A teaching and learning log

[Caromarlyse]

The first place I worked used basically an audiolingual method. [...] Relevant here is that plenty of the students didn't like the method [...], but I can ony think of two who didn't like the corrections! [...]

The second place where I saw a different way of looking at correction was really young learners (around 4 and 5). They loved trying and being corrected, trying again and being corrected, trying again... They correctly saw it as a game, not as something serious where a mistake means something is wrong, nor as something competitive where a mistake might mean you look like you're not as good at it as the others. [...]

The biggest take homes for me are that expectations matter and levels matter.

Regarding expectationbs, all the best methods I know have something to change the expectations regarding errors. [...]

Regarding levels, the communicative approach encourages you to learn by creatively using the language to communicate something real. This is exactly what advanced learners and strong intermediate students need IMHO. [...] control should be passed over gradually as students grow in competence. In the beginning, the teacher should be in complete control and by the advanced level, the student should be in complete control. In the months and years in between, the teacher should be gradually and strategically* passing over more and more control to the students. This is what I would want if I could afford classes. IMHO the communicative approach excels at the latter end of this process and is actually damaging at the start. [...]

You didn't say what level you are or what approach your classes follow.

Thanks for your very full reply. I find it interesting to hear about it from a teacher's perspective.

I've looked up the audiolingual method (I'm not all that au fait with all of these pedagogical methodologies), and I think personally I'd hate it, because I rely so much on the written word and get very confused if I can't match sounds to it! But I too don't mind corrections. I think we all like to know where we stand, so I can imagine that expectation setting is important here.

As to your point on levels and questions about me, I have different languages at different levels, and different experiences.

Russian I started as a beginner with a teacher who (I realise now, but didn't know at the time) used the communicative method. When experiencing it (but without then being able to put a name on it), I found it unhelpful at times - for example, sometimes I was asked to do stuff that was more creative/free form when I didn't have the level for it, so I felt I was forced into translating quite directly from English and I didn't end up retaining anything. I also think that, in my case, too many of my pronunciation errors were glossed over, which has created a whole lot of remedial work for me to do now. When I found a textbook with longer texts that I started to work through on my own, and then recycled words/collocations taken from there, I could do a lot better in writing tasks. I also found (though whether this is the communicative method at play or not, I don't know) that there was very little repetition of material covered in previous classes, plus scarcely any opportunity given to prepare in advance for a class, with the topic generally being unveiled on the day - both these things really impacted my ability to remember/recall vocabulary. I can't completely disparage the approach taken, as I did learn the language to some extent, and it got me over my fear of speaking. Plus, it's impossible to say whether or not I'd have had the same issues with a different approach. But I do have a pretty major beef with the lack of correction causing real difficulties for me now trying to move forward. I'm experiencing two major problems: (1) teachers wanting to regress in all areas to address the pronunciation issues, rather than being able to do remedial work in one area but push me forward in others; and (2) teachers not incorporating enough repetition and not being patient enough to provide correction over and over where it is required. Issue (1) is huge but exceptionally common. Issue (2) is possibly down to teachers not wanting to be boring, and is not an absolute deal breaker, but it would be nice. I have other experiences in different languages, including at higher levels, but I could go on for pages, and I am in a bit of a funk today about my Russian pronunciation so I should probably stop. Essentially, which is where I think this conversation started, I am all for a lot of correction!

[Random Review]

Learning:

Today I finished lesson 16 of Level 3 of the SSiW new course. I have also worked through 6 of the level 2 vocab units (old course) and 10 more Glossika sentences bringing me to 155 (I miscounted by 5 before!). I'm really enjoying this second romp through level 3 (my first one being about 9 months earlier followed by a long break from Welsh). One thing I'm really noticing with levels 2 and 3 is how much my recall after 9 months depends on my cognitive load at the initial exposure. I should probably unpack this.

Certain sounds are quite hard to distinguish in Welsh and the challenges are entirely oral. An interesting example is that I find /v/ (spelled "f" in Welsh) and voiced th /ð/* (spelled "dd" in Welsh) much harder to distinguish in Welsh than in English, because the Welsh "dd" is much stronger than the English voiced "th". Whenever a word contains a difficult to hear sound, my recall after the 9-month break is less strong.
Similarly, some words are introduced inside difficult structures, such as those containing conjugated prepositions. Again, my recall of these words is less strong after the break.
One last example: sometimes Aran and Catrin (the two voices) pronounce things differently. Whenever that happens, my recall after 9 months...

