I’m kinda sorta getting through the confusion from Wednesday.  Last night, I worked up a little chart contrasting the emphatic vs. frontal vowel sound contrasts which helped enormously in completing the homework.  I still reckon I spent between 5 and 6 hours total completing that chapter.  Whew…  This afternoon, I met briefly with the teacher to talk through the sounds, and I think I have a basic grasp of the vowel distinctions now.  It’ll still take a while to internalize the concept — not to mention to learn to make an automatic distinction when spelling words. 

We’re using the Aliif Baa text (intro to the Arabic alphabet), and I did verify one oddity with the teacher.  He happened to ask about the chapter today in class, and, almost to a man, the entire class expressed confusion at the pronunciation of one of the primary speakers on the DVD.  There are two main speakers in the listening exercises: a man and a woman.  The man speaks quite clearly, and I find him quite easy to transcribe.  The woman, on the other hand, is about as easy-to-understand as I can expect a woman to bespeaks in a muddled fashion.  She’s been giving me fits on her vowel length throughout the series, and when we got to the “emphatic [d] sound,”(the letter “daal” to people familiar with Arabic) she (mystifyingly) pronounces it as a [b].  The teacher checked on that while I was in his office, and verified that she indeed did have a freakish accent.  While the teacher still could hear the sound as a “emphatic d” in some instances, several words had  a clear [b] sound to it.  The teacher said that it was probably dialectical, but given that it is a primer text for Modern Standard, something that misleading is best classified as an error of course material compilation.  In short, the teacher promised to look into it, and this will likely go into a text-review letter for feedback in compiling subsequent editions.  It’s likely that subsequent editions will need to find a new female model to record audio text, as the current model’s accent is so far off-kilter.  Something to take into account if you are ever using Aliif Baa.  This “total breakdown in pronunciation” part of the book occurs in Unit 4. 

ahhh… the comedy of badly translated restaurant menus…

I’m not sure about “virgin chicken,” but I am all about “burnt lion’s head,” personally.  Another favorite (and frequently seen) restaurant typo: “crap fried rice” – while easily mistakable for editorial honesty, it’s actually misspelled “crab fried rice”….  

A blatant plug from the China Post, but as a former student at Taiwan’s Providence University, I gotta add this…  Seriously, anyone who wants to do some serious Mandarin study would be remiss to discount Taiwan.  As the article notes, the Taiwanese government even offers rather substantial scholarships towards that purpose…  Nothing like being paid to learn…  (which, incidentally is pretty much the grad student mantra.)

Overall, a good class today.  We focused a bit more on speaking than on writing today.  I also got back my test — 92%, and with a good chance of getting an additional 2% grade boost due to a grading error (the teacher took the test back to evaluate).

After class, I first went to the language lab to do our first video assignment, and then I got busy with the homework….  Oh. my. goodness!!!!  We’ve officially turned a corner towards the “freaky hard” pole of the language learning continuum.  Much of the current unit is about distinguishing “normal” vs. “emphatic” [s]-sound.  Let me explain…   In English, we differentiate words like “sate” and “site.”  Specifically, we recognize that the vowel sounds (ok, technically diphthongs, but I’m trying to keep this as easy as possible) differ.  We illustrate this graphically (i.e. we “write” the difference) by representing this with different vowels.  Arabic, on the other hand, makes the same sound distinction, but has decided to represent this difference by changing the preceding consonant.  For example, Arabic might write the above two words as “sate” and “*s*ate” with “*s*” being a separate consonant letter.  The idea is that the consonant”forces” the vowels to take different sounds.  -A very interesting approach to organizing a writing system!  I’m actually quite interested in this line of thought, but in the practical sense, it’s (so far) pretty awkward to learn.  I think ultimately, I’m going to have to go through the alphabet (or, at least, what we’ve studied thus far), and list all letters in emphatic vs. normal categories, and then correlate those with the correct vowel sound.  In the meanwhile, recognizing the difference between that “s” and “*s*” is giving me fits, and unfortunately, having scanned ahead in the book, it seems that there are quite a few of these emphatic consonant equivalents coming up.  I do have to wonder (and unfortunately, I won’t be able to check this until I learn all the letters) if it wouldn’t have just been easier (more economical, at least) to differentiate vowels.  I think the key is the fact that normal Arabic text doesn’t actually mark “short” vowels, and apparently these vowels can be contrastive (i.e., distinguish two words — such as “rot” and “rut”).  Still an interesting approach…

