The Last Word On Nothing

You call that science?

By: Richard Panek | May 9, 2016

Last week I invited readers to participate in a little experiment. I’d had what I thought might be a big idea: a possible correlation between rate of reading speed and facility with learning foreign languages. My younger son and I are slow in both categories. My older son and my wife are quick in both categories. I had taken a few informal polls—friends, students—and found a correlation rate of 100 percent. Now I asked readers of LWON. The sampling wouldn’t be scientific, I acknowledged, but I still wanted to know whether, in their experience, the correlation held true.

I was wrong in more ways than one.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | May 7, 2016

May 2 – 6, 2016

Guest Veronique Greenwood’s final post in her series about learning Chinese ends with triumph: she not only argues with a Chinese cab driver, she wins.

Meanwhile the rest of the LWONers were inspired, got into the act, and voila! ecco! ¡mira! a whole Week of Learning Languages posts!

Richard proposes a grand theory: maybe the ability to learn languages is related to the ability to read fast. He’s got an N of 14, and the commenters add 14 more. It’s getting interesting in there, though no simpler.

Cameron found a program that encourages those pesky bilingual kids who won’t talk their home language, only their school language, by introducing them to scientists who talk only their home language.

Helen has learned a lot of languages, which means she has a lot of cultures in which she can be confused, awkward, and rude. The comments get interesting again, this time about when to use polite “you” and when to use informal “you.”

Jessa’s Canada, which has two official languages, once considered a third, Gaelic. A fifth of the Canadian senators spoke it but they decided it was too mythopoetic to be official. And Gaelic in Canada died.

Divided By Common Languages

By: Helen Fields | May 5, 2016

a row of dictionaries on a shelf

I learned a lot of languages in my teens and 20s. I say “learned,” but don’t expect fluency. You shouldn’t try to have a very complicated conversation with me in any of them today. But there have been points in my life when I had dear friends with whom I only spoke Japanese or Norwegian. I can buy a watch in French and have occasionally exchanged very basic information in Spanish. Once I made a phone call in Italian—and the taxi showed up the next morning. At the right time!

But I’m not one of those people who can show up in a country, hang around in bars and youth hostels, and somehow magically “pick up” the language. All of these were pounded into my brain through large amounts of time spent in classrooms, going through flashcards, writing out sentences, memorizing dialogues, and so on.

All of that classroom-based learning meant that I often knew a lot, without really understanding how people really use these languages in the real world, and particularly how they avoid offending each other.

Continue reading →

In Their Own Words

By: Cameron Walker | May 4, 2016

Inspired by guest Veronique Greenwood‘s three-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) about learning a foreign language, some of the contributors to LWON volunteered for a week’s worth of essays about their own encounters with the challenges of linguistics.

6870398473_ca5487e19b_z

This week, we’ve been looking at what it’s like to learn a new language as an adult. Kids seem to pick up languages easily, and I’d always hoped I could give mine a new language when they were young. (So far, my attempts have been less than successful—I spoke my poor excuse for Spanish to my oldest son until he was about two, and he finally said, “Mama, stop talking like that!”)

For some kids, the language they’re learning is more appealing than in my case—so much so that they start losing their native language. That’s what Joana Moscoso and Tatiana Correia learned was happening in the UK with kids whose parents came from Portugal. The two researchers had made the same journey themselves as adults—originally from Portugal, both came to the UK for their PhDs, Moscoso in microbiology, Correia in materials physics.

The two researchers were concerned—they knew that being bilingual could provide many benefits. People who speak more than one language may have greater mental flexibility, have better memories and better ability to concentrate. They also have may have better job opportunities. These researchers didn’t want students to lose their native language—but sometimes, they’d stop speaking to their parents in Portuguese. “They think their home language is obsolete, that it’s only used for boring things like brushing your teeth,” Moscoso says.

So the pair rounded up some colleagues and planned a science class for kids in an afterschool Portuguese class. They designed it to be like speed dating with a scientist; kids would get a chance to talk with every scientist about their research. They’d make it feel casual, so kids felt comfortable asking any question they had. And they’d do it all in Portuguese. Continue reading →

Parle français? Read English? ¿Una palabra a la vez? Oy.

By: Richard Panek | May 3, 2016

When my younger son was in high school, my wife and I realized we would need to hire a tutor for his French class. Sometimes I would overhear their lesson, and I would think: He’s hopeless. I didn’t mean that word in a critical or disapproving way. If anything, I invoked it out of empathy. I had been hopeless with high school Spanish. How hopeless? To this day it’s the course I avoid attending in my version of the nightmare where you wind up one credit short of graduation.

