Do You Speak A Second Language?

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.

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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.

Also, when you say the word "jalan" all I can think of is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyndakiGbaw

Turkish has that doubling thing. One purpose it has is to make an adjective into an adverb. So yavaş = slow, yavaş yavaş = slowly.

Those are interesting results.

In fact this has been a v v interesting & informative thread on many levels.

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)

yep it is Betawi but gue-lu was originally from Hokkien. Gua-lu is also pretty common among KL-ites, but over here it codes not so much as "cool" but urban poor/low class.

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.

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

the doubling of words is interesting. There's changing the meaning of a word (like jalan2), and plurals (teman = friend, teman2 = friends). And then there's words like "masing-masing" which only exists in its doubled form (and is kind of hard to translate. sort of means "individually" or "each", but it's not quite either of those either).

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

Oh, yeah... but the presence of reduplication in Indonesian/Malaysian isn't a result of the creolizations. It's a common feature of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. Sorry, I wasn't very clear with that statement.

maybe I'll just keep kicking this thing until it becomes a general topics in linguistics thread.

That would be fine with me. I love to read about this stuff, even though I have no formal education in it.

Maybe we could ask a mod to add "Rolling Linguistics Thread" to the title?

i'd totally post in a rolling linguistics thread - it's a trip growing up american and never even needing or wanting to learn a fergn language, then actually having to. plenty to talk about! plus, holy shit, the trolling that could be done

that's what i'm afraid of
1000 posts to come up with a name for a thing that has already been named for decades
i guess i'll just have to put up or shut up <-- lord love a phrasal verb

I did it again. One of our pages asked me in Spanish if we had any storytimes yesterday morning and I shouted out "nai!" (nothing, in Japanese) to a roomful of expectant families. Why do I do that?

It seems to be a thing. In Cornish class last night, this woman started a sentence in Cornish, got distracted by a word she stumbled over, then finished the statement in German. If you learn other languages as an adult, they get filed in the same place as "other language" rather than differentiated.

Yeah, when I was struggling for a word in Spanish, there were many times when all I could come up with was the Japanese word... like ten years after I'd quit studying Japanese. Where does it come from?

In other news, the newish John McWhorter book "What Language Is (and What It Isn't and What It Could Be)" has some really interesting stuff relating to adult language acquisition and the effect it has on languages worldwide, particularly those used as lingua francas. Also is a good attempt at getting across a concept that is very difficult for an English-only speaker to grasp: English in the context of the world's languages is not a typical language at all, so it is not a great model for getting a sense of how language itself works. Namely that it's comparatively regular and predictable grammar gives the illusion that language is (or needs to be) far more orderly and systematic than most of them historically are.

Is English orderly and systematic, though? When I study other languages, I always am struck by the sense that it really isn't. The only thing that's easy to use about English is how much things like word endings have worn off. That one only needs to grasp for one form of a word to say "with" as opposed to 6 in Cornish.

I think in Europe it might actually be Latin that gives more of the impression that languages are regular and orderly.

But I do agree that English isn't typical at all. That it's a bodged together language itself.

yeah, compared to French the rules for English are incredibly erratic. French has a maddening number of tenses and rules but once you learn them they're incredibly consistent and reliable. English, not so much.