Lunch!, T-minus Five Days, Conversation Topics, Three-Way Sex, and SCOTUS vs. Diversity

I met some friends for lunch at Jade Garden, it was delicious! It's the reigning champ of dimsum in Seattle. No, I've never been to O'Asian, but look at the name, children, it's a non starter. They might as well call it No Asian. (I've never been, so who knows. Maybe it's full of Chinese people. The critics like it... but the critics also like Seven Stars Pepper over 老四川 Sichuanese cuisine... in a pinch, follow the Chinese people...)

I bought me a cheap, new microphone that works well, so expect to see some more videoblogs over at my travel blog: jp goes to china (dot) blogspot (dot) com. Yesterday I posted a my first videoblog, but I think I fell short of fullfilling the spirit of the assignment: I only stuck to very basic Lesson 1 items that I know I can do well. Maybe tomorrow I will try to talk about something more substantial, so you can *really* see how much work I have to do on my Mandarin.

So the RD of the program in Hangzhou has been sending us emails, what/what not to bring, what to expect from the language pledge, etc. One of his recommendations was to equip yourself with a PDA and PlecoDict, which IS SO COOL. It's two dictionaries on your PDA, and it breezes between listing and recognizing your English, your pinyin, or your hanzi! All students of Mandarin should equip themselves with this tool. All.

So right now I'm brainstorming some vocabulary for conversations that I know I'll have. Some topics I thought of are:

1. I have diabetes. (vocab: diabetes, blood sugar, blood test, sharps container, carbohydrates, walking...)


2. Leave Asian Americans alone! (vocab: cultural blindspot, not intuitive, ignorant ethnic majority, lack of compassion, refusing to assimilate, children of immigrants...)


3. Bush is a moron! (vocab: I did not vote for him, blue state, dishonest, un-constitutional, un-American, totally incompetent, liar, shameless, dumb cowboy...)


4. I'm not White people! (vocab: Filipino, fighting over milk, removing shoes at the door, fear of Spam, crimes against rice, stand-around-holding-a-beer parties, I'm not responsible for your stereotype...)

If you can think of any other topics, or any other vocab that I should prepare for the topics listed above, please let me know.

On another note, there is a Kia ad, both in radio and on tv, where a couple talks nervously about finding a Kia as if it were THREE-WAY SEX. Yes! Why am I the only one getting bruised by the subtext hitting me over the head? Look at the way they are talking about the Kia, for pete's sake! Am I the only one that thinks this? Obviously, OBVIOUSLY this is intentional.



And, finally, if you want to read about the bullshit SCOTUS decision that diversity is not an academic and social advantage, read what Dr. B has to say. I don't even want to think about it.

To think, I once had faith in this country.

Maps of Spanish Verb Tenses

So I'm seeing a lot of people click over to and email links to my Map of the Present Tense, and its companion Map of the Preterit Tense.

How funny! Who knew such a wonkish post would be so popular....

So here are my questions for you all...

• How did you find my site? Did someone point it out to you, or did you stumble across it?
• Are you studying Spanish? Teaching it? How do you plan to use the maps?
• Do you want to see more of my materials? I have other verb tenses, as well as materials for the subjunctive mood, if you're interested.

Hope to hear from you!

Map of the Preterit Tense

So my Map of the Present Tense was so highly acclaimed (one positive comment) that I decided to post my map of el tiempo pretérito. Use this tense for simple, single-actions in the past.

Regulars: As always, the regulars are in the east, where everything is orderly and predictable. Comer: comí comiste comió comimos comisteis comieron. Vomitar: vomité vomitaste vomitó vomitamos vomitasteis vomitaron. Study these endings.

JP, do we have to learn the vosotros
form?

Yes.

But how are we....

Just stick an "-is" on the tú form, for
goodness sakes.

Irregulars. In the wild west, you see there are exactly four irregulars. There are no more.

So that French TA in college, who poo-pooed Spanish because there were too many irregulars to fit her brain around, to her I say, il n'y en a que quatre, mademoiselle, que quatre.

Ir and ser have the same forms: fui fuiste fue fuimos fuisteis fueron. So learn two verbs for the price of one. Dar and ver are not terribly irregular; dar has a little bit of an identity crisis... it thinks it's an -ir verb. The only "irregular" thing about ver is that it doesn't wear any accent marks. In fact, none of the verbs living in the wild west wear accents; they are all naked.

The Stem Change (tm) verbs live in the north, just as in the Map of the Present Tense. But notice that in the preterit, only the -ir verbs get stemchang-ified. In fact, it's the same damn -ir verbs in the preterit as in the present.

Finally, the Minority Verbs live in the south. I coined this term because although they might not look regular compared to the verbs in the east, they are, in fact, totally regular within their own culture. That is to say, they have a separate set of endings, which they use regularly. Tener: tuve tuviste tuvo tuvimos tuvisteis tuvieron. Notice that all of these forms are naked (i.e., no accent marks).

Also notice that these preterit forms use alternate stems. Of course they do, they're minorities. We expect their roots to be different, for them to have slightly different cultural backgrounds. Do you have a problem with that? Just because they're different?

There are four kinds of alternate stems, so you might as well memorize them according to their groups: the ones whose vowels change to -i-, the ones whose vowels change to -u-, the ones that get -uv-, and the few that gain a -j-. There are 14 total, and they're all listed on the map.

My students like to put them in a certain order and then create a mnemonic sentence out of the first initials. Fine, kids, do what you gotta do. Remember, when it comes to mnemonics, the raunchier the better; just keep it to yourself.

Is that it? Is that all there is to forming all the verbs in the the
preterit tense?

Yes.

