Grayson's Language Log

[gsbod]

Children's books are not really my thing, but I loved Momo. It was a real surprise. I get the feeling it was written more with the parents in mind anyway. Without wanting to get too political, given it was written in the 1970s, it seems to be strangely prescient about changes to working life and its knock on effects towards the end of the twentieth century. I think the only difference is these days those grey men wouldn't be smoking, maybe they'd just be burning through data on their smartphones instead...

[Le Baron]

Started reading Momo by Michael Ende. Also simple, perfect level.

I see now that I read this in Dutch some time ago. I was just vacuuming in the bedroom and saw it on the small bookshelves. I hadn't even checked to see if it was a translation. A neighbour lent it to me as a recommendation, I think she named her cat Momo.

[grayson]

2023 WEEK 4

So.

I'm officially shelving my language goals. As I wrote this morning in my productivity log, I'm sad about this, but it's the right thing to do. I made these plans when I thought I might be retiring, and they no longer realistically fit into my schedule. Sure, I could run myself ragged doing a little every day, but it would be at the cost of more meaningful things I could do with that time, and I suspect it wouldn't get me very far anyway.

I'll still be significantly engaged with language — my day job is writing, and come fall, I'll be studying linguistics full time.** There will be foreign language study as part of that degree. But these personal language goals are once again back-burnered.

Best of luck to everyone in your language projects! And in all the parts of your lives. I'll drop in and read from time to time, though less frequently than I have been.

---

2024 update: I started volunteering with the Dutch Refugee Council in April 2023, and decided to postpone my return to university by a year, to September 2024 while I did some soul-searching. As a result I've traded out the original plan (to get a BA, MA and possibly PhD in linguistics) for a one-year certification to teach Dutch as a second language to refugees, also starting in September 2024. My original goal was to be involved with language in a way that would get me certified to teach again -- I taught math at uni back in the early 1990s and loved it -- so the new path achieves that goal, with the added benefit of working to help the disadvantaged.

[grayson]

2023 WEEK 46

Nearly 10 months later, I'm officially studying Spanish again. Because....

...in April I started volunteering one day a week with the Dutch Council for Refugees (Vluchtelingenwerk, VWN for short). Hugely rewarding, very glad I started. My job is to explain the asylum procedure to refugees who have just arrived in the Netherlands. None of them speak Dutch, of course, and most don't speak English well enough for a real conversation, so we work through interpreters (by telephone). Sometimes, however, there's no interpreter available. It doesn't happen often, but it happened to me a few weeks ago, with a group of recent arrivals from South America.

If they had been from Russia or Turkey or Ghana or China, I would have had to postpone the session -- not impossible, but also not easy. But their language was Spanish, a language I once spoke quite well. So I did the session without an interpreter, and it worked out acceptably well: in part thanks to the limited English of two of the refugees supplementing my very creaky Spanish; in part thanks to context -- I'd make it to the end of a sentence and flounder for a word, but it was clear to them where my sentence was going, so they'd give me the word and we'd go on.

I got through this session, and they got the information they needed, but I am certain much of what I said took a form like "now is the being of askness for questions". Going forward, I could write out the standard explanation I give and translate it into good Spanish, sure, but that won't help me answer questions on the fly, and I currently can't understand their questions in the first place unless they speak very, very slowly and often repeat themselves. Moreover, when we have capacity (and thus don't have to interview refugees grouped by common language), we also discuss their personal situations and lend tailored information and support. At present, I could not remotely do this half of the job in Spanish.

As reasons go to dust off an old, buried language you once knew, this one is pretty compelling.

----

To that end, I'm listening to Radio Ambulante (link) podcasts. I've also bought a month of access to Jiveworld (formerly Lupa; link), a learning app that uses Radio Ambulante stories as its vehicle. Jiveworld is quite wonderful, but I don't think I'll continue with it -- I think I'm better off immersed in listening to native content at full speed than I am with transcripts and vocabulary popups. Jiveworld breaks up the Radio Ambulante stories into chapters and I'd really prefer to just listen to the whole podcast unbroken.

