I've read some interesting things on input from Alexander Argüelles and more recently from Keith Lucas. The theory is that what is most important in language learning is good input not practice. This is not to be debated here; I informally subscribe to the input hypothesis and put it into use every day, by simply listening to regular French conversations on my radio and keeping my radio dialed to "Radio Lobo".

I was just wondering whether a similar approach might be taken to developing writing talent. From perhaps third grade on, we are forced to produce essay after juvenile essay on "My Summer Vacation", "Thomas Jefferson: Great at being a white guy", and "How we got from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to trampling the life from wage slaves just trying to unlock the doors at Wal-Mart." Sorry, I just had to get in something about that.

What I mean is that if input is what develops linguistic ability, the best way to teach kids to write is to get them to read good writing. A limited amount of Writing Theory and Grammar may be helpful at some point, but kids are going to learn a lot more about writing from reading a single Dickens Book than they will by memorizing the eight* parts of speech or the order of the elements of a research paper.

*Debatable, but eight is what you were likely taught.

Stujay and Great Expectations

One of my favorite passages from Dickens is Pip talking of his new decadent lifestyle in Great Expectations.

"There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did."

Well, I've find some hype that I am somewhat more optimistic about, so I guess that quote was not relevant at all. hmmmmm

Anywho, if you've come here through a google search having to do with polyglotism, language learning, or other such things you have probably heard of Stuart Jay Raj (and read his blog instead of mine). Well, he's starting this new series called Mnidcraft that purports to teach--

* Super Memory
* Perfect Pitch
* Touch-type in multiple languages including Thai, Sanskrit and Korean
* Be ‘funny’ across cultures
* Increase self-esteem in yourself and others
* Mimic sounds, body language and mannerisms
* Build instant rapport with people you’ve just met
* Master tones in Tonal Languages including Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese
* Solve the Rubik’s Cube
* Use an Abacus
* Circular Breathing
* Morse Code / Sign Language alphabets
* Speed Reading
* Simultaneous Interpreting
* XML and programming fundamentals.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty much an expert at most of those already, so I don't know how much something like this is going to help. I mean, come on, I haven't stopped circularly breathing for the last ten years and I solve Rubik's cubes practically on accident. And 'abacus'?!? Please, abacus is my middle name; except I usually spell it in Korean Morse code.

For reals, though, based on what I have seen him come out with in the past, I am crazy excited about this.

Here's the link fer y'alls--: http://stujay.blogspot.com/

Apples to Pickles

I just wrapped up a lengthy argument in which I denounced the game "Apples to Apples" and my interlocuter defended it. The problem was that I have never played Apples to Apples, I was actually thinking of the game "In a Pickle." It took a phone call to an outside expert in order for me to realize my mistake. The fact that two reasonably intelligent adults can discourse on a topic for half an hour and not have a clue what the other is saying is something to consider, but what really struck me as interesting was how I had mixed up the two games.

The similarities are apparent. Both games involve using the names of similarly-sized naturally-occuring edibles (well, a cucumber is not always a pickle, but it is the image that I have) to form a well-known idiom in English. Of course, when I mixed up the games I did not consciously think this through, and neither did I consciously identify and classify the similarities when I first heard of the games. Apparently I made the mistake based on superlinguistic* classification and reasoning. Take that Linguistic Determinism!

Hardline Linguistic Determinists don't believe that kind of thing is possible; they would likely tell me that I used language to make the mistake, then forgot. I don't think so. If that was the case I don't think it would seem so likely that I would classify fruits and vegetables as so near. The only readily available supraset I can think of in English is "foods," but in my mentalese (see Pinker, "The Stuff of Thought") there appears to be a "term" available for the subsets "fruits" and "vegetables."

If you are unfamiliar with some of the linguistic ideas I refer to above, here it is simply: --Thought and language are not the same thing.

corollaries: You need not be able to articulate your thoughts in order to prove you are thinking. --Articulation and thought are not the same thing.

My thoughts must be translated twice before you can think them. From my mentalese to a shared language (English here) then into your mentalese. --My thought and your thought are not exactly the same thing no matter how close the linguistic similarity of their expressions.

Don't understand? Stephen Pinker explains it much more loquaciously in "The Stuff of Thought," "The Language Instinct," and "The Blank Slate."

*Many would say "sublinguistic," but this assumes that language is superior to thought that does not employ language.

El Pendrive?

I wish I remember what blog I saw this on. The real academia española has accepted "pendrive" into its list of "real" Spanish words. The reason I saw this blogger give was that the spanish-origin alternative was like ten words long. That's quite the circumlution... what about "pastilla de memoria" or "memoria portatil" or even a neologism combining "USB" with a Spanish word, maybe "memoria USB"; few English speakers know what "USB" stands for anyway, it could just as easily be Spanish!?

The moral of the story is twofold. One: There are often no real reasons why a language behaves the way it does; there are many factors that influence it, but usually no one thing or definite set of reasons that we can identify as the initiators of linguistic change.
Two: No academy, government, teacher, linguist, scrabble champion, or other authority figure can tell you what is or isn't a real word or real language X; there are stylistically better choices, there is understandabilitiousness to be considered, but the concept is just not concrete enough for any one person to make exclusions based on their personal finite set of knowledge.

By the way, "pendrive" is not accepted by the Blogspot spellchecker.

More green than wide

We recently studied comparatives in Structure of English, and it reminded me of one of my favorite movie scenes involving a blackboard. The protagonist, Plato, is defending his friend who has angered Koretski, a professor of economics in late Soviet Russia.

K: That’s strange logic.

P: Logic is never strange. Either it is logical or it isn’t.
But you can show anything with logic. I can show you, for example that a crocodile… is longer than it is green because it is long on top and underneath, whereas it is only green on top.

K: What crap!

P: Just for Comrade Koretski, I’ll demonstrate that it’s more green than wide. It’s green lengthwise and widthwise whereas it’s only wide widthwise!

The name of the movie is Tycoon: A new kind of Russian, and you might guess correctly that it is in Russian.

"blitzkrieg" study session

I heard an interesting idea from a classmate of mine who has achieved an impressive level of fluency in Japanese. He doesn't believe in the "inch by inch" theory of language learning; instead, he advocates going at it at about a dozen hours a crack! I put in similar hours for about a few weeks when I was in China, so I can attest that this works, but it will leave you exhausted.

He thinks that it takes some time to get in the right mindset to learn, which is why he scorns "Learn X-ish in ten minutes a day." I agree to a point, but rather than do away entirely with short regular sessions I advise sticking with it even if you don't have hours at a time. In order to get the most of your short sessions, you should concentrate on leaving your native language mindset behind and immersing yourself in your L2.

This means
-do not translate word by word, try short paragraphs instead.
-try to avoid background noise in your own language, in fact...
-...it may be helpful to even provide some background noise in your target language. I use Pandora.com or Scola Television for this purpose. Have them readily available so that you do not waste time adjusting your linguistic orientation.

Lingus.tv

I'll do a review on this after a bit. Check it out yourself if you're studying Spanish.

lingus.tv