Now pay attention. This is not important.

The first line of an essay should usually be what we call a "hook," which is a line to get the reader's attention and make them want to know more. I always give my students various options for what a hook could be. For example, they could use a surprising statistic: "More than half of the people on Earth live on less than $2 a day." Another option would be a short anecdote. These aren't the only options of course, but they're very good and always neglected by my students. Nevertheless, they generally seem to ignore my suggestions and go for their old reliable formula, which goes something like "[whatever the topic is] is an important issue nowadays."

Of course, this doesn't really meet the criteria I was asking for. I like to point out to students that simply saying that something is important doesn't really make it important. More so, if a teacher or parent says to them, "Now pay attention. This is important," chances are they're not going to listen or think the upcoming is message is actually important. I tell them that good writers show instead of tell (like by using a statistic, or an anecdote, like I've been saying all along).

Still, other students have another strategy that still doesn't really work: they use the superlative. If saying "Fast food is an important thing in people's lives" is a weak hook and doesn't get the reader's attention, then certainly saying, "Fast food is the most important thing in people's lives," will. At least, I imagine this is what their thought process is. The problem is that this doesn't remotely make their writing stronger because it's clearly an exaggeration. The note I usually make when someone writes this is, "Really?!? More important than family? Than your religion? Than breathing?" This usually drives the point home. I then remind them of what I've been saying from the beginning, that they should use some sort of statistic or anecdote. For example, they could talk about how there's an intersection here in Doha that locals refer to as cholesterol corner because there are several American fast food chains on all sides of it, or they could also talk about how this city has the highest number of Hardee's restaurants per capita of any city in the world. I'm not sure that last one is actually true, but it feels like it. Seriously, there are an absurd number of Hardee's here.

Language Learning for Better Dental Hygeine

While brushing my four-year old's teeth we've started reviewing how to count to ten in a few different languages. The way it works is this. I divide his mouth into six sections: bottom back left, bottom back right, bottom back front, and then the same for the top of his mouth. As he brushes each section, I count to ten in a different language of his choice. Once I get to ten we move on to a different part of his mouth, and I count to ten in a new language.

So for instance, we usually start in English, so we count to ten while doing the bottom back left section. I ask him what he wants to do next. It might be Spanish, so I say "uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez" while he brushes the next part. Then we continue maybe in Hungarian, "egy, kettő, három, négy, őt, hat, hét, nyolc, kilenc, tíz." Next might be German, "eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn." We might continue with Slovak, "jeden, dva, tri, štyri, päť, šesť, sedem, osem, deväť, desať," and finish in Danish, "en, to, tre, fire, fem, seks, syv, otte, ni, ti."

The other day we were doing this, and I was counting in Slovak. I paused for a moment after saying the number three, and my son immediately jumped in and said "štyri," which I thought was very cool. It showed that he was paying attention and learning.

My wife points out that we should probably be brushing a little bit longer and should count to fifteen. I suppose that means I need to learn how to count higher than ten in Slovak and Danish.

Counting by Twenty

I recently reviewed how to count in Danish, and it uses a fairly unique system. In pretty much every language I've learned, multiples of ten are usually based on the other factor. That is, 2 times 10 is twenty, which is clearly based on the number "two." In Spanish, 4 x 10 is cuarenta, which is clearly based on the number "cuatro," and so on. Danish is unique in that numbers starting with fifty are based on multiples of 20, not 10.

20 tyve
50 halvtreds
60 tres
70 halvfjerds
80 firs
90 halvfems

Starting with 50, "halvtreds" is an abbreviation for "halv tred sinds tyve," where "halv tred" means 2.5 (though literally "half three", or one half less than three), "sinds" means "times" (as in to multiply), and "tyve" is twenty. So the number 50, instead of being based on 5 * 10 is actually based on 2.5 * 20.

Likewise, "tres" which is 60 is an abbreviation for "tre sinds tyve," which we've already established means 3 * 20.

The number four in Danish is "fire," and "halvfjerds" (70) is an abbreviation for "halv fire sinds tyve", or one half less than four (3.5) times 20, or simply 3.5 * 20 = 70. The number 80 is then simply "fire sinds tyve," or 4 * 20.

Finally, five is "fem." We should all see the pattern by now. One half less than five (halv fem) is four and a half. Multiply that times 20 and we get 90.

I was curious to see if this system of counting occurred in the other North Germanic, or Scandinavian languages. You can see what I found in Table 1.

Table 1. Comparison of numbers in Scandinavian languages

   
So clearly, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic all use the system where they multiple by ten. Faroese, the language spoken in the Faroe Islands which are a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, appears to use both systems. It also has the fewest speakers of all the North Germanic languages, making it hard to find a lot of written information on why it has two sets of numbers and when each are used.

