itchy soles

Go Back to Sandwich School

2011-03-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

Girl, I am a bro-seph without haliotosis.
I don't like roses or deep vein thrombosis.

Can't my rhyme getchya to understand, please,
All I want really is bread, meat, and cheese.

Ginger once though archeology was cool,
But I sent her straight to Jimmy John's school.

So run, Ginger, run, as fast as you can.
And make me a sandwich, for I am a man.

--by Kevin, a character I created who has no relation to Kevin, my roommate.

strains of "the vocal apparatus"

2010-07-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

I currently sit digesting a supper-time breakfast food feast while I listen to folk songs strummed on a mandolin, guitar and autoharp along with the strains of a violin and a dulcimer accompanying Janel, who, I can only assume, beat up an angel and stoled her voice.

My eyes droop somewhat after a week of testing, reading, and getting to know others who share my passion for language in its abstract complexities and its poetic subtleties. Cultivating a passion for "the vocal apparatus," as Dr. Jamin Pelkey intones and so aptly appelifies our anatomical precursors to intimated auditory experience, has provided countless (about 402) hours of shared joking, general revelry, and spontaneous, outrageous, incomparably transcendent and "here"-y worship of the God of Words—the eternal logos.

The Summer of Homeliness

2010-06-20T19:54:00.001-07:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...," but mostly it has been a really good time.

I've been meaning to compose some updates of what I'm up to this summer, but I'm only getting "a round tuit" one-third of the way in. Alas, I have been much too busy diving into the ocean on O'ahu's North Shore, surfing a six-man canoe, stuffing myself with Chicken Lau Lau, Poi, Roast Beef, Sushi, Shrimps, Opi'i, Kalua Pig, et al., soaking up vitamin D, bushwacking through the rainforest, wading through slushy waterfalls, climbing through Haua Trees, and, most recently, studying linguistics and eating ramen-- Pity me, friends.

Kaitie's family were wonderful hosts in Hawai'i where I stayed for the first few weeks of summer, and I was not the least bit eager to leave the islands. Thank you so much Tamura family!!

A cheap flight to Seattle afforded me a few days of exploring the Northwest before reaching my final destination of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. Summary follows:

->Seattle: expensive, but plenty of folks to keep one company when one chooses to sleep outside downtown. Must see: Metzger's Maps by Pike Place Fish Market.

->Vancouver: great cheap hostels, good food in Chinatown, a pervasive panoply of appropriate coffee parlors. Must see: the towering stacks of McLeod's Books.

The Skytram from Vancouver took me to Langley last Sunday morning where I visited Christ Covenant Church (CREC) and was fed by the Vroom family, a most excellent introduction which has provided me with an exceptional impression of Canadian hospitality.

After my first week of classes at Canada Institute of Linguistics at Trinity Western University (CanIL @ TWU) I am more excited than ever to be investigating Linguistics with the goal of eventually translating the Bible for a people-group in Southeast Asia. My professors and fellow students share many of my interests and eccentricities with the former also possessing stores of wisdom and stories from all over the world.

Never before have I seen such an assembly of my particular variety of theologically-inclined language nerds. From finding out that more than half of us juggle or ride unicycles to being unable to go ten minutes without a pun, it is constantly confirmed that Wycliffe-bound Linguistics Grad Students are my people.

I miss you all. Especially Coram Deo, Mom, Dad, Morgan, Micole, Katee, my CPK homies, Smith MC and now Kaitie. I pray God's blessings for you all, his comfort in distress, his provision in poverty, the leading of the Spirit in mission, and unfathomable, beatific, overflowing enjoyment of his character and creation.

I'm not a fanboy, There was a sale!

2009-11-14T19:32:00.000-08:00

A Primer on Worship and Reformation.
This is the fifth Doug Wilson book I've read in the last two months. Some of you may be concerned. No worries, y'all, there was a great sale on a lot of his stuff over at Canon Press. You can borrow my copies if you missed it!

