Language learning may change your brain and personality!

Yet another article touting the benefits of language learning caught my eye recently,  How to learn 30 languages by David Robson on BBC.com. He states that language learning is "arguably the best brain training you can try." Since I  enjoy the process of studying languages anyway, it is heartening to think that I am also giving my brain what Robson describes as a "tough mental workout." I may be strengthening attention and memory and even delaying the onset of dementia.

Another key idea is that of multiple languages providing learners with "a new cultural skin." You may have experienced the sensation of adopting a new identity when you speak another language.  I certainly have, but only with certain languages.

When I speak Spanish rather than my native English, I soften my expression to be more polite. I find that I invade others' personal space by giving more abrazos to my speaking companions. ( Abrazo is translated into English as "hug" or "embrace," but I would never give a hug to someone I just met when speaking English; however, I might give an abrazo in the same situation when speaking Spanish.)  My expression is less abrupt in Spanish; for example, I  answer questions in English with a "yeah," or an "uh-uh", while in Spanish, I might say "Sí, ¿cómo no? (yes, of course), or "No, gracias" (no, thanks)

The Portuguese language has an even more noticeable effect on my reticent personality.  I love to speak Portuguese. The sounds are pleasing to the ear, and I can produce all Portuguese sounds with some resemblance to the original.   The grammar is playful.  Can grammar really be described as playful?  I think so.  I enjoy leaving out the word "it" when not required for meaning, as in the response, "Tenho, sim." (Yes, I have it).  I think it is cool to have a special subjunctive tense to express future doubt.  "If I speak Portuguese" becomes "Se eu falar português," and it feels like I have gotten away with not conjugating the ver "falar." Yes, a bit geeky, I'll admit.

When I speak Portuguese, memories of when and how I first learned Portuguese come to mind.  For a few minutes at least, I can again be a young language teacher on an NEH-sponsored trip to Brazil to learn Portuguese.  I can buy a morning café com leite (coffee with milk) from the nuns at a small stand in front of the university.  And I can smile at the Brazilian immigration officer who remarked that I spoke pretty good Portuguese as I was leaving the country. 

The two other languages I work on every day, French and Irish Gaelic, are mainly for brain training. I never expect to be fluent in either language, but I enjoy the challenge on Duolingo of analyzing how these two somewhat complex languages express meaning.

So, thanks to the BBC article for helping me justify the amount of time and energy I spend on language learning. I have high hopes that my brain and personality are changing for the better with each passing day!

Snowclones for summer entertainment

No, the word "snowclones" in the title is not a typo.  It is an invented word announced by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in Language Log to describe an observable language phenomenon.

Granted that eating a snow cone

on a blazing hot summer day may be a bit more fun than looking for examples of snowclones in modern communication,  I still think discovering snowclones is amusing.

The term "snowclone" was inspired by the mistaken notion that Eskimos have many more words for snow than other languages (I'll spare you the details). A less complicated example of a snowclone is "X is the new Y."  You are probably familiar with "Orange is the new black," or "50 is the new 40."

Snowclones are described as a kind of cliché that can be used as a template for new expressions, much like fill in the blank expressions.  Sometimes snowclones are described as a type of word play and other times less positively as the result of  lazy communication.

I learned about snowclones about a week ago through a text from my son, who knows I am a sucker for any new concept about language.  Sure enough, I have been able to identify three snowclones already.

The first is "Keep calm and carry on," the phrase used in Britain during WWII to inspire the British public.  I have seen numerous examples of the same phrase with a new ending, many dispensing advice.

Next, I recently read an article entitled,    "This is your brain on Jane Austen."  The original slogan, "This is your brain on drugs" originated during the 1987 Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

The use of the phrase to describe positive changes in the brain during focused reading of classic literature moves a negative experience into a positive one. 

And finally, have you noticed how the days of the week are now being designated for certain activities?  "Casual Fridays," the idea of dressing less formally at work once a week, is an example. And in my home town of El Paso, Texas, located on the border with Mexico, restaurants offer "Taco Tuesdays" with many varieties of this tasty snack for as little as $1.00  apiece.

I'll be trying to identify more snowclones in the future.  They are a great reminder that language is a creative process, ever-changing, and available for all of us to enjoy.  Let me know please if you make a snowclone discovery (or eat an awesome snow cone)!