Map of the Present Tense in Spanish

UPDATE: Click the image for a larger view. There's also a Map of the Preterit Tense, if you're interested. Other materials (more tenses, subjunctive, etc.) will be posted by request.

The mental map above is of the Present Tense in Spanish. Don't freak out now if you don't just understand it at first glance.

One of the problems my American high school students have when learning how to generate Spanish verb forms is that it's presented sequentially. Of course, that's probably the best way to do it, but many students never see the big picture. If verb forms are presented sequentially, the way a freight train goes down the tracks sequentially, they get discouraged from their perspective because a) they try to keep it sequential in their brains; or b) because they don't see the beginning or end of the train from where they're standing; they don't know that when or if the train of different forms will ever stop coming. Very discouraging.

Well I'm here to tell you, folks, that when you're learning the present tense, there are exactly four categories of present tense verbs. There are no more than four. The regulars, the five irregulars, the yo-baby verbs, and the Stem Change (tm) verbs.

Four! That's all. You can remember four kinds, can't you?

The Regulars. These are the vast majority of Spanish verbs. I put them on the right (in the East) because they are kind of conservative, very reliable. To conjugate a regular verb, you replace the infinitive ending with the appropriate suffix, depending on the person/number. So, for example, my favorite -er verb would be:

comer
yo como
tú comes
ella/el/Usted come
nosotras/nosotros comemos
vosotras/vosotros coméis
ellas/ellos/ustedes comen

Piece of cake, right? Let me know if you need an explanation on how to conjugate regular -ar and -ir verbs, but for now I'm going to assume you know how.

JP, do we have to learn the vosotros form?

Yes.

The Irregulars. There are exactly five irregulars (if you find more, we can put them on the map). You'll notice I've put them on on the liberal left, in the Wild West. They are crazy! The good news is there are only five irregulars, and they are super high frequency, so you have no problem learning them. Being irregular, they are a little unpredictable, so you have to memorize them: ser, estar, ver, haber, ir. Look them up if you want to see them!

The only reason ver is listed among them is because third person singular is ve, which the regular rules don't predict. Otherwise, ver is pretty much predictable. You can remember that, can't you? (Ask me later about written accents)

The Stem Change (tm) verbs. These verbs live in the industrial North on the map. There is a trademark sign there to remind you that this is a specific brand of verbs. Some people think that when anything outside of regular happens to a verb, that it must be a stem change. Uh, no.

According to the Appellation d'Origine Controlée, Stem Change (tm) verbs are very specific. The -ar and -er verbs have one of three changes:

• -e- changes to -ie- (pensar/ella piensa; sentar, recomendar, etc.)



• -o- changes to -ue- (poder/ella puede; mostrar, etc. I put jugar in this category, even though it's a u and not an o.

The -ir verbs have two categories:

• -e- changes to -ie- (sentir, herir, etc.)



• -e- changes to -i- (pedir, ella pide; servir, etc.)



• -o- changes to -ue- (morir, etc.)

If it's not one of the changes listed above, it's not a Stem Change (tm) verb.

The -ir's here are separated from the others because they behave as a group in the preterit tense so I might as well set them apart here.

Remember, these Stem Change (tm) changes only happen "in the boot".... ask me later if you don't know what that means.

The Yo-Babys. It's called "yo" because the changes only happen in the "yo" form. The "baby" part is purely mnemonic. If you're too mature for that, you may call them "the verbs in which only the first person singular form is not regular." I put the Yo-Baby verbs in the south, where the climate is a little warmer and the culture is more laid-back.

• the Yo-G's. The yo form has a g in it (hacer, hago. poner, pongo. etc.)



• the Yo-ZC's. Conocer, conozco. Conducir, conduzco.



• the Yo-E's. Saber, sé. Caber, quepo



• the Yo-Oy's. Dar, doy.

That's it. All Spanish verbs live somewhere on this map. There are no other kinds of present tense variations. Most verbs live in the regular region; only those five listed live in the irregular region. Some verbs, like tener and venir are very rich, so they live both in the Stem Change (tm) north and in the swanky Yo-G south.

So this map is a review tool; it doesn't make much sense to you if you haven't studied Spanish before, but people who have taken a couple years of sequential presentation tend to enjoy this map a lot.

When I teach this map in my Advanced Grammar class, there's always relief at the big-picture perspective. I don't test the map, they don't have to memorize it. Of course, when I teach the map, I have them brainstorm all the verbs they know that live in a certain region. Then, when they have a question about how a verb is conjugated in the present tense, I ask them "where does it live on the map?"

I would say they get the general category right almost all the time; most of the time they can zero in on the specific branch. Even though I don't test the map, the kids like to study the crap out of it for some reason.

Code Switching

My cowsin C and I have always been very linguistically aware kids. She was always better at understanding Tagalog than I was, given that her parents spoke Tagalog to each other. My parents spoke Pangasinan to each other, but they used it as a secret language; it wasn't until my late 20s that I started picking up on the gist of their conversations. When both H and I were both studying Tagalog, we all decided to speak Tagalog once in the car. It lasted for a few minutes, but after a while it sounded so... artificial... to hear us all speaking Tagalog with each other, we had to stop. We might as well all have been speaking French.

Ilocano was the most secret of all languages; we heard it only in certain contexts. If you ask any of my parents their ethnicity, they will claim to be Ilocano. One time C told Grandma R that she didn't like Ilocano; Grandma R slapped her!

However, the ones that grew up in Sto. Tomas are linguistically Pangasinan. Sto. Tomas was originally in the Pangasinan province, but the border was redrawn, and they were lumped in with the Ilocanos. I think a lot of my ancestors actually moved to Sto. Tomas from Ilocos Sur.

