If I study 8 pages of the Russian-English dictionary every day, I will have gotten through it by the time I return to the states. >.>
(Obviously to build vocab you need to do more than just see the word once, the idea is to create an ongoing list of useful words/words I should know, and continue studying that list as it grows and then especially once I get back home. This might be a stupid idea.)
Let's start this with the reminder that I am not a polyglot, or multilingual. I wouldn't even go so far as to say I am bilingual. I speak a non-standard dialect of English, and can get by with written Standard American English (and haven't made a fool of myself in a setting requiring spoken Standard American English in a long while). For simplicity's sake, in this post I will commit the sin of lumping together all dialects of a language, standard and non-standard alike (horror of horrors, I know). So let's say that I speak English fluently. If asked what foreign languages I speak, answers vary depending on if I'm trying to impress someone or not (hey, at least I'm being honest). Probably I'll list Spanish and Russian. In a job-interview setting I might also mention that I once tried to teach myself German*, that I took a month-long course in Yiddish**, and/or that I understand French when it is spoken to me***. Most people assume that I speak Russian fairly well (if you take a lot of factors out of context, it is an understandable assumption, especially if people don't often hear me speaking in English) and are often surprised to find I speak Spanish. I also tend to qualify both languages with "I know some Spanish and very little Russian." But it is important for this conversation to understand that my Spanish is pretty good. I am by no means fluent, my spoken grammar is horrible, I'm sure my accent sucks, and my vocabulary is very small compared to a native speaker. However, I can read novels in Spanish. I can discuss complex topics, and form complex sentences. I can write essays. I can write a descent short story. With note-cards and plenty of preparation, I can make an okay formal speech. I can understand people speaking in Spanish on the bus, I can watch television in Spanish (except soap operas, but that's a different story), and I can translate for confused Peruvians that come into Hammond Castle looking for a tour. The particular important fact is that I can think in Spanish (and have dreamed in Spanish) for extensive periods of time without switching to English, unless I consciously decide to make the switch. Once you can do that in a language, the outside world can mess with your head. If you're very tired, the particular word you want may only come up in the wrong language. For example, the other day I wanted to say "question," which is not a hard word to remember, but all I had in my head was "pregunta" which is Spanish, and is not the right word, damn it. You might sleep talk in a foreign language (no one has mentioned me doing this, but one of my friends who is much better at Spanish than me has done that on several occasions). If you overhear people speaking in that language, it could shift you over into it, and (especially if you're tired, say at finals period or something) you could begin to think/speak in that language instead. After a long day studying Russian, I have to consciously speak only English to the people around me. It's much worse if I've just been watching or listening to something in Spanish, and have allowed my mind to switch into thinking in Spanish.**** I guess that's all just a really long introduction to explain why, when my Russian professor said "Ciao!" to me today, I automatically said "Hasta Luego" instead of, say "Goodbye" or "Ciao" or anything in Russian that would have been appropriate in that situation. I blame finals.
* I ended up with the ability to count to ten and a basic understanding of the way German vowels sound.
** I can tell you that the pomegranate is red, and that this is a red pomegranate. That's it.
*** Slowly, using simple words and phrases, with lots of charades to accompany it.
**** "If you don't use it, you lose it" applies to languages, hence why I don't remember any Yiddish anymore. I used to know all these words... but if you don't keep up with it, out the window it goes. Which is why I occasionally put on music in Spanish, or listen/read the news in Spanish, or watch Spanish Disney Movies on You Tube. I haven't taken Spanish since last fall, and I don't want to lose the language skills I worked so hard to get. I would love to keep taking Spanish courses, but it is unlikely that I will have space in my schedule for them. So, at least for the immediate future...
