Are you a language tourist?

General discussion about learning languages
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Henkkles
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Are you a language tourist?

Postby Henkkles » Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:16 pm

Dabbling. I don't like that word. Not only does it not sound serious (although it doesn't need to be serious) but it's hard to translate across languages, as the verb is a bit of an English specialty. Let me propose a term: language tourism. I don't mean learning touristic phrases in advance of a trip. No bawn-jure, sill voo play.

Now I got to thinking. Tourism is all about exploring and enjoying new places for a short period of time without further commitment. It's all about the experience. I want to experience lots of languages that I don't really mean on integrating into my life, because I simply don't have the time. I live in Sweden so I need my Swedish, I want to widen my career prospects so I'm preëmptively studying French. But something like Basque? Fascinating language (ergativity is probably one of the less interesting things about Basque) but as I'm not emigrating to Euskal herria and don't have a personal connection to Basque at all, what is one such as myself to do? Why not go on a "language trip", book a hotel at Hippocrene Beginner's Basque for two weeks and just enjoy the views, taking it easy? Language tourism, like tourism, can refresh us, give us some new perspectives without being too much of a commitment. It can also be a way to scout a place out, if you're maybe thinking of moving there in the future, and want to see what it's like. As a bonus, this also serves as a way to recontextualize the phrase "oh you know I just speak tourist Spanish" which is easier for laypeople to understand than "I dabble in Spanish" or something, and is infinitely more translatable. We even use the same term for wanting to explore languages as we do with places, Wanderlust! We want to wander, so let us do that, just not at the expense of more serious endeavours. Sometimes you just need a break from German to learn some Tagalog or Vietnamese, like we need a break from work to go to Santorini or Mallorca.

It's entirely possible I stole this idea from someone, as it feels oddly familiar, but I can't bring to mind who it could have been, if anyone.

I am a proud language tourist, and I've been planning a trip to Welsh (not Wales) with my copy of Colloquial Welsh that I've had lying around for years. Don't feel guilty for being a language tourist, but acknowledge which language projects are tourism and which are more serious commitments, so it's easier to keep them separate.

//This is really also what sets us languages aficionados and amateurs apart from the rest. This kind of behavior is only done by the kind of people who, when they get together over a beer, talk about rare features of rare languages like it's the best thing ever (it is the best thing ever).
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby Iversen » Wed Jul 20, 2022 1:28 pm

I suppose I am such a person. There are languages which I study, and there are languages which I read about at home, and when I visit a place I also try to pick up some details about the local language or languages (including their writing systems). However it is important to stress the pitifully low level of those touristical endeavours - if I later return to the same place after I have learnt the language I should be prepared to have real conversations, read the local newspapers and and ... that's a totally different ballgame. I don't go somewhere to learn the local language, I go there to be a tourist, and just as I don't carry Mona LIsa home or a tasmanian devil home with me I don't expect to return home with anything more than flickering memories, photos and maybe a postcard or two. Language learning happens at home.
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby Sae » Wed Jul 20, 2022 3:47 pm

I think I like that term, it's definitely more flattering than "dabble" and gives credit to people who are curious about languages and want to experience them without committing to them.

And with the mention of Welsh, I was born in Wales and I really should put 'Welsh' as a language I one day learn, I realise it's an endangered language, though it's in a better place than it used to be. And it can be beautiful language to listen to, despite what some seem to say about it. I listened to a storytelling performance that was spoken in English but sang in Welsh and I thought it sounds beautiful. So I hope you enjoy er...your trip to Welsh?

I am trying to think where I fit here. There was a time when I jumped from language to language to try and learn, but they were biased to one part of the world that interested me, which I've never physically been to, those languages were Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Old Norse. But I remember very little of what I learned, but I ended up trying to write a couple of stanzas of a poem in Old Norse. And it all became a part of my interest in storytelling as an art and I took a great interest in the Eddas and Viking Sagas are part of that. I also threw Finnish. And now that I have friends from Norway, Sweden and Finland I could have thrown them off by now in speaking their languages.

But I remember very little of what I learned, because I didn't get hugely far nor did I stay practiced, so I guess then 'tourist' applies, I went there for the experience but didn't stay. Maybe one day, I'll pick one of those languages to take all the way.

I also did the same with Japanese. Though at one point I wanted to take it all the way, but I didn't so it's moot. I studied Karate and we learned the Japanese for our techniques and it felt like learning the language was the next natural progression, as I think as a teenager I got the thought of my head of going to Okinawa and trying out of the Karate schools there...I might still one day, as I would love to visit Okinawa anyway.