Choosing a Language on a Whim

6,500.  That's the number of different languages estimated to exist in today's world.  Some counts give a higher number, some a lower, but no matter how you look at it, acquiring all languages in a lifetime is not a reasonable option, even for dyed-in-the-wool language enthusiasts.

How then does a language learner make a decision about which language (or languages) to select for study? We might like to think that when choosing certain languages we make rational, clear-headed decisions that will pay tangible dividends in the future, like new job opportunities, job promotions, and increased social contacts.

After examining my own rationales for selecting different languages, however, I have come to the conclusion that language choice is often not rational at all.  Sometimes a language choice is merely circumstantial. And often the choice of a language for study is subjective, based on emotions, feelings, and yes, even whims.  

English is my native language. I really didn't choose it; it chose me by reason of birth and upbringing. English is my everyday, working, default language.  I am very happy to have it as a means of communication, but as a subject for study, English doesn't interest me. I get really annoyed when I have to research an English grammar or punctuation rule.  And I get no particular thrill from speaking English.

Spanish, my first foreign language, was a natural choice. My home town of El Paso, Texas is located on the United States-Mexico border.

We are a bilingual community.  I  heard Spanish as a child and still continue to hear it on a daily basis. Studying Spanish in elementary and high school and later in college was an easy choice for me, one that felt natural in my environment. But I still categorize Spanish as one of my workaday languages, along with English,  that I use for purposes of communication.

French entered my life in college as a natural choice for the college second language requirement, and it has been in and out of my life several times since then.  I'm afraid my interest in French waned in college when a grumpy professor told the class that I had the worse pronunciation for a French 'r' that he had ever heard!

I once taught a semester of high school French in an emergency situation, but my pronunciation never improved.  I sort of gave up on French until I had the opportunity recently to travel to Canada and spend time with French-speaking friends (who are completely fluent in English as well).  Oh, how I envy their language abilities.  I still include French on my daily Duolingo study, but my chances of becoming a fluent French speaker are not promising, as much as I admire the language.

Then I enrolled in a Portuguese course at our local university.

It was love at first sight, or more accurately, first sound. What an absolutely gorgeous language! Speaking Portuguese is pure joy - and I have no trouble at all pronouncing the Brazilian 'r' sound! Even the grammar seems less complicated and demanding than other languages. And Brazilian Portuguese has an interesting future subjunctive verb that adds a richness of expression.  No wonder  Brazilians refer to their language as "the language of the angels."

My most recent language, Irish Gaelic, is truly a labor of love.  It is a Celtic language and not easy for an English speaker to learn.  Quite honestly, I have little hope of acquiring communicative abilities in Irish Gaelic, but the vocabulary and grammar are so different from the Romance languages that I usually study that I am intrigued. Each sentence I am given to work with on Duolingo is like an absorbing puzzle.  And the sounds of Irish Gaelic are soft on the ear.  I at least know how to say "I like..." in Irish Gaelic:

Some of my languages were thrust into my life by circumstance.  Portuguese and Irish Gaelic are the languages I choose to study.  Who knows why?  I only know that when I log on to Duolingo every day to practice my four foreign languages, Portuguese and Irish Gaelic are the languages that feed my soul.

Why would you want to study Portuguese?

I have often been the recipient of questioning looks when I reveal that one of my favorite languages is Portuguese.  "Why study Portuguese?" "Where do they speak Portuguese?" "Isn't Portuguese just like Spanish?"  Oh, the defense I could make for a language that appears consistently in lists of the top ten world languages and, as a bonus,  is a beautiful, melodious language.

I know why I study Portuguese, but I wanted to find out why participants in my "First Steps to Portuguese" class this summer chose this language. And I received some very revealing answers.

For example, upcoming travel plans!  One participant has a cruise planned that will stop in both Brazil, the largest country in South America,

  and also in Cape Verde, an island country off the coast of  Western Africa.

Another participant has family to visit in the Azores, nine volcanic islands in the Atlantic that form an autonomous region of Portugal.

Still another class member enjoys Europe and would like to visit Portugal,

especially in view of the recent strong US dollar against the euro.

