The archives from my previous blog on blogger.com are finally up, so this blog finally has some pre-history (of a sort).  I’ve been doing this since Jan., so feel free to go through some back issues!

Some say yes…..  Personally, I don’t quite believe in ranking languages in an order of difficulty.  While many people believe in the singular exceptionality of the difficulty of learning their language as a non-native (basically every language group on Earth will have people like this), every language has hard points and every language has easy points.  While some languages will be easier for certain learners due to similarity to their own language (for example, an Italian native would usually learn Spanish more easily than a German speaker), languages still are just time-consuming (note: I didn’t say “difficult”) and require significant effort.  Just as an example — most people always assume that learning Spanish is significantly easier than learning Chinese (and for learning reading/writing, they’d be correct), but for oral language, I’d have to admit that, in my own experience (and note that others’ experiences may vary), that Chinese, notably lacking in all the verb conjugations that make Spanish-learning sticky, was quite a bit more straight-forward.

Ah music — the foreign language teacher’s best friend!!!  What better way to immerse your students in the sounds of the language, while simultaneously presenting them with “realia” (real, tangible artifacts from the country of study — one of the holy grails of language teachers*).  Music is indeed a powerful tool for both teaching and learning language, but one has to keep in mind that music is a double edged sword in the hands of the learner.

While there are certain undeniable benefits to using music to learn language (the biggest of which has to be motivation — it’s simply fun to most people), there are certainly also disadvantages conferred by music.  The principle disadvantage of music is that music distorts language.  Even if you’re Italian, you really don’t speak like you would sing (in the case of tone-deaf people such as my brother and father, this is a really, really good thing, as otherwise all conversation would be intensely painful).  Singing elongates certain vowels and clips consonants.  The grammar and structure of a song is also often quite different from that of normal conversation.  This often makes the actual lyrics of songs quite difficult to grasp, even for native speakers (and certain genres of music seem to absolutely revel in incomprehensibility).  This causes such (often unintentionally hilarious) mis-hearings as “excuse me while I kiss this guy.”  Personally, I tend to mishear more lyrics than I decode correctly.  While ”Smells Like Teen Spirit“ is utterly incomprehensible to anyone on the planet (apparently, even Kurt Cobain tended to get the lyrics messed up), I am at a quite advanced level of lyric-decoding ineptitude, even managing to mangle Animaniacslyrics to the raucous laughter of my friends… Sigh… 

Thus, songs need to be vetted for clarity.  The best songs to use for teaching/learning are those with a clear story line (ahem… folk and country music fans may rejoice).  Songs can be great for learning individual vocabulary items and expressions.  I can certainly think of plenty of words that I learned from particular songs in the languages that I have studied.  While the most important factor that will influence learning success is enjoyment of the song (as learning will usually be most effective if you listen over and over — this would be quite tedious if you didn’t actually like the song), try to choose songs with clear enunciation and with a coherent story line, which will allow you to internalize more grammar, pronunciation, and narrative structure, in addition to vocabulary.

* The internet has been a godsend for language teachers by giving them easy access to a whole array of realia — from music to short stories, from pictures of coke cans to driver’s license application forms.  “Back in the day” (i.e., pre-netscape), language teachers refined the art of begging anyone going to the country where their language is spken to bring back every newspaper, sandwich wrapper, etc. that they encountered on their trip. 

My prior articles on heritage languages focused mostly on the subject in the North American context; but as this article aptly demonstrates, the same phenomena exists in other countries as well.  It particularly points to the role of language policies in preserving or degrading people’s retention of heritage languages (in this case, ethnic Chinese in Indonesia).