My parents usually speak Pangasinan to each other, and fellow Tomasinos, which I always look forward to hearing. But sometimes, they will switch into English or Tagalog, often to clarify or to be extra emphatic. And other times, they will just plain speak English or Tagalog, out of habit. A couple times, I have asked them, "Why aren't you speaking Pangasinan?" Usually, they don't know why.

Auntie R sometimes talks to little-ol'-me in Pangasinan, which I like; it makes me feel like a country kid, or like I'm hearing a secret. The Manila relatives often don't know anything about Pangasinan, not even relational titles (e.g., "there's no such thing as 'kuyang.'")

Anyway, my parents' generation has been using languages all our lives to include us, exclude us, bring us closer, and alienate us in a very fascinating way, and it's very second-nature to us, all of us. It's funny, some of my co-workers are very conscious about switching to a common language as soon as someone new enters a room, as a courtesy... Me? I neither switch to include, nor do I care if other people switch. I actually feel the opposite; it feels a little shady to me to always compulsively include everyone, unless they are actually joining the conversation.

Which brings me to a point: I once asked, "Why aren't you speaking Pangasinan?" And the answer was, "Because your Auntie X is here, and she doesn't speak Pangasinan." So they are total courtesy switchers.

Now, I'm being honest when I tell you that it has NEVER in my life occurred to me that I would say, "So, I'm here, I don't speak Tagalog, why don't you switch to English." I have always preferred to listen, catch the gist, and when important, to pretend to understand. I have asked for translation, but I have never asked for them to switch to English. I don't recall any of my cowsins ever asking our parents to switch to English, either. Why not?

And why would they automatically switch to Tagalog to include Auntie X but not switch to English to include me or my cowsins? It can only be a kind of multilingual family sociopolitical explanation.

So me, I don't courtesy switch, and I have no expectation that anyone will do a courtesy switch on my behalf. I've also been known talk to people in languages I know they don't speak... usually just a greeting, sometimes an urgent imperative... because I know they're going to understand from the context. And some of them get flustered, but usually, they do get it. Because communication is 80% paralinguistic anyway. (Did I just make up that statistic?)

Anyway, the reason I started writing this epic post is because I just found a list of language games on wikipedia. When cowsin C and I spoke Pig Latin to each other, our parents were totally baffled! As Filipino English speakers, they had zero comprehension of Pig Latin, which delighted us, but pissed them off. That was hilarious. We both got really good at Pig Latin, but eventually we stopped because it made them uncomfortable.

When H became a Spanish speaker, we started speaking Spanish to each other, and my dad actually told us not to speak Spanish, because we could be telling secrets. Of course, H and I were like, ha ha yah right, but it was fascinating to me that both in this case and in the case of Pig Latin that some multilinguals could have the same irrational insecurities as the English-Only monolinguals.

Basically, we are only allowed to speak a language they understand.

So it's funny to me that my cowsins might be more linguistically progressive than my parents' generation, even though we were much less linguistically versatile.

Like a Jerk!

Joshua Trujillo of the P-I took this; it's on a closed-off overpass on 520 in the Arboretum. Who is Gina? It's a mystery.

______

So you know how I hate flashcards? Well, I'm doing some flashcards.

After my Mandarin summer intensive last year, I knew about 200 characters. Now I gotta get them all back, and more. I've been spending my days reading blogs from people doing study abroad in China, and one blogger reported that in my program they give them 50 new characters per day, with dictation the next day to quiz them.

That's right... dictation. Son of a bitch! What is it, the 50s? Should I bring my cassette recorder, for goodness sakes?

Man! But I can't change China, so I'm studying flashcards. Like a jerk!

Will flashcards help me do dictation? No. Doing flashcards will help me to do one thing well, and that is... flashcards. You know what will help me do dictation? Being able to speak Mandarin, that's what.

Sigh. But for now, I'm going to do my flashcards, and write sentences for the characters I don't know well.

Like a jerk!

Weekend wrap up (part 1)

I hate slow talk.

So Ken Carroll of chinesepod.com linked to my post where I said I hated slow input. We discussed it a little on chinesepod.com's discussion section.

I respect his opinion, and I know that most people think they need slow input.

I personally think slow input is a placebo.

Why? Because if you don't know a word's meaning, saying it slowly doesn't help you with the meaning. It also distorts the natural intonation of an utterance, so forget trying to use any paralinguistic strategies involving context.

When we say "input" we mean, technically speaking, the initial presentation of vocabulary and/or grammar to the learner. Those of us who claim to use the 'communicative method' use real communication to present input. Our pronunciation may be a little careful, and slower than, say, a teenager, but as a rule, we present input in context; i.e., in a real sentence, with a real message that is relevant to the student.

I believe slow language is totally inappropriate for input. Slow language is ok for clarification, for pronunciation practice, but input? No.

But JP, some people talk too fast for me to understand!

First of all, this situation is usually not input.

Second, speed is probably not the real problem. Usually, if you don't understand something, it's because they are talking too much, not too fast. That's assuming you're capable of understanding their words. If you don't know the words they're saying, no amount of slow is going to help you understand.

If someone is talking too much at you, interrupt them. Ask for clarification, try repeating what you did hear, whether you understood it or not. Take a wild guess at what you think the person is saying, and say it back to them as a question.

Saying "talk slower please" might get you good results when you don't understand someone in your own language. However, more often than not, if you ask a European to talk slower, chaaaaaaanceeeeees. Aaaaaarrrrrrreee. Thhhhhhheeeeeeeyyy. Wiiiiiiillllll. Taaaaaaaallllk. in a way that is slow, detached, distorted, and ultimately not helpful.

Anyway, whatever. Not important to most people.

