Reflections on learning a language

 If you have followed my blog you know that one of my post-retirement projects was to learn a new language. Believe me or not, I have been so busy in my first eighteen months of retirement that I never got round to language learning and hadn’t even decided which language to learn. I wanted a language that was different from all languages I know so it would be a real challenge, but still manageable. I didn’t want to learn a language to be able to travel and speak it – I just wanted brain gymnastics. The languages I considered were Hebrew, Japanese and Welsh, each with a challenge of its own and each with a special significance and attraction.

I won’t claim that embarking on language studies was a new year resolution, but it felt a good starting point. After further deliberations I chose Welsh, which was perhaps too convenient a choice since at least it uses Latin alphabet (although with several weird digraphs to convey weird sounds). I had previously looked at various learning platforms, assessing their suitability for my purposes. I don’t want live online sessions in a group, and I want to practice when and where I please. I want to keep my own pace. I don’t want to compete with fellow learners, and I don’t want tests and assessments. Somehow, Duolingo popped up in my searches, and I decided to give it a go. After four weeks I am still happy with it. I have read reviews describing Duolingo as a gaming platform, and it is true that you get jewels, crowns and other rewards, and that after each completed lesson a green owl gives you praise for your progress. I ignore these aspects, and they don’t bother me. I have even got used to comments such as “Awesome!” and “Amazing!” after every correct answer.

On the other hand, I have read complaints that the neverending practice of “I don’t want to buy the seven goats and the five ducks” wasn’t useful for an everyday conversation, which is only partially true, because through such practice you will eventually be able to say whatever you want or don’t want to buy, in whatever quantities, at your travel destination. I guess it all depends on your expectations. I don’t intend to become a fluent speaker; as I said, all I want it keep my brain in trim. For this objective, counting goats and ducks is perfect.

What does bother me about my fellow learners, on the rare occasions I visit the discussion forum, is their casual attitude. You can see from forum participants’ profiles what languages they are learning and how far they have proceeded, and I am puzzled to see that lots of people are learning fifteen languages. I know there are linguistic geniuses, but is it indeed just a game: they sign up for a language, do ten lessons and claim that they have mastered another language? Well, it’s their problem.

My problem is not to be tempted by Duolingo’s rewards and stay on the same lesson and practice, practice, practice, until I feel confident and the exercise begins to feel repetitive. Of course as my vocabulary grows and grammar becomes more complicated, I need more and more practice. The algorithm works fine, making me go back and repeat and revise. It keeps track of my previous mistakes and makes me practice correct answers. I am loving it.

So what have I learned in four weeks?

I think the course design is great. It has been a long time since I learned a language from scratch, but I don’t think I had to memorise so many words in each lesson. Yet memorising words isn’t enough, you need to practice using them in grammatically and syntactically correct phrases, and Welsh grammar and syntax is mind-boggling. And the words are mostly unrecognisable, except for obvious borrowings. Eliffant or dolffin or even teigr are easy, but what about buwch, blaidd, cwningen, hwyaden and llygoden? None of the languages I know are of any help. Similarly, while you probably are safe with Ionawr, Ebrill and even Awst, you get lost with Gorffennaf or Rhagfyr.

Pronunciation is deceptive because many letters are pronounced in unpredictable ways, and yes, those digraphs! Although I have realised that the sound learners find the most difficult is similar to my native Russian’s щ, which English and Swedish speakers find completely impossible. And I have no problems rolling my rs.

And yet I probably could make a simple conversation now, introducing myself by saying that I am not a farmer or an electrician, but a female (!) teacher; that I don’t wear winter clothes in summer; that I don’t like ironing, but enjoy walking; that I want carrot/potato/leek/pea soup for lunch, but I don’t eat meat, and I don’t eat sausage either (those small words!); that I like cats and I like dogs too; that I like learning Welsh; that I am tired, good night.

Duolingo uses a computer-generated voice which is wise, but I also listen to other recorded voices to get used to the sounds. I have found a site with children’s audio-books to which I listen, and every now and then I recognise a word. I have learned to sing Old Macdonald had a farm in Welsh. Very good when you are practising animals. I have bought a book titled Teach Your Cat Welsh. How could I resist it? It offers a slightly different vocabulary from Duolingo. I don’t think I would have reached “Don’t scratch” in the near future. I have tried to read a real picturebook, but it felt a bit too advanced so far. But I understand sentence structure and basic grammar even when I don’t know the words. Sometimes it is hard to find a word in a dictionary because consonants mutate in certain positions: un ci, dau gi, tri chi.

