Do You Speak A Second Language?

lol "after Kieron Gibbs"

partly because of this thread, but mainly because i've been talking about it off and on for the last few years, i enrolled in an introductory Mandarin class last night! tbh this first course is probably going to be too easy for me (i lived in china for a few months a few years ago and still remember some mandarin, and definitely still have an ear for picking out tones), but it'll be great to bust out the workbook and begin learning it in earnest. last time around i was just picking up things as i lived there, which was nice, but i often felt like i was missing really essential components of the language.

Putting this here because it seemed like a good idea:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

That reminds me of a passage in this Roger Deakin book I'm reading, about an extinct Australian Aboriginal language - which had 3 different forms of the imperative! There was 1 for issuing straight commands, another whole tense for being insulting or patronising, and ive forgotten the third. My mind just boggled, like, what a fascinating way of looking at the world. And that's something that's been lost already, and more languages are vanishing.

With 6000 languages (and decreasing) there's so much out there for the collector of linguistic curiosities. Different grammatical forms depending on whether you actually witnessed the event you're reporting! Languages with 16 genders! Languages without numbers!

If anyone's looking for a challenge, two stalwarts of entertaining Linguistics 101 lectures are the Australian languages Dyirbal and Guugu Yimidhirr: Dyirbal has the (relatively) famous gender category containing "women, fire and dangerous things" and used to have a crazy taboo language inside a language:

There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people[citation needed]. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialised and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.

Meanwhile, Guugu Yimidhirr uses geographic directions for everything:

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.”

^ From this rather lovely article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Jawel, je spriche several toal'n.

(dutch french german english west-flemish)

women, fire, and dangerous things is also an excellent book by the excellent george lakoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-9rpJITY8

I know that sapir-whorf is looked down upon but imo if we're being honest with ourselves, it's probably true

I just started with a new doctor and we did half my exam in Italian as it turns out he studied medicine in Bologna.

I find my faculty for languages has improved as I've got older, my Italian is still pretty strong and I can converse in french better than I could and even follow conversations in german pretty well, I can catch the flow in catalan and spanish as well. Maybe it is not being told I am rubbish at languages by teachers that has improved me. (it's exposure more than anything).

Depends on what interpretation. Strong Sapir-Whorf is decidedly not true.

xpost

I remember reading about a study or a theory that said that children aren't more natural at learning languages, rather, since all that happens to the kid is being exposed to that foreign language 24/7, the kid is forced to pick up the language - sink or swim, as it were

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

One of my best grad professors worked half the year in Puerto Rico and half in AZ. He said another prof at the University in PR had been going on an attempt to pick up Spanish through straight immersion and absolutely no instruction of any kind, and hadn't gotten anywhere with it after living there for six years.

perhaps it would work if you did it Billy Madison style

Modern Sapir-Whorf-esque research naturally steers clear of statements like "the Hopi have no concept of time", looks more like this:

There were also observable qualitative differences between the kinds of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example, the word for "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny. The word for "bridge," on the other hand, is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy and towering.

www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

This folk hypothesis was the rationale behind the amazingly named bill English for Children, sponsored by wealthy businessman Ron Unz, who tried to build a political career out of bilingual education. It mandates that kids can learn English in a year in a classroom immersion setting. Naturally, because it's Arizona in the 21st century, it's played out in some very bizarre ways. But in grad school I had to read a ****lot**** of research about how it's nearly impossible to attain academic proficiency in a second language in a year, though conversational L2 is doable.

So what it means is kids in AZ only get one year of focused English education (and how that's been mandated has been really controversial), with the basic understanding that no L1 support is allowed.

That's horrible bs. Sorry kids in AZ.

Yeah it's really awful, no L1 support makes absolutely no sense.

aw that's terrible. anyway like abbott said I'm just spouting off folk psychology and I apologize in advance if I'm stepping on the toes of anybody itt :/

An NPR piece on the "four hour block" that ELL kids get in Arizona.

Anyway that's basically the reason I want to learn Spanish. SO many of my students are marginalized by this! Just knowing a teacher speaks Spanish really makes those kids see that teacher as an advocate. All I can do know is stop asking them to say "chinga" in class, which really knocks their socks off, and that's just one swear word.

stop asking them to say "chinga" in class,

haha I mean ask them to stop saying "chinga," yikes!

hahaha

qué asco!

iirc most of the research says that second language development will be stunted based on your development of your native tongue. the idea that you could drop in the middle of country x and learn their language is dependent on how well you have mastered a language to compare it to.

i will defer to our ESL experts on this one, but this is something my wife the school psychologist with a billion special ed referrals from kids who have nonenglish native languages has told me from conferences on such matters.

also, abbs, I think our kids will stop saying chinga whenever their teachers stop saying "chingao!" at various surprising/upsetting events
which is to say never
ay chingado

yeah that makes sense to me, based on personal experience. but I still hold out hope! foolishly xp

the big problem in PK12 Ed is that conservatives and other like-assy politicos promote full English "immersion" for strictly political reasons (don't want to recognize Spanish as a language being spoken in the US in mass quants). so rather than mandating comprrhensive bilingual education, we (Texas) get it cut off after elementary (I guess Spanish is cute when your little but scary when you're adult sized and might say bad Spanish words about me that I can't understand bc I'm a monoglot pig). all ths does is deny our kids a sense that their culture is important and that they're big dumbos if they can't speak English right. which makes me irate obv.