Vancouver customer service

Far be it from be to draw sweeping conclusions based on a few experiences. I'll just tell you what my sister and I experienced.

• She called to confirm our hotel room, the guy on the phone said, "yah, we have you're reservation." Period. There was an awkward pause, and then she realized she had to ask him to actually confirm the details (number/size of beds? length of stay?). Hello!
• The waiters at Guu served us some delicious food, but seriously, three of them asked us for our drink orders, and one of the dishes we ordered never came. We asked twice, and finally told them to cancel it after we got tired of being there.
• We stopped at a computer store; they didn't have the part we were looking for, and wouldn't tell us where we could find it. Laughed, actually, that we would ask him.
• Went to another computer store; receptionist told us to follow a passing employee, who did not stop to acknowledge us. Hello?
• Teenage cashiers too busy talking to each other to notice us waiting to buy our kitchen utensils. Manager scolds them in front of us. Smoooooth.
• We were totally ignored in a number of stores on Robson Street.
• Greek restaurant we went to for breakfast only had a few tables, but the one waitress was totally slammed, as she let the few customers sit as far apart as possible. When customers came in, she told them "hope you find a clean table."

To be fair, we got good customer service at La Bodega for tapas, and also at Ecco Shoes and Abruzzo. We tried to draw a generalization that it was white people giving us bad service, and asians giving us good service, but then some asians gave us bad service....

What can I throw my money at?

So I get this question all the time: What book/CD/online service can I use to boost my language learning?

The smart answer is this: All of them, if that's what gives you confidence. The easiest and best way to learn a language is to use it daily in real communication, let your language instinct kick in. The second best way is to get a tutor and/or take a class. It's a distant second, but it's been known to work occasionally, when both teacher and student emphasize daily practice and real communication.

In general, all the other stuff is a pile of crap; flash cards will get you through a vocab quiz, but that's about it. The vast majority of everything else is basically just glorified flash cards. Berlitz: glorified flash cards. Rosetta Stone: electronic, glorified flash cards, with an added bonus of operant conditioning.

If that helps you, makes you more confident, then by all means throw your money at Rosetta Stone. Seriously. For many people from predominantly monolingual countries, confidence is a big problem, since they associate an inability to express yourself verbally as mental retardation. When I was in Michigan, one insult I often heard was "Uh, she can't even speak ENGLISH." As if knowledge of a certain language was a minimum for intelligence. Well, the people with this attitude tend to have issues when they're in a second language classroom, struggling; that they're stupid for not being able to express themselves. These are the people that should throw money at confidence builders like flash cards and Rosetta Stone.

Otherwise? Save your money!

However, there are three programs that receive my stamp of approval as supplements. They are not meant to be the primary means of language instruction; they are something you can do in addition to being immersed in the target language and/or taking a good class.

Pimsleur. Native speakers speaking at almost normal speed. The student gets a chance to supply the answer before it's given. Caveats: you have to do a half an hour a day, every day, repeating lessons until you master them. You have to answer out loud and hear yourself; you can't just *think* your answers. Borrow the CDs from the library; don't buy them at Barnes & Noble. Limitations: it's all oral. You won't learn how to read or write. If you have a bad ear for foreign sounds, it won't stop and help you.

Bilingual Book's 10 Minutes a Day series. They make books, audio materials, etc. to help jumpstart your language study. My Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day came with sticky vocab labels, flash cards, a menu guide, and a take-along Pocket Pal. It was written in a way that is not totally useless as a language learning supplement, like some of the other programs on the language learning bookshelf. One annoying thing is that they provide gringo-spelling approximations for target language words.

Finally, chinesepod.com has nice bite-sized, functionally realistic dialog analysis. It's not going to help your spoken Mandarin, but do it enough and it might help you with your listening and reading comprehension. Aspiring Polyglot reviews chinesepod's sister podcast, SpanishSense.com which doesn't look bad. Remember, this might help you with listening and reading comprehension, but it won't necessarily raise your Spanish grade.

One very annoying thing about both chinesepod and spanish sense is that in the beginner levels, the dialogues are super artifical: words are read slowly and haltingly, with ridiculous artificial inflection.

Listen to me: slow input does NOT help you learn language. No! NO NO NO. At best, slow input helps you learn SLOW LANGUAGE. (Ken, I was just being facetious!) Whenever you get mad at someone for "talking too fast," you need to remind yourself that you don't speak that language, and no amount of SLOW is going to help you understand.

Counter-intuitive? Remember when you learned to ride a bike, and you found that it was easier to balance when you had a little speed? Remember when you first learned to drive, and you realized you had more control with a little speed?

Same with language. Slow speech doesn't help your memory. You don't need every word in a sentence in sequence in order to understand what someone is saying.

Besides, that's not how your brain listens to your own native language, anyway. Your brain listens for semantic landmarks and then fills in the information in between. You need to learn to do that in your second language. Slow speech levels semantic landmarks, and over-emphasizes the non-content words that hold sentences together.

So don't bother with slow speech. Negotiate with the speaker. Make the speaker say less, maybe pause for a second. Ask the speaker to repeat. Ask the speaker to explain. Ask the speaker to write. Ask the speaker to show you. Anything, ANYTHING but slow speech.

So chinesepod and spanishsense? You can listen to the crazy slow speech if you want. The good stuff is in the intermediate and advanced levels, when people start talking normal speed.

Update: Ken from chinesepod.com just found this post and linked to it! He called me wholly misguided. I guess it's the wrong time to tell him I'm his secret admirer. So now that serious language learners might be reading, I should clarify....

No, I don't actually think that slow input begets slow output. What I think is that slow input, while catering to the emotional needs of many target language learners, doesn't necessarily help comprehension in the wild.

