December 7th, 2011
A couple from Mexico were sitting in a bus station. I said something to them in Spanish, using the word for car–coche. The woman told me that coche was a degraded, Anglocized word and that I should instead use carro. She said coche sounds like coach, but carro is its own word. I kept thinking that carro sounded like car.
People throughout Latin America have their opinions on Spanish words. Most people there don’t have strong opinions about words. Some do have a narrow enough view of the world as to think their way of speaking is THE way. Never let this make you feel inferior. Just enjoy the differences. It’s part of the language journey.
My wife and I have different opinions about what a cushion is and what a pillow is. As far as I’m concerned, a pillow can never never never be a cushion, and a cushion can never be a pillow. You might not believe this, but my wife sometimes calls cushions pillows. It doesn’t seem to bother her one little bit. She’s the kind of person who would probably use coche and carro interchangeably. Well, I am too, but I have my limits. A cushion cannot, or at least should not, ever ever ever be called a pillow.
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November 16th, 2011
English is famous for its dangling prepositions, and Winston Churchill spoke for lots of English-speakers when he said something like, “The rule of the dangling preposition is a rule up with which I cannot put.”
Some people debate whether he said those exact words, but if he was like most other people, he made good use of a good line when he found it, and he probably said it in many variations. It really is a great comment on English grammar.
Unless they’re weirdos, people usually use one way of talking and another way of writing. The rules of written language are considered the official ones, but most of us don’t care so much about them when we are talking, and it is truly WEIRD when people insist on speaking according to the rules of proper writing.
Spanish uses a few dangling prepositions. For instance, to say that one group of people is always the group working for another, we might say, “Siempre trabajan para.” They’re always working for. (Emphasis on “for”.)
Siempre tratan de. They’re always trying to. (Emphasis on “trying” with no success.)
Siempre vienen de. They’re always coming from. (Emphasis on “from”, never going “to”.)
These normal examples of Spanish, but they are not used often, nothing anywhere close to the every-other-moment way we do in English. You can almost say the dangling preposition doesn’t occur in Spanish, but only almost. If you want to talk like a textbook, that’s your choice. If you want to sound like you actually know the spoken language, you’ll dangle an occasional preposition like a real pro.
Tags: Speaking
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October 18th, 2011
You would think you wouldn’t be able to find many cellphones in countries where poverty afflicts the majority of people. I met three salespeople in a hotel 15 years ago who were on their way to South America to sell cellphone service. I asked who in the world would buy it. Since then I have found out that even very poor people throughout Latin America have found a NEED for a cellphone. I interviewed a poor, young woman from Honduras who said the phones are now everywhere in her little country. Everyone seems to be telling me the same thing about their poor little or poor big countries. People need cellphones like they need water and their next meal.
As a matter of fact, I am finding that impoverished people in almost every country are finding a way to get their hands on a cellphone so they can call, text, tell time, and play ringtones and music. All this is aside from surfing the web. Same in the USA. Poor people sacrifice almost anything to get a phone. Middle-class people stretch beyond their budgets to upgrade their phone plans. Gotta have the upgrade. Gotta have the upgrade.
It all shows how much people are alike in some ways, no matter what language we speak or what culture we come from. My cellphone still doesn’t do anything but tell time and make calls.
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October 1st, 2011
A Canadian-born American raised in Massachusetts and living in Indiana told me that the people of New England are gracious people. “You will like them,” she said. “We are not snobs.”
So! She knows about the way we Midwesterners grow up with the belief that New Englanders are snobs. I don’t know where I got it, but I grew up with that impression. And because I thought they were snobs, I saw their behavior as snobbish.
Now that I’ve finished my 10-day tour of the six states, I can say that I was treated with respect and good humor everywhere I went. No snobs in sight on this trip into the nooks and crannies of northeastern United States. The people wanted to participate in the culture and language lessons I create. My team and I can’t wait to return.
