Cognates - Friend or Foe?

One of the first challenges of a new language is learning the vocabulary, especially at the beginning stages of study.  We grasp anything that will help our brains remember new words. That's where cognates (words that are similar in two languages) enter the picture.  

Definition of Cognate

Cognates are generally friends to the language learner, allowing us to immediately understand the meaning of words and remember them for future use.  Cognates are great for soothing jangled nerves of language learners. 

You can immediately get the meaning in Spanish of these words because they are cognates of English words.

absurdo

magnífico

secreto

declaración

 Let's try some English cognates in French.

admiration

cigarette

dialogue

pirate

Here are some Portuguese-English cognate words.

animal

hospital

moral

eternidade

Irish-English cognates are a little more difficult to find, but thankfully I have come upon several playing around with the beta version of Irish on Duolingo.

pasta

dinnéar

tae

péarla

But be careful with cognates!

The cognate story is not all rosy.  Sometimes there are words in two different languages that look like cognates but are what have been labeled 'false friends'.  These words only appear to have the same meaning, but in actuality they have very different meanings. Beginning language learners are sometimes led astray by these false friends and, as a consequence, make some pretty strange statements.

The classic language goof made by Spanish learners (very common in beginning Spanish classrooms), is thinking that embarazada in Spanish means 'embarrassed' in English. Many a poor student has unknowlingly announced to the class that he or she is pregnant.  The correct Spanish translation for 'embarrassed'  would be avergonzada.  False friends, indeed.

Here is an example of false friends in Spanish and Portuguese that would often confuse my beginning Portuguese students.  The Portuguese word acordar means 'to wake up', but in Spanish acordar means 'remember'. The correct translation would be the Spanish despertar.  

A common error of French learners is another case of a false friend.  Assiter in French does not mean what an English speaker would expect, which would be 'to assist'.  Instead, assister means 'to attend'. Aider is the French word for 'to assist'. 

And here are some false friends I just learned about in Irish, which I know will be very useful! Mná means 'women' on restroom doors.  (Might look like 'man' to someone in a hurry!)  Fir, which means 'men', indicates the men's restroom, not a type of tree.  

So will cognates play the role of friends or foes in your language study?  Maybe we need to regard them as we do our human friends, enjoy them, but with a touch of caution! 

Do you speak a dialect?

Is the language you speak a dialect?  I'll bet the majority of us would say, "No, I speak real language." After all, the version of the language we speak serves our communication needs quite well, day in and day out.

From a linguistic viewpoint, the answer to the above question is, "Yes, I speak a dialect, because everyone speaks a dialect." Some linguists even claim that the term 'dialect' should be substituted for 'language'.

But the term 'dialect' has acquired a  bad reputation through the years.  It carries a whiff of something unpleasant, unacceptable, substandard, uneducated, lower class.  You get the picture. So it is easy to see why we may be reluctant to admit that we speak a dialect.

The definition of a dialect has nothing to do with language itself, and everything to do with society. In most societies, one dialect (version) of a language becomes what is known as the 'standard language.'  Ah, that term feels much better, doesn't it?  Generally, a dialect becomes the standard language/dialect because it is spoken by those individuals with power, influence and money.

Linguists often quote a translation of an observation in Yiddish that " A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  In other words, if a certain dialect has power behind it, it will be recognized as a language.  Conversely, a dialect without power will remain a dialect.  All dialects have an equal ability to convey what their speakers want to say.

Standard language/dialect is associated with formal oral communication and also with writing.

It is usually found in the media, textbooks, classrooms of all levels, and second language instruction. Standard language is often associated with the variety of language spoken in the capital cities of countries, since they are generally centers of government, education, and banking.  So we have some language snobbery occurring - Parisians versus Canadians, residents of Madrid versus those of Mexico City, Londoners versus Scots, Washingtonians versus Texans.

Some Scottish dialects

A popular example comes to mind to demonstrate dialectal differences. How do you express plural 'you'?  In Standard English, there is not a separate word for plural 'you'.  Sometimes just saying 'you' doesn't express the plural meaning that I need.   Being a Texan, I find 'y'all'  useful. Other English speakers in the United States have invented other creative words for plural 'you', like 'youse', 'you-uns', and the current choice of many young wait staffers, 'you guys'.  Here is a short article giving more 'you' plural options.  From Y'all To Youse, 8 English Ways to Make "You" Plural

Now comes decision time.  Should a person speak their own regional dialect or the standard dialect.?The answer will be a personal one, depending on factors such as audience,  communication style, and  intended communication.  If I speak to my family with the same language that I would use teaching a university course, my family would think that I am putting on airs.  And if I were to teach a class using my Texas drawl, I might have a few critical students.

