As I am working towards my goals of reading a French and a Chinese book this year, I read a few articles on how to
study languages. (I hoped some reader would share their study tips in my last post but I guess this blog has so few readers no one answered. So I had to look for study ideas elsewhere.)
One article pointed out the difference between having a vague idea of studying some language and having more measurable goals as to what one wants to do with that language. I gave this a lot of thought.
Turns out I have definite ideas of what I want to do with the languages I am studying or want to study. Maybe I did need to write them out. Thus, for my future reference, here are the reasons for learning my target languages:
Romanian: to read one Romanian book every year, for ease in travelling and for less laborious reading. Basically, Romanian is a jokey and warm language that boosts my self-esteem; I just want to have more of it in my life.
Chinese: to read at least one Chinese book every year, for ease when travelling in Taiwan. I also want to read more comic books from Taiwan and Hong Kong. As well, I want to write more beautifully in Chinese, maybe hiring a tutor to help me with Chinese calligraphy. I want to write a lot of letters in Chinese to my friends in Taiwan.
Japanese: to read the occasional Japanese book or article on cultural topics that interest me (mostly onsens, food, games, arts, crafts and literature). To be able to understand my favourite Japanese tv shows and movies without subtitles. To be able to research new onsens for subsequent trips.
French: to read one French book every year and to read a few nineteenth and twentieth century novels or other books in the original. I also found French very useful when travelling in Tunisia, so I want to be able to use it in other Francophone African countries like Senegal and Rwanda. I want to read more French and Belgian comics. Of course there’s also the extensive travelling in France I want to do and possibly living there.
Spanish: so much great Spanish literature to read in the world! Plus, Spanish is just a fun language to speak. One of my goals is to spend the Mexican Days of the Dead in Oaxaca with a family there. Then there is a personal research project I want to do in South America.
Italian: for reading more Italian comic books, some literature and mostly for ease of travelling and of travel research. I also want to rent apartments there for month-long trips. It would be nice to have long conversations about Italy with my future neighbours.
German: because I want to live and work in Austria. I also want to read some German literature in the original language and I want to play boardgames in the original languages.
Russian: for speaking and some reading. I suspect there’s a whole world of cool, wacky children’s literature I need to read in Russian. I want to watch Cheburashka without making up my own dialogue (my Cheburashka DVD set only has Japanese subtitles).
Swedish: I want to read all of Tove Jansson’s books in the original language, as well as any biographies. Also, I want to travel to Sweden. Hopefully I’ll find more reasons to study Swedish once I start learning about the culture.
Inuktitut: mostly I want to learn to write in their cool alphabet. I don’t know any Inuit people, but it would be cool to try some out when I visit Iqaluit. Plus, I believe that one should speak the language of the country one is in. Canada has a lot of aboriginal languages yet all the annoying white people here snarl “Speak English!” to poor immigrants trying their best to speak English, when really English is not the original local language. Ideally, Halq’eméylem would be better for my needs but I like the Inuktitut alphabet so much.
Taiwanese: for speaking when I visit Taiwan. I also want to learn at least one Chinese dialect to see if it’s really a dialect or if it is a separate language. Plus, Taiwanese sounds so bad-ass.
Cantonese: to order dim sum in Richmond for starters. Also, to watch Hong Kong movies in the original, to chat more when I visit Hong Kong or when I meet grandmothers at friends’ houses here in Vancouver. Chinese grandparent types have lived through an amazing and dramatic century – they must have incredible stories.
Hungarian: like with Swedish, I hope that I’ll find more reasons to study when I start studying Hungarian. Mostly, I want to be able to have conversations when I travel to Romania and Hungary (Hungarians are such nice people), and especially to be able to do research on Romanian history.
Kinyarwanda: for travel when I go to Rwanda. I want to ask questions and be a good enough listener so I can understand the stories about life in Rwanda and the genocide. I bet too that there are some great etiquette lessons the Rwandans have, which, once I learn what they are, I’ll write about.