I’ve heard many claiming to have perfected the perfectway of learning foreign language vocabulary.  I always take this with a grain or two of salt.  Everyone learns differently — otherwise we would have the teaching/learning of every subject down to a fine science.  I’m especially suspicious of methods that claim to eliminate the need for memorization.  I’m sorry to have to say this, but in learning anything, sometimes you’re just going to have to buckle down and face the tedium of rote memorization.  People who claim that, by merely practicing again and again, one “avoids” the task of memorization are merely deluding themselves.  That is merely another (incidentally effective) way of memorization.  Memorization has gotten a bad rap in learning because most of us connect it to last-minute “cramming” before exams in high school or college.  In reality, memorization involves any activity that allows you to later recall studied information.  Memorization, in effect, is the gap between “studying” and “learning.”  Mind you, “learning” FL information is usually not enough.  You not only want to know vocabulary, but you want to be able to access it in real-time conversation (i.e., lightning fast).  This requires developing automaticity — i.e., “mastering” the information/vocabulary.  The same is true for any type of learning.  For example, as a youth, I enjoyed hacky-sackabout as much as most kids my age.  While I never thought of it in terms of “studying,” “learning,” and “mastery,” that’s what I essentially did.  I studied the various kick positions from a booklet (which, if memory serves, came free with the foot bag), and practiced them in controlled exercises with my brother until they became natural movements and even unconscious reactions during hacky-sack play.  One could make similar analogies about fixing cars, learning to quilt, etc.  You get the point.

A lot of people argue that it is best to learn vocabulary through association — and I have to agree.  Mnemonic devices abound in language learning.  I’ve discussed before how associating new vocabulary with movement can help.  I have found in my own FL learning that anything that relates to me personally is much easier to memorize than more arcane (to me) subjets.  For example, having no sisters, I’ve noticed I have relatively more difficulty remembering the word for “sister” than for “brother” in a new language.  In languages like Japanese and Chinese where there are different words for 1) big brother; 2) little brother; 3) big sister; 4) little sister; etc., I’ve noted that it’s easiest to remember the words that are relevant for myself.  Thus, I tend to recommend to novice-level students to focus first on the words they need to communicate about themselves (which, of course, is everyone’s favorite topic of conversation, anyway).  The other words will come…  Language acquisition is basically the sum of experience we have in expressing ideas.  Some ideas come up more frequently than others for certain people — and it’s important to get those words first.  For example, while linguistics terminology is hardly a pressing issue for most people to learn how to say in a new language, you’d better believe that it’s one of the first subjects I try to tackle once I have “the basics” down pat.

I had my first test today!

Actually, not too bad…  We also learned the university FL-learning computer system, as we’ll be doing various assignments through the semester involving making video recordings of us speaking.

The writing homework is officially getting to the difficult stage.  In the beginning, with only a few letters to choose from, dictations were easy, but I noticed today having to think and refer back a lot in the book in order to remember how to write certain letters.  Also, the listening is getting more complex as new (and hard to distinguish) sounds enter the picture.  Case in point — today we learned the [d] phoneme, which I found difficult to distinguish from [t] in word-final position (i.e., words that end with [d] and words that end with [t] sound a lot alike).

All frustrations aside, I am pleased with the study thus far though.  While my vocabulary is still sparse, it’s slowly growing, and I noticed today that I can read (parts of ) some words captured in news articles.

Example:

Such makes it all worthwhile…

Do I run these stories a lot?  Sure.

Will I stop running them anytime soon?  Probably not.

Am I basically just saying “neener neener neener” at the world because I already speak Chinese.  Pretty much…..

Dennis Byrne (Chicago Tribune) opines…

Takeaway quote: These folks want to dump English as the national language because, to them, anything that smacks of English-only suggests that “assimilation” is a good idea, when they believe that the whole concept of assimilation is a bourgeoisie, white-bread, if not racist, idea that no longer has a place in America. And anyone who disagrees is a “nativist,” “hater” or racist.

I know that, as a linguist, I am expected to be the voice cheering on the steady encroaching bilingualism in America, but my heart truly isn’t there.  I look around in the world, and I see very few countries that enshrine bilingualism/multilingualism into their law that are not defined by warring linguistic factions (sometimes the fighting is only political, but often the battles take an outright shoot-’em-up form).  I don’t want that here…  I cheer on voluntary 2nd language learning by anyone, and, due to the natural reticence of Americans in L2 learning, I am excited that more and more of my countrymen are taking an interest in the world beyond our own borders…  But…  I don’t want bilingualism imposed by judicial or educational fiat.

Furthermore, I’ve always held the supposition that the millions of (Spanish-dominant) Hispanic students in the U.S. needing 1st language support in order to learn English to be deeply suspicious outright racist.  You will note that millions of students of other ethnicities have gone through the U.S. school systems, learned English, and gone on to rewarding lives without even the mere suggestion that the schools need to accommodate their first language.  Some students fail, for sure, but isn’t that true in the English-speaking population.  I’ve always asserted that the “Hispanic problem” (i.e., the high rates of academic failure among children of Spanish-speaking immigrants) stems not from having to negotiate a 2nd language (Chinese children have a much larger hurdle here, and have much higher success rates!), but rather from environmental factors such as parental education, poverty, etc.  Whether you speak English or not, it is well documented that if a child’s parents aren’t educated, or if you grow up in a household with few/no books, or if there are familial legal/substance abuse problems, etc., that child’s educational outlook is statistically bleak.

A beautiful article on the nature of human language……..

Just sad…  but really, how hard would it have been to get a Spanish interpreter in Florida?????