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extrapenguinToday's Fopinions February is for sewn, on the joys and hardships of learning languages. Icon meme will happen tomorrow.
(Despite the forethought, I don't think I really have much to say about language learning beyond the resources pile I gathered for Chinese. This is misc blather.)
Joys and hardships are really two different things, I think – so I shall start with the hardships. The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation. The more one wants to learn, the more appealing it is, so the easier it becomes, and vice versa. The greatest hardship of mine in language-learning has been having to learn Swedish. It's mandatory for all Finns, despite only being spoken by a small and highly regional minority in Finland; I have never in my life lived anywhere it'd be useful, or where signs would be given in Swedish as well as Finnish. (It also ranks that the Swedish-speaking minority is much better-off on average than the Finns; that the Swedish is a remnant of quasicolonial overlords, just like Russian might've been, but no-one objects to Swedish like they object to Russian; and that it is very hard to study any of Finland's indigenous Saami languages in not-Northern Finland.) Having to sit through two+ hours a week of something one knows one will never use (oh, and we're also taught a BS mixture of Rikssvenska and Finländssvenska, so it's not like we can use it to properly communicate with anyone...) and listen to the lies of "oh of course you will use it! it's Super Useful!!!" was very goddamn annoying. Nevertheless, it was easy, because I already spoke English at a high enough level to be useful in "cheating", and had studied French, which was also a source of loanwords. I merely had zero motivation, so studying the language was a hardship.
Other candidates for hardships include my not yet figuring out how to install a Chinese input method on top of my Finnish keyboard layout in Linux. Also the Russian genetive plural, but that I could've solved had I been able to throw a bit more time into the language.
With the grumpy grumpness out of the way, let me talk about the joys! For me, the greatest joy isthe grammar figuring out how something works, and also the "why" of it! I enjoy noticing little things and figuring out the grammar of how they work, such as e.g. the Guardian subs translating Ye Zun's 问得好！ as "Good question!" and noticing that this uses 得 and the literal translation would be more along the lines of "asked well". My deepest joy is the joy of understanding; figuring out grammar is but one way of making the unknown known.
On a deeper level, there's also noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently – I fairly often get blocked when writing English because I want to use a very specific Finnish word for which there is no real translation. I love the new approach to thinking about things, and the joy of understanding from that.
As for language study, well. 业精于勤。 Oh, and the ability to grasp stuff written in more languages is neat.As would be the ability to tell people they mistagged their fic's language using their native tongue.
sewn, on the joys and hardships of learning languages. Icon meme will happen tomorrow.(Despite the forethought, I don't think I really have much to say about language learning beyond the resources pile I gathered for Chinese. This is misc blather.)
Joys and hardships are really two different things, I think – so I shall start with the hardships. The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation. The more one wants to learn, the more appealing it is, so the easier it becomes, and vice versa. The greatest hardship of mine in language-learning has been having to learn Swedish. It's mandatory for all Finns, despite only being spoken by a small and highly regional minority in Finland; I have never in my life lived anywhere it'd be useful, or where signs would be given in Swedish as well as Finnish. (It also ranks that the Swedish-speaking minority is much better-off on average than the Finns; that the Swedish is a remnant of quasicolonial overlords, just like Russian might've been, but no-one objects to Swedish like they object to Russian; and that it is very hard to study any of Finland's indigenous Saami languages in not-Northern Finland.) Having to sit through two+ hours a week of something one knows one will never use (oh, and we're also taught a BS mixture of Rikssvenska and Finländssvenska, so it's not like we can use it to properly communicate with anyone...) and listen to the lies of "oh of course you will use it! it's Super Useful!!!" was very goddamn annoying. Nevertheless, it was easy, because I already spoke English at a high enough level to be useful in "cheating", and had studied French, which was also a source of loanwords. I merely had zero motivation, so studying the language was a hardship.
Other candidates for hardships include my not yet figuring out how to install a Chinese input method on top of my Finnish keyboard layout in Linux. Also the Russian genetive plural, but that I could've solved had I been able to throw a bit more time into the language.