It's really quite systematic and reliable. I hadn't intended to write about it quite yet, but there was a real humdinger this week (I have underlined and bolded the relevant parts:

Trust you = ymddiried ynddoch chi

This has a difficult to distinguish sound (I really had to strain to hear if "ymddiried" was "dd" /ð/ or "f" /v/).
This has a difficult structure (a conjugated preposition).
This has a pronunciation difference between Aran and Catrin (Catrin doesn't seem to pronounce the underlined "dd").

As you might imagine, with a full house like this, I had zero recall of this word (the first time this has happened) and it has taken me a few lessons to start getting it.

Teaching:

I had a less draining week this week, but I'm still feeling a ​bit burned out. I've decided to take a week off at the start of August (my first since New Year. I really feel like I need it.


Finally, I know that I had said I would write about the connection between my touch typing errors and Welsh mutations, but I really want to use my time to reply to the latest post from Caromarlyse. I don't want to be presumptious and assume that anyone would notice or care that I'm pushing it back, but I thought I should explain for the sake of politeness. Having someone interested enough to talk to me at such length about the issues Caromarlyse raises is too nice an opportunity for me to pass up.


* the "th" in "the".

[Random Review]

Russian I started as a beginner with a teacher who (I realise now, but didn't know at the time) used the communicative method. When experiencing it (but without then being able to put a name on it), I found it unhelpful at times - for example, sometimes I was asked to do stuff that was more creative/free form when I didn't have the level for it, so I felt I was forced into translating quite directly from English and I didn't end up retaining anything. I also think that, in my case, too many of my pronunciation errors were glossed over, which has created a whole lot of remedial work for me to do now.

You're quite right about all of that. These are some of the reasons I hate using the communicative method with beginners. It's not only not very effective, it can also be damaging to long-term proficiency unless the teacher is extremely careful.

I also found (though whether this is the communicative method at play or not, I don't know) that there was very little repetition of material covered in previous classes, plus scarcely any opportunity given to prepare in advance for a class, with the topic generally being unveiled on the day - both these things really impacted my ability to remember/recall vocabulary.

All the coursemaps I've seen and used don't build in nearly enough review. Most teachers with regular classes make up for this by planning regular review into their lesson plans and if you have a regular teacher (communicative or not), he or she should absolutely be doing that.
An important caveat is that if you tend to have different teachers, there's not much they can do and you're relying on the design of the course and are likely to be very disappointed.

One other caveat: online teachers for the company I work for do not get paid for planning time and our wage is so low* that when I plan classes for regular students, I effectively take my wage for those classes below the UK minimum wage. I often choose to do that for most of my regular students, but teachers who choose not to (and me when I don't!) definitely don't deserve criticism. I also never plan classes for students I don't know well (remember that this would involve working for free), I use the cookie-cutter lesson plan provided by the company.

I think it is quite common for online companies to cut wage costs by using this McDonalds-type model. As a teacher, if you don't plan, you're at the mercy of the coursemap regarding review. This is less a flaw in the communicative method and more a consequence of the new cookie-cutter approach of many (most?) online companies. If your teacher is freelance or works for a company that pays them for planning time and you are a regular student, then they should definitely be planning in review regardless of the method.

* My first year, I got 9p an hour more than the legal minimum wage. Now in my second year, I get 59p an hour more. The former wage can easily be obtained washing dishes (which I did for 8 years) and the latter wage sometimes can too. Washing dishes at least comes with a social side and camaraderie to compensate the low wage.

I'm experiencing two major problems: (1) teachers wanting to regress in all areas to address the pronunciation issues, rather than being able to do remedial work in one area but push me forward in others; and (2) .............................................................. Issue (1) is huge but exceptionally common.

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but what you are expecting from your teachers regarding issue 1 is actually really, really difficult. I've been teaching for 7 years and I think you can probably tell by now that I work really hard but I'm still not very good at doing what you expect. It's much easier to help students avoid problems than to fix them and fixing them while keeping other areas moving forward in an interesting way and still following a methodology and a coursemap all the while is harder still. I've known teachers with that kind of skill level (they are out there), but the majority of teachers I have known (including me!) aren't very good at it. For us, it requires an exceptional amount of planning.