And the reason I created this hypothesis? Because I fucking HATE it when people slow talk me. Language learning is my passion, teaching language is my profession, and I only ever use slow talk (rarely!) for clarification, never NEVER for input.

For the record, I do use chinesepod.com every day, I know that slowtalk is what customers want and expect from a beginner level, I know that those elementary dialogs are not "language in the wild" situations, and yes, I do have a slight man-crush on Ken. Is that so wrong?

Why You Fail at Language Learning

Some of you are experts at failing to learn language. Often, you make up totally stupid reasons, like "I'm bad at languages" or "I'm past my critical period." Bullshit.

You fail because you're doing it wrong. Here are some of the reasons why you fail. A couple of them are the teacher's fault, but the vast majority are your own fault.

1. Your unbelief. When I tell you a feature of the language, whether it's pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar, you are skeptical. You find the target language illogical, inefficient, or somehow unreasonable. You believe a dictionary more than you believe me, the instructor. Example: people who think the French "R" is too unreasonable. People who don't understand why there are so many "redundant" object pronouns in Spanish.

2. Your shyness. It's ok to be an introvert in life. However, if you can't talk to other people, you're going to learn less.

3. Your fear of making mistakes. If you can't make mistakes, you can't learn from your mistakes. When you get called on in class, your jaw locks up, tears come to your eyes, you hesitate. You look around. Your name. I asked you to say your damn name. Are you so scared you don't know you're own name?

4. Your fixation on English. You ask what stuff means in English, and you only want to hear the answer in English. You blurt out English translation when you figure something out. When I ask you a question in the target language, you try to get confirmation in English before answering. STUPID. I speak English, I don't need your translation, jackass.

5. You give up so easy. You resent the fact that I give you grammar rules, so instead of concentrating on the rules, you just try to do what you think sounds right, i.e., total uneducated guessing. When that strategy doesn't work, you decide it's too damn hard and you exclaim "this is hard" and then you hate it. You will do everything except for FOLLOW THE RULES I just gave you.

6. You do your homework to finish instead of to learn. You don't know or care about the grammar the homework is trying to get you to practice. You try to do your homework as efficiently as possible, rather than practicing the material. You bemoan the busy work. News flash: language is busy work. You want grammar to go into muscle memory, you have to do the drills, kid.

7. You don't use target language enough. You learn to ride a bike by getting on a bike. You learn to drive a car by getting behind the wheel. You learn to play a song on the piano by playing it on the piano. You learn to use chopsticks by using chopsticks. If you don't use the target language, you won't learn the target language. It's not something you can get good at by reading about it.

8. Your teacher doesn't use target language enough. Perhaps your teacher is more interested in communicating with you than forcing you to learn. Sucks for you. You should complain. This is why I didn't learn Filipino: my teachers only spoke it 30% of the time, they didn't actually us it to communicate with us. You'd think that all the Filipinos I know would be sympathetic, but Filipinos are so bilingual that they will look at you straight in the eye and say "Ok, now I am speaking to you in Tagalog," IN ENGLISH. It's maddening. And when they finally do manage to speak to you in Filipino, they rarely do it in a way that is helpful to 2nd language learners; i.e., they don't offer options, they don't help you negotiate for meaning, they don't rephrase or repeat... they just give up and tell you in English. If you want to learn, both you and the person speaking to you must tolerate the temporary and minor discomfort of the vocabulary gap. If either of you just go around it by speaking English, you will never learn. NEVER.

9. Your teacher is too error oriented. Your teacher loves to catch you on the exceptions, the irregulars. You never get to see the big picture. Newsflash, teacher: error correction is ineffective. The learner only learns from mistakes with internal motivation.

10. Your curriculum is based on theoretical completeness, rather than communicative proficiency. This is a big one, especially when it comes to French. Your French book wants to teach you the subjunctive, first by teaching you the regulars, then by teaching you the non regulars, then by drilling you to death on all the exceptions. There are plenty of Americans who NEVER LEARN the French subjunctive, they get along in their lives just fine. Is it worth learning? Absolutely yes; French people are much more impressed when they don't hear awkward grammar mistakes. However, they are much LESS impressed by people who know the grammar rules but can't talk. If your instructor is teaching you grammar rather than how to talk, you should a) learn as much as you can from that teacher, and then b) make sure your next teacher emphasizes communicative proficiency.

10. You've "moved on" from the basics. Language learning is cumulative. Period.

11. You don't have enough strategies. Do you circumlocute? Do you negotiate for meaning? Do you use new items in generative contexts? Do you look for patterns and opposites?

12. You're not being intuitive. Sometimes, you have to put two and two together by yourself. Seriously, use your head.

13. You ask the wrong questions. Instead of asking for the one word in the sentence you didn't understand, you say "What?" When I ask you what it was you didn't understand, you say "the whole thing." Bullshit. Usually, it's just a one word vocabulary gap.

My French host brother once asked me "Tu veux encore du pain?" Because of his regional accent, I didn't understand the last word. "Do you want more bread?" It was the word "bread" that I didn't understand.

But instead of saying "Sorry, do I want more what?" I said, "uh, what? I don't understand."

He said, in French "Doooooooooooooooo youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu......"

"waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnt mooooooooooooooooore........."

Dammit! I undersand all of that! All I want to know was what the last word was!

"BREAD" he said quickly, and by this time he was laughing, so of course I didn't understand it.

So in this case, "uh what? I don't understand" was a FREAKING STUPID question on my part.

Italians are different. If you say "uh, what? I don't understand" to an Italian, he will immediately rephrase the question and restate it slowly in a way that is totally baffling. You have to ask Italians specifically, "please repeat?" if you want another chance at that word.