As for me, 'y'all' will continue to serve me in my everyday conversations.  But when I am receiving my award for the Nobel Prize for Literature, I may decide 'you' is a more efficacious choice to thank the panel members.  I doubt if that will be one of my worries for a while!

    

Languages and Imagination

Language learning has gotten a bad rap through the years!   Unpleasant images spring up of long vocabulary lists and verb conjugations to be mastered before we were even allowed to order a coke in another language.

It was like a Jane Fonda exercise video telling us we had to "feel the burn" in order to acquire another language.

I survived traditional language instruction in school because I enjoyed learning languages, no matter how they were taught.   But as an adult, I have freedom to choose my own language learning path.

Nowadays language learning is much more sociable.  We are encouraged to use language for real communication with others.

But the reality of language study is that sometimes we don't have anyone to communicate with in the language we want to practice. It still often remains a solitary activity.  So I have been trying to fire up my imagination to liven up language study time.

I usually spend about an hour a day on Duolingo, practicing four languages.  Sometimes Duolingo asks for a translation into English and at other times a translation from English.  With each translation, I try to conjure up a scenario in which I would use the sentence.  Memory experts tell us we need to connect new information to an image that will help us recall it.  And that picture in our minds can be nonsensical, funny, outrageous, or pleasurable.

My idea for creating scenarios began, I believe, with my husband Wayne's Spanish study.  The sentence in question was "El gato no cabe en la puerta."   (The cat doesn't fit in the door.)  I imagined something like Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire cat, trying to come across the threshold with a big grin on its face.

In Duolingo  Portuguese, I am at a Level 14, so I find lots of interesting sentences for imagining. "Please, give me another chance" was the latest.     I am driving my red Lamborghini a bit too fast up the beautiful Douro River Valley of Portugal when a handsome young policeman pulls me over.  I bat my eyelashes at him and say, Por favor, me dê outra chance.  Well, a girl can dream.

My Level 12 Duolingo Spanish provides me with pithy comments like, "That is going to resolve itself."  I'm in the plaza at Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain, admiring the cathedral.

A bedraggled female pilgrim begins telling me her trials and tribulations on the Way of St. James. She has met her soul mate, but he has taken up with a hippy actress from California. I assure her with Eso se va a resolver solo,  not even believing it myself.  Ah, el amor!

As I try to use imagination with my other two languages, French (Level 6) and Irish (Level 5), I have to work a bit harder. I'm on a train in France, and it is dinner time.  I'm not much of a meat eater, but I would rather eat chicken than beef, so I ask a young teenager in the dining car (who perhaps won't make fun of my American accent), Tu manges du poulet? (Are you eating chicken?)  I won't even try to imagine his response.

Irish (Level 5) has been a true challenge. At this stage of learning, my Irish knowledge is mostly nouns.  I am in Dublin, Ireland, and a robbery occurs in the pub where I have dropped by for a pint and some lively music.

 

A handsome Irish policeman is taking notes on the incident.  "Who were the robbers, ma'm?" he asks politely.  Bean agus fear  (a woman and a man), I reply.  "Thanks, darlin'," he replies with a wide grin. 

So, as you can see, I have been having a really entertaining time learning other languages.  I hope you have as well!

Brain training through languages

A few of the many world languages

I  just completed my daily hour's language practice on Duolingo, and my brain is tired - which is a good thing. Recently the media have been touting the importance of keeping one's brain active throughout life. Since I am a self-confessed language nerd, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and exercise my little grey cells by learning different languages.  Here is my brain/language training daily routine.

Great advice!

Spanish.  I begin each Duolingo session with the Spanish language for a brain warm up.  Since I have been working on acquiring Spanish since I was a child, I can generally breeze through the Spanish lesson. I sense that I have a 'Spanish brain' somewhere in my mind, and after a few responses in Spanish, I can enter into that other brain and put my responses on automatic.  Quick responses are great for communication in Spanish, but not so effective for brain training, since I don't have to do much hard thinking.

Serenity Prayer in Portuguese (much needed by language learners!)

Portuguese.  I choose Portuguese next because it takes effort to keep Spanish and Portuguese separate in my mind.  They are sister languages, both descended from Latin, and are certainly similar, but they also have significant differences in vocabulary, grammar, and especially pronunciation.  I can move from automatic responses to getting my brain cells firing. 