Caromarlyse, you mention "teachers" in the plural and a lot of what you want from your classes isn't really compatible with that. Much of what you are asking for (and I know there's no way you could know this) requires your teachers to do extra work for free- at least if the company I'm at is typical. The majority of teachers I have worked with (including me) are willing to do this for our regular students; but I wouldn't do that for a student who I didn't know or one I only saw occasionally. I honestly think you would be better off with 1 regular teacher for the kind of work you mention.

Caromarlyse, before moving on, I want to thank you for this interesting conversation and I just want to make sure that you know that my robust defence of (most) teachers above does not imply any criticism of you or that I think your criticisms of your classes aren't valid. On the contrary, I think most of them are totally valid, I just maybe disagree about the target. I also don't think your expectations for your classes are unrealistic: again, I just disagree about the target.

I'm really grateful that you've taken the time to share all this with me.

I am all for a lot of correction!

I don't really know where I stand TBH. I definitely think that correction is often better than doing nothing (especially with lower levels); but I don't really think it's usually very powerful. When teachers plan our own lessons, one of our major goals is to scaffold activities enough to allow students to do it without making many important errors (I'll unpack what I mean by "many" or "important" in a minute). Then there's the issue of what actually is an error.

At this point, I seem to have written War and Peace and I'm worried that no one will read it except us. This is a worry for me as what I want to say next is stuff that I always intended to talk about in this language log. I'm going to post this as is and then start writing the second part of my reply separately. Hope that's OK. I t should be up tonight too.

[Caromarlyse]

All the coursemaps I've seen and used don't build in nearly enough review. Most teachers with regular classes make up for this by planning regular review into their lesson plans and if you have a regular teacher (communicative or not), he or she should absolutely be doing that. An important caveat is that if you tend to have different teachers, there's not much they can do and you're relying on the design of the course and are likely to be very disappointed. One other caveat: online teachers for the company I work for do not get paid for planning time and our wage is so low* that when I plan classes for regular students, I effectively take my wage for those classes below the UK minimum wage. I often choose to do that for most of my regular students, but teachers who choose not to (and me when I don't!) definitely don't deserve criticism. [...]

I'm definitely live to the issue of pay, and (hope!) I don't expect too much in terms of planning outside of classes. I think even just spreading a topic over more than one class would solve the issue, which shouldn't involve any more work. In all of my cases, I'm not following or expecting to follow a set curriculum, so that should be feasible.

I'm experiencing two major problems: (1) teachers wanting to regress in all areas to address the pronunciation issues, rather than being able to do remedial work in one area but push me forward in others; and (2) .............................................................. Issue (1) is huge but exceptionally common.

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but what you are expecting from your teachers regarding issue 1 is actually really, really difficult. I've been teaching for 7 years and I think you can probably tell by now that I work really hard but I'm still not very good at doing what you expect. It's much easier to help students avoid problems than to fix them and fixing them while keeping other areas moving forward in an interesting way and still following a methodology and a coursemap all the while is harder still. I've known teachers with that kind of skill level (they are out there), but the majority of teachers I have known (including me!) aren't very good at it. For us, it requires an exceptional amount of planning.

Caromarlyse, you mention "teachers" in the plural and a lot of what you want from your classes isn't really compatible with that. Much of what you are asking for (and I know there's no way you could know this) requires your teachers to do extra work for free- at least if the company I'm at is typical. The majority of teachers I have worked with (including me) are willing to do this for our regular students; but I wouldn't do that for a student who I didn't know or one I only saw occasionally. I honestly think you would be better off with 1 regular teacher for the kind of work you mention.

Interesting to hear that this is such a problem, and it helps to reset expectations. I should clarify, however, that in my case I had a single teacher for around 150 classes before trying to move on to someone new (and struggling to find someone, hence the use of the plural). My aim is just to work with one person, because my experience is that you then get to know one another better, and there is also more motivation on the teacher's part to commit to you once you've committed to them. I have found someone who I think should work out now with what I want, and who has suggested taking some time out of each class for remedial work, and some to move forward with different stuff, so I hope the planning burden there is not too heavy. Also I'd stress that I am prepared to pay for this, and am definitely not trying to exploit anyone!