I was perhaps less empathetic about my son’s reading habits. His school-issued paperback copies of The Odyssey and King Lear were full of doodles. I printed out an essay I thought he might like—all of two pages long—and left it on the living room coffee table, where it sat unread for months, until I finally surrendered and threw it away. He never read for pleasure. He’s the son of two writers: How dare he not read for pleasure? Your parents are pleasure-givers. Here’s a book. Have some pleasure. Are you experiencing pleasure yet?

One day I decided to accept the fact: His brain just doesn’t work that way. Mine certainly doesn’t. How many times have I felt frustration at the slowness of my progress through a book? How often have I found out after finishing a book or a short story that I’d missed a major plot point? How often—

Oh, wait.

I asked my son if he was a slow reader. Yes, he said. Then I asked him if frustration feeds his disinclination to read for pleasure. Yes, he said.

And then I asked myself: Does a correlation between reading speed and a facility for learning foreign languages actually exist?

Continue reading →

All the Chinese You Need to Take a Shower

By: Veronique Greenwood | May 1, 2016

This is the third and final post in a series about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally (if you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here: part 1, part 2) . Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese.

The character for "study," which appears in the words "student," "university," and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr) — The character for “study,” which appears in the words “student,” “university,” and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)

On Monday evenings, I ride my bike into the leafy faculty quarter of the university and teach four ten-year-olds in English. Very suddenly one night, around 6 pm, I started to hear the particles in their speech. They holler and chatter at each other in Mandarin until I shush them and make them speak English, and now my own knowledge of their language is such that these specific parts of speech jump out at me. Even when I don’t understand the rest of the sentence, they tell me something about what the kids mean.

Particles contain information about the speaker’s desires and expectations—even the tense. They can transform the meaning of a sentence, but they’re simple, single syllables—ne, ba, le, la, among others—and so you can start to pick them out, the same way someone learning English might hear “the,” “a,” and “and” in my words. A “ba” often means that someone is asking for confirmation. A “le” often means they are speaking about something that’s past. A “ne” asks a question about something that’s already been mentioned. A “la” makes an order sound more like a request.

These exist in part because Mandarin uses tones to convey meaning and thus cannot use them to convey emotion or expression quite as easily as English. Instead, a particle climbs on to the end of a statement and gives it the specificity that we would give it with the rising and falling of our voices. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | April 30, 2016

April 25-29, 2016

This week, Veronique Greenwood’s glancing knowledge of Mandarin becomes a daunting challenge, spurred on by some tentative communicative exchanges in China.

Some argue that Shakespeare couldn’t have written some of his plays because the author of the plays knew too much. There’s another explanation: Perhaps he acted like a journalist.

Helen bore witness to the passing of a gigantic snow bank in Washington, DC. Just look at it.

Test yourself: can you tell which of these photos are taken by an eight-year-old? Ann thinks her experiment is a failure (but I got 90%).

Starlings look to half a dozen of their flying mates to coordinate their movements. The result: a murmuration, and bliss for the viewer.

Image: Helen with the remains of her ice pile

Redux: Murmuration. The poetry of the morning walk.

By: Christie Aschwanden | April 29, 2016

This post first ran on January 15, 2013.

This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the sun was shining, and my day never feels quite right without our morning ritual.

And so we pulled on our snow boots, bundled up and headed out the door. The snow was squeaky cold, and the air had a briskness that put a hustle in our strides. Halfway up the hill to the lookout, a loud ruckus. Dave turned to me. “Stop. Shhhh…” We looked at each other. “Hear that?” A lush symphony of bird song. Starlings, from the sound of it. But where?

We looked skyward. Nothing. Upslope, only a crow in a nearby piñon pine. Then I spotted them in our neighbor’s willow trees down below. Starlings, yes. Hundreds of them. The moment I pointed to them, as if on cue, they rushed skyward in unison. The birds formed a rising crescendo, then swooped down, and then up and across the sky, like a ribbon, wrapping around itself.

If nature has ever produced a more perfect thing than the mesmerizing beauty of this starling swarm, I have yet to encounter it. No other phenomenon has ever stopped me in my tracks quite like this, made me forget everything else in the world except the brief moment of grace unfolding before me.

A flight of starlings in concert is called a murmuration. Murmuration–even the name is poetic. Continue reading →