In my last Duolingo session, I lost a heart by translating 'pocket' as bolsillo in Spanish rather than the Portuguese bolso; I also lost another heart by choosing the Portuguese word leva for 'wear', making a parallel with Spanish llevar.  Portuguese expresses 'wear' with either the verbs veste or usa.  Thank goodness I didn't lose my third heart and have to start the lesson over. 

French calendar.

French.    French is next on my practice list.  I have studied French several times in my life but with large gaps of time in between study, so my grammar is still pretty well intact, but my vocabulary is fairly minimal. And I won't even mention my pronunciation.  So anything I can get correct in French is a bonus.  My brain moves out of the Spanish/Portuguese area (which I'd be willing to bet they share) and into a new French space.  I don't mix up French with Spanish or Portuguese, but I do mix it up with English.  I lost one heart by writing French dauphin as English dolphin.

Irish cities.  Good opportunity for language practice!

Irish.    And now that my brain is thinking linguistically, I tackle Irish.  Oh my.  Almost every sentence looks and sounds like a mystery to me.  No meaning comes through automatically to give me a hint.  I have to analyze every word separately.  The nouns I have to check for singular or plural endings and definite and indefinite articles.  The verbs I need to check for position in the sentence and for endings which specify the subjects.  And I love it!  When I am doing Irish, I am completely absorbed in the thought process. It is a mini-vacation from ordinary life.

So if you would like to challenge your mind and enjoy learning about other languages and cultures,  a regime of language learning may be for you.  Now if I could just get into a physical routine for my body.....   

Just about my speed!

Irish language has arrived on Duolingo!

Duolingo Irish Program

Okay.  I know what some of you are thinking.  Why did I do a little happy dance when I saw that Duolingo has begun offering Irish language study?  At first glance, it may seem to be a rather silly way to spend my leisure time.  But offhand, I can think of three good reasons to include Irish in my list of languages to keep up with.

Reason No. 1. Challenge.    Irish is a VSO language.  This means that in a typical Irish sentence, the verb comes first, the subject next, and the object last.  The languages I am acquainted with, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French,  all place the verb in a different position, the middle position.  They are known as SVO languages, and the SVO  language pattern is seared into my brain.  

The majority of the world's languages are either SOV or SVO languages, so the VSO pattern of Irish will be something very new to me.

 "I see him" is going to become "See I him",  translated into Irish vocabulary.  It will be great brain training to make myself think of the action word first in Irish. And it is harder than you may imagine (I failed miserably several years ago trying to learn another VSO language, Scottish Gaelic).  I hope to create some new brain synapses with a new way of thinking.

Reason No. 2.  A New Language Family.    Up to now, I have only explored two of the world's language families, Germanic, the origin of English, and Latin, the origin of French, Portuguese and Spanish. Irish is a Celtic language with ties to Scottish Gaelic and Manx, as well as Welsh, Cornish and Breton.  Can you find the Celtic branch on the tree?

   

Reason No. 3  Cultural Ties.  Vague family stories have led me to believe that at least some of my ancestors were Scots-Irish who migrated from Scotland to Northern Ireland in the 1600's and moved on to America in the 1700's. Since I have no further details, I am free to create romantic stories in my mind, all of which are probably far from realistic.  But I can dream of castles, sea waves crashing, and green as far as the eye can see, can't I?  I have always felt a pull towards the British Isles.  Could it be something in my genes?   

Ireland

I'll try to keep those romantic images in my mind as Duolingo is taking me through the sometimes painful babysteps of acquiring a new language.

Why do we hate to make language mistakes?

"Acquire language like you were a child!"  "Don't be afraid of making errors!" "Talk to as many native speakers as you can!"  There is certainly no scarcity of advice nowadays when it comes to how to acquire other languages. But how easy is it to follow that advice?  Why is it so hard to allow yourself  to make errors when learning a foreign language?

Let me say up front that I understand that mistakes are a natural part of the language learning process.  I accepted communication as the main goal of foreign language learning many years ago.

Communication is the goal!

I am familiar with the concept of  interlanguage, a term that linguists use to describe a version of the new language that a learner speaks on the road to becoming a native-like speaker. And every learner's interlanguage is rife with errors. Errors are a good thing, I keep telling myself.

Now let's go from theory to practice.  Making errors in another language (surprisingly more than making errors in my native language, English) embarrasses me to death.  And I have met very few adult learners of other languages who feel differently.  Both my husband Wayne and I have been faithfully completing Duolingo language lessons each day.

Duolingo

Both of us murmur an interjection (or in Wayne's case, more probably an expletive) when the program informs us that we have erred. And to add insult to injury, the program takes away a heart (serious business!), accompanied with a few bars of lugubrious music.