With the grumpy grumpness out of the way, let me talk about the joys! For me, the greatest joy is
On a deeper level, there's also noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently – I fairly often get blocked when writing English because I want to use a very specific Finnish word for which there is no real translation. I love the new approach to thinking about things, and the joy of understanding from that.
As for language study, well. 业精于勤。 Oh, and the ability to grasp stuff written in more languages is neat.
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Date: 2019-02-05 19:27 (UTC)Sadly, I'm probably not going to be able to help out with your keyboard layout/Chinese input problems. I've barely gotten to the point where I can take care of my system without bothering my husband - though to be fair, I've tackled some pretty specific problems over the years, including figuring out Chinese input methods.
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Date: 2019-02-05 19:33 (UTC)LOL!
I love grammar, too, but alas, most approaches to language learning seem to be of the opinion that grammar is either evil or frightening, and therefore should be downplayed as much as possible. NO! That's what I want to know! *grabby hands*
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Date: 2019-02-05 19:51 (UTC)If I were using a US keyboard, I'd have succeeded by now with fcitx, but as the Finnish keyboard is named differently, it won't work. I also want to keep my punctuation where I'm used to it, so, uh, not gonna happen the easy way.
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Date: 2019-02-05 19:59 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 20:01 (UTC)IKR? The point of teaching languages to adults is that they can learn the rules explicitly and then apply them, rather than try to intuit them by exposure! The grammar is the best part!!!
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Date: 2019-02-05 20:03 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 20:03 (UTC)Weirdly enough, Chinese was (in Germany) often upheld as lacking in grammar, probably due to some very problematic unexamined cultural biases and--- no, just no :P
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Date: 2019-02-05 20:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 20:31 (UTC)The point of teaching languages to adults is that they can learn the rules explicitly and then apply them, rather than try to intuit them by exposure! The grammar is the best part!!!
RIGHT???????
But "grammar" is apparently a dirty word to lots of people. Possibly because they don't actually understand what grammar is - the most baffling/infuriating thing I've seen recently was some person apparently involved in teaching languaes who claimed Chinese has no grammar. *headdesk*
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Date: 2019-02-05 20:34 (UTC)Ha, I just came across that kind of claim, and honestly, the only way I can make sense of that statement is if the person in question just completely doesn't understand what grammar is in the first place.
(I mean, grammar is often taught badly. But the fault is in the teaching, not in the grammar!)
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Date: 2019-02-05 21:31 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 21:34 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 21:35 (UTC)Agreed – grammar is the difference between "man bites dog" and "dog bites man". One needs the nouns and verbs and other vocabulary items, of course, but the grammar is also essential.
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Date: 2019-02-05 21:36 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 21:44 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 21:45 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 22:30 (UTC)Haha!
Yeah, I suspect it's something like that. AAAAARGH.
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Date: 2019-02-05 22:57 (UTC)And I was just commenting to a friend yesterday that I love learning other language's in-jokes and puns, like "year year have fish" for Lunar New Year.
Approaches to language learning are constantly changing - I have a Russian learning book (for English speakers) from the 60s that I made a Tumblr post about ages ago because I find it so interesting.
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Date: 2019-02-06 02:05 (UTC)the grammarfiguring out how something worksYes! I love grammar -- it's interesting and satisfying. And yes to this too:
noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently
♥
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Date: 2019-02-06 02:37 (UTC)And here we have one of my biggest frustrations with modern language-learning programs, whether at universities or software!
Instead of giving me lists of vocabulary and some example sentences to memorise, JUST TELL ME HOW IT GOES TOGETHER! DICTIONARIES EXIST: I CAN FILL IN THE VOCAB LATER! It's so much easier to learn how the parts connect and put the parts into that frame than to try stringing the parts on the fly without a layout. I really can't figure out why everybody's convinced that people hate having a framework!