I've also got a news podcast from Voice of America's Spanish arm ( Voz de América; link) bookmarked, with mixed feelings. I've deliberately avoided the news for three decades, relying on my husband / friends / colleagues to tell me if something big is happening that I need to know about. On the other hand, it would make me better at my VWN job to understand what's going on in the world. Radio Ambulante is of course also providing me with a richer Latin American context, but these aren't current events, and I feel like I'm doing less than I could be if I ignore the immediate political, legislative and cultural situations that are spurring people to flee their countries. That said, yesterday's newscast opened with a story about premature babies dying in a hospital in Gaza because there's no electricity... so my tender existential how-can-the-world-be-this-way oh-god-don't-tell-me-about-horrible-things-I-can't-do-anything-about heart is going to get a little battered along the way. The difference now, though, is that I can do something to help -- I am doing something to help, visibly and concretely if only in a small way, and knowing the news helps me to do that.

What I'm expecting is that after a month or two, my listening comprehension will suddenly click over, into a higher gear. I've had that experience before, as if there's a hump I have to get over and then things come flooding back. Meanwhile, I am musing on the best way to improve my vocabulary (things I don't know, plus recalling things I used to know). It's probably digital reading of some kind, where I can use Apple's nearly effortless lookup and translation features. The key is to read things that interest me, and let the vocabulary build organically. That won't be the most efficient way to do it -- dedicated vocab study would be -- but it will, in the long term, be more effective, simply because I'll keep doing it. (I also think that learning words as they show up in context will be less fragile, long term, than learning them deliberately.)

[MorkTheFiddle]

Glad to see your shout-out for Radio Ambulante and Jive World, even with the caveats. They are good if limited resources, IMHO.

[grayson]

2023 WEEK 47

• roughly 45 minutes a day -- Radio Ambulante posts a new episode each Tuesday; I am listening to the episode each day, then finally on Monday reading the transcript (in Spanish). I get the overall story while listening, but miss many details. It's a little like a treasure hunt -- each time I relisten, I catch something I didn't catch the time before. Rewarding! I also notice I'm already distinguishing words better than I was two weeks ago. Often I hear a term I don't know, but it's clear how to spell it and I can look it up. (I still also hear plenty of things that are just a rushing river of sound .) Reading the transcript at the end of the week helps me solidify vocabulary (and rewards me with all the details I missed while listening).
  
• roughly 1 hour a day -- I've found another podcast, from Diana Uribe who is a Colombian historian / storyteller. She posts new epsiodes a little more erratically, but generally between a few days and two weeks apart. There's no transcripts for these on her website, but I am enjoying listening to them (even missing many details). I listen to the same episode multiple days, until a new one comes out.
  
• I'm not listening to daily newscasts anymore. I much prefer the histories from Diana Uribe, and there's only so much time in a day.
  
• roughly 30 minutes a day -- I've returned to the novel I was reading in Spanish a year ago (a translation of Earth Unaware, a book in the Enderverse).

I try to do all 3 activities each day, aside from my day working with refugees; I only get reading in then.

[grayson]

2024 BEGINS
My Spanish schedule took a hit during the holidays but I'm back at it now, both listening (to Radio Ambulante et al) and reading (still in La Tierra Desprevenida).

My comprehension's taken a hit from the extended break, but is still higher than it was before I started in mid-November.

I'm still settling into the new year and how to sensibly schedule in all that I want to accomplish, language- and otherwise. I'll likely report here roughly every month on the language bit.

Best wishes to everyone for a rewarding 2024!

[grayson]

January 2024 retrospective

I ditched the Enderverse prequel, La Tierra Desprevenida, because it just wasn't interesting enough to me. OSC had a co-author on this one and maybe that's why it didn't hook me the way all OSC's other books have. I decided to switch to something written in Spanish rather than translated to it, and settled on El mapa del tiempo by Félix J. Palma. Not very far into it yet.

I tried transcribing Radio Ambulante podcasts, just a couple of minutes in each session, and had wildly varying results. One time I got nearly everything right (with repeated listening and stopping and starting); another, I missed more than half. This was frustrating, especially on top of my growing sense that reading novels and listening to RA is not the most efficient, effective way for me to be going about this. I'm sure I'd get there, but too slowly for my wishes.

Browsing around the 'net I happened upon a free, short placement test from a local uni and it confirmed what I had started to suspect: the gaps in what I used to know are too great to make up for the advanced things I still know. I placed A1, simply because I have forgotten too much basic vocabulary and grammar, and being able to recognize advanced verb tenses in no way compensates for this.

