, inspiring three students to go.

Un motivo mallorquín recurrente es Rafa Nadal, señala Marcos: un estudiante hizo un proyecto sobre su vida personal y profesional usando vídeos del tenista con diez años; otros hicieron un trabajo representando una entrevista "en broma y en serio", con el manacorí.

Basically: A recurring Mallorcan theme is Rafa Nadal - one student did a project about his personal and profesional life using videos of him as a ten year old tennis player; others did a project representing an interview "in jest and in seriousness", with the star.

Mònica Marcos está encantada con la buena acogida que ha tenido su curso introductorio de lengua y cultura catalana y sueña con poder ofrecer la especialización en esta facultad donde hasta ahora se enseñaban todas las lenguas románicas excepto el catalán y el rumano. Gracias a ella, a la University of Missouri ahora sólo le falta el rumano.

It says thanks to her, the University of Missouri has gone from only missing two Romance languages: Romanian and Catalan, to now missing only Romanian. What about Galician?? But still, a nice sentiment...

Incluso puede seguir disfrutando de las ensaimadas, aunque sea casi rectangular como la que hizo con toda su ilusión y de motu propio una de sus alumnas. Asegura que "era buena".

A bit about Emily's Ensaimada. ^^

Scotland Summary

I'm at Allan's house now and will be for the weekend. We'll catch up on some much needed sleep and maybe take a trip or two out, like to New Lanark or Hadrian's Wall, but for the most part I'm starting to look ahead to Spain. Scotland has been awesome. I was expecting a lot from the country but it has exceeded all expectations. The highlights have probably been Edinburgh (seeing Allan's haunts, the, lovely castle, etc...), climbing Ben Nevis (the U.K.s highest mountain), Loch Ness (the good, the bad, the pathetically touristy), and our brief but spectacular taste of the Hebrides Islands (Allan, Lucia and I had an afternoon on a beach of white sands and turquoise waters, and all to ourselves!) As far as the company goes, I love both Allan and Lucia dearly, and we had a lot of fun, but I'm not sure I thought through the ramifications of my plan to get them to hook up clearly. In fact I'm not sure I even expected it to actually work. It did and I'm happy for both of them but of course there were a few lonely times and a few awkward times but all ameliorated by a bunch of drunken Slovakians on one night and a certain Slovenian on two others.

We didn't complete our walk in the end. We'd planned to go from Ft. William to Inverness across the Great Glen Way, crossing Scotland from sea to sea and not even at its absolute narrowest point! In the end we were a bit cocky. I still think it wasn't so much the raw distance as the fact that we did our trial run in dry weather, on flat ground, and with half the weight. Really smart, and to make matters worse the day before the walk was the day we climbed Britain's highest mountain, and you're not supposed to do anything the day after. While we had unbelievably nice weather for most of the days of the trip, it rained every day we were walking, and after several days of trudging through pouring rain and the like, Allan was in lots of pain, I had caught some sort of sickness from Lucia, and Lucia was both sick and in pain, though possibly to less extremes, so we ended up taking the bus on two days. Still, we completed more than half the walk and learned a lot for next time. We should have been in better shape, we should have built in a rest day (especially considering Ben Nevis), and there were also things outside of our control, like pretty bad weather even for Scotland and illness. Whatever sickness Lucia brought with her from Chile was some nasty stuff - she is only now recovering after a month of sore throat, dripping nose, and cough, whereas I had the same symptoms more severely and acutely (already feeling fine again), and now Allan seems to have caught the same thing.

Is it rainy here? A few days in I would have told you it was all rubbish. We had lovely sunshine on the islands and the weather while climbing Ben Nevis was also fine. Yes it rained when we were in Glasgow but somehow rain bothers me less in urban environments. Then we started walking and it rained the WHOLE TIME - and then we finished and the weather in Inverness was absolutely glorious again. But what's really freaky about the rain here isn't the frequency (it rains far more in Costa Rica, for example), or the intensity (when it does rain in St. Louis in the summer, you better be inside unless you want to be blown into the Mississippi or struck by lightening, it's somewhat less here), but more of the combination between the two and other factors as well. It does rain frequently, I'd say at least once every other day, and unlike in, say, Costa Rica its still quite heavy and unpredictable, and cold or at least a bit bracing.



What I dislike about Scotland:

The wet, because towels and clothes never dry but always seem sort of damp and cold.