Caveat: This is not meant personally, this is not in reaction to anything specific anyone said or did. The simple reason why I wrote this is because I am a dork, and was reviewing my reading for Law today and came across the discussion of how linguistic choices in political ads create an "other" and a "white, feminized, 'soft' national body." Which I thought was really cool and interesting, and reminded me of a point I've meant to articulate better at some point. The book is The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed for the interested. ( Collapse )
So you say your language is better than others? So you say other languages are more primitive? I don't really have time to go through this all, but basically... you're just wrong. ( Collapse ) All languages have their faults and all languages have their benefits. Let's examine your examples for a moment. English is lacking in uniformity, because of so many borrowed words (English is the language that lurks in dark alleys and mugs other languages, rifling through their pockets for spare vocabulary). On the other hand, this lack of uniformity means an ability to talk about a range of topics rather specifically. For example: woman, girl, gal, dame, female, etc. Spanish is incredibly complicated, but the different verb forms allows for more precision and more efficiency. A lot can be said simply by adding a different ending to a verb, putting on a different accent on it, etc. I already talked about German and Russian efficiency. For example, the Russian word холодно (holadna) means "it is cold outside!" or "what cold weather we're having!" or "I'm so cold!" or simply "COLD!" This obviously means a loss of precision, but it allows for one word to have a huge depth of meaning. I can't speak to Hebrew or Arabic, since I don't know anything about them, but I would like to make a separation here between a language and a writing system. We use the same writing system as Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Swiss, Italian, Norwegian, Czech, and many other languages, but we do not speak the same language. Writing systems are very different, and if you're interested in that I suggest reading up on how our phonetic alphabet evolved. Start by looking at the phoneticians, because basically it was their writing system that led to the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. I need to go do my homework now, actually, but I'd love to talk about this more with you.
I have compiled two lists, one of the languages that the internet rates hardest to learn, and one of the easiest. You'll notice, in bold, which ones are on both lists.
Hardest Languages To Learn Basque Hungarian Chinese Polish Japanese Russian German Korean English Swahili
Finnish
Estonian
Ukrainian
Serbian
Easiest Languages To Learn
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Russian
Arabic
Portuguese
Swahili
Hindi
Urdu
Modern Hebrew
What does this mean? If some languages are both hard and easy to learn, surly these lists must just be wrong, right? Maybe not. The ranking of languages by difficulty is silly in the first place. Some languages are certainly more complicated than others, but their difficulty is really ranked by how closely related they are to your native language. So if you want something easy and you're an English speaker, go for German. If your native language is Spanish, Portuguese is the one for you. If you're looking for a challenge, the languages that are ranked highest on difficulty are the ones that are not related to many other languages, such as Basque and Finnish, so they are certainly a challenge, and knowledge of them doesn't even give you the benefit of being able to sort-of understand related languages. If I were to rank the languages I want to learn (there's quite a list) I'd do it by a few other criteria: number of people who speak them, relationship to other languages I know/am learning, and how likely I am to use them in the future. If you're curious, I'll put the list beneath a cut once I work it out a bit more. ( Collapse )
I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me. - Alex Poulos
Planning for study abroad means planning for how I'm going to be able to eat while abroad. Denmark, while it is a very progressive country, is not very friendly to vegetarians. Neither is Russia, and many other places I want to go my Junior year. So I'm searching for different phrases in the languages of the places I could be going, so that I can ask for food I can eat. The plan is to make up little note cards with lots of useful phrases. Some will be about what I can and can't eat, and some will be asking for directions back to wherever I'm staying. The phrases will vary based on cultural perceptions of meat, but the description seems to be, "I am a vegetarian. I eat no meat, fish, poultry, or pork. I can not even have a little bit of meat, fish, poultry, or pork. I like animals, so I do not eat them." That's quite a lengthy statement every time you need to order a meal!