14. You make stuff up. I thought you couldn't have two verbs in the same sentence! I thought it's subjunctive whenever you have "que"! I thought all adverbs end in "-ly!" No, children. Only memorize the grammatical rules I tell you. Don't memorize the ones you invent while you are drunk.

15. You don't take notes or pay attention. Children, if after a year of high school Spanish you still think "ustedes" means "they," you need to slap yourself on the face with a shoe. If you don't write down new words that you learn on the fly, you deserve it when I ridicule you for not knowing it only 10 seconds later. If you just asked the same question that two other people just asked, you are not taking your education seriously enough.

No more fooling around

Here's what my Spanish classes are going to translate this week. No more fooling around.

No, it's not a translation class. Sue me. We've done all the grammar. It's time for them to put it together.

1. What money?! The money (that) my girlfriend gave you to give me. The money (that) you had promised to give me! Gimme it now!
2. The truth!? Don’t tell (it to) her. Let me tell (it to) her. If you tell it to her, she will be sad that we (had) lied to her.
3. That song, you all! Sing it to us again! Sing it so that we will be happy, like when you all sang it the night of the wedding, after the mean people finally left.
4. Chinese? Let’s all learn it before we lose the opportunity. Our parents will be glad that we’re learning something useful, and if we speak it well, we can hang out with our Chinese friends in Tiananmen Square.
5. Mmm, tacos! Chop me some onions, we can go buy fresh tortillas after my mom gets home. If you can’t wait, we’ll go to the taco bus on Rainier Ave. Then we can eat us some tacos.
6. As soon as the teacher shows up, tell us “quiet.” We will hide ourselves,; Billy should turn off the lights. As soon as he enters the room, Billy should turn them on again, and then everyone should yell (at him) “Thief! Liar!”
7. I can’t believe it! What an idiot! If he doesn't apologize to us for it, I am going to write a letter to his boss. Let the boss know everything! I’m sick of that idiot always coming around here and saying stupid things to us!
8. Oysters? Buy them small. Let them not be too big. It’s not easy to eat the big ones. Wait a moment, let me open it for you. Eat it up as soon as I open it.
9. Teenagers! If I had had the opportunity to study Japanese painting as a student, I would have done it seriously. They’re not going to have another opportunity! But don’t waste your time telling it to them; they don’t listen to adults!
10. I hate to wash dishes. I hate that nobody washes my dishes. Please wash them for me, you all. If I paid you all a hundred dollars, would you wash them for me?

Language Goals

Aspiring Polyglot has inspired me to post my language goals. I've posted my linguistic autobiography before, but there's something to be said for putting your objectives down in writing.

Unlike Aspiring Polyglot, I don't want to be that concerned with government certifications. I don't ever want to be a translator or interpreter, and I live in the US, so I don't really have to specialize.

One drawback to being American, specifically from the Pacific Northwest, is that culturally speaking, we tend to not speak in paragraphs. Not even in English. If you meet someone in Seattle who talks to you in paragraphs, chances are they didn't grow up here. We tend to say a sentence or two, and then ask a question, even if it's just to check for comprehension.

In other cultures, the educated norm is to speak in paragraphs (sometimes pages). So when I'm in speaking Spanish or French, my normal m.o. is to listen quietly for a long time, and then say something thoughtfull when I can get a word in edgewise. This in itself is cultural, since typical French and Italian speakers, especially, both speakers tend to speak simultaneously when they converse.

I might never get to the level of acculuration of simultaneous conversation. It might be a cool trick to learn how to do simultaneous translation, but my bias will probably always be translating into English rather than from it. Old dogs....

Anyway, here are my goals:

Spanish: I want to be able to do stand up comedy in Spanish.

French: It would be cool to be able to watch a movie in French without putting on subltitles. My French could potentially be as strong as my Spanish, but it's a lower priority. Although I can express myself in French without much effort, my listening comprehension could improve considerably. Quebec accent is pretty tough for me, since I'm not used to it.

Italian: As with French, I want to improve my listening comp. I should work on my written skills and do the advanced grammar that I never did. Also, I want to get the killer accent back that I used to have; nowadays when I speak Italian, I hear a Filipino accent. As far as speaking, I need to learn more vocab, so I'm not inventing vocab and grammar by italianizing French or Spanish words that come more easily to me. It's hard to believe that in '94, my Italian was stronger than my French or Spanish put together.

Tagalog: I need to learn conversational vocabulary and drill the crap out of grammar, especially focus constructions. I would love to speak Tagalog well enough to write a textbook, because existing material is all FUNCTIONAL APPROACH, which annoys me.

Mandarin: I started later in life (unlike Sp/Fr/It) and I have no heritage knowledge (unlike Tagalog) , so killer near-native pronunciation is probably going to be out of the question. My goal is to become an advanced speaker and to learn how to read and write. That's all. If I can have an intelligent conversation, read a newspaper, and order Chinese food with no surprises. I don't care if I sound like a laowai. As long as I don't sound like a gringo.

Portuguese: Portuguese makes me laugh, because it's so sexy, the grammar is different in charming ways, and I already understand half of it. If I get to the point where I'm satisfied with my Mandarin (i.e., I have a teaching job) then I'll try to pick up conversational Brazilian Portuguese. Not necessarily for mastery; just as a palate cleanser. I have a minor fantasy of moving my family to Portugal, spending my days eating fish and drinking vinho verde, and getting paid in Euros.