Again, I have no memory of when a language I was learning started making sense. One strategy that my Swedish teacher insisted on is starting writing from start. Even if it is just a very short text, like: “Good morning, I am making breakfast, I want bread and cheese and honey, orange juice, coffee and milk. I enjoy walking, and I am wearing a coat, a hat, a scarf and gloves”. I write such silly journal entries every day, trying to use as many words and phrases as possible. I write with ink in a pretty notebook, creating links between brain, eye and hand. Likewise, I talk to myself in Welsh, name objects around me, make small reflections. “I like chocolate, I am eating chocolate”. 

I have learned 230 words most of which I actually remember and can use. I spend about an hour a day practising, including weekends, although I only signed up for 15 minutes. I have no idea how far it will take me. When I one day get to the end of Duolingo’s course I will consider what I want next. Maybe I can sign up for an advanced course. Or maybe I can switch to learning Hebrew.

Re-reading A Clockwork Orange

 

I am resuming my re-reading challenge after a long break as I was reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light – slow read of many, many pages that took me over two months. Goodreads points out to me that I am behind schedule.

I included A Clockwork Orange in my list because it seemed an obvious choice, and now I cannot remember whether I read it before I saw the movie or after. I saw the movie in 1975 at the very earliest (a pirate black-and-white copy), and I haven't watched it since so I have just glimpses of episodes and no memory of whether the movie follows the novel. Not unexpectedly, what I remember is the worst scenes of violence and the worst scenes of Alex's therapy. I don't remember how the film ends, actually don't remember the rest of the plot after therapy. Likewise, my memory of the novel was extremely vague.

My current copy has a foreword, from which I learned that the novel was published in the USA without the final chapter and that the film was based on the American version.

Since I was prepared for the violence, it didn't shock me, and it is possibly less shocking because it is narrated by Alex matter-of-factly in his idiosyncratic language. I was much more disturbed by the moral and political messages which I find far two explicit and therefore less effective. Maybe it is the spirit of the early 1960s.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel is the language, much of which is obviously missing in the film. I haven't counted, but I would guess at 5 to 10 slang words per sentence, and I wonder how many make sense unless you know Russian. You can always figure out the meaning, but for me part of the joy of reading was recognising the Russian words cleverly disguised by English spelling and grammar. I am not referring to “gulliver” and “horrowshow”, but to much more subtle and imaginative usage. In some cases it took a few instances before I got it - “oddy knocky” was one, not straightforward to get from the context.

What Burgess and his critics perhaps didn't know is that at the time the novel was written, Russian nadsats, or teens, were actively using a similar kind of jargon where you not only needed the knowledge of English, but also a good deal of creativity. So you could hear phrases such as: “Я митингую с герлой в восемь клоков” (I am meeting a girl at 8 o'clock), ”У меня трузера штатские” (My trousers are from the USA) or ”Чилдренята, напутонивайте шузы” (Children, put on your shoes”), which is exactly the way Alex uses language. I have tested these examples on some Slavic scholars, and they didn't pass the test. I wonder whether Burgess would have passed it.

I got curious about how the novel was translated into Russian, and the translator used this very same kind of slang, spelling – and misspelling – English words in Cyrillic and inflecting them by Russian grammar. So Alex's droogy becomes his frendy, mesto becomes pleis, litso becomes feis, and deng becomes mani. No Russian reader today would have problems with this language, it is common currency.

In terms of language, A Clockwork Orange is compared to Finnegans Wake and Ridley Walker. I never got past the first page of Ridley Walker because I am not a native speaker, but in Finnegans Wake it helps to be multilingual.