If anyone is interested, I found this article on mentalfloss.com which discusses some other unique counting systems.

Eurovision 2013 Edition

An enjoyable way to learn a language is through music. When a song is catchy, you'll want to listen to it more than once which enables repetition for learning. If you learn the lyrics and sing along, then you'll again be repeating correct grammar and structures which help you practice the language. But finding music, let alone good music, can be difficult, especially if you're new to learning the language.

For those who want to learn a European language (or the language of a country that is close to Europe), the 58th edition of the annual Eurovision competition can be a good place to find music in multiple languages. Well, to a degree I suppose. Since countries aren't allowed to vote for themselves in the competition, there is the tendency for the music to be in English so that it appeals to the largest audience possible. In the last twenty years, the winning song has been entirely in English sixteen times. Still, each year plenty of songs enter the competition in other languages. In fact, my first exposure to Eurovision was when I was learning Hebrew in college and we learned the words to the 1979 winner, the incredibly catchy and upbeat הללויה (Hallelujah). Here is a list of all of this years' entries that are not in English, including links to lyrics to help with your language learning. If you click on the artist's name and profile, you'll get sent to their official link which includes the lyrics in the original language, English, and sometimes French. 

Didn't qualify for the final

Country: Croatia, Language: Croatian
Artist: Klapa s Mora, Song: Mižerja (Misery)

Country: Montenegro, Language: Montenegrin
Artist: Who See, Song: Игранка (Igranka, The Party)

Country: Cyprus, Language: Greek
Artist: Despina Olympiou, Song: Aν με θυμάσαι (An me thimasai, If You Remember Me)

Country: Serbia, Language: Serbian
Artist: Moje 3, Song: Љубав је свуда (Ljubav je svuda, Love is everywhere)

Country: San Marino, Language: Italian
Artist: Valentina Monetta, Song: Crisalide (Vola), (Chrysalis (Fly))

Valentina Monetta also represented San Marino in last year's contest where she sang a ridiculous song about Facebook. In fact, whenever someone mentions Facebook, I sing a little bit of the chorus to myself as a joke that only I get. This year, she's back with far more serious fare. I kind of liked this song, so I'm a little disappointed that it didn't go through to the final.

Country: Macedonia, Language: Macedonian, Romani
Artist: Esma and Lozano, Song: Пред да се раздени (Pred da se razdeni, Before the Sunrise)

Country: Bulgaria, Language: Bulgarian
Artist: Elitsa Todorova and Stoyan Yankulov, Song: Само шампиони (Samo shampioni, Only Champions)

Here's another one I'm disappointed didn't qualify for the final. I like the combination of heavy percussion and Bulgarian folk music (including bagpipes) mixed with modern pop/rock.


Country: Israel, Language: Hebrew
Artist: Moran Mozar, Song: רק בשבילו (Rak bishvilo, Only for him)

Country: Albania, Language: Albanian
Artist: Adrian Lulgjuraj and Bledar Sejko, Song: Identitet (Identity)

Qualified for Final

Country: Estonia, Language: Estonian
Artist: Birgit, Song: Et uus saaks alguse (So there can be a new beginning)

Country: Moldova, Language: Romanian
Artist: Aliona Moon, Song: O mie (A thousand)

Country: Iceland, Language: Icelandic
Artist: Eythor Ingi, Song: Ég á líf (I am alive)

Country: Greece, Language: Greek
Artist: Koza Mostra feat. Agathon Iakovidis, Song: Alcohol is Free

This is a somewhat odd combination of traditional rebetiko music and essentially ska. I think it kind of works though.

Country: Hungary, Language: Hungarian
Artist: ByeAlex, Song: Kedvesem (My darling)

From the little bit I've followed this in the Hungarian press, it seems like Hungarians are proud to have a song in the final, but disappointed that it's sung by someone they see as a hipster dufus. I actually like this song quite well. It's very simple and sweet, and I love when the timpani kicks in during the chorus.

Country: France, Language: French
Artist: Amandine Bourgeois, Song: L'enfer et moi

I like the thundering beat of the chorus and the video filled with memento mori, but is there anyway she can keep her dress straps up? It seems like in every shot of this video they're falling down to the point where it just seems comical.


Country: Spain, Language: Spanish
Artist: ESDM, Song: Contigo hasta el final (With you until the end)

If this is from Spain, why does it sound like it's from Ireland? Also, once the white horse appears it just makes me think of the Father Ted parody of Eurovision titled "My lovely horse." I guess this means this song didn't do much for me, since all I could think of the entire time were jokes.