I downloaded the FSI Basic Spanish course, volume one and printed it, because I vastly prefer printed study materials. If I'm going to keep studying Spanish (more on that below), then I'm going to go at it with guns blazing, because that's all that makes sense.

But am I going to keep studying Spanish (or anything else)?

It will take two years at a consistent two hours a day for me to achieve sufficient skill in Spanish that I can forgo the use of a telephone interpreter in my work with refugees. Beyond that are Farsi, Turkish, Russian, Chinese and a handful of other languages we regularly encounter -- at another 4, 4, 4 and 8 years of consistent two-hours-a-day study each. That's a long time and a lot of hours.

I haven't decided yet; I'll take February to do that. Of course I can keep dabbling whenever I feel like it, for fun, and I imagine I will, now and then. But that will be "getting off the pot" rather than.... staying on it.

[MorkTheFiddle]

One day at a time, my man, one day at a time.
Admiration for your help to those with less!

[grayson]

February 2024 retrospective

Goodbye, intensive language study
As planned, I spent February carefully deciding whether continuing to pursue Spanish mastery will best serve my life goals going forward. And the clear answer is: no. It's astonishing how disappointed I am by this. I mean, I am clear that it's the right choice, but it's also hard to give up the thrill of excitement when I think about language-learning things. Grammar! Deciphering words heard on a train! Being able to read books! Being able to answer refugee questions!

But my overarching desire in life is to feel I am spending and have spent it meaningfully, and mastering any new language just isn't on that path for me. Even for my work with refugees. Mastering any single language would only enable me to help a small slice of them in their own tongue; mastering several is an obvious pipe dream (not to mention a decades-long endeavor). We have interpreters for long conversations, and for short ones, simply creating a short table of common things they ask / I say would do the trick in many cases. ("I will be in the next room if you need help. Please send your documents to this email address and I will print them out for you.") And for things not in that table, there are apps like SayHi that do a pretty solid job of bridging the gap.

In short, it is not remotely the best use of my time to learn languages in order to help make the world a saner place.

Hello, new career teaching Dutch
Quoting from my 2024 Beeminder journal (my main log):

After last month’s realization that money cannot be a relevant factor in deciding how I spend my time, combined with my ultimate goal to spend as much of my time as I can concretely being a light in the darkness, it was suddenly obvious that I should look at vacancies similar to the work I do now as a volunteer with the Dutch Refugee Council.

So I pinned a few refugee-organization tabs and refreshed them daily. A lot of what came by required a background in social work (which I don’t have), but there were also lots of vacancies for teachers of Dutch as a second language (“NT2”). So many that I finally took a look (I’d assumed you’d have to be a native speaker to qualify, but you don’t; you just have to speak the language incredibly well – C2+ on the CEFR scale). I also discovered that there’s a serious shortage of certified NT2 teachers.

I am particularly captivated by the NT2-teacher vacancies at the COA, the national organization tasked with maintaining and staffing the country’s refugee centers. These are full-time positions where you’re a part of the whole team of counselors and support staff, attending morning briefings and interacting with residents outside of class time, too – really being a full part of a system designed to support, shelter and nurture them.

So I applied for a one-year certification program in Amsterdam and, after an intake interview to assess whether my Dutch was good enough, am delighted to report that I will be starting in September. Before that, I’ll attend a four-session preparatory course in May for participants who are not coming from a previous career or degree in education. In the summer of 2025 I’ll be certified and ready to find a position.

So.... learning THAT language did contribute directly to your current goals, didn't it?
Yes, it did. I've thought about this and here's what stands out for me: I met my husband (just celebrated our 25th anniversary) while I was taking Dutch lessons in the US in 1995. Without that, Dutch would be yet another language where I have three words and a few sounds I can pull out at parties.

Seen one way, learning Dutch gave me my husband, our children, a life in Europe, and a career as a translator. And I think that's a great way to frame it. But the important thread through all of that is that meeting my future husband is what made it worth continuing to learn Dutch. His mother speaks no English, so my Dutch was useful when we visited them or they visited us. After we moved to NL in 2002, it was very useful to speak the local language at my kids' school, in shops, on the street. In short, there was a real-world reason that made improving my Dutch worthwhile to my goals at that time. It was never, after that first year, about learning a language for its own sake.

Someday I may have a real-world reason that makes learning another language more than just a fun pastime. I don't rule it out forever! Just for now.