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Date: 2019-02-06 07:59 (UTC)I agree 100%. I had that with English. I started learning English at school when I was 14 and I had two excellent teachers, so it was more joy than hardship. And then we started to have access in Poland to movies and books and magazines in English and my motivation only grew, because I wanted to read and watch those things. And then came the internet, where everything I was interested in was in English, and the rest as they say is history. :)
Ha, so you had to learn Swedish at school. When I was young we had to learn Russian, I started when I was 10. And at school it was definitely hardship (and unlike English later, my Russian teachers were horrible), although I came to appreciate Russian language’s beauty when I was older (after I finished school and wasn’t force to do that anymore :)).
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Date: 2019-02-06 09:45 (UTC)! It's so much easier to learn how the parts connect and put the parts into that frame than to try stringing the parts on the fly without a layout.
EXACTLY. I can learn vocabulary on my own! I don't need you to shove random words/phrases/sentences/characters at me without explaining how they're constructed! I don't understand why anyone thinks that's a reasonable approach to language learning.
(I actually looked at maybe possibly learning Mandarin Chinese, but it all looks incredibly frustrating when nobody seems to want to explain anything structural.)
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Date: 2019-02-06 14:02 (UTC)The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation.
Exactly. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people talk about languages as "easy" or "difficult"; Finnish is a pretty good example of that. It's not a difficult language -- it's that for a lot of non-native speakers who find themselves having to learn it, it happens in an environment where they don't necessarily need to know it in everyday interaction (expats, exchange students, and other groups who mainly work and study in institutions where English is the norm). So when your practical investment in learning a language is limited to "it would be nice to understand what people are saying on the street sometimes" -- of course it's difficult.
figuring out grammar is but one way of making the unknown known
&
different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently
This such a great, poetic way to put it. <3 Do you have any interest in cognitive linguistics? This is pretty much the founding thought the field is built on.
And here's my hot take: a language consists of nothing else but grammars (sic). ;)
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Date: 2019-02-06 17:47 (UTC)I like Linguistics! I got into it via conlanging ages ago, and have kinda sorta kept up with Uralic research.
Huh, that is interesting! It's like a grammar reference, except with vocab and translation excercises. (In the realm of language books I've had, Кафе Питер is probably the best. It taught grammar points in the lessons, and the end of the book had a short grammar reference of Russian.) I'd still enjoy that book's approach to the official HSK book's approach to teaching Chinese, mind.
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Date: 2019-02-06 17:58 (UTC)OH and the rankings are so very often done with a monoglot English-speaker in mind! So no, Estonian would not be a hard language for me, a Finn, to learn, even if a monoglot English-speaker would struggle more.
Good point about the practical investment aspect. English is easier to learn in large part because of the stranglehold anglophone media has on global culture – we all get exposed to it a lot all the time.
I've mostly poked around the whole historic/reconstructive linguistics area, since I've mainly been interested in stuff for conlanging purposes + in Uralic languages. I take it cognitive linguistics is a bit further from the chronology and a bit further into psychology?
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Date: 2019-02-06 18:21 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 18:46 (UTC)To generalise, cognitive linguistics views language as a function of a person's cognition -- not something reflecting our thought, but the thought itself. I've found studying language through this lens incredibly satisfying. If you're at all interested in it, there's a ton of literature out there. -- Not to push unwanted recs on you, I just thought to ask. :D
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Date: 2019-02-06 18:47 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 18:52 (UTC)I KNOW. Why. Why, teaching program things??? Let me learn the goddamn language, instead of simply do the chatbot "pick least inappropriate response from the ones memorized". Argh!
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Date: 2019-02-06 18:58 (UTC)Textbook-wise, the New Practical Chinese Reader series actually explains grammar, and the ChineseSkill app does as well (albeit in a more limited way). Classes are variable, but the young teachers who're doing it as a year of exchange thingy can occasionally be persuaded to grammar it up.
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Date: 2019-02-06 19:32 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 19:49 (UTC)I have taken zero linguistics courses ever in my life; all my knowledge is from the internet. Do other places teach linguistics differently?
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Date: 2019-02-07 04:24 (UTC)I'm not trying to learn a language in order to talk to people; that's just a side effect! Bots can talk to people, it's the easiest part! Once you know how to read, write, and speak it, you can have all the conversations you want - but first GET ME TO THAT POINT. Don't send me into conversation unarmed!