Lost allusions

Thinking further about my yesterday's experience I realise that another reason for my emotional disturbance is an acute sense of lost allusions, the lack of common cultural ground, the paucity of mother-tongue immersion. I have in all these years deliberately avoided Russian diaspora, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Russian emigrants of all generations have been suspicious of each other; I have heard slander about most of my former compatriots, and I can just imagine what has been said – perhaps is being said – about me behind my back. In every Russian diaspora there are factions and groups; in Stockholm there are several Russian Orthodox parishes that don't recognise each other; there are mutually exclusive societies and associations. I never wanted to be part of it so I preferred not to join. Then, as any diaspora, it is highly heterogeneous, and I see no point in socialising with anyone merely because we happen to come from the same country, but with whom I wouldn't socialise back in Russia. Also I made a point of becoming personally and professionally integrated in Sweden, in all things Swedish. It never occurred to me to get involved with the Slavic department, because I had never been a Slavic scholar and had neither interest nor competence to become one. I did attend Slavic conferences and other events, but only when topics interested me for my own professional goals. I also tried to become involved in various communities, from the parish to charity work to Swedish Institute for Cultural Exchange, and abandoned those for various reasons.

The gains are obvious: I would have never been where I am now if I hadn't invested in my professional career. But the losses only became clear to me obliquely. I would go back to Russia to speak Russian and to immerse into what had been my element since I was a child: intellectual talk with common denominators, where allusions didn't have to be spelled out. As years went by I started to notice that I wasn't any longer atuned to my friends' framework of mind. I didn't understand their references; sometimes, their language felt alien. I wasn't able to keep up with new literature, new thinking, new worldview, new gossip. I wasn't one of the gang anymore. Some of my Slavic scholar friends caught up and passed me in their knowledge of contemporary Russia. For them, it was their study object. I could never make my country of origin a study object. And I had to keep up with my own study objects.

The allusions got irretrievably lost. There is no point throwing out literary quotations if your conversation partners have no idea what you are talking about. You cannot explain every joke. Finally, you give up. I have read about emigrants who forgot their mother tongue, or perhaps suppressed it. I hope I haven't quite forgotten Russian although I have fewer and fewer occasions to speak it, and sometimes I ask myself whether I should persist at all. I even speak to myself in my two other languages. I read Russian literature, classic and modern, but I cannot write professionally. So much of my grown-up vocabulary has developed in the other languages.

What happened yesterday was a rare occasion of shared allusions. Everybody laughed together, everybody recognised and remembered (I am sure there were people who didn't, but we can ignore them). I was brutally and painfully reminded of my voluntary isolation, of severed ties, of my cultural luggage that will die with me, unclaimed.

ABC blog: L

To see previous entries, click A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K

L is for Lacan. Like Freud and Jung, Lacan is not a literary theorists, so his ideas should be applied to literary studies with caution. While Freud claims that all human problems are connected with sexual frustration, Lacan claims that all human problems are connected with linguistic frustration. At least, this is the bit I find helpful. My principle, when I use a theory, is to see what can be helpful for my particular purpose. Many children's literature scholars have picked up Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, the point at which a child perceives themselves as a separate subject. Mirror stage, according to Lacan, occurs at the age of about eighteen months. I cannot see what one can do with it in discussing children's literature besides noting the abundant scenes in which a girl (and occasionally a boy) looks at themselves in a mirror and stating that the character has for the first time perceived themselves as a subject and therefore was immature before.

Feminist critics have picked up Lacan's idea of Father's Law, but I understand it still less. It is hugely sexist and reductive.

Therefore back to linguistic frustration. What can be inferred from Lacan's developmental model (and what has been elaborated by Julia Kristeva) is that as human beings we move from a pre-verbal to a verbal stage. Lacan calls them something different, and Kristeva's terms add to the confusion, so I'll stay with pre-verbal and verbal. For a picturebook scholar, this is a treasure trove. Images can express something for which words are insufficient, including emotions. But our culture is word-oriented; therefore, Lacan would argue, we are culturally conditioned to move from the non-verbal to verbal (and schoolteachers tell children that they are too old for picturebooks and must read real books). But, Lacan would continue, words are inadequate to convey complex mental states and generally the complexity of the world. Therefore, a person who has abandoned the pre-verbal for the sake of the verbal will inevitably feel frustrated. A way to deal with is to reconcile the two – which is exactly what a picturebook does. Highly oversimplified.

There are scores of children's books in which a child learns to read, write and use structured (adult) discourse and thus loses their pre-verbal imagination and immediacy. Lacan might say that reconciliation is impossible. There will always be a conflict between the pre-verbal and the verbal. Nowhere is it as tangible as in children's books.

It may or may not have to do with cerebral hemispheres.

Contemporary children's and young adult novels incorporate visual elements, including different fonts, into the verbal, to interrogate the dominance of the verbal (I assume that's the point). Where digital books will take us in this respect is unpredictable, but the possibilities are unlimited. 