At this point, I seem to have written War and Peace and I'm worried that no one will read it except us. This is a worry for me as what I want to say next is stuff that I always intended to talk about in this language log. I'm going to post this as is and then start writing the second part of my reply separately. Hope that's OK. I t should be up tonight too.

Sorry for derailing your thread, and thanks for your responses!

[Random Review]

I think even just spreading a topic over more than one class would solve the issue, which shouldn't involve any more work. In all of my cases, I'm not following or expecting to follow a set curriculum, so that should be feasible.

TBH it actually does involve quite a bit more work than you might think if you are not their regular student. You have to find the previous classes, read the teaching notes and any comments left by those teachers and try to work out exactly wat was covered and what might need to be reviewed. However, now that you have a regular teacher again, I'm sure they will do more than that. I'm sure they will schedule reviews intelligently.

I should clarify, however, that in my case... and am definitely not trying to exploit anyone!

Ah, that's exactly what I had in mind. I see you were way ahead of me.
I definitely didn't want to insinuate that you were exploiting anyone. Regardless of what I feel about the company, I love working with my regular students and any extra work I do for them is because I want to (hence why I never do it for non-regulars). It's regular students like you that have stopped me ditching teaching completely. Most teachers I worked with were exactly the same.

I'd also say that due to the very differet cost of living, a minimally adequate wage in the UK is far too much money to ask of someone in, say, Indonesia. It would be affordable for students from Japan, S. Korea or (these days) China; but it would be unfair to charge that to someone in Brazil. This wasn't a problem when the teacher went to live in Indonesia or Brazil, but with online classes, I'm not sure how this circle can be squared.

Sorry for derailing your thread, and thanks for your responses!

You are crazy. You have brought it alive. I was worried I'd just be in here talking to myself!


Anyway, part two of my answer to your previous post:

I'm not sure how I feel about correction other than that it is better than doing nothing. With the new cookie cutter model of online teaching of pre-prepared one-size-fits-all lesson plans for on-demand classes, it's the only tool left in a teacher's toolbelt; but that wasn't how it was when we planned our own lessons. Really, correction is plan D for when plans A, B and C fail. A lot of planning was about scaffolding activities adequately so students could actually do them, anticipating errors and intervening before the student was asked to use the language, and building rapport so that students naturally want to model their output on what they hear from you. The lesson plans provided to me now don't scaffold activities adequately, I can't anticipate errors for a lesson plan I first saw 5 minutes ago with students I just met and there is obviously far less rapport than with a regular class so students often ignore my models to say it their way (which is often not correct). I'm exaggerating when I say it's the only tool I have left, but not by much.

Expectations about errors are not just about how many errors you expect to make. Really the words "error" and "correction" are a bit misleading for what a teacher actually does. The simplest example of this is that I often don't want to correct an incorrect sentence and do want to "correct" a perfectly grammatical and well-pronounced one.

A simple example would be getting a student to use contractions and weak forms***. What the student said might be (usually is!) perfectly correct, but I might want to ask them to use the contractions and weak forms to sound more natural. Chinese students are often very reluctant to do this even when asked, so it feels like correction. On the other hand, a student might pronounce the unaspirated /p/ sound in "sp" as an "sb" (schoolteachers in China often tell their students to do this) and I wouldn't correct this even though it's not correct. It's so subtle that you have to listen really carefully to hear it and most people wouldn't notice (I also don't notice unless I'm actually listening carefully for pronunciation). Also, the more I learn, the more I find out that this sort of simple model (voiced/unvoiced; aspirated/unaspirated)is often an oversimplification. Phonetics and phonology are much more complicated than that and I'm not an expert (although I try my best to read about them and to learn). There's a lot of stuff about voice onset time that I'm still in the process of trying to understand and so there's always the genuine risk of my being totally wrong about subtle stuff like that if I decide to correct the student.

It's the same with grammar. Here are a few things I heard yesterday:

1) My child will always use crying to get what he wants.

This is a perfectly correct sentence in the right context but it just doesn't sound natural to me in the context in which it was uttered (sharing a problem). It's not wrong per se, even in that context; but the fact that it sounds unnatural indicates that its meaning probably isn't precisely what the student intended. The student had a Chinese L1 and this pattern is very common for Chinese students. It's a perfectly correct sentence that successfully gets the meaning across and yet I would consider correcting it (in the end, I didn't).

2) ... teached...
This is a 100% incorrect form from an intermediate Chinese student and I wouldn't dream of correcting it (I might with a different L1 or a different level). I know from experience that Chinese students usually do very well learning irregular verbs and so this error is very unlikely to stick. I also know that students with a Chinese L1 find it very difficult to remember to use the feature "tense" at all. Correction would have risked giving her a negative feeling for correctly doing the hard part (using the past tense) just because she made a small error that is unlikely to stick in the long term.


In addition to the above, there's another way that correction is not about getting correct sentences. It's about the process and the underling representations. Let's start with the latter:

I have a regular Italian student who regularly dropped subject pronouns ("I think is impossible"). We tried a number of techniques, so I'm not sure which one "worked", but over a couple of months she made these errors less and less often. They flared up again for a few lessons several months later when we did a lesson with some subject "wh" questions (which tells me a lot about her underlying representation of those questions in her mind!) but we got through that patch too. She also starts to make mistakes whenever we have a topic that uses a lot of preposition phrase subjects. She seems to mentally represent them as a subjectless sentence with a prepositional adjunct.

For example, where I hear:

After the class is OK for me.

What she sometimes seems to hear is:

After the class, ∅ is OK for me.

This means I have to listen really carefully to subtle (don't let the comma fool you into thinking there's a big pause) differences in her intonation and rhythm and other clues to try to decide if she is representing this sentence in a grammatical (in terms of English grammar) way. I don't know for sure if I do that successfully.

You can see that you can often only decide if something is an error in the overal context of your experience with a student (especially one you know well). Going back to the overuse of "will" for habits by Chinese students. The other day I had a class on housework and one of the students was Chinese. He used "will" to describe how often he does chores every single time he was called on. None of his individual sentences sounded unnatural to me, but the cumulative effect of using "will" every time did. His individual sentences were fine but he clearly arrived at them via an underlying representation of "will" that isn't accurate.**

The second thing I mentioned is the process being more important than the result. One of the things I think that Mihalis from Language Transfer understood like few others about Michel Thomas is that that kind of course is all about building nested structures of processes in the right order and heirarchical relations for the language being taught to turn meanings into sentences. That's a very unclear sentence (sorry) so let me illustrate:

When I was learning Spanish I learned the subjunctive from books and took a wrong turn (like so many other students, the books mostly do a bad job of this!). What I unintentionally ended up with was a very different system to native speakers or advanced speakers. Let's take a very basic sentence:

Quiero que me llames

I see that you have studied Spanish and I guess that most people on here know that "llames" is a subjunctive form. How I would arrive at a sentence like that is by getting to the verb in a subjunctive context, access "llamas" as the meaningful form for "call" in that person, number and tense and then convert "llamas" into "llames". After 2 years in Madrid, I got quite good at this and rarely made mistakes (that was 6 years ago and I'm helluva rusty now, though!). However, I don't think that's what really proficient speakers do. I think they never at any point access "llamas". Perhaps (if you're of a lexicalist bent) they search their mental dictionary through the subjunctive forms until they find "llames", perhaps (if you're a hardcore generativist) they access syntactic structures for building subjunctive forms from roots to build "llames" or perhaps something else; but whatever it is, they're not doing what my mind was doing and building from "llamas". Undoing this is a bit of a project of mine at the moment.

I can see the same kind of thing with students. I have a brilliant student from China who rarely makes tense and article errors but gets frustrated with herself when she does (because she hears them). She has studied all the grammar books intensely. I strongly suspect that what she does is similar to me with the Spanish subjunctive. The articles are the ones I'm most confident about so I'll do that one (although I'd love to go through tense one day!). What she seems to do is reach the noun (or more accurately build the noun phrase without articles) and then decide if she needs to add an article or not and which one. This means that she makes mistakes whenever her cognitive load is high. I'm pretty confident that this is not what natives do. For a start, from introspection, it doesn't feel right. But I also have more concrete evidence:

1) You can sometimes literally hear natives repeating "a" or "the" while they search for the exact noun they want. They seem to have already planned the right article for the meaning of the noun phrase before theyeven find the noun.

2) We sometimes change our mind about using a noun mid-sentence and when we do, we seem to be as bad at using articles as learners are. For example, on YouTube, I often hear things like "It's great build". You can hear in the intonation that they started to say "it's great" and then at the last minute decided to specify that what was great was a build. I guess it's possible that this could just be a linear order thing, but it feels like it's more than that, because if I actually heard myself say this, I would go back and restart the noun phrase. The fact that natives often don't do that, makes me feel that we didn't even process the missing article (if that makes any sense to you).

There's obviously a great deal of scope for teacher error and misinterpretation here*
I know I should get to the point. Above you said:

and not being patient enough to provide correction over and over where it is required.

I have a regular student who once pulled me up for not correcting her on some of her errors. She said that it affected her confidence when teachers didn't correct her. I was able to show her my extensive handwritten notes on her errors and that I was thinking very hard on what did and didn't need to be corrected when and how. She was happy with that and she's still my regular student. I actually wrote this before in a message on the previous page but deleted it from the final draft because it paints me in a falsely positive light.

That's going to have to be it for now. I also wanted to talk about the tension between feedback and rapport (especially with regards to recasts), about the different techniques teachers use to elicit correction of different stages of production and about explicitly handing over responsibility with teenagers. If I haven't bored you to tears today, maybe we can talk about those three some time? Either way, I look forward to reading your reply to this and your thoughts on what I wrote.

* This isn't something wrong with teachers. The other day in the supermarket, the checkout wouldn't let me use contactless. It said there was a £45 limit for contactless. I was making a £5 purchase at the time! I called over the assistant and she told me that this sometimes happened with contactless for security reasons. Of course, I knew that! The problem was that the message was normally "Contactless is not available at this time". I had never seen this new message and it didn't seem to make much sense to tell me there was a £45 limit when I was making a £5 purchase. It's understandable why the assistant made this incorrect assessment of my issue. It's just part of life whenever there is an asymmetry of information.

** For anyone who knows Chinese, I strongly suspect that this and other patterns (such as with conditionals) is partly because Chinese students map "will" onto "会" (although lexical aspect also seems to be part of it).

*** Weak forms:

[Caromarlyse]

I think even just spreading a topic over more than one class would solve the issue, which shouldn't involve any more work. In all of my cases, I'm not following or expecting to follow a set curriculum, so that should be feasible.

TBH it actually does involve quite a bit more work than you might think if you are not their regular student. You have to find the previous classes, read the teaching notes and any comments left by those teachers and try to work out exactly wat was covered and what might need to be reviewed. However, now that you have a regular teacher again, I'm sure they will do more than that. I'm sure they will schedule reviews intelligently.

Sorry, I've been a bit busy, but just to clarify, my situations were all where I had just one teacher for a package of lessons, and that single person didn't build in any review at all. I wouldn't expect anyone to pick up from someone else and ensure overlap!

[Random Review]

Sorry, I've been a bit busy, but just to clarify, my situations were all where I had just one teacher for a package of lessons, and that single person didn't build in any review at all. I wouldn't expect anyone to pick up from someone else and ensure overlap!

Genuinely surprised by that. I don't know what lies behind that omission. I'm sorry.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

[Random Review]

Sorry I've missed so many weeks. I read a rather scathing opinion about language teachers elsewhere on the forum that upset me. I respect the person who wrote it and they're totally entitled to express their opinion; but I just didn't feel up to writing on here for a while. I'm not quite sure why I was so emotionally fragile with respect to this topic. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I don't want to give up on trying to write this log.

I finished all 3 levels of SSiW (both old and new courses) and felt like taking a break from Welsh. I'm still doing 10 new Glossika sentences a week to keep it ticking over. I'm currently on 367 sentences (so a little over a 3rd of the way through level 1).

I'm working through Pimsluer Indonesian at the moment, which I still had on my Audible account from when I was in Indonesia. I hadn't even looked at Indonesian since I left Indonesia and frankly found the language uninteresting when I was there; but maybe I was too quick to dismiss it.
Long story short, I randomly read a claim in a paper that "lah" is a focus marker in Indonesian. I've been really interested in syntax for the last couple of years and had been rather envious of claims for focus marking in cool languages like Fongbe. I guess I had heard so many claims of Indonesian being simple and practical that I never even looked for cool things like that. I mean, I knew that "yang" was interesting and the prefixes were interesting, but I mistakenly thought that was it (and I probably underestimated just how interesting even those are). So, anyway, I have nothing else I particularly want to do right now, so I'm giving Indonesian another chance. My feelings about Indonesia are a mystery to me TBH. I know exactly why I liked Spain and why I didn't like China; but I honestly don't really know why I didn't like Indonesia. I think maybe I just went there with a negative attitude because of where I was emotionally and because of China and maybe I didn't give the place a fair chance. I'd already decided I hated it before I even got there.

So I'm on lesson 22 of Pimsleur and plan to continue to spend about 30 minutes a day when I finish it. I'm also reading some grammar because I find it interesting.

I've also been playing with the FSI Yoruba tone drills. I don't plan to try to learn Youruba, I'm just curious about it and how it works (and have been for years). The drills are good although many of the tapes cut off part way through. It's a fascinating language.

I plan to reactivate my Spanish and German and eventually to get there with Chinese and Welsh; but in terms of actually learning to speak a language, that might well be it for me (I may or may not add Indonesian and Irish to that). Apart from those 4 (or 5), I plan to indulge my real passion, which is using languages (plural) as a way for me to explore language (singular) and to play with the languages that I'm most curious about (at the moment, that would be Greek, Norwegian, Yiddish, Swahili, Yoruba, Cantonese and Manx). It would be nice to at least be able to read some of them, though.

Indonesian is already rewarding me with interesting structures. For example, I find it interesting that you have to use "yang" with subject questions. In English, it's difficult to tell if "who" has been fronted from the normal subject position to the left periphery in subject questions (and I've seen arguments both ways). For example:

Who eats bananas?
Bob eats bananas?
Who does Bob eat?

Is that first "who" in the usual subject position like "Bob" or is it in the usual left periphery "wh" position like the "who" in the 3rd question? As I said above, there is some disagreement among syntacticians regarding English and I'm obviously not qualified to adjudicate based on syntactic argumentation. However, liking languages can help IMHO. English doesn't offer much evidence either way and the question doesn't really arise in Chinese as Chinese "wh" words are expressed in situ. German is suggestive, but its V2 syntax means subjects work quite differently (for example, any main clause subject in a VSO* main clause automatically must be in the left periphery and that would apply to "wer" too). Spanish, well, Spanish is complicated when it comes to subjects ha ha.

But Indonesian really offers an insight. In Indonesian, you have the option to pronounce "what" and "who" in situ like Chinese or in the left periphery like English. As far as I understand it so far, if you have "wh" movement, you need to use "yang" (which seems to usually be analysed as some kind of complementiser). This means you can ask:

You want what?
Or
What yang you want?

The curious thing is that subject questions obligatorily need "yang" and so the "wh" word is presumably in the left periphery of the sentence. What you have to say is effectively:

Who yang eats bananas.

I know, Indonesian is not English, but when you put that together with the German pattern above, I'm starting to feel like English subject questions have "who" or "what" in the left periphery rather than in situ.

As for "lah", is it a focus marker? I don't know, I don't know enough Indonesian or enough about syntax to offer an opinion; but it's pronounced in approximately the right place in the sentence so I'm enjoying the idea.

Regarding teaching, I had a student from Japan who had already finished the lesson she chose, so we did some work on pronunciation, specifically /l/ and /r/.
She didn't do very well trying to imitate my pronunciation. I tested whether she could actually hear the distinction and she did no better than chance (this was an advanced student with excellent English in so many ways and near perfect grammar). Next, I tried giving her minimal pairs to pronounce and telling her what I heard her saying so that she could get feedback. For example, I gave her "leap" (which I glossed as jump) and "reap" (which I glossed as harvest). She was to try to pronounce "leap" or "reap" at her own discretion and I would respond with "jump" or "harvest" depending on what I heard her say. This proved a much better approach and she did start to improve. Then I remembered a video I saw on YouTube years ago. The guy in the video recommended reading sentences to a native speaker and having them rate you numerically on how native you sounded. I tried adding that to what we were doing. So for the example above, if she said an unclear "reap", I would reply "harvest 2" and if it was a clear one, I would reply "harvest 4" (or "5" if it was perfect). I wish I could remember this guy's name to credit him properly, because this proved to be an extraordinarily effective activity. I don't think I've ever seen such an extraordinary improvement. In 5 minutes, she went from being barely being able to pronounce /l/ and pronouncing /r/ quite poorly (particularly with the vowel /i:/) to being able to pronounce both perfectly.

In hindsight, it occured to me that this made sense as the exercise gave her immediate feedback that she could use (which my pronunciation didn't give her as she couldn't hear the distinction). It reminds me of something I remember Cainntear saying on here about learning to hear a sound by learning to pronounce it.

I really want to try this activity again, but I don't know when I'll have the chance. At any rate, fair play to the guy in the video based on what I saw in that class.

* Edit: SVO (don't write posts late at night, kids)

[Random Review]

Indonesian: In the last 2 weeks, I finished Pimsleur. I think I might continue with Indonesian. For now, I just did the first tape of the audiolingual course on Yojik as a kind of holding pattern.

Welsh: I'm currently on 397 sentences on Glossika. There has been a lot of use of "gallu" (and short-form versions of it) to mean "be able" in the last 20 Glossika sentences. The SSiW northern course covered it for literally about 2 minutes out of dozens of hours, so I figured it must be mainly southern. The northern course uses "medru" and variants. My curiosity got the better of me and I started the SSiW southern course.

What can I say? It seems a bit unproductive TBH; but I'm trying to move away from "shoulds" a bit more and be less embarrassed to just follow my curiosity. I'm already on lesson 18 of level 1 (having already done the northern course makes it easy to go quickly). As expected, the main difference I'm seeing so far is vocabulary and pronunciation. Gallu (and variants) came up right away. Other new words include cwpla for finish (the northern course uses gorffen), and the obvious ones like moyn for want and hoffi for like. As far as pronunciation is concerned, this is one area where the southern dialect strikes me as much easier than the northern one. The northern one is full of sounds that don't exist in English, like unvoiced versions of consonants like "r" and "m" (and others) and difficult vowels. As far as I can tell so far, the southern dialect seems only to have the infamous "ll" sound (which it shares with the northern dialect). Grammar differences are small so far. The southern dialect expresses "need" in a different way from the northern (lit: there's a need to me), but it's a way that is transparent and logical to anyone who has studied the northern course. It also seems to consistently use the doubled object pronouns* (with associated mutations). These were taught in the northern course, but were described as "posh" and taught as an optional bit of polish. They also use "i fi" instead of "i mi" for "to me", which is kind of intuitive given the relationship between /m/ and /f/ in the Welsh mutation system and hasn't caused me any problems at all. The one difference that really throws me is using (f)e instead of (f)o as he/him. That's the one thing I'm struggling with. It's facsinating to see it combines differently with vowels: it only uses the initial (f) after certain vowels, whereas the northern form (f)o seemed to add it more consistently after vowels.

Probably the most fascinating thing is the way they pronounce the "dd" sound /ð/. This is the same sound that we have in "the". When I was doing the northern course, I had a really hard time telling if words had this sound or the /v/ sound and often had to look it up. I'm having no such difficulty with the southern course! For example, when I heard the word cwrdd for "meet", it was new to me; but I heard clearly that it ended in /ð/ not /v/. I think the southern dialect must pronounce this sound exactly like the English equivalent. The northern course used cyfarfod for "meet".

Teaching: I have a really neat example sentence from my classes. A while ago, I commented that I think many students from China (at least) go through a stage where they process I'm, she's, you're, etc as subject pronouns. I had a beginner's class where one student very much seemed to be going through this stage.

I'm is sales. (intended: I'm a salesman).

This makes sense as an almost word for word translation of Chinese on the assumption that "I'm" is a subject pronoun here and glossing over "sales" for "salesman". This student clearly translated quite a lot in the class. Another sentence he produced was:

My father not is doctor.

This is Chinese, word for word. The interesting thing is that he seems to be using "not" as a negative adverb at this stage. I rarely see this stage (I think it must be too fleeting to see it often), but I do often see students who are a bit further on apparently using "don't" as an unanalysed chunk (again, they seem to use it as a negative adverb).

Well, as usual, this is getting too long. I'd better end it there. As always, a big thank you to anyone who reads this.


* I'm speaking loosely in an attempt to make it less confusing to anyone not studying Welsh. In reality, Welsh personal pronouns don't really have different case forms and the first element in what I'm calling doubled object pronouns is really (from what I've read) an agreement form.

Similarly I haven't tried to differentiate betwen phonetic and phonemic representations of sounds. In this case out of a fear of getting it wrong and being pulled up on it (ie. cowardice).