Advanced restaurant proficiency: Korean, Arabic, Greek, Japanese

Probably won't get around to it: Farsi, Pangasinan (my parents' endangered language)

Filipino American Kid Glossary: the Naked Edition

bumba: naked. To go bumba; to be naked. Bumbastar; porn actor, or someone who is naked for too long.

labos: naked, exposed, without pants (i.e., Porky Pig)

burles: inverted slang for labos, therefore more fun. Also, reminds me of "burlesque."

panty: any underwear, including men's. E.g., "tell your brother to put her panties in the dryer with the panty of your dad."

puwet: butt. See also babot, ubet, tumbong.

singit: crotch. Funny because it sounds like English "Sing it!"

puki: vagina. See also pipit, pekpek, bao

patutin: weener

mabaho: stinky. Also mabantot (butt/fart-smelling), ma-anglit (rancid smelling), kilikili power (b.o.).

bungid: bend over.

Captain's log, stardate 200612.19.19

Elevated rapid transit is awesome. I can tell you that the elevated sections of the Paris Metro are the best parts of the system, in terms of riding experience. Do the noise and arial obstructions outweigh the convenience? Anyone in Chicago will tell you 'no.'

So why do I like monorails instead of heavy elevated or light rail? Because elevated monorails DON'T DERAIL.
____

Let's see, for breakfast I made a cheese omelet and some bacon.

Went to Ross to buy my chair; stopped at the Spanish Table to buy a bottle. Wandered around the Market for a while, had a cup of chowder and a crab roll for lunch. Forgot to drop off my pants for buttons; oh well.

For dinner I made steak and potatoes, deglazed again with some sake. I had some of my left over pie for dessert.
____

So I went into work today to to pick up some stuff, and found that a colega had left me a little tin of chocolate walnut cookies. Delicious. She wrote "to: khuya" in Arabic, which means "my brother."

See? Arabic and Tagalog are the same language!
____

I keep forgetting; I saw Mario Battali yesterday, as I drove past Zeitgeist.

Bacon links

So the Accidental Hedonist is posting about bacon now, so I have to chime in.

When I was in Ann Arbor, I ate at Pizzeria Uno's two or three times. (What's with the obligatory apostrophe-S on restaurants? I find it gringoriffic.) Usually I ordered something called the Spinaccoli, because spinach and broccoli are good on pizza, even to this carnivore.

Once, when I was particularly homesick, I called them up to order a Hawaiian pizza. For those of you who are not blessed to be from the Washington, a Hawaiian pizza to us means Canadian bacon and pineapple. However a Google Images search and a Wikipedia article seems to indicate that the use of Canadian bacon is not universal. Here in Washington, it's always Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Yes, I know many of you out there who cry blasphemy putting fruit on pizza. You should email someone about that.

Anyway, I was homesick in Ann Arbor, and I thought a good old fashioned Hawaiian pizza would be comforting. So I called them up, and they had never heard of a Hawaiian pizza.

The difference in Pacific Northwest English and Midwestern English is not apparent to others, but to me the difference is huge, usually in vowels. But we also have different lexical items (i.e., parking garage vs. parking 'structure'), and most shocking to me at least were the variation of cultural artifacts. For example, people who live east of Montana have never seen or heard of a maple bar, that gross bloated fried raft with a maple glaze.

Hawaiian pizza is another one of these cultural artifacts that was unknown to the guy I was ordering pizza from. No problem, I'm a linguist, I will circumlocute.

"I want a regular cheese pizza with Canadian bacon and pineapple."

"Um..., we have pineapple...."

"And do you have Canadian bacon?"

"Um..., we have bacon, I don't know if it's from Canada..."

First of all, my name is not 'um.' "Listen, do you have ham?"

"Um..., yah, we have ham..."

"Ok, I want you to make me a regular cheese pizza with ham and pineapple."

(Skeptical) "Um... ok, one pizza with ham and pineapple..."

So apparently these people don't say "Canadian bacon." They might well have called it something else, but I didn't stick around long enough to find out. I wanted out of that flat, bland, creepy town that white people seem to adore.

They don't know about Canadian bacon. They don't know about maple bars. They certainly don't know about espresso.

To be fair, they did have something I had never heard of, a "yeast ring." Or even a "chocolate yeast ring." It's a kind of doughnut, that to me sounds itchy. To me a yeast ring looks like this:

Slammed and Wasted.

Ok, folks, I'm officially slammed I was awarded a certificate from the Over-Scheduled Society of America.

(Do other people say "slammed?" Where I'm from, "slammed" is restaurant language, meaning that your tables are all full of needy customers. Also, it can be used more generally to mean that you have a ridiculous amount of work.)

So I haven't been writing lately. Two of my hit counters have stopped functioning; when I get a chance I will delete them.

One of the reasons I wish I could go back to teaching at the university level, instead of teaching high school, is nightmare parents, who treat you like you are their personal monkey. It is inappropriate to tell them "you are too stupid to talk to." And that's all I will say about that.

Today I asked my students if they've been studying every night, since last week when I gave them the lecture that they have to study every night. They said they haven't been. They have a quiz next week, and I told them that if they don't practice their Spanish every night, they should expect a C on the quiz. Right? They all agreed.

People don't suck at learning languages because they are not smart. The suck at it because THEY ARE DOING IT WRONG. And it doesn't matter how much I tell them, they don't believe. I tell them exactly what has to be done, and they DON'T DO IT.

I've managed to rid my classrooms of a lot of terrible habits, like "English bombs," when the student blurts out English translation to "clarify." Duh, no wonder they have no natural retention, all they care about is English.

What's amazing to me is when students don't correct their mistakes. They read their sentence, I correct them, and they NOD at me. It doesn't occur to them to correct their paper, to some of them it doesn't even occur to say it correctly.