Other class participants displayed an interest in acquiring other languages because they were born in another country (Mexico, Chile, and Japan that I know of) or have studied other languages sometime in their lives.  One person told me she had studied six different languages but spoke none of them fluently.  That's okay in my book, because the journey while studying a language is an exciting experience.

But one of the most insightful answers to the question of why study Portuguese came from a participant who declared, "Learning languages keeps my brain young."  

And that may be the best reason of all!

What are the first steps to Portuguese?

"The Portuguese class I am teaching is starting tomorrow,"  I informed my husband this morning at breakfast, perhaps to warn him that I will be preoccupied for the next six weeks.  

When I told him the title of the course, "First Steps to Portuguese,"  he was polite enough to ask what those first steps will be.  Ah, I'm glad he asked!  Here is what I hope to communicate to participants at the first class meeting.

STEP 1  Understand what you can and cannot learn in a new language in an introductory course.

What a fast-paced, speeded up world we live in.  We want to learn a new language quickly and then move on to the next big challenge in our lives.

This is getting a bit ridiculous!

For most people, language acquisition just doesn't happen quickly.  Learning a new language is a skill to be added to life, probably a little bit at a time for a very long time. It is akin to learning to play a new musical instrument.  Slow and steady wins the race.

STEP 2  Accept the fact that making errors in a new language is a vital part of the acquisition process.

This is a very hard fact to swallow.  No one past puberty age likes to make a mistake.  And yet, if we try for perfection in a new language, we lessen our chances of achieving fluency. Lighten up! Laugh at your own mistakes!  Be a child again!  After all, children work through their language errors and become communicative adults.  

STEP 3  Use your native language to connect to the new language.  Take advantage of cognates,
words that have a similar appearance and sound in two more more languages.

Portuguese is a daughter language of Latin, as is Spanish, so Spanish speakers have some real advantages when learning Portuguese. Spanish speakers can make a good guess at Portuguese words like 'claramente' (clearly), 'amor' (love), and 'atenção' (attention).  English speakers will soon find Portuguese words they can understand immediately as well such as 'inventor,' 'americano,' and 'usual.' 

STEP 4  Recognize sounds unfamiliar to you in the new language.

One of the main frustrations I encounter in new learners of Portuguese is the sound system, which is a bit more complicated than, say, Spanish.  Spanish has a high letter-sound correspondence, so what you see is usually what you get.  

Portuguese, on the other hand, has some challenges in this area.  I'm going to experiment with my new class and see if a heads up about some of the more unusual Portuguese sounds will reduce some initial frustration.  Here's what we will practice:

ç (c cedilha) always makes an 's' sound as in 'caça' (hunt)

nh is close to a Spanish ñ or the 'n' sound in 'onion'

lh is like the 'l' sound in 'million'

ch is a soft sound, like the beginning sound of 'chartreuse'

Now for the really fun sounds that make Brazilian Portuguese distinctive!

The  'r' !  I love this sound because I don't have attempt to trill the r!  For a double r, or an r at the beginning of a word, the sound is like a hard 'h' sound in English or the 'jota' in Spanish.  A single 'r' between vowels is a flap, the same as a Spanish 'r' between vowels.

And 't' and 'd' take on new sounds before an /i/ sound, 't' changing to a hard 'ch' as in church (beginning and end sounds)  and 'd' changing to the first and last sounds of  'judge'.

I hope my new students will feel confident about learning a new language after taking these first steps to Portuguese!

What's Linguistics about anyway?

Linguistics - a field that has held a lifelong fascination for me. But I do catch some flack from family members and friends for pursuing my interest in this somewhat esoteric subject!  ( A few typical comments from them include, "Linguistics, what's that?", "Spare me the details!", and "Get a life!")

Allow me, if you will, to attempt to convince you that Linguistics is an essential part of our everyday lives, because Linguistics is, simply put,  the scientific study of language. Unfortunately, the more expanded definition of Linguistics is a bit more intimidating.

The first four topics in the definition, morphology, syntax, phonetics and semantics, all seek to explain the workings of your mind when language is created or comprehended. You may never stop to consider what is happening internally with language, but then we seldom analyze what is happening when we walk down the street, wave to a friend, or open the car door . All of these activities are, under normal circumstances, automatic.  