What all this means is I now have three pages in Microsoft Word about how I don't eat meat. Or chicken. Or pork. Or fish. As I continue to plan my semester/year abroad, I am going to make a list of vegetarian restaurants or restaurants with good vegetarian options which are near places I am going to be seeing. So if I want to visit Paris and see the Eiffel Tower, I can grab lunch nearby. If I go to the program in Copenhagen (which I really, really, really want to, and which is why this list includes so many countries) I'll have a list of many restaurants in that city, so I can explore and try them out. If I go to Russia (my number 2 choice, I think) then I'll have a longer list of Russian restaurants, etc. I will also have to contact the airline(s) and let them know I need a special meal. The advice is to travel with food, so I'll have to bring things with me on the flight, and find somewhere I can buy them once I get there. I think a little kit of water, tea, vitamins, soy joy, dried mango, at least one microwavable meal, and maybe a sandwich or things to make a sandwich with, should be good. I'm also going to type up some of my favorite recipes (and find new ones online and in my cookbooks here) to make a sort of traveling-cookbook. That way, if I have to make my own meals, I can make something delicious, and if I have a homestay, I can help my host family with meals so that they're not totally responsible for learning how to care for a vegetarian. I feel bad, because basically I'll show up and be like, "hey, I'm living with you, but I can't eat any of your food and now you have to take care of me and cook for me, yay!" So I want to be able to help out and cook with them so that it will all be happy. Being a vegetarian has never felt limiting to me before, but now that I think about traveling, I feel like I have a lot more work to do, just to make sure I'm going to be able to eat. ( Collapse ) One of the things that does concern me is that DIS (the organization that runs the Copenhagen thing I want to go to) takes its students out to dinner a lot. On 95% of school-run trips, there's food provided. That's great! But it means I can't pick the restaurant, which means ordering food is harder. My options may be salad, salad, and salad for as long as I'm at a school run trip. Definitely snack-bringing time. My plan is to make the program aware that I am a vegetarian, and talk to my professors before any such trip about it, and ask them if I'll be able to find anything to eat. I'll bring my little veggie kit and we'll see how it goes.
I just learned how to change my language on my keyboard. Now when I click alt-shift it cycles through English, Spanish (Spain-international sort), and Russian.
Obviously that will take a little getting used to, but it will be really helpful, especially for Russian, once I know the alphabet and start needing to write assignments in class. It'll also cut down the length of time needed for Spanish essays. Good thing, too, since I've got another class on essay writing in the fall. It makes writing all sorts of things a lot simpler. And it means if I go abroad to Denmark, I'll be able to add Danish to one of the languages and type things for my Danish language class. Awesome! I love my laptop. It really is so helpful. I can carry it with me to class. I can take my notes on it and then I'm not tempted to doodle (and if I turn off the internet connection, I can't be distracted either) and then you can search your notes and... ramble ramble ramble. Point is, I'm excited for the fall.
So I learned the word for "Failed" in Arabic is فاشلة or Fashala. I have no idea why I'm telling you this, except that it's interesting, and a kind of cool word.
They say the Danes are the happiest people in the world. How can a country so cold be so happy? I have a theory. There's a word in Danish, Hygge, which translates roughly to coziness, but it's not plain old American coziness. When you come in from the cold and sit by the fire with your family and sip hot cocoa, that's cozy. When you come in from a cold ride on your bike and have a cup of hot cocoa with your family while talking about your day, that's hygge. When a father and daughter share a touching conversation in a quiet subway, that's hygge. When a young couple does that, they're being assholes. The fact that they have a word for being cozy and happy says a lot about their lives. Language is a reflection of how we see the world, and we see the world a certain way because of our language. A culture that values coziness in the face of freezing winters is going to create happier people, and happier people are going to value coziness in the face of freezing winters.
...and that is why I love linguistic anthropology.
05/07: I talked to my mum on the phone for a long time today, and we came to the conclusion that the trip's not happening. We just can't afford it. They had the power shut off and my grandparents paid for it (even though we already paid the bill) and so now they won't pay for this trip. I'm not entirely clear on how we ended up with less money than expected, because everything they've told me about seems to come out them giving us exactly what we expected (we paid the electricity bill, they give us more money for the bill, we pay them back... where did they lose money?) But, whatever the reason, I'm not going. I need at least $3000 more to pay for it, and that's not happening. So. I'm really disappointed, it seems like the trip of a lifetime and I can't go because of something outside of my control, but... well, I just can't go, that's just how it is, the end.
This post is all about my trip to Bulgaria this summer. ( Collapse ) ( Collapse )
restless
accomplished
verbose
awake
productive, ocd, same thing
easily amused
...?
disappointed