Takeaway line: “According to CLF’s Kim Mc-Connell, if I fail to speak French like a native Quebecer in three weeks, it will prove that learning a language as an adult is impossible…”

Just ponder that! If you don’t perfect a language in three months, you’re doomed to failure. Hmmm… Apparently noone has ever learned a language then… I’ve said it beofre, I’ll say it again… Language proficiency is the product of time spent immersed in the language. Three weeks is an absolutely unreal time frame to pick up more than the basics, as the author of this article (click the link) well points out…

The search for the original human language continues…

They’re looking for “the mother of all languages” in Santa Fe.  Far from being some description of Sadaam Hussein’s personal slang coinages, this is the quest to seek the orgins of human language.  Ever since William Jones discovered sizeable similarities between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit root vocabularies, linguists have managed trace the world’s languages back into a handful of “families,” characterized by common ancestors (i.e., Greek, French, Hindi, Persian, etc. all descended from a single parent language.  The fun part begins at trying to find the common ancestor of these parent languages, and ultimately, to find the original human language from which all other languages descended.  Whether you take a creationist or evolutionist view, most theorists will agree that human language had to start at a single source.  Particularly from an evolutionist model, the idea that multiple groups of humans independently developed such a similar language ability at relatively similar points at time is improbable to the point of ridiculousness.  Thus, there has to be a single ancestor of all human languages — so English and Chinese are cousins of sorts..

Because sometimes, I fall asleep after getting home from work….

• Pick-up line of the day: “How big is your Heschl’s Gyrus?” (Pretty freakin’ cool study on a part of the brain that appears to have a direct link to one’s ability to acquire a foreign language)

• I draw the line at diapering my laptop…

• Japanese youngsters in imminent danger of losing their God-given right to grow up learning to speak crappy “Engurish”: should English be introduced at the primary school level in the Japanese educational system? (ummm…. yes?)

• “Hindi should be considered for use as a main UN language” (Well, it has roughly 3x more native speakers than either French or Russian…)

Quote of the day: “…when you live somewhere for a long amount of time, you know, it is at least polite to learn the language to some level.”  Guess where this is from!  No, guess again… 

As mentioned yesterday, there is a huge separation between learning grammar and being able to use it. In the language teaching profession, this is often referred to as the difference between “acquiring” vs. “learning” a language. These terms were coined by Dr. Stephen Krashen, who defined “learning” as “learning about a language,” i.e., learning grammar and vocabulary and syntactic conventions in isolation from the language as a vehicle for communication. “Acquisition,” on the other hand, refers to the natural process by which children learn their first language, and the attempt to replicate that process in second language learning settings. According to Krashen, we only acquire a second language through massive amounts of L2 input in a low-stress situation.

While the merits of such arguments provide good fodder for linguists to publish ever more articles, for the language learner, such a distinction may seem irrelevant. Let’s focus on what will directly impact you as the learner. First, if the distinction defined above is true (and personally, I buy it), you will never gain language proficiency from studying grammar. Grammar is important (for reasons we’ll discuss later), but knowing all the minutiae of grammar doesn’t cause fluid speech. When looking for a language course, thus, one should look for a class that includes a lot of listening and speaking components.

Additionally, one should be aware that, because of this distinction between learning and acquisition, one can know a grammar rule, and still make the mistake every time in speaking. Many of my students over the years have taken issue with grammar studies, claiming that they already “know” these points. Yes, I know well that they have “learned” the points, but they are not using them at all yet. Such is the nature of foreign language study. Grammar exercises are designed to hammer points again, and again, and again — until such structures become automatic. You will not be able to speak fluently until such forms come naturally without aforethought. The goal is to reach a level of automaticity (I admit, this is suuuuch an academic buzzword) in your grammatical output. It takes time too. I’m the first to admit that you probably “learn” everything there is to know about a language’s grammar in the first 2-3 years of study, but how many people do you know who become fluent in such a short amount of time — especially in non-immersion settings (i.e., the 2-3xweek classes)? It takes massive amounts of input and speaking/writing practice in order for grammatical forms to change from being something you have to recall (often at duress) to something that just sounds right.

The mind truly boggles…. I’ve seen similar plans before, but usually bilingual schools alternate half days. I am simply betting on this quickly being changed as half the students on any given day will have brought the wrong books…

Question: Will the teachers alternate days as well, or will the same individual teach in both languages?

My take: Noble, but these endeavors have a somewhat spotty track-record. One can only wait and see whether or not the program “takes.” The success is more or less dependent upon district resources, finances, student background, etc. Still, much better than transitional bilingual education (whereby Hispanic students are basically taught content courses in Spanish until they “catch up” in English), whose track record is much worse. I kind of find myself wishing that such classes were available when I was little…