A lot of students in my community are in a dual language program in their elementary school. They learn half the day in English and the other half in Spanish. I've seen 5th graders writing advanced essays in Spanish on dinosaurs.

The ones who aren't in the dual language program are fluent in conversational English and Spanish, but only really know how to read and write in English. They look at simple written Spanish and have trouble with it, I suppose because they have no experience in formally learning to read or write in Spanish.

Some years ago, the large organisation for which I work instituted a new graduate trainee scheme*. Among the stipulations were that candidates must speak one other language in addition to English. However, the language did not need to be a national language. It could be an unspoken language music, or it could be command of a specific vocabulary, or it could be fluency with verse. Honestly. I was one of those who screened applications. My favourite was from someone who claimed to speak the language of the music industry: "I am able to 'blag" my way on to the 'list" before 'ligging' at the 'aftershow'." Curiously, one of the applicants was the singer in a band whose just-released album would be voted the 58th Best British Album Ever soon afterwards in a major UK music magazine. I clearly did him a favour by not putting him through.

* The man who oversaw it was appointed with the brief of ensuring fair and transparent recruiting. He was offered the job after the head of the organisation met him at a dinner party. The appointee told me this story with no awareness of the irony – or the paradox – at its heart.

Hey - I'm starting a beginner's course in Mandarin soon too! :-) I figured it would be interesting to tackle something that was entirely out of my comfort zone, as being fluent in a Germanic and Romance language, I can just about work out what signs and various nouns mean in languages like Italian, German etc.

I've seen 5th graders writing advanced essays in Spanish on dinosaurs.
Surely easier to use paper?

*internet high fives dog latin*

oh how i lol'd

Z S - I think there's a Mandarin thread on ILX.

sadly I only know school/college-level german and french. Ich heisse Kirsten und ich bin dreizen jahre alt. Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof bitte?
Oh and I can say the first few words in mandarin(?) and last few words in Spanish of 'please reserve the front seats for seniors and people with disabilities', thanks Muni.
Would kind of love to speak Japanese.

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On the off chance that there's anyone near central London with a free morning or afternoon who would like to pilot a new English-language proficiency test, ILX-mail me. You'd need to be a native speaker of English and you'd get a £30 Amazon voucher for your time.

saya bisa bicara bahasa indonesia - tidak seratus persen lancar, tapi cukup untuk momong2. darimana* roz?

(* "darimana: meant in terms of a) where are you from? and b) just as a normal conversational gambit - indonesians don't really say "how are you?" to each other very much. i mean, there's a translation for that phrase ("apa kabar" or "what's news") in indonesian, which indonesians use to talk to tourists (even if you don't speak english, most balinese seem to somehow know that "apa kabar" is usually about the 5th and 6th words of indonesian the tourists tend to learn), or perhaps someone close to them, that they haven't seen in months. BUT: usually they ask either "where are you coming from" or "where are you going" instead. which seems intrusive if you aren't used to it but it's just the equivalent of "how are you" - it's not really like you want to know about someone's inner emotional lives when you ask "how are you", and if you're coming from your mistress's house or something, you don't actually have to say so when asked "darimana?", "jalan jalan saja" is fine.

also, i used to be able to speak crappy-but-enough-to-scrape-by thai, but it's been so long since i've been in thailand that about all i can do is count to 10 as a bar trick. neung, som, saw, see, ha, hok, get, bat, gauw, sip... wait, am i fucking that up?

oh saya juga gak bisa ngomong bahasa indo dengan betul atau tepat, karena saya sebenarnya dari Kuala Lumpur. kamu tinggal di Indo dulu ya?

(this feels oddly formal - when I talk to my Indonesian friends, instead of "saya" dan "kamu" I usually use "gue" and "lu/lo", which is basically just urban/young people-speak (derived from Chinese) for "I" and "you".)

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

Yesterday Brandon Mably (famous knitter) kept asking if I hadn't lived in England or was a native English speaker. My standard knee-jerk but also honest reply: "Watched too much BBC when I was a child." lol. Also, I am just (or maybe was?) very good at languages, especially accents.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only one obvious joke-vote. Amazing!

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

actually it's kinda cooler than that - you can just repeat a word and it means something similar but new. for example: jalan = "road" jalan2 (jalan jalan) = "drive/walk around to some places, whatev"

Roz, gue and ku/lo is, yeah, they call it bahasa gaul ("language cool") though it's so common it's almost ubiquitous. is it from originally from chinese? i thought it was batawi (the jakarta ethnic group, and therefore how hip city people talk on tv)

then again i learned my indonesian in a university setting, so a lot of words i use sound sorta ridiculously formal, but at least people understand me. more or less. actually i wont deny it, my indo is fairly shitty for having been here 9 years! but, a lot of expats in bali barely try, so most people cut me a lot of slack for even bothering to be able to hold a stilted conversation

oh yeah, roz: ngga, yang benar saya tinggal di bali sekarang, sudah simbilan tahun disini...

ha, this is awesome, talkin bahasa on ilx :) small world and stuff.

That's called reduplication iirc? (repeating morphemes to change syntax?)

Yep! Or doubling. Apparently Indonesian makes frequent use of it, which is kind of interesting. I learned to associate it with pidgin/creole languages, of which Indonesian is not one.