I am a talented teacher. I am being wasted. I am being wasted on students who at worst refuse to connect the dots, and at best just don't believe they have to study. Present, preterit, imperfect, future... and they've been studying the first three for PAST TWO YEARS.

They don't master these tenses, and then they have the NERVE to expect to get an A.

Hey! Just "looking over the material" DOES NOT HELP YOU.

No language practice = no language learning = no getting an A.

I am being wasted.

Maybe next week I will have a knock-knock joke festival.

A few words before grading....

I have to grade, you all.

But before I do, I wanted to just catch you up on my life.

Remember back in '88 when we went from Oly to Seattle in two minutes?

I just bought a new suit. It's BAD, children, the suit is bangin'. Tommy the salesman started putting shirts and ties together... hoo, that was fun. I saw an interview look, a fancy date look, a Pentacostal church look, a singing-at-a-wedding look (cream tie on a cream shirt: stand back). Then he brought out the white shirt with a white tie, and I said, no, Tommy, that's if *I'm* getting married. My cousin's bride would be mad at me if I showed up to her wedding flashier than her.

I said, Tommy, this is fun, but we can do it later. I pick up the suit on Friday. I think I'm gonna go with the light green shirt and light green tie with blue squares. We'll see what my sister thinks.

Finally, for Gwen, I don't know if you're still reading Gwen, but I will help you with the Preterit Tense. There are only four categories of preterit: Regulars, Irregulars (only 3), Minority Verbs (only 12), Stem Changers (the same IR stem change verbs from the Present Tense). Four kinds, that's all. There are no more.

Filipino American Glossary: bastos

pronunciation: bas-TOS

adjective; often an exclamation

(1) - rude, disrespectful.
When you go to visit your cowsin, you better say hello to your uncle and auntie. When you do not say hello, that is very bastos.

(2) - dirty, naughty, porn
When we go to rent a video, she spends all her time in the bastos section.

You can check out all the times I used the word "bastos" now!

Ay, Sticky Vagina!

I don't know how knowing how to say this expression in Tagalog is going to improve your lives. It's Auntie A who says it, and we love her for it, but it's not something that naturally sneaks into your vocabulary.

Anyway, by popular demand....

When Auntie A drops something, she exclaims "Ay! Puki malakit!"

Enjoy!

Update: We have always said that Auntie A is the only one that says this. She is Tagalog and Kapampangan, and we love her. We can't claim it's a Filipino thing, or Tagalog thing, just an Auntie A thing. However, its a phenomenon that could only happen in a vaginocentric culture.

Update Number 2: My mama wrote in with a correction; she claims Auntie A says "Ay, puking malaki!" which a) is absolutley not what I remember, and b) not "sticky vagina" but "huge vagina." Sheesh, I hope this thread dies down soon.

Update Number 3: I've posted some corrections over at BitchPhd. Hopefully, that's the final word.

Low Point in the Blogging Cycle.

We've all been there. Interesting stuff happens, but we're too busy to blog, or it just feels like a chore to have to put something out there.

Last week was the awful shooting at the Jewish Federation in Belltown. There's two directions I'm thinking about following. The first is that whole "Fight 'em over there, so we don't have to fight 'em over here." The second is how the shooter had been baptized christian, a fact that sends that pangit Malkin grasping at straws (sorry, I refuse to link to that diseased gorilla). Something tells me she's not so hard on Mel Gibson's anti-semitic tirade..... Sure, he didn't shoot anyone, but you have to admit, we're talking about degrees of hatred; the hatred itself is not in question.

One of my classmates in Chinese class loves to make jokes about communism, and how funny it is. Our laoshi is not always find it funny, and today when it started to get weird, my other classmate started reading out loud from the textbook. I love that class! I'm sad that it's coming to an end.

I just want to do my Chinese homework and play my computer game. I don't want to face the orthodontist (I'm totally about to get braces again). I want the re-fi to be finished. I'm coming to a crossroads in my "music" career, suddenly big opportunities but no inspiration. The school year is about to start again; time to get into the 'stance.' I missed half a blood pressure pill last night. Sigh.

Well, if you ever needed to be reminded of American air superiority, you should come to Seattle this week. The Blue Angels are screaming across the sky all this week, to the delight of all of us, right? Just think, in some parts of the world that sound means death from above! We're so powerful.

I'm toying with the idea of writing about how to successfully learn a language. It might actually be a list of terrible habits that keep people from learning. If language learning is an instinct (and it is), then it may be more helpful to look at the ways people manage to sabotage that instinct.

part one: Skinner Box; part two: Big Mistake

I love learning Mandarin. Love it, love it, love it.

I felt a little sad today, when I realized it would end next month. So I thought about getting the Rosetta Stone program, because sometimes spending money makes me feel better. A friend of mine called it 'the best marketed program out there.'

Well, I let the kid at Northgate Mall give me his best Rosetta Stone pitch, but I left without buying it. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong.

I realized on the drive home what it was; it was all just a bunch of fancy operant conditioning. Dr. Skinner would be so proud.

Eventually, though, the end result of operant conditioning is not language acquisition; at best, I would become really good at the Rosetta Stone task itself. Maybe it could support the language acquisition that's already happening, but there is no evidence that anything could help (or even have any impact at all) on the instinctual process that takes every human child from zero to relative clauses in six years with negligible explicit instruction.

You better check out Other One Spoon if you think that explicit correction and teaching has any effect on language development.

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Today I bought a bagel sandwich for breakfast. One of them looked like wheat, so I said, "Is this wheat?" and the lady said happily, "Yah, but they're so good, you can't taste that there's any wheat at all!"

Anyway, you know how I feel about bagels, but it was that or no breakfast at all.

Mistake.

I do have to admit that the post-diahrreah relief and euphoria was acute.