One of the rare books that I plan on rereading.
The chapter on typology and exegesis was fantastic, my thoughts about text, deconstruction, interpretation, metaphor, inspiration and structuralism were consummated in enlightenment, but it left me hungry for much more.

The chapters on the acceptance of children in the church through the participation in the sacraments and on the Psalms as our ?preferred? form of verbal communal worship bear rereading simply because I'm not sure precisely what he's saying.

How to Read a Bad Book

2009-11-14T19:12:00.000-08:00

The Mantra of Jabez, a satirical bit I picked up for a dollar at the Canon Press sale last week, was exceptionally amusing for about five minutes. It would have made a great blog post. Doug Jones, I love your articles, I share your disdain of bad exegesis and shallow theology, and I approve of the literary company you keep, but Voltaire you are not. Your prolixity reminds me of a Stewie Griffin style run-on, restating and expounding on the punch line until even the high dude feels sorry for you.

Anyway, I can't complain too much since the book was less than 75 pages long. For the rest of you, here's what to do when you run into a book like this, one that beats the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.

1. Consider it an occasion to practice your speed-reading.
2. Admire the font, binding, other things that have nothing to do with the writing.
3. Be optimistic. You have the next twenty minutes of skimming to change your mind.

philosophy for theology

2009-11-08T13:43:00.001-08:00

This isn't one I read recently, but I frequently come back to it. 101 Key Terms in Philosophy and Their Importance for Theology is a great brief reference with a genius cross-referencing system.
by Kelly James Clark
Richard Lints and
James K. A. Smith

New Tim Keller

2009-11-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

Just read the new Tim Keller book this morning. Counterfeit Gods was, honestly, at least as good as his last two. What I love about Keller's writing is he's not inventing novel nomenclature or theology. Instead he takes common, even trite, words and expands your understanding of them in a way that someone with next to zero theological background can understand. His understanding of American idolatry is just simple enough and truly profound.
7.6 of 10

Free E-Book

2009-11-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Grow: Reproducing Through Organic Discipleship.-Winfield Bevins. Free. 1/2 hour to an hour to get through. Good concise vision.

Books from the last few weeks

2009-11-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to give brief reviews. Just enough that you won't waste your time reading my blog. Read these books instead!

I've read a few Doug Wilson books in the last month or so. They go pretty fast, clearly written, strong points, independent (somewhat contrarian) perspective.

Doug Wilson
Recovering The Lost Tools of Learning- Not as good. He had good points, I just think you can get everything you need from the Dorothy Sayers essay he includes as an appendix. If you want to know about the modern classical school movement after that visit the Logos school or New Saint Andrew's College site.

Easy Chairs, Hard Words- Answers hard questions about reformed theology from a more mainstream Arminian-leaning evangelical's perspective. By no means comprehensive, but an excellent and entertaining introduction. I highly recommend.

Black and Tan- I'm a little scared to recommend this even though I thoroughly enjoyed it. Civil War and slavery in America from a man who says he is 'regenerate but unreconstructed.' Seriously this book is dangerous to own. How do I set the font really small when I say this-I recommend.

Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die- John Piper. Excellent for use as a devotional. I've been waking up with this lately.

Chosen By God-R.C. Sproul. A pretty good summary of the Basic tenets of Calvinism. I recommend this if you read fast, but not worth more than two hours. For a better treatment of this read J.I. Packer's intro to John Owen's The Death of Death

Black Religious Leaders: Conflict in Unity-Peter J. Paris. Overview of the philosophy's of Malcom X, MLK jr., JH Jackson, and Adam Clayton Powell jr. Attractive format. I recommend that you read this critically and in conjunction with outside research. +1 star for primary sources in the appendices.

More coming. Unfortunately, I'll not be reading much besides math books for the next month. Happy Reading!