The way hot and cold spouts are separated and the hot water gets as hot enough to make tea - sometimes that can be handy yeah but usually you just have to pick between burning your skin off or freezing - it would be so easy to combine the spouts but no, why would anyone ever need warm or even lukewarm water when they could have boiling or icy?

The unpredictability - I mean rain is fine, but if you wear your raincoat it probably won't rain and carry it around all day, and if you don't, it's guaranteed to rain regardless of the forecast and regardless of how blue and clear the sky seems when you go out.

That there are random areas that according to Allan are rough, and I believe him of course for like Glasgow which has a reputation, but I mean he'll even say it of these little towns which look so sleepy and sweet. Makes me a bit sad. :( Why do these places have to be so gritty and real when they look so much like a fairy tale?



What I like about Scotland:

The wet, because it feels lovely and is good for my skin.

The food, the food, the food. I love the meat pies with their delicious flaky tender pastry and mix of vegetables and meat and spices inside. :D :D :D The candy is tasty, like Crunchie with its honeycomb centre, and the Galaxy and Cadbury chocolate. And there are berries by the side of the road, like in Finland and Norway, and very nearly as tasty. They have Magnum Ice Cream which is always a bonus. Blood Pudding really isn't bad after all, Potato Scones are quite nice, the availability of Indian food is always pleasant even when it doesn't seem to fit, and here's the big one -

Haggis: it's awesome.

The evil pine tree forests (in spite of everything), and the native deciduous forests with their dappled sunlight.

The moss and the lichen and the rocks (never get old somehow).

The Gaelic. It's more real than I expected, (but, to be fair, I was being pessimistic.) I've heard several people speak it and up north the signs are written in Gaelic first, English second.

Scots, too, and the myriad of different accents, are also somehow more real than I expected. Part of this I think is just the normal growing up in America you think everything else is hopelessly quaint and exotic, grow up and get disillusioned and then get surprised again to discover some things are real.

The Islands - they're as lovely as anything Caribbean or Mediterranean, different of course. I expected the desolation and the wildness and they are as advertised, but the deep blue of the waters and white sands caught me by surprise.

The Mountains. If you know me at all this comes as absolutely no surprise, but many of the are bigger than expected and all of them lovely. I expected them to be more like the Appalachians in a sense with more tree cover but I love them the way they are, more naked and windswept and almost like the Faroes. There are so many waterfalls snaking down everywhere like liquid silver and there are even some valleys by the sea that could rival the average Norwegian fjord.

The way the power outlets have little individual on-off switches.

Inverness. Perhaps the lovely weather made me a bit bias, but I thought the city was so nice with the river running through and the funny bridge and all the churches and the castle. :)

Loch Ness - its super touristy but even that's a bit fun once in a while, all the Nessie madness is so ridiculous it becomes fun again. And Urquhart Castle is lovely, and I had fun taking a swim in the Loch itself.

Ben Nevis - what a great mountain, what a lovely day spent climbing it. It's a bit of a challenge but really beautiful at every stage. Breathtaking in both senses of the word. :P

Edinburgh - So much culture for such a small city, plus its just so lovely and historic, even taking out, say, the brilliant castle and Arthur's Seat, the little mountain. Most of the city is actually a World Heritage Site. If I could afford to study abroad in an English speaking country, it would be in Edinburgh for sure.

The castles. I know it's super duper stereotypical but they're everywhere and it's just so cool. Allan actually has one like a fifteen minute walk from his house, a little one and not very old but still beautiful and ruined, all trees and vines twisting around the stonework and birds living in the upper stories. ^^

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

Catalan... now in Canada

I've been reading Catalunya - One Nation, Two States, and I'm finally getting some ideas about a paper. Like I said before, I'm interested in how spread out Catalunya is, how it's in Spain and France too, and in Andorra, and even a bit in Italy and in Canada. Yep, apparently there's a small but substantial Catalan community in Quebec. One Nation, Two States is mostly a comparison between two communities in Catalunya - one Spanish (Portbou) and the other French (Cerbère). They are right across the border from one another and are indeed so closely linked that women from Cerbère often get their hair done in Portbou. Both cities have had challenges in maintaining their Catalan language and culture, but Portbou seems to be managing it better than Cerbère, which the author of this book blames the French government for to a large extent. So, that's interesting. The idea of a Catalan state as spread out from Spain to France to Andorra to Sicily to the Balearic Islands to Quebec, how the culture and language have managed in each place, and why. Something like this might work, but of course I need to focus it. It would be very easy to do Spain vs. France, but I'm also intrigued by the others. Especially Andorra - no one talks about Andorra.