Amharic: also for travel. Plus, I want to learn the Ge’ez alphabet. Again, I want to be able to listen better to conversations and to meet the people who don’t just speak English. We’re also lucky in this part of Canada because we have a lot of Ethiopians. It would be nice to understand Ethiopian songs too. I can’t sing but I have a secret fantasy of going into an Ethiopian karaoke bar and wowing everyone. If there are karaoke bars for Ethiopians.
Arabic: mostly I want to conduct some history research in Syria. Maybe once I know a little Arabic, I would find some good literature to read in the original language.
Finnish: for ease of travelling and it is the language of the country where Tove Jansson was born and where she lived. Now that I have started studying it, it turns out Finnish is incredibly beautiful and melodic. No wonder they and their Baltic neighbours are such good singers. I want to trill like those Finns. There are also more and more Finnish comic books I am discovering that I want to read. Another reason I want to study it is because, like Hungarian and Estonian, it is not in the Indo-European language group.
Norwegian: I want to travel there. I also had a Norwegian penpal who sent me a book on his country and in the book it said that by law every library in the country must own a copy of every Norwegian book. With a government that supportive of Norwegian writers, they must have a few good ones. I want to read these authors in the original.
Dutch: I love travelling to the Netherlands and I loved Flanders. I want to chitchat more in Dutch/Flemish with the people there. I also want to research a WWI topic.
Estonian: because it’s another beautiful, trilling language. Mostly my goal is to learn from cover to cover the one Estonian textbook I started. I have no hope of speaking Estonian when I am not travelling there. But I can read and master this one book.
Today is the day to start working on my goals of reading a Romanian book, a Chinese book and a French book. I want to do this every year for the three languages I am most advanced in my language studies.
For French, this project is straightforward. Read the book, look up words a lot at the beginning and slowly begin looking up fewer words. I figure I’ll remember the verb conjugations as I get further into the book. The book I picked is a Turgenev novella; last year, my friend D. suggested reading a book in translation to start with as translations are easier.
Chinese is slightly more complex. The biggest problem is that I recognize a lot of characters but I can’t remember the strokes for writing them. Since I am starting off with a children’s book (I haven’t been immersed in Chinese written culture since 2002), I figure I can zip through the book and then spend the rest of the year working on rote memorization by re-writing the characters over and over again. Ideally there is an app to keep track of this – we live in the future now so I can advance beyond actually writing out by hand on paper. If not, I’ll recycle the backs of ads and on junkmail envelopes.
Romanian is where my language studies get really difficult. According to Anglos, this is my first language. But I grew up in North America and spent nearly my entire 1-12 education in English-speaking Canada (aside from kindergarten in Romania, some sort of schooling in Austria and a few laughable months in China). I have never studied Romanian grammar. I can barely understand dialogue on Romanian television and especially not on news reports. My job for six months on a visit to Romania was to provide comic relief on radio for 100,000 listeners with my poor reading of Romanian news.
The Romanian book I want to tackle is a history of my ancestral village Tibru, written by the priest there. He autographed my copy and sent it through my parents to me. I have never met him. I am pretty excited about his book though.
Tibru is a village in Transylvania, more specifically in Alba County. It is about half an hour from the county capital Alba Iulia, tucked in a valley high up between two hills. The village got electricity and phone lines in the late 1970s and running water only in the last five years or so. Being in a valley, the village is long, with to churches and a picturesque, almost gothically spectral cemetery near the upper end. Each property is fronted with a tall wall and wooden gate that encloses a courtyard and a house and barn. Some houses, like my grandparents’, have vineyards at the back stretching up the hillsides. There used to be houses with thatched roofs but those were gone on my last visit in 2007. Between my grandparents’ house and the cemetery is a cottage-sized boulder in the middle of the road where my mother played as a child. I remember a werewolf neighbour when I was a child.
With Tibru’s location in what was once the Austro-Hungarian empire and later near one of Romania’s most historically important cities, the past has bestowed some drama for those curious about its local history. The priest’s book will clarify some mysteries for me. How old is Tibru? If it existed back then, what effects did the Mongol invasion have on my patch of Romania? How devastating was the Black Death in these parts? Just what happened in Tibru during the late eighteenth century revolt led by the Romanian peasants Horia, Clo?ca and Cri?an? Was Tibru always a Romanian village or was it Hungarian?