2008-11-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-11-08T07:58:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

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

lingus.tv

Word of the Day- Peli

2008-10-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun way to talk about films in Spanish; just clip the -cula off "pelicula" for a word that is fun to say and fun to hear.

peli, peli, peli, peli, peli

I believe I first heard this word from the good folk at Notes in Spanish

Polyglot Movies- El Gran Final- The Great Match*

2008-10-10T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you liked The Gods Must be Crazy I must recommend The Great Match (El Gran Final). TGM/EGF is similar the TGMBC in that it is driven by sociological observation of the third world that ultimately reflects back on the absurdity of the Global North as well. If you're like me, a whole movie in a click language (!Kung) was probably the highlight of the former film, so you will be pleasantly surprised to hear that the latter is almost entirely in three languages nearly as exotic. The most mundane of these is Kazakh, which I originally mistook for Mongolian since the setting was decidedly Mongolian looking, though perhaps I only think it less exotic since I have met Kazakh speakers at my university. When the film moves to the Sahara we are treated to the language of the Tuareg, Tamasheq (lots of phayngeals in this one) interspersed with Arabic. The final language comes from a whole family of languages rarely given any attention except by SIL; Tupi (This is apparently the name of the language and the language family) is spoken by rainforest holdouts in Northern Brazil and may sound quite primitive to English speakers because of its frequent use of glottal sounds (sounds like swallowing loudly or emphasizing the space between "uh-" and "oh").

If you are not a linguistics nerd don't let my reccomendation scare you off; this is really an enjoyable flick.

Word of the Day- Japanese

2008-10-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a great word you can use even if you know no other Japanese.

Sugoi!

It means great or neat-o. I can't speak much Japanese, but this is a word it has been interesting to pick up on in in listening to Japanese conversations and movies. It seems that it is sometimes used to effect a kind of adolescent-school-girl register in Japanese, especially when it is used as a tag for everything. (sentence + sugoi ne?, I'm not sure if that is a proper question, more of a suggestion particle really, but there is definitely a rise in intonation at the end.)

The Polyglot Song and the linguistic savvy of Britney Spears

2008-10-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

Most Americans are aware of the song "Brother John" and probably know at least part of it in French as "Frère Jacques," many other cultures have appropriated "Frère Jacques" but have not necessarily made a direct translation. When I first heard that familiar tune in Chinese, my friends in the middle kingdom were adamant that it was a Chinese song. They seemed somewhat pacified when I explained that I was not claiming it for America but for France.

Here are the words in Chinese:

两只老虎
两只老虎
two tigers
跑得快
跑得快
running fast
一只没有耳朵
one has no ears
一只没有尾巴
one has no tail
真奇怪
真奇怪
That's really strange.

Yes, indeed, that is really strange. Check out those last two characters, they mean "strange," but apparently Britney Spears bears them as a tattoo thinking it means "mysterious." At least that's what I heard; seems plausible, though. I mean I have Hanzi meaning "flying monkey" tattood on me for no good reason. I totally knew what it meant, and I wasn't the slightest bit drunk, which is surely more than we can say for any of our American teen sex godesses.

Lingua Links 1

2008-10-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of recommendations of language resources on the web.

http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/ is the internet home of Alexander Argüelles, one of the most accomplished polyglots ever. Argüelles focus is a little different from the average foreign language fanatic's; some of the best information you will find on his site is on languages you have probably never thought of studying. Gothic or Faroese, anyone? His series of videos on languages past and present in the Germanic branch has really spurred me toward doing more research on the historical varieties of my own language. (In fact, within a month I hope to bring you some interesting information on the history of grammatical case from Old English to present.)

Many of you will be more interested in his methods for learning modern languages than in his expertise as an historical philologist. Argüelles makes a good case for returning to some of the more traditional methods of language learning. He almost refuses to even mention popular audio methods like Pimsleur and Michel Thomas. He highly recommends a series called Assimil that relies heavily on the natural ability of learners to parse the language themselves and learn through natural sounding audio and authentic texts. Before you consider buying a self-study course of any kind, check out his video reviews.

Word of the Day

2008-10-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

From Spanish-- galleta

This is definitely one of my favorite words in any language. Galleta can mean a "cookie" or a "slap." If you know how those might be related, please share!