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Date: 2019-02-07 06:41 (UTC)It's the complete lack of any culture-related information that really gets me in that Russian book. You'd get to the end with the ability to read Cyrillic, a decent vocabulary, and the ability to construct perfectly grammatical sentences, but you'd have to figure out greeting people and introducing yourself from first principles.
But of course, it's also designed for people who learned formal English grammar, which is not really done any more. I remember my Indonesian teacher trying to explain passive voice to us using the terms "subject", "verb", and "object", and it was an uphill battle for her because none of us in the class had ever thought about English that way.
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Date: 2019-02-07 12:34 (UTC)Linguistics as a discipline is pretty broad these days, yeah. It doesn't divide into specialized fields or separate schools of thought neatly, either. My knowledge is mainly of fennistics, and I've only quite recently realized how different the Finnish departments around the country are. I've been taught in a highly theory-oriented environment; some departments are more practically-oriented, or focused on "traditional" (from my pov) linguistic analysis. (There has, historically, been a lot of... I don't want to say animosity, but there are definitely tensions between departments.)
Fennistics divides into specialized fields such as variation studies (study of dialects and idolects, mostly), conversation studies, comparative linguistics, onomastics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and interactional linguistics... Something like kielenhuolto (which has no direct equivalent in English! but overlaps with areas such as language planning, language policy-making and language standardization) is also a field of its own, but obviously it isn't an academic discipline as such. All of these fields interact with each other, and other disciplines; in practice, a lot of the linguistic work that is done defies neat categorization. And this is just in Finland; the international differences between universities can be huge. As much as American scholars have contributed to "our" academic tradition, many of the US schools come off as rather old-fashioned and rigid in their thinking when compared to fennistics. Again, I'm biased, but frankly reading some of their stuff is just funny.
Uhhh apologies for these long comments. I could blather on about this a lot. The point is: different places do teach different kinds of linguistics; and so do different individuals; humanities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Date: 2019-02-07 16:09 (UTC)Huh, this sort of trips me up; in Finland, Finnish (as a first language) is taught with the Latin-derived grammatical terms, and we're expected to at least know that the grammatical cases have names. (When I was a wee penguin, one exam question was just a single word – talo (house) – and a table with the cases named, and we were expected to fill it out, in singular and plural, and know how to form e.g. the translative plural.) English as a second language was also taught via the grammar with the grammatical terms, as were all the other languages.
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Date: 2019-02-07 20:12 (UTC)Nodnod! This definitely sounds like reality. (And to take it further, I think learning about stuff like maths and music and art etc also opens up new ways of conceptualizing the world.)
Huh, I didn't realize that kielenhuolto didn't exist in English! This is interesting. It's also interesting to see how humanities divides into things based on ... approach, I guess, when my field divides into subfields based on what we're studying.
Huh, this is interesting! Has the US suffered from having a critical mass of people so that the subfields could segregate completely, or was there something else going on?
Also, no need to apologize; this is one of the things I'm a sort-of hobbyist in, and I always like learning new things!
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Date: 2019-02-08 11:36 (UTC)As far as I understand, the segregation of fields is exactly what has contributed to the occasional, um, humour value US scholars' work holds for me. Obviously there are many departments which do work that I tend to think of as "European-style" -- interdisciplinary and porous. However, there are pockets who are still affected by the legacy of Noam Chomsky. His work was instrumental in the historical development of modern linguistics, but he unfortunately popularized the idea of universal grammar (the theory that humans are born with an innate knowledge of grammar), which is obviously just... not true. It's frustrating (and funny) reading literature that begins with an apologetic critique of Chomsky. It's something I'd never considered was needed.
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Date: 2019-02-09 20:43 (UTC)Egads, Chomsky. I'm not even really a linguist proper, but ... no. One would've thought that grammar not being universal* would have been obvious, but apparently not!
* Should we ever discover aliens, no doubt the grammar of their language(s), should they have something that we recognize as a language, would be utterly alien to us, but even human languages have considerable variation.
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Date: 2019-02-10 01:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-13 06:28 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-13 17:09 (UTC)