Country: Italy, Language: Italian
Artist: Marco Mengoni, Song: L'essenziale (The essential)

Of course, as I already mentioned, this post only includes those entries that are not in English. There are nine other songs (all in English) that will be competing in the final. Personally, I put my money on either Malta's entry for just how cheerful it is (and because the guy is a full-time doctor, part-time singer. How cool is that?) or on Norway's I Feed You My Love, but that's probably because I'm a sucker for European electropop. You all should be able to tune in to find out for yourselves. The final airs starting at 9pm Central European Standard Time this Saturday and can be streamed online at Eurovision's website.

Writing Effective Essay Prompts

Purpose of Writing Prompts

I'd like to begin by making two important points about what the purpose of an essay prompt is. First, the ultimate goal of academic writing is for students to be able to identify their own topics and research questions. Since they probably can't do this to begin with, we provide them with writing prompts. This means that essay prompts are essentially scaffolding. That is, they ideally provide support for students to accomplish something they cannot currently do while also building the framework for skills they'll be able to use independently in the future. 

In addition, prompts in a writing class should have a different function than in a content class. In a content class, like say biology or history, an essay topic is often assigned to a student so that they can demonstrate knowledge of what they have learned. If the class just finished a unit on World War II, for instance, an appropriate prompt might be for them to write on the effects of the war on the German economy. In a writing class, however, the content is writing itself. So unless we want to assign some sort of bizarre meta-writing assignments (e.g., "What is the correct way to organize the essay you're currently writing?"), we need to consider some other options.

Besides demonstrating knowledge essays can also be written to create original knowledge. That is, instead of simply regurgitating what they learned from the unit, they can create a unique and original work based on their own ideas. What both of these points bring me to is critical thinking. When writing an essay prompt, I'm trying to prepare the students to be able to identify issues and create their own research questions. In addition, I want them to be able to write using new ideas instead of just repeating ones they've already learned.

Negotiable Curriculum

To accomplish this, I start with what is termed a negotiable curriculum (Mirembe, 2002). The original article where I read this from is about how a teacher in Uganda who had to to teach a sex education class, but instead of using the standard curriculum, elicited ideas from the students and built the syllabus around that. I figure if it's good enough for sex education, then it's good enough for my writing class. About a week before beginning an essay, I have an informal discussion with the students where we try to generate ideas for topics together. For instance, we recently worked on argumentative essays, and before that I gave the students the following task. I wrote on the board:

For each of the following categories, write which improvements you'd like to make.

• Personal
• Community
• University
• Country

Students would then have 5-10 minutes to write their answers (anonymously, of course) and then submit them to me. After class, I would go through all of the students' responses and see which ones had a high frequency. For instance, my students frequently talk about how they wish they had better time management skills under the personal category, or how they'd like to improve traffic in their community. Based on the high frequency interests that the class shares, I would then create prompts for the students to write on. In this way, I'm providing scaffolding for students by putting them on the path to identifying issues, but not yet having them create the actual research questions themselves.

A Few Rules

For creating the actual questions, I have a few rules that I try and follow. First, it should generally be a topic I know something about. This is simply because I have to make comments on the content of the essays and don't have time to look information up. A few semesters back I made the mistake of giving students the topic of "Which smartphone is better for students: iPhone or Blackberry." The problem is that I have never used a Blackberry, so whenever students said something about it, I had absolutely no idea if it was accurate or not.

Similar to this idea, my next rule is that it should be a topic the students already know something about. The first-year writing course I teach is not a research course, but even if it were I'd want to follow this rule. One reason for this is time since it would take the students more time than we have to research a completely new topic and then write about it. The other reason is that I again want them to create something original based on their own ideas, and if they have no previous knowledge of the topic, then this will be unlikely.

My next rule for topics is that it has to be something I actually want to read. Part of this is because there are certain topics that I've already read hundreds of times and don't want to read again. My university is gender-segregated with separate campuses for men and women. As such, students always want to write about having mixed gender classes, but I really don't feel like reading about it again. The other reason is that if I want them to write something unique and original, it should be about something where I actually want to know their opinions. Students frequently get asked to write about global warming, but to be honest, I really don't care what a 20-year old Qatari girl's opinion about global warming is. I recognize that it is important for my students to learn about and form responsible opinions about environmental issues, but if I didn't have to mark their assignments, I wouldn't have any interest in reading their opinion. There are, on the other hand, plenty of topics about my students' lives that I would like to know more about, since I otherwise only get to see small glimpses of their lives and culture. 

 Forcing Them to Think Critically

That isn't to say that I wouldn't use global warming as a topic. I try to write the questions in a way that usually involves some sort of synthesis in order to force them to think critically and make connections. So I would never give them something as simple as "What are the effects of global warming?", but I might give them "In what ways does global warming affect families in Qatar?"

Sometimes I come up with how to make a topic more specific based on follow-up questions I might have. For instance, a common topic that seems to float around our program is "Why is fast food popular?" which I don't find terribly interesting. Students usually respond with something about how inexpensive it is, which I think is kind of a ridiculous answer in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. So one semester I came up with this:

Inexpensive fast food is generally popular among the lower-class, yet it is extremely popular in Qatar, which is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Address this paradox by writing about the causes of the popularity of fast food restaurants in Qatar.