Tags: Culture
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September 25th, 2011
My 10-day tour of New England to collect lesson content for some of the hundreds of PK-8 video lessons I make is all the more interesting because of the way people here speak English. I’m not the only one struggling to understand what Americans are saying when they speak English. A man from Maine says he can’t understand the people on Long Island. A woman from New York told me just last night that she can’t understand Long Islanders either. I’m asking a lot of New Englanders to please repeat themselves. It’s a lot like the trouble I had on my recent trip to South Carolina. It’s exactly the same problem I have adjusting to certain Cubans and Argentines. It’s all part of the language adventure.
Tags: Culture, Pronunciation
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August 29th, 2011
One of my favorite things about building learning environments is that human beings learn in much the same way. The popular idea spread throughout the retail and school world during the past 30 years is that people learn in different ways–as if they have different kinds of brains. There are differences that educators and parents need to pay attention to, but they aren’t the kind that make you…well…let me say it this way:
People tell me all the time that they are visual learners or auditory learners or that they have to be in motion when they’re learning. These are not learning differences represented in the brain hardware. These are mainly habits and preferences and, more often than not, bad understanding of how learning happens. In other words, if you try to teach somebody in a proven effective way, and that person is thinking, as so often happens, “But I am a visual learner,” or if the teacher is thinking that, the learning process will be short of optimal.
We are all innately visual, auditory, and active. If we are not able to see, we wish we could. If we can’t hear, we wish we could. If we can’t move, we wish we could. The reason we wish we could is that we are made for it.
Tags: Academia, Learning a Language
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August 18th, 2011
I just finished a 10-day trip to South Carolina. I heard all kinds of accents there among people born and raised in the USA. Some were from New England, some from the South, a few from elsewhere. What struck me was the great variety of accents that Americans have. Many were the people I asked to repeat what they were saying so I could understand. One Virginian conservation officer said:
“I’m…speak…ing…like…this…just…for…you…so…you…can…under…stand…me
Good thing he did. Some of these American people are tough to understand.
Tags: Speaking
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July 25th, 2011
This year our business will probably grow to three times what it was last year. Our video project for schools is almost complete. Other projects underway will take our time and energy. This video project has been a great ride and will require some maintenance. It’s still a small part of everything we have going on with language and non-language projects, but it’s hard to imagine anything being more fun than making lessons of all the interesting people and events I’ve covered.
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July 5th, 2011
I’m getting ready to do a video interview of a woman who turns the drab outside appearance of her apartment into a garden every spring. I’ve been watching her handiwork for the past several years, but I never saw her until a few days ago. I knocked on her door and told her I wanted to interview her and her pavement garden and turn the visit into a Spanish lesson or two that would be seen by kids and supervising adults around the country. She said okay and thank you.
A two-part series will show the life and beauty that Oasis Woman brings to the asphalt pavement and concrete walkway in front of her apartment, as well as a small flower garden at her boring back door, and a sort of English garden just past the pavement behind her apartment, on a weed-ridden bank at the edge of a field.
This will be a story of hope, showing how one person takes control of drab and makes it bloom and grow in living color. It’s not easy to do on really hot pavement, but she makes it happen every year.
Tags: Feature Stories
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May 2nd, 2011
This has to be said every now and then: you learned your first language without the help of us certified language teachers.
Now, how could that possibly happen without us? Well, it happens that way every day in every place. If you find yourself in the middle of a language and having to communicate in it on a highly frequent basis, you simply do become expert in that language within several years or less.
School usually commits the error of making language too academic. Line up all the parts. Label them. Quiz on them. Then big tests. Look at the scores. Wow. Nice scores. But the students usually can’t communicate in the language. In fact, I just returned from Chicago where people told me, as they do everywhere I go, that they took years of Spanish in high school and college and they can’t do much of anything with it.
Make new language a regular part of your life, using it at least a little bit everyday, and you will achieve degrees of fluency as you go along. That’s how we all can learn language. Nothing has changed. If you do take academic courses, those should be a big help, but daily use of language is always the superior factor. No so-called latest scientific method for learning will ever top it.
Tags: Academia, Learning a Language
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