See! I'm not a poor language learner, my brain is just wired wrong!

General discussion about learning languages
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aokoye
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Re: See! I'm not a poor language learner, my brain is just wired wrong!

Postby aokoye » Wed Mar 29, 2017 9:17 pm

Iversen wrote:Unfortunately that won't do in my case since my brain has connected singing to the brain center for extreme disgust and perversion. That being said, I have spent a couple of evenings reading a translation of Oliver Sack's Musicophilia, and he delivers a panegyric defense for singing and playing and listening to music as a tool in psychiatry. Something that can make catatonic patients dance and amnesiacs remember...

Have you gotten to the chapter in Musicophilia that deals with people who have a very intense and emotional disdain for music? I could have sworn there was a chapter about it in that book but it's been a year or two since I read it.

Searching google/google books didn't give me what I wanted but it does turn out there's a newish diagnosis called musical anhedonia which Sacks very briefly touched upon in Musicophilia. That said, I really liked that book and need to reread it sometime soon.
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Iversen
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Re: See! I'm not a poor language learner, my brain is just wired wrong!

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:40 am

I have read the whole book within the last couple of days, and I'm going to comment on it in my log thread*. But just to prevent misunderstandings: I do NOT hate music - I just find singing obscene, maybe because it mostly was rotten vocal music that smashed the ongoing stream of music in my head while I still was composting (still there, but somewhat less dear to me since I dropped that activity). Imagine that you are trying to listen to something in a target language, and an irritating stranger is screaming repetitious messages into your head in your native language. And it just goes on and on and on ... like the simultaneous interpretation which is laid on top of the original sound on German TV.

* done
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Re: See! I'm not a poor language learner, my brain is just wired wrong!

Postby aokoye » Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:23 pm

Iversen wrote:But just to prevent misunderstandings: I do NOT hate music - I just find singing obscene, maybe because it mostly was rotten vocal music that smashed the ongoing stream of music in my head while I still was composting (still there, but somewhat less dear to me since I dropped that activity). Imagine that you are trying to listen to something in a target language, and an irritating stranger is screaming repetitious messages into your head in your native language. And it just goes on and on and on ... like the simultaneous interpretation which is laid on top of the original sound on German TV.

I was being facetious. For what it's worth I actually do tend to have music streaming through my head all the time. Not to the extent of a musical hallucination, but it's there almost all the time. Sometimes it's annoying but most of the time it's not an issue.
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Re: See! I'm not a poor language learner, my brain is just wired wrong!

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Mar 30, 2017 7:09 pm

Iversen wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Is there a Youtube video of Anthony's presentation? I'm assuming it was a presentation.


There definitely is ... at Youtube
Thanks for this. It's a fascinating idea, that music can teach (some of) us languages. That part of music's value is that it teaches us phrasing seems sound to me. The difference between "What is this thing called love?" and Benny Hill's version, "What is this thing called, love?" points up the importance of phrasing. For me, a native English speaker, phrasing is a particularly challenging part of learning Latin and Ancient Greek.
Thanks again, and thanks to Anthony, too, of course.
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