While they could answer the prompt, "Why is fast food popular?" without having to give it much thought, it is basically impossible to answer this second prompt without some level of critical thinking.

Similar to this, I try to write prompts that don't involve a lot of extremes. For instance, my students are very used to answering prompts where they have to argue for or against banning something, like cellphones in the classroom, or fast food on campus. In these essays, their arguments end up being that the topic being discussed is either completely good (so it should be kept) or completely terrible (so it should be banned). I try to use language that doesn't force them to one extreme or the other, like asking whether something should be limited or restricted, but not outright banned. This again forces them to think critically and in degrees instead of simply arguing that something is entirely good or entirely bad.
 
I think that sums up my thoughts pretty well. Oh, and I'll even cite the source I used here.

Mirembe, R. (2002). AIDS and democratic education in Uganda. Comparative Education, 38(3), 291-302. doi:10.1080/0305006022000014151    

Children's Television: Die Sendung mit der Maus

Since 1971, German children and adults alike have been enjoying the fantastic program Die Sendung mit der Maus (The Show with the Mouse) on the station Das Erste (available here), and I think you should too, especially if you're studying German (but honestly, even if you're not). I've already talked a little bit about the benefits of using children's television as a language learning tool here, and this show does many of those points very well.

Each episode consists of generally three short segments with animated shorts in between that natürlich feature the titular mouse and his sidekick elephant. The introduction of each show introduces all of the episode's segments, with the announcer previewing each in German. But then the introduction starts up again, only this time in a different language that changes each week. One week it might be Japanese, and the next Irish. At the end of the sequence, the announcer says "Das war..." (That was...) and tells you what the language of the week was. So already right there, it's earning points with me because it exposes the viewer to multiple languages.

The first segment usually seems to be some sort of educational video, often showing how something is made or how things work. Some of them are genuinely interesting, even for adults. Last week, for instance, they demonstrated the prototype of technology that could be placed on top of a cellphone and would be able to tell exactly what you're saying based solely on the movement of your face muscles (you can imagine the applications for this if you had to be quiet in the library, were at a loud rock concert, or had to say something secretive like a PIN code). If you look at the site now (meaning May 8th) you can see other ones that demonstrate how wind turbines work, or what it's like to have diabetes. Again, since the segments rely so heavily on visuals, it is fairly easy to follow even without knowing German. For those are trying to learn it though, the language is simple enough for young children, so it's a good place for beginners. (And if you don't believe me that watching children's television is easier, try watching another one of the programs on the site's player, like the nightly news or a soap opera like Sturm die Liebe and see how well you do). 

The rest of the segments seem to be geared more toward a younger audience, like Ringelgasse 19 where the children who have imaginative fantasies, or the giant blue bear Käpt'n Blaubär. There's sometimes even an episode of Shaun das Schaf (Shawn the Sheep), which is exactly the same as in English in that it contains no dialogue.

What I particularly like about watching the show online is that new episodes frequently have the option to watch them with subtitles, or untertitel (abbreviated "UT" on the player). These subtitles are of course in German, not in English. This allows me to try and watch a segment once and try and figure everything out. Then I go back with the subtitles and find words I don't know in a dictionary (the online Wörterbuch from Beolingus is excellent). After studying the words, I can go back and watch it again, and see how much better I can understand it without the subtitles. (It should be noted that the archive contains individual clips from previous shows, but none of them are subtitled).

Of course, this is all especially great if you have young children and want to expose them to different languages. My four-year old knows a couple of words from German now because of it. Of course, here refers to the main character not as "Die Maus" but as "Mitder Maus" (as though "mitder" were his first name).

Die Sendung mit der Maus is available for free and without the need of a VPN from Das Erste's website (here is the link one more time). New episodes are uploaded on Sundays. Subtitles are usually added a few days after. The show also has an interactive website that children might enjoy, found here.

What Makes a Language Useful

A few years ago, my wife informed me that her nephew was going to start studying a foreign language in middle school. He had wanted to study French, but his mother made him study Spanish instead, insisting that the language was more useful. Now admittedly, where their family lives, like most of the United States, has a much larger Spanish-speaking population than French, yet this still set off the usual rant I give whenever someone claims that one language is more important or more useful than another. Personally, I believe that different languages are like different tools in a toolbox, and that it is just as absurd to insist that a hammer is objectively more useful than a saw as it is to claim that one language is more important than another. Like the tools in my metaphor, it really depends on what your purpose is. If you're trying to cut wood in half, for instance, a hammer is going to be useless compared with a saw. Likewise, what makes a language useful depends wholly on what purