22:10
Coatepec, Mexico
I used to listen to Spanish radio while I fell asleep. I figured my teenage brain would work it out eventually. And while I don't know if it significantly contributed, it did give me dreams with some wicked subtitles.
But I'm pretty sure it did help. Or at least listening did. I had always been a good listener. My parents might disagree, however, it probably didn't seem that way to them. I think eventually they figured out that I was really good at listening to exactly what I was interested in. Other things kind of didn't make the team.
It's a love/hate relationship with my attention span. I have the ability to "zoom in" on a particular subject matter; poke it and prod it in my brain to see what shapes I can make with it. I can get completely absorbed into a task and forget all other things. Food, water, chores I should be doing. They all take a nap. I lose track of time and then may become immediately uninterested in what I was doing. So sometimes it's difficult to get the correct things done.
It's a love/hate relationship with my attention span. I have the ability to "zoom in" on a particular subject matter; poke it and prod it in my brain to see what shapes I can make with it. I can get completely absorbed into a task and forget all other things. Food, water, chores I should be doing. They all take a nap. I lose track of time and then may become immediately uninterested in what I was doing. So sometimes it's difficult to get the correct things done.
But the moral of the story is, I can focus in on details that slip most people. I use these skills to do my best to imitate subtle nuances inherent in other languages. I realize that I will probably always have a bit of an American accent but I'd like to try to minimize it as much as possible. One trick I've picked up working on specific phonemes is to listen to how a native speaker of another language speaks your native language. AKA, listen to their accent and pay attention to the sounds that they have difficulty with and the sounds that they make instead. Those are the native sounds that they use that they can't get rid of. I try to use those sounds. Imitating accents is funny, but it's also a handy tool in speaking someone else's language more precisely.
As it turns out, even though I am light years from fluent I constantly receive positive feedback that my accent is quite good. However, this creates another love/hate situation because at the moment I cannot carry on a decent conversation with a stranger. Thus, when they hear my accent they think I'm fluent and attempt to speak to me as such. Therefore, I try to ham it up just a little so they know I'm a novice and I need them to speak slower. In the end, though, if I become fluent I may be able to get away with blending in pretty well.
As it turns out, even though I am light years from fluent I constantly receive positive feedback that my accent is quite good. However, this creates another love/hate situation because at the moment I cannot carry on a decent conversation with a stranger. Thus, when they hear my accent they think I'm fluent and attempt to speak to me as such. Therefore, I try to ham it up just a little so they know I'm a novice and I need them to speak slower. In the end, though, if I become fluent I may be able to get away with blending in pretty well.
Right now I'm at the point where I got distracted from my language learning task. I need to jump back into it. As Carlos pointed the other night, I've been really lazy and not trying to learn recently. And that's okay. It's a lot to take in. But even with my recent laziness, I have learned a lot.
...
I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking when I came here with regards to language. I think, "I'll figure it out" is what I remember telling myself. And it's true. I am figuring it out. But it hurts a little. Before coming here, my biggest concern with language was that I would be significantly less articulate. I would feel... stupid. Or incapable. I knew it was going to be humbling. And that's something you have to prepare yourself for. Because nothing is more humbling than being completely unable to do what a two year-old can do. You WILL make a fool of yourself. You WILL order something you didn't ask for and you MIGHT accidentally cut a bunch of old grandmas off in the Walmart Seniors line. Whoops.
...
Let's get to the actual learning part, yeah?
Immersion learning kind of works like this -
You're still in the airport and think, "Still kinda looks like America..." But all of a sudden you realize that you can't change the channel. This isn't UniVision. This is you trying to find out where you're going to sleep tonight. Yes. You look very out of place. Ok. Find a map. Oh shit. It's all in Spanish. Goddammit. .....Yes! A Starbucks! English! ...Oh. Nope. Sixty-five bucks seems a little steep for an espresso... Ah! Crap!
You go back and forth soaking in the fact that you're actually in a different country and you need to play by their rules ahora.
Personally, I thought I wasn't going to be nervous about using my Spanish. I was wrong. I definitely got nervous. Especially when I got caught off guard; like when a stranger would ask me a question at a store or something. "Sorry lady... I got nothing. 'No entiendo. Soy gringo.'"
It was much easier to prepare a specific question first and then sort through the results as best I could. Better than that, I learned to think about what some of their followups might be. That way I'm ready to have a conversation and not just spit one phrase out and look completely lost.
But no matter where you are, you can't escape it. You will start learning. Little by little (poco a poco) your brain starts picking out contextual clues and assimilating it with what you know about body language and what you could expect in that situation. From a cloud of mist emerges small raindrops as you pick out and clump together words and phrases.
It's like making a huge puzzle. You dump the pieces out onto the table, flip them over and start to sort them. It doesn't matter what the picture of the puzzle is. It could be solid white. The first thing you do for any puzzle is find the end pieces. Where are the limits? The boundaries. Where is the skeletal structure that I can work with? These are your verbs. You may sound stupid saying, "They want" instead of "you want" but a native speaker can help point you in the right direction if you give them something to work with. Verbs are important. Know at least a couple. Like "want, need, have, find, eat..." This will significantly cut down on the amount of pantomiming you will be performing.
From there you group together like and like. Maybe a blotch of a different color but eventually you find the similarities. Take these groups, lay them out inside the perimeter and guess about where they should go based on the picture on their relationships to each other. These are your pronouns, adjectives and direct objects. Now use the rest of the pieces to fill in the gaps. These are going to be your extensive vocabulary and phrasing. Of course, the last step is the hardest and that's where you'll spend most of your time. You know how it's supposed to look. Now you just need to make it whole.
The most important tool you have in your kit is your ability to actively follow a conversation even if you don't understand ANYTHING that's spoken. You understand more than you think. Watch people's body language. Their expressions. Vocal tones. Look at the way they use their hands and the way they stand. Timing is crucial, too. Underneath all that spoken language is the real root of it all. Try to tune out the audio just a little and focus on what their body is saying. Eventually you'll be able to match that up with what's coming out of their mouth.
Listen to the tone of people's voices. It is kind of a song when you think about it. Once you listen for it you'll start to hear the patterns. Think about something that you could say without any consonants or vowels. Just humming the pitch of your phrase. Something you could say with tape over your mouth. Like, "I don't know". It could literally be written into musical notes to be replicated by an instrument. I know there are some tonal languages like Mandarin and Cantonese and I've always wondered how emotion was expressed through that language. I'm guessing it would be really hard for a non-native speaker to figure it out.
...
So far, I've noticed a few distinct differences between Spanish and English
Spanish
- Words are much more predictable to pronounce. There are a few irregulars but they are rare.
- There are much fewer words used in everyday vocabulary.
- But their many faces (conjugations)
AND
- Words have more possible definitions make it difficult to discern their exact meaning.
English
- Pronunciation of English comes from at least three different languages and is very difficult for non-natives to predict based on spelling.
- There are many, many words. Many have more than one meaning and several synonyms. It's kind of like word overlap.
- Carlos pointed out to me English has a lot of very confusing two-word verbs. "work out", "turn off", "get laid". It's tricky trying to define that.
An interesting point that I discovered with Rodrigo was the way in which native speakers mumble their words. In English we kind of just mush them all together. Other native speakers generally figure it out.
"Wudya wanna do duhday?"
We even change the pronunciation of the consonants to make the language more... Ergonomic, I guess. Spanish speakers do something a little different. Instead of changing the sound of the consonants the just leave them out all together. But they are fairly stringent on maintaining the vowel sounds despite the loss of their former roommates. It's difficult for me to type out an example for you. But trust me, you'll hear it and remember... Just focus on the vowel sounds and you'll be able to guess what the consonants were well enough.
...
I have to admit, it's kind of cool being the English Ambassador. There's never been anything in my life where I was the hands down best at something. I've always been a little competitive and I did okay in some areas, but now, I'm the KING! I am amazing at speaking American English. Go ahead. Ask me anything. The difference between "who" and "whom". Hold on... I got this.
I totally didn't have it. I could NOT adequately translate it. But ANY other question and I'm the master.
And that's where things break down. You reach a point where no amount of google translate or animated hand gestures can explain a rudimentary difference in language. The problem, as I see it, is there are just too many translators. I mean, first of all you're translating abstract brain waves into a vocalization, sending those out to be translated by another person's ears and then reverse thrusters. It's pretty complex when you think about it. Using another operating system makes it a bit trickier. So it doesn't help that spoken language is one giant idiom to begin with. In the end it's kind of a sink or swim situation. You could get by with a doggie paddle but then you'd never be no Michael Phelps, would you? I didn't think so.
It's like making a huge puzzle. You dump the pieces out onto the table, flip them over and start to sort them. It doesn't matter what the picture of the puzzle is. It could be solid white. The first thing you do for any puzzle is find the end pieces. Where are the limits? The boundaries. Where is the skeletal structure that I can work with? These are your verbs. You may sound stupid saying, "They want" instead of "you want" but a native speaker can help point you in the right direction if you give them something to work with. Verbs are important. Know at least a couple. Like "want, need, have, find, eat..." This will significantly cut down on the amount of pantomiming you will be performing.
From there you group together like and like. Maybe a blotch of a different color but eventually you find the similarities. Take these groups, lay them out inside the perimeter and guess about where they should go based on the picture on their relationships to each other. These are your pronouns, adjectives and direct objects. Now use the rest of the pieces to fill in the gaps. These are going to be your extensive vocabulary and phrasing. Of course, the last step is the hardest and that's where you'll spend most of your time. You know how it's supposed to look. Now you just need to make it whole.
The most important tool you have in your kit is your ability to actively follow a conversation even if you don't understand ANYTHING that's spoken. You understand more than you think. Watch people's body language. Their expressions. Vocal tones. Look at the way they use their hands and the way they stand. Timing is crucial, too. Underneath all that spoken language is the real root of it all. Try to tune out the audio just a little and focus on what their body is saying. Eventually you'll be able to match that up with what's coming out of their mouth.
In the same way that we gather information about a person's state or intention through facial expression, we also download quite a bit through tonality and pitch of spoken language.
Listen to the tone of people's voices. It is kind of a song when you think about it. Once you listen for it you'll start to hear the patterns. Think about something that you could say without any consonants or vowels. Just humming the pitch of your phrase. Something you could say with tape over your mouth. Like, "I don't know". It could literally be written into musical notes to be replicated by an instrument. I know there are some tonal languages like Mandarin and Cantonese and I've always wondered how emotion was expressed through that language. I'm guessing it would be really hard for a non-native speaker to figure it out.
All in all I'd say this video clip from the film The Thirteenth Warrior illustrates immersion learning quite well.
...
So far, I've noticed a few distinct differences between Spanish and English
Spanish
- Words are much more predictable to pronounce. There are a few irregulars but they are rare.
- There are much fewer words used in everyday vocabulary.
- But their many faces (conjugations)
AND
- Words have more possible definitions make it difficult to discern their exact meaning.
English
- Pronunciation of English comes from at least three different languages and is very difficult for non-natives to predict based on spelling.
- There are many, many words. Many have more than one meaning and several synonyms. It's kind of like word overlap.
- Carlos pointed out to me English has a lot of very confusing two-word verbs. "work out", "turn off", "get laid". It's tricky trying to define that.
An interesting point that I discovered with Rodrigo was the way in which native speakers mumble their words. In English we kind of just mush them all together. Other native speakers generally figure it out.
"Wudya wanna do duhday?"
We even change the pronunciation of the consonants to make the language more... Ergonomic, I guess. Spanish speakers do something a little different. Instead of changing the sound of the consonants the just leave them out all together. But they are fairly stringent on maintaining the vowel sounds despite the loss of their former roommates. It's difficult for me to type out an example for you. But trust me, you'll hear it and remember... Just focus on the vowel sounds and you'll be able to guess what the consonants were well enough.
...
I have to admit, it's kind of cool being the English Ambassador. There's never been anything in my life where I was the hands down best at something. I've always been a little competitive and I did okay in some areas, but now, I'm the KING! I am amazing at speaking American English. Go ahead. Ask me anything. The difference between "who" and "whom". Hold on... I got this.
I totally didn't have it. I could NOT adequately translate it. But ANY other question and I'm the master.
And that's where things break down. You reach a point where no amount of google translate or animated hand gestures can explain a rudimentary difference in language. The problem, as I see it, is there are just too many translators. I mean, first of all you're translating abstract brain waves into a vocalization, sending those out to be translated by another person's ears and then reverse thrusters. It's pretty complex when you think about it. Using another operating system makes it a bit trickier. So it doesn't help that spoken language is one giant idiom to begin with. In the end it's kind of a sink or swim situation. You could get by with a doggie paddle but then you'd never be no Michael Phelps, would you? I didn't think so.
No comments:
Post a Comment