So L is in the first place for language. 

L is also for love, which is omnipresent in children's literature and implies, according to cognitive criticism, that two individual goals, to be happy, are equally valuable for both, to the degree that each is prepared to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of the other.

Heteroglossia

I have just come home from Norway. Yes, again. And yes, another PhD examination. I will not repeat the whole procedure, but there was a trial lecture and the defence itself, and there was an elegant examiners' dinner, an elegant lunch with the candidate and supervisors, and an elegant doctoral dinner with family and friends.

A slightly new aspect this time was the mixture of languages. The thesis was written in English, and the defence was in English. Neither the candidate, the supervisors nor the examiners are native English speakers. That's not unusual in the Nordic countries. The unusual was that both examiners are native Russian speakers. Who spoke Russian non-stop, much to everybody's amazement. But why would they be amazed? Didn't they look us up when they invited us to examine? Didn't they know that we were both nomadic subjects with a heavy luggage of languages? Perhaps our current affiliations were more important than our eclectic academic past.

On the other hand, my fellow examiner was perplexed that I could talk to Norwegians. "So you speak Norwegian?" "No, I speak Swedish". "Do they speak Swedish?" "No, they speak Norwegian". How very confusing. At the doctoral dinner it turned out that the candidate's sister spoke Hebrew, so suddenly she and my fellow examiner had a secret language. And I could help showing off and saying "Good morning" in Lithuanian when we met over breakfast. I could certainly have managed some Yiddish (bad German can always pass as Yiddish), but that would have been too much.

I cannot be sure, but I believe this Babel babble made me particularly tired.

Book of the week: Embassytown

This was a rare occasion when I bought a book that I didn't know much about. I had read three books by China Mieville. I read King Rat some years ago and remember it vaguely as disgusting. I absolutely loved The City and the City, that Julia had recommended (if I had been aware that it was by the author of King Rat I probably wouldn't have wanted to read it). I started Kraken and gave up after a hundred pages. But someone who has written The City and the City is worth attention, and there are also people whose opinion I value who rank Mieville high. I was browsing amazon to fill up my tablet for travel, and there was one of those silly recommendations: “If you liked X, you may also like Y”. Or perhaps just: “Most popular now”. I didn't read the synopsis.

I am not an avid SF reader so I may be quite wrong about my sense of novelty, but in the first place I don't care whether it is SF or anything else. No spoilers, but this novel is about the use of language. Not about the characters' use of language or even the society's use of language, but about the writer's use of language. You read the first ten pages, and you don't understand anything because all words are strange. You can clearly see that they are nouns, verbs and adjectives, but the meaning is hidden – so far. Then gradually all these empty signifiers are provided with referents, that are also strange and unfamiliar, but it works. And this is such a brilliant example of the interdependence of form and content: the novel is about language, but it also uses language in a way it propagates for.It is also an example of what you can do with language in fiction - possible worlds and all that. Playing with words. It reminded me of a maths colleague explaining high-order dimensions: don't try to visualise it, just think. I hope nobody comes with the bizarre idea of making a movie out of it. I am sure somebody will. 

I wonder whether the author has been reading the same books as I the past couple of years. The novel oozes of cognitive poetics.

Plain English

There is a society struggling for people's rights to understand their own language. Although I love long and unusual words, I am all for it. When we get letters from the City Council or the gas company, I must always read them twice or more, and I still never understand whether I owe them or they owe me. I wish all these people took mandatory courses in plain English.

Worse still are some colleagues who believe that if you can understand a scholarly text it isn't scholarly. Oftentimes I wonder whether those who write these convoluted texts understand them themselves. It is easy to use ready-made blocks of phrases and put them together, while if you ask the authors exactly what they mean they get confused. All scholarly work must at least be translatable into plain English.

My favourite dialogue from Winnie-the-Pooh:

“The atmospheric conditions have been very unfavourable lately,” said Owl.

“The what?”

“It has been raining,” explained Owl.

“Yes,” said Christopher Robin. “It has.”

“The flood-level has reached an unprecedented height.”

“The who?”

“There is a lot of water around,” explained Owl.

It's all Latin to me

An unusual decision has caused a heated discussion. Apart from being a sesquipedalian, I also love Latin phrases, but for everything there is a time and a season. And it is especially irritating when some people use Latin without knowing the exact meaning.