Don't lose all three hearts, or you are dead!

After every conversation I have in a foreign language, even in e-mails or text messages, my mind goes over and over the message long after it is gone, checking to see what errors I may have made.  And if I discover one, I blush.

I try to remember that making errors is a positive step in language learning when I am helping Wayne with his Spanish study.  I don't correct him when we are conversing.  I subscribe to the doctrine that correcting speakers when they are trying to formulate language in their minds is not only counterproductive, but possibly discouraging to them. But he persists in asking me, "Was that right?"  If I respond with, "Do you feel like you communicated what you wanted to say?", he says, "Yes, and was it right?"  

Why do language mistakes loom larger than other mistakes we make in life, like taking a wrong turn, calling a wrong number, or forgetting to lock the back door?  Maybe it's because language is something very personal to humans.  We create it from our minds.  And we hate doing it wrong!

 

How to learn those pesky Spanish verb forms

Duolingo Owl

I am having such a great time practicing languages on Duolingo recently that my husband Wayne became curious (he hates to miss out on any fun).  So several weeks ago he enrolled in his own account on the Duolingo Spanish program.  Wayne doesn't admit to being hooked on the program, but I see him working on it fairly frequently on his laptop or iPhone.  And I hear some fairly strong language when the program gives him an incorrect answer signal!

Lately Wayne's frustration with Spanish verb forms have caused me to think about how difficult it is for English speakers to conquer Spanish verb forms.  Why is this?   And what techniques might make learning Spanish verb forms more accessible?

To look at the why question, a possible answer may be the difference in amounts of English and Spanish verb forms.  If you want to say 'talk' in English in the present tense, it generally doesn't matter who the subject of 'talk' is.  It's 'I talk', 'you talk', 'we talk', 'they talk', with the only slightly different forms being 'he talks' and 'she talks'.  So when you speak English, you don't have to pay much attention to the verb form.   Yes, there are some  irregular verb forms, like 'I am', or  'he is', but the regular forms are a piece of cake.

Now enter Spanish, a daughter language of Latin, with seemingly endless verb endings.  More often than not, when the subject changes, so does the verb ending.  To speak Spanish, you have to constantly be aware of matching the ending to the subject.  For the verb 'to talk' in the present tense, the forms are,  'yo hablO', 'tú hablAS' ''él/ella/usted hablA, 'nosotros hablAMOS', 'ellos/ellas/ustedes hablAN. The English-speaking brain isn't used to having to put attention on verb endings.  That's why I believe that Spanish verb forms seem to be a hurdle for English speakers.  We are required to pay close attention to an aspect of language that is not required to the same extent in our native language.

Spanish verb conjugation

Be that as it may, when all of the analyzing and complaining is over,  Spanish verb forms must be conquered in order to communicate in Spanish.  Some English speakers try to circumvent the Spanish verb system by using the main verb form without any endings. So they say 'yo hablAR' (which  translates to 'I to speak"), which sounds pretty strange to the Spanish-speaking ear!

When I first studied Spanish in school (back in the Dark Ages), we were required to write out  full conjugations of Spanish verbs, both regular and irregular, in a seemingly endless number of tenses.  That was the traditional method of making sure we knew which verb forms matched each subject.  I can still remember pages and pages of two-sided notebook paper filled with my handwritten verb conjugations.  We weren't allowed to actually use Spanish for communication until we knew all of those verb forms.  Whew!  Only the most dedicated language students made it through that obstacle course.  Fortunately I was one of them and continued to study Spanish.

Intellectual torture may be good for the mind and soul, but I believe there is a better and less painful way to learn Spanish verbs.   It  involves using the forms for real communication, not just learning the forms in the abstract. So, since we like to talk about ourselves so much, just getting used to putting an 'o' on the end of verbs when using the subject  "I"   would be a good start.  And then putting an 's' on the verb when talking directly to another person might be the next step.  I can imagine lots of simple conversations using just the 'I' and 'you' forms.  Then we could move on to more complicated communication.  Eventually conversational situations could be set up so that all possible subjects could be used.

Would there be Spanish language learners who would eventually want to see a full verb conjugation written out? Possibly, depending on their learning style. But I would like to suggest that the conversation practice should happen first and the abstract learning should follow as a synthesis.

I wish I would have been taught Spanish with a more conversational approach.  My mind gets very tired having to mentally run through a whole verb conjugation to select the right form.  And I know the person I am speaking to gets really tired waiting for me to do those mental gymnastics!