The tricky thing about reading in Romanian is that I don’t know how to study it. I am so poorly equipped with the grammar, I recognize grammar structures but I can’t replicate them on my own. My vocabulary remains at a kindergarten level. Yet, I can’t see myself writing Romanian words over and over like I do with Chinese characters I am trying to remember. One thought is to write out the book in a notebook, with one line in Romanian and a translation below in English. Certainly that’s not something I want to do for every book. But maybe to start off with that might be good. (Then too I would have an English translation to let friends visiting Tibru with me read and I can pass on a digital copy to the priest for his use.)
Is anyone reading this who has suggestions? How are you studying foreign languages? And if anyone has advice on how I can get WordPress to show the accent marks on Closca and Crisan’s names above, that would be most welcome. I keep updating WordPress but it refuses to let me use accent marks.
*Hopefully in a few years I can pick Spanish again and eventually add more languages. One day, my wish is to read a book every month in a different language alongside all the English language books I read. German, Italian and Japanese shouldn’t be too far off in the future if I apply myself. Then there’s my budding interest in Finnish and Dutch, and my longtime interest in Swedish too. Not to mention the other languages in which I eventually want to hobnob (Kinyarwanda, Inuktitut, Cantonese, Norwegian, Amharic, Arabic, Russian, Taiwanese and Estonian). I may have to learn Czech too to watch some Czech cartoon DVDs I got in Japan. Or maybe the Japanese subtitles will eventually get me through the cartoons.
As I continue reading Superdove, there are more great pigeon trivia tidbits I will be using to impress family members at Christmas dinner:
Squab meat is low in fat and rich in iron. (Turns out I have a squab recipe I clipped out from a cooking magazine article called “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – I wish I kept the recipes for the drumming drummers, piping pipers, a-leaping lords, dancing ladies and a-milking maids.)
When precocial birds like chickens, turkeys and geese hatch, they are immediately mobile. Altricial birds like pigeons are born weak, naked and blind.
Pigeon fathers and mothers both secrete crop milk to feed baby pigeons.
Pigeons as supermarket meat never really took off because pigeons can procreate about twelve times a year. Compare that to the 200 plus eggs a chicken can lay in a year.
The US’s largest pigeon meat operation is the Palmetto Pigeon Plant* in South Carolina.
According to British historian Joan Thirsk, alternative crops and livestock rise in popularity during periods of excess cereals. In post-Black Death Europe, the smaller human population meant grains could be put aside for feeding birds; similarly, the low grain prices in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries also translated into increases of raising pigeons.
Fancy pigeons like the English short-faced tumbler have such short beaks that foster parent pigeons must feed their young.
Pigeons don’t have X and Y chromosomes; just one sex chromosome, with females having one chromosome and males having two copies.
The skin around a pigeon’s eye is called a cere.
Pigeons cannot fly at night because they have terrible night vision.
Pigeons will return to a home loft even after years (hence their use as messenger pigeons – “one-way communicators” as Humphries calls them. Pigeon racing, where pigeons are timed on how long it takes them to return home, “is the ultimate test of the bonds between people and domestic animals” (page 66).
Noah sent out a raven from the ark before he sent out the dove/pigeon. The raven never bothered returning.
Messenger pigeons were used in ancient Egypt to tell the downriver dwellers when the flood waters arrived; Julius Caesar may have used them in his Gaul campaign; the Crusaders used them; and during the 1870 siege of Paris, refugees escaping with their pigeons sent messages back to those still in the city on waxed paper attached to tail feathers.
During WWI and WWII, military pigeons were divided into their own companies and even received medals for bravery (established in Britain in 1943). Some brave pigeons were Flying Dutchman, Beachcomber, Commando, William of Orange, Billy, Princess, and GI Joe (his stuffed body is now at the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum at Fort Monmouth, NJ).
Two-way communicating pigeons travel between home lofts and food locations.