Catalan Paper

Now that the Nihonjinron idea has come into being, been developed just a bit, and been planted, I can start thinking about Catalan. It's troubling me a bit, not because I'm not interested, but because I've already written a similar paper - the interrelationship between the Basque language and separatist movement in Spain, as compared to that of Catalan. I could write the same paper in reverse, but of course that would be too much double dipping, and even if I were tempted to try it, I'm actually turning this paper in to the same professor.

There are other topics I could write on, yes, but they are less personal. For some reason there are tons of books about Women Writers in Catalunya, for example But what kind of essay can I write about them? I could read one or two books in English, or a few short stories, but reading even one short story in Catalan would be hard, and anyway I feel that I lose the whole point if I'm analyzing literature from a linguistic perspective and it's translated. And anyway I'm not interested in the topic, not in the same way that I'm interested in language and mannerisms and little things. cultura has always been more interesting to me than Cultura - daily life endlessly more fascinating than the arts of high society.

Anyway I went and picked up some books. One of them begins with a foreword that's just quote after quote about the connection between language and identity, and I love each one. Language brings out such emotion in people - more than any other aspect of culture, perhaps. Not that language and culture are the same thing, but that language is perhaps the heart of a culture - anything else is decoration.

I'm just going to start doing research and see where it takes me. That usually works.

The books I picked up:

Catalunya, One Nation, Two States by Alexander Alland
This is the one that starts with all the language quotes.

Catalonia, a Self Portrait, by Sorber
This is a collection of excerpts and short stories from translated Catalan literature that is supposed to build a portrait of the culture.

Escribir la Catalanidad, by Stewart B. King
Basically, why it's impossible to describe the Catalan culture in Spanish. Or something like that. And the book is written in Spanish, about Catalan, by a guy with a rather un-Spanish and un-Catalan name. ??

Hmmm... noticing these titles juxtaposed makes me think of something else. There's so much about Catalan and Catalunya, but Catalan isn't spoken only in Catalunya - also in Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the South of France, even a little slice of Sicily. And this intrigues me too... And I found out that at one point, a few hundred years ago, there was a veritable Catalan empire stretched horizontally across the Mediterranean, and the Catalans at one point held Athens.

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 - 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/ :)

Chinese Writing... Yikes!

"One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character."

- http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

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

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.

The Education of the Swedes

Hei alle sammen!

Jeg håper at dere liker dere her i Florida! For en søt familie dere er! :)

Jeg tenkte bare at dere ville kanskje vite at her tar vi av bordet etter frokost.

Ha det kjempefint!


It didn't take us long to notice the Swedes. When you stay in a hotel for more than a week, and particularly when you attend the breakfast every morning, you begin to become acquainted in a distant, 'stalkerish' way with several of the more interesting families who are following the same patterns.

The most interesting, most obvious family this week has been a family of Swedes. Loud father, quiet mother, two singing blonde children with bright blue eyes. They dominate the room with their loudness, their foreignness, the singsong quality of their speech... the way they never clear their table after they eat, leaving the busboys, who are only supposed to replenish food and empty trash cans, a mountain of china and rubbish.

So I played a little trick, or taught them a little something, or did the busboys a bit of a favour, depending on how you want to look at it. I wrote them a note, last night, and stuck it under their door. You can see the note in it's original above - the translation would be,

Hello everyone!
I hope you like it here in Florida! What a sweet/cute family you are!
I just thought you might want to know that here we clear the table after breakfast.
Have a great time!

This morning, inconspicuous as always, we watched. And if they didn't clear the table, every bit, admirably so! We were a safe distance off, but could hardly contain our giggles as mamma and pappa walked to the trash cans again and again with the piles of dishes.

Moving, Touching, Romantic Chapterbook

The other day I went to the little bookstore near our Winn Dixie and found a book in Finnish! I bought it on the spot, hardly caring what it was about. Well, I've started in on it. It's slow going because I need to look up many words, and with Finnish you don't just 'look up a word' as you can in Spanish... it often takes a bit of time to deconstruct the word into various smaller words, or at least separate the ending, sometimes reconstruct the altered original stem, etc. But ah, the feeling when it goes well, and you have an actual sentence in front of you!