Let's get the basic topics of Linguistics out of the way.  Morphology deals with how words are formed in the mind, for example, how we acquire the mental rules for forming plurals. (Did you know that plurals are more complicated than just putting an "s" at the end of words?) Syntax deals with how words are put together to form sentences.  ("Man bites dog" is more newsworthy than "Dog bites man."  How do we comprehend the difference?)  

Phonetics deals with the sound systems of languages. (My English speaking upbringing did not allow me to develop the Spanish trill sound, unfortunately!) And semantics deals with meaning. Ah, now there's a deep philosophical subject.  I can understand why a friend of mine once observed, "Linguistics is a bit dense, isn't it?"  Dense yes, but I still say well worthy of the effort to study.

For the less masochistic learner, the specific branches of linguistics named in the definition have more of an interface with ordinary life. Have you observed that people speak differently when chatting with friends than when giving a formal presentation? (Sociolinguistics)  Are you fascinated by different varieties of English?  Scottish dialect is one of my favorites. (Dialectology) 

Are you a mom or dad observing your child acquiring language? (Psycholinguistics)  Are you fascinated as I am by  Isaac Asimov's talking robots?  (Computational linguistics) Do you wonder why you have trouble reading The Canterbury Tales in the original English?  (Historical-comparative linguistics)  And would you like some guidelines about how best to acquire a second language?  (Applied linguistics).  Is the field of Linguistics sounding any more appealing now?

 I think I can prove that I am not alone in my interest in language.  I have a very useful app on the iPad called Flipboard that allows me save articles of interest to me in my own digital magazines.

And since I have chosen to share my Linguistics magazine with the world, these are today's statistics:  3,227 viewers, 57,452 page flips, 1,029 followers and 154 articles.

Someone else besides me is a  Linguistics nut!  That feels really good.  

Is 'casual language proficiency' enough?

Let's say you have finally taken the leap and made the decision to acquire another language. Would you be satisfied with the goal of "casual proficiency" in the new language?  I read this term recently in a Profhacker blog, "Learn Another Language During Your Commute with Duolingo."

The reference to  Duolingo in the title is what caught my eye.  Duolingo is an online language learning program. I'll admit that I have been addicted to it for about a year now.  As a matter of fact, I  have a 357 day streak going, which means I have used Duolingo every day without fail for almost a year! Whenever I run across an article about Duolingo, which is getting great coverage in the news these days. I read it with great interest.

The Duolingo Owl keeps me motivated!

I have often thought that one of the most difficult aspects of language acquisition is the "stick-to-ivness factor."  Lots of people claim they want to learn another language.  But when it comes to the daily effort required, most of us give up before we reach our goal. 

And this is where the concept of "casual proficiency" may be of benefit to language learners.  The idea of setting a reasonable but not overly ambitious goal for language acquisition sounds great to me!  After all, the idea that I am learning a new language to be a translator for the United Nations may be a bit unrealistic.

I signed on to Duolingo practice with the goal of maintaining proficiency in Portuguese, which I had been teaching at a local state university.  Then I added Spanish, because my college major was Spanish, and I live on the Texas-Mexico border where daily opportunities to use Spanish exist. Next I added French because I have taken lots of French courses in the past, and also because I have French Canadian friends whose bilingual ability puts me to shame.  And finally, I added Irish Gaelic.

My profile on Duolingo

Why Irish Gaelic, you may well ask. I'm not sure myself except to say I have always been drawn to Celtic languages. And let me tell you, Irish Gaelic is not an easy language for a native English speaker to learn!   But  the concept of "casual proficiency"   keeps me working on Irish every day.

I am certainly not going to be recruited by the European Union as a translator.  I will not have any college credits in Irish Gaelic on a transcript. I will not be able to understand Irish on radio or television or read an Irish language newspaper. If I were fortunate enough to travel to Ireland in the next year, I still would not feel confident enough to strike up a conversation in Irish in one of those lively pubs.

Irish pub

  

And yet, just the mere fact that I can now recognize some Irish words, find the verb at the beginning of the sentence, and maybe understand a familiar word spoken in the lilting accent is enough to keep me slogging through the Duolingo lessons. And I shouldn't say slogging. Duolingo lessons are one of my favorite entertainments.

After all, I can find comfort in the fact that "casual proficiency" just about describes the relationship I have with my iPhone 5s.  And I'm certainly not going to give up on it anytime soon!