Mmmmmm, me gustan las galletas. oy!!! Que violencia!

Learn Languages despite depression, limiting laziness, making myself more motivated.

2008-10-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Maybe you've experienced times when you could not wait to get back to your grammar book or dive into five Pimsleur courses in a single day. Maybe you are manic or maybe you just like languages as much as I do. Those are great times to take advantage of and really progress in your foreign language skills, but if you are not careful you could waste your time by completely abandoning the language once your drive dissipates.

It would be ridiculous for me to simply tell you to buck up and get back to your books. The truth is, there are times when our interest wanes. Here are some ways you can mitigate the damage to the linguistic structure you have been building.

1> Be reasonable with your goals.
-Don't try to keep up the amount of study you were doing when motivation was not a problem. When you fail to meet unreasonable expectations you may lose heart and abandon the endeavor entirely.

2> Do "full body workouts" instead of isolating specific skills.
- If your study consists of reviewing conjugations a few minutes a day, you will quickly forget vocabulary. If you are only reviewing your flashcards, you are going to forget your grammar. If you only have a few minutes do something like translating a text or listening carefully to something you have a transcript for.

3> Don't just put in your time.
- It's easy to load up the iPod and count on a Pimsleur lesson or some music to maintain your skills, but if you are not actively participating you will not get much benefit. A few minutes of focused study is going to be more rewarding and get you back to your previous state of motivation faster.

Be smart about it, and you will be back on the path to fluency faster.

Good Luck and Cheer Up!

Passive learning, Great listening.

2008-10-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

Many of you know pandora.com is a great place to discover great music, but you might also think of using it as a tool for language learning. Just start a station with a band that sings in the language you are trying to learn, and 'thumbs down' any song that is not in your target language.

You might not learn a lot of new vocabulary by just having music in the background, but you will get a good feel for the rhythm of the language. That rhythm is the syntax and phonology of the language and the attitude of the native speakers.

Here's some great seeds for starting a Spanish station:
Cafe Tacuba, Manu Chao, Molotov, Orishas

For a French hip-hop station:
MC Solaar, Supreme NTM, Tandem

I've tried starting a German-language station with Die Artze, but good German music seems a little hard to come by.

Learn grammar on the go or on the toilet-- sans ipod.

2008-10-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

Here's some quick advice on learning the grammar of a foreign language in those spare moments between classes, on the walk to work, or while you are using el bano.

Become very familiar with dialogues. You don't necessarily need to sit down and memorize a chunk of text; the great thing about learning with natural dialogue is that you will pretty naturally be able to recall chunks of it after reading it a few times. The ideal dialogues to work with have a readily available idiomatic translation in your native language or a language you know very well.

Don't bother parsing the language right away, just be able to understand it's general meaning. Later, during the aforementioned downtime, you will have a chance to think through the grammatical construction.

You may eventually want to go back to a grammar book and clarify some points, but now that you have thought it through on your own you will understand the explanation much better, and when you attempt to speak your own brain, rather than textbook drivel, will be giving form to your utterance resulting in quicker more idiomatic communication.

Hear with your throat, not just your ears!

2008-10-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

Check out this article if you have ever had pronunciation trouble. That's r's for you students of French, umlauts for German, tones in Chinese, r's in Japanese, r's in Spanish, et cetera.

http://www.physorg.com/news140613973.html

Summary: We sense correct pronunciation not only in our ears, but in our throats. They go a short way in applying this to speech therapy.

I immediately thought of how I usually vocalize my vocabulary flachcards as I go through them. I've always known this helps, and now there is science to back it up.

I also thought of my ESL students who still have trouble distinguishing , , and sounds, even though I have modeled it correctly and drew articulation diagrams. Maybe the best way to get them to hear it is to get them to say it.

I have avoided that in groups just because it can take so long to get everyone to say it correctly. It seems that many high school and college language learning classrooms have the same problem. Students are expected to learn listening before they are able to speak when the two skills may really be codependent.