With the languages I am learning now, there's some pragmatism behind learning them with the intention of taking them all the way. But, I think once I have learned Tuvan well enough, I might tour other Turkic languages because I am fascinated by how far they spread and the relationship between them. And as I am learning Mongolian, I will at least have my curiosity about Tuvan's Mongolic ties satiated.
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Stephendaedalus
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby Stephendaedalus » Wed Jul 20, 2022 10:34 pm

I wasn't always a tourist, but rather, it made most sense for me to read and learn stuff in languages I wasn't completely fluent in, and I would spend years reading novels, one french copy and one english copy, side by side. You can see there's an ongoing trend, now that I'm fluent in french and bored by it. (I'm struggling to choose between latin and greek next.) My recent tourist inclinations are in league with 'acquiring a more acute sense of our linguistic faculties', as a whole. Japanese was for me a whole new way of processing information (going from the implicit syntax of indo-european languages and much of finnish, to a much more explicitly marked syntax) and that's what made me so addicted, and to really get the hang of it, you have to become familiar with lots of japanese vocabulary. Before japanese, I thought the infinitive case was an universal feature of human language. (It's not, it's frequently just for articulating nominalization, perhaps in a way that the subjunctive/conjunctive is colloquially circumvented in english and french.) So while I don't think I'll ever bother myself with mastering all sorts of technical vocabulary of japanese, as I had to with swedish, english or french (in order to make it through novels, etc.), I'm way too addicted to the feeling of being able to switch to another angle, to not be hoarding for similar experiences. Sometimes I too wonder whether it's not just trying to discover another unusual and surprising linguistic feature. (Such as, have you ever heard of "object conjugation", ie. when a language where the personal pronoun affects the suffix of the object rather than just the verb? Saw that on the basics of erzya, a language related to my native finnish, which only has possessive suffix. May exist hungarian, but I'm not sure. Or such as: when hindi speakers place the verb for "be" after a transitive verb...)
Last edited by Stephendaedalus on Thu Jul 21, 2022 1:02 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:31 am

Probably not. Though it's always tempting. Some commitment is necessary to learn even basic functional language beyond phrasebook struggling; enough to make it even a little bit enjoyable. So I often feel this sort of thing leaves one a 'dilettante, and that you go beyond dilettantism by learning more, by which point it's no longer just tourism.

What is 'tourism'? It's superficially visiting a place, often on a guided tour or to fixed attractions, but never knowing it beyond that surface. I've been a tourist many a time and it's fine in its way. However I've had to visit a place multiple times to prevent it being just a fleeting sort of memory. I want to know some places as much as you can without actually living there, not just see them. There may be an argument to say absorbing a little of the language might be a way in. I don't know that it is, and that for me 'touring' to a language is the same as a flying visit. I wouldn't rule out that it couldn't plant a seed of interest for the future.
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:58 am

You may be a language tourist if...

You can't get though a page of Hebrew without flipping though your Sumerian book, ordering a book on Ancient Egyptian phonology, and refreshing Duolingo to see if their Zulu course is out yet.
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Jul 21, 2022 1:25 am

Not really. My absolute priority is getting the languages I am serious about to proficiency, so I am saving language tourism for some point in the future when I am "done" with my serious language learning. But some tourist destinations are so attractive I can't help but make a small excursion from time to time...
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Jul 21, 2022 11:15 am

I've often considered having a portion of my language learning time dedicated to languages I'm curious about but ironically not completely dedicated to. In theory I could split 3hrs language time between one hour of French (most serious language), an hour to 'second tier' serious languages that won't take the place of my French obsession (Dutch, Spanish, Norwegian), and then an hour per day on language dabbling, now aply rebranded language tourism by Henkkles. There I could plough through an escape to Assimil Le breton, Le catalan or L'occitan. Next time round I could aim to start and complete one of the others that I didn't choose first time round, or do a Dutch-based Frisian course or a French-based Luxembourgeois course.

There's a risk... that I'll want to take all of them to B2 or further. Then I'm in real serious trouble because I'm already in troubled waters - those 3 hours never existed in my day to begin with, and what there was (2+ hrs at best) has dwindled dramatically.

Maybe I ought to hang out in Canberra for a while and hound the Australian government to enforce mandatory language learning lock-down styled multiligualism- for the plight of language diversity, every Australian must now provide evidence of learning multiple languages or face harsh penalties!

Oh, okay then, you've made it law, I'll just have to learn Galician, Catalan, Alsatian, Asturian, Frisian, Basque now. :lol:
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby tractor » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:34 pm

lichtrausch wrote:Not really. My absolute priority is getting the languages I am serious about to proficiency, so I am saving language tourism for some point in the future when I am "done" with my serious language learning. But some tourist destinations are so attractive I can't help but make a small excursion from time to time...

Same here. It’s hard enough to learn just a few languages properly, so I’m trying to resist and restrict my wanderlust and language tourism.
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Re: Are you a language tourist?

Postby galaxyrocker » Thu Jul 21, 2022 3:58 pm

Ah here I was thinking this would be perfect for me to talk about all the trips I've done to do immersion programmes, that are basically me being a tourist too. Darn.

But, sometimes I am, yes. Especially when I get distracted and have no reason to focus on a particular language, I'll just dabble in many and never get anywhere (and often never have the intention of it). Sometimes, I do it just because I heard something was linguistically weird, so I'll go read a grammar on it or learn a few phrases if I can. Othertimes, it's because I am supposedly serious, but just end up not sticking with it.
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