Right. So, how much have I read?

Erm... the front and back cover? XD I've only had a bit of time after breakfast! I'll summarize, but please don't get mad for bad translations. XD

The Title is: Tyttö ja kartanonherra
My Translation: The girl and the lord of the estate

The author is Catherine Cookson. I was pretty sure the book was translated, which is a bit sad but oh well. I checked the publication page and it says, Englanninkielen alkuteos The Dwelling Place ilmestyi 1971 Suomentanut Eva Siikarla. Right, definitely translated, and older, too.

I started in on the back cover.

Cissie Brodin, köyhän maatyöläisen kymmenpäisen sisaruparven vanhin, menettää molemmat vanhempansa. Cissie päättää pitää perheen koossa hinnalla millä hyvänsä. Hän sijoittaa pesueensa nummelle kallioluolaan ja aloittaa taistelun jokapäiväisestä leivästä. Juuri kun elämä alkaa sujua, mahtavan aateliskartanon nuoriherra raiskaa Cissien - ja pian tyttö huomaa odottavansa lasta.

Cissie Brodin, the oldest of ten siblings in a poor serf family, loses both parents. Cissie decides to keep the family together at whatever cost. She relocates the brood to a craggy den on the moors and begins the full time struggle to eat (lit. for bread). Just when life begins to flow(?), the lord of a great noble estate rapes Cissie - and soon the girl discovers that she is pregnant.


Notes:

1.) I love Finnish. Some words are just so beautiful! Like sujua for flow, luola for cave. And raiskaa is dreadful and perfect. Then again, where does it get words like tyttö for girl? :S

2.) Nummi = Moors.... seriously? I haven't read a book set on the moors since Secret Garden, and now suddenly I'm reading both this and Wuthering Heights. :S

3.) The little grab line is: Koskettava, romanttinen lukuromaani! This seems to mean "Moving (or touching), romantic chapter-novel!"

Somehow, with the subject matter, I don't think this is a children's book, but the grab line is trying to convince me otherwise. XD

五十かんじ！ （５２ Kanji)

本田下上山川日国人語英一二三四五六七八九十男女子大小好時何月半百千万円高安学生先校私間毎来週今年火水木金土曜

I now know 52 Kanji. My goal is 200 by the time I go to Japan.

An original (and true) sentence in beautiful Kanji:

三週間日本にいます。

I will be in Japan for three weeks.

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.

Translations are Like Wives

"Translations are like wives. The beautiful ones are not faithful, and the faithful ones are not beautiful." - Some Saying

Love this. :)

Japanese Update

I wasn't lying when I thought something broke over spring break. But, as I think I've said, it wasn't the Japanese language, as I had hoped. It was just the script. But now finally the language itself is bending. I actually think it's helped to learn in Romaji. I know I shouldn't, but it's helping a lot. I'm getting the grammar figured out, I'm learning the vocabulary much more quickly... Since I already understand the syllabaries pretty well, the plan is now to keep up with Kanji and work on grammar and vocabulary, then about a week before the trip go back and review the kana.

We'll see. I'm only at chapter 5 in my book. I'm not a big fan of this book, but I am learning important things, just in a disorganized and frustrating fashion. And I say the language is bending because it's looking just a bit more possible, I'm not feeling as trapped when I think about how they express various things... I am not just parroting phrases, I can actually make my own sentences now! I know three verb forms (past, non past, and hortative) and about 12 verbs, and the rest of my vocabulary is slowly growing. Some things I can say now (albeit slowly for most of them):

In English:
Which newspaper do you read?
I bought the apple at a kiosk.
Mobile phones are in the electronics counter on the sixth floor.
I didn't go.
Who will cook?
In that case, let's go to the mountains.
I studied Japanese in Tokyo.
Let's eat at eight o'clock.
Shall I carry the suitcase?
The Japanese eat rice every day.
Let's buy the cheap one.

In Japanese:
Dono shinbun o yomimasu ka.
Kiosuku de ringo o kaimashita.
Keitai denwa wa rokkai no denkaseihin-uriba ni arimasu.
Ikimasen deshita.
Sore dewa, yama e ikimashoo.
Watashi wa nihongo o Tookyoo de benkyoo shimashita.
Hachiji ni tabemashoo.
Suutsukeesu o mochimashoo ka.
Mainichi nihonjin wa gohan o tabemasu.
Yasui no kaimashoo.