*The Palmetto Pigeon Plant has a pigeon cursor that freaked me out the first time I went to the site. As for the “House for Forced Matings,” why didn’t they just call it the “House for Non-consensual Pigeon Sex” or the “House for Pigeon Rape”? The company has diversified since 1989, now raising cornish hens, silkie chickens and poussin chickens.
Thursday May 15th 2008, 12:07 am
Filed under: Language
As my mother now lives in Romania, her English is getting a little rusty. This provides hours of enjoyment as she tries to pronounce once-familiar words and string together sentences.
Tonight, she couldn’t quite make her point – that the Chinese actually invented the pizza – because she kept substituting different words for invented: inverted, invaded, injected.
Sometimes, to tease her, I ask her the name of her favourite little dwarf-man on Lord of the Rings. The conversations usually go something like this:
Monday July 23rd 2007, 6:26 pm
Filed under: Books,Language
Seven years after first reading it, I finished reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow a second time. It took me nine months. However, unlike the first time I read it, this time I understood the ending. I kept a notebook with the characters’ names, their distinguishing traits and most important actions. I crisscrossed back and forth in the novel until I finally learned who was who and why they did what they did. I was relieved that there were no aliens in the book.
I originally picked up the book because it was about someone who was half Greenlandic and far preferred the Inuit side of her heritage. I am not Inuit, nor have I ever even been to any polar regions. However, as is obvious with my Inuktitut pseudonym, I am rather more interested in Inuit culture than your average white person. More particularly, I reread Smilla because I wanted, besides getting the ending, to compile a list of the interesting Inuktun words:
Of course there is qanik – “big almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost” – from the first paragraph of the book and quoted on the front of my movie cover edition. Once Smilla returns to Greenland, then the ice expert in her takes over:
Agiuppiniq: snow drifts across the ice Apuhiniq: snow compressed by the wind into hard barricades Avangnaq: north wind Hiku: permanent ice Hikuaq: a type of ice floe Hikuliaq: new ice Ivuniq: packs of ice forced upwards by the current and collision of the plates Killaq: air holes Maniilaq: ice knolls Pirhirhuq: snowstorm weather Puktaaq: another type of ice floe Sikussaq: ancient black ice formed in protected fjords
Inuktun, the language spoken in Smilla’s hometown of Qaanaaq, is the most closely Greenlandic language related to Canada’s Inuktitut-speaking people. This must be why the words have all those Qs at the end. Ideally, these words will one day enter the English lexicon and hence be available for Scrabble players. I never find a spare letter I to make a qi. Inuktun words would do wonders for my Scrabble strategy.
Tuesday September 12th 2006, 8:46 pm
Filed under: Blogging,Language
A mystery has been solved!
In my nerdsome youth, I collected a number of penpals from around the world. One penpal that I had for purely aesthetic reasons was a beauty from South Africa who, originally from Zaïre (now the Congo), wrote in a mixture of French and English. Her theory was that the French would improve my Canadian school system French*.
Thus my penpal always signed off her letters with bisous and A+.
A few trips to France later and I got my bisous down. Little kisses. According to BellaOnline’s French Culture Editor, Melissa Demiguel, “it is quite versatile as it can be used to finish conversations, sign letters and demand kisses.” There’s also plein de bisous and plein de petits bisous.
A+ is weirder and has remained a mystery despite my penpal’s explanation.
In her conversation with Le Mec – ha! I remembered that one! The colloquial for guy! – the revelation that A+ = à plus, or à plus tard, struck me with the force of finally getting it after fifteen + years of wondering. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It was a good joke.
*For the bilingualism naysayers, I contribute my poor French not to the inadequacies of the Canadian school system but to bilingualism naysayers themselves and to my own debilitating shyness.
Thursday August 29th 2002, 9:52 pm
Filed under: Language
Hardly I had to reconfirmar, Ethiopia I am yes sixth of the bottom in the human index of the development of a Rumania is number 63. I will push that in the faces of those naysayers when with himself white Iulia. Stop to complain yer!
Wordplay, the site for words and fun, suggested using Altavista’s Translation Service to translate something back and forth. The above passage is an English-to-Spanish-to English translation of the below passage.