Pat’s Polemics

This summer has proved fruitful in terms of language study. The other night I was lying on the floor near where my wife was sitting reading. I reached for the nearest Russian book on my shelf and began reading, just a few paragraphs. Then I grabbed the nearest Urdu book and did the same - at a much lower level of proficiency. Thereby I assured myself that I had many hours of good reading ahead of me, reading the classics in literature and poetry in those languages and a couple of others - Spanish, French, Latin, less so in Italian.
The languages I'm starting on are Modern Greek, Kweyol, and Dutch. The Greek will give me the most trouble but I am very enthusiastic about it. Dutch less so due in part to the cognate-rich vocabulary and absence of morphological complexity. Kweyol will be the easiest since its vocabulary is based on French for the most part though its grammar is entirely different.

With Spanish,

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As I've described before, I realized when I started teaching fl that in May my students remembered what I had said to them in August but not much of all the grammar I had taught in between. That got me to thinking about my own language ability. My knowledge of Russian grammar and vocabulary was impressive but my ability to communicate was poor, requiring lots of looking up, etc. My Spanish was more fluent, which made sense since I had used Spanish in my work as a counselor over 20 years.
But the language that simply flowed out of me without struggle was French, a language I had had two years of in high school and had not studied since. What was going on here that if someone walked in a started speaking French, I fell in with them effortlessly (keep in mind, my French is quite restricted in terms of vocabulary b/c I don't use it much). And I remembered Margie, my girlfriend with no English when I was a senior in h.s.

I've described before how by coincidence I was charged with meeting a newly arrived French family when I was in my last year of French, a junior. The man was hired by my ROTC club but he took the job only on the condition that I interpret for him. So that senior year of h.s. saw me functioning in French a good deal of the time. And, IMHO, that is why French stays with me whereas the five semesters of college German + one year in h.s. have left me Deutschlos - Germanless. And don't forget, all of you out there who are sure that learning grammar rules provides the basis for progress in L2, I love grammar and have at this moment at least 15 books on grammar going, both of individual languages like Norwegian and Hawaiian, but also linguistics books deeply analyzing a wide variety of grammars. I have on the table right now an article from 2000 on the Language Wars, prescriptivism vs descriptivism in teaching English grammar (the author leans toward the former).

So this is what convinced me that languages are learned via communication in them, not by studying the grammar. If the latter were the case, I would have learned over two dozen languages by now.

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My first class was a Spanish conversational class in 8th grade, 1954. I went into Latin the following year, then French. One year of German, then I had 5 semesters of German in college before dropping it. I had 3 semesters of Russian before dropping it. Then no more language classes for 25 years until I had to take a summer of Spanish classes, 4 of them.

That was not entirely true. Over the intervening years I took classes in the History of Russian, of Spanish, and of German. I took several more courses in Russian - reading and composition courses and poetry - and a class in Spanish Civilization of the Southwest given in Spanish. Once I took the summer of Spanish, I began taking language courses in methodology, Spanish dialectology, etc.I took a five weeks intensive course in Russian in Moscow and an 8 weeks intensive course in Macedonian. I also took a graduate course in French for which I read and wrote a paper on French West African literature.

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In some self-talk, I found myself saying "e infieldad" instead of "y in...", the first sign that e before i has been acquired. I wonder how?
I've been reading a lot in Spanish the last few days.

Also, last night as my wife was asking me to throw out some residue from a roast, I noticed a mushroom still in the broth and when I went to say I needed to get the mushroom out first, the word that popped into my mind was hongo. I had just been reading in Spanish but I haven't used or read the word hongo in quite a while, so it seems I was in the Spanish part of my brain still, despite chatting with my wife in English.

Next day........
After an evening of speaking Spanish, this morning I thought about a little girl of "diez u once anos", showing the spread of the e before i rule to the u before o rule.

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Post from a listserv:
> In fact, when I was asked in France, "Tu aimes Harry Potter?" I never did
> manage to understand until the speaker pronounced it not English. I was
> sure some deficiency in my vocabulary prevented me from understanding.
> Marti
>

It is very frustrating in a language where English words are used in almost every sentence. In Urdu, b/c of the British influence, not only Engish words are thrown in at every occasion (and not just to show off but as an integral part of the language), but they enter into the grammar, so that to pay someone becomes kys ko pay karna. On top of that, many English words are used in a different sense: hotel means restaurant and rush means a crowd.
It really messes me up, even in writing b/c they use the Arabic alphabet and I'm trying to make sense out of mit only to realize they mean M.I.T. My brother is doing graduate work at MIT becomes Mera bhai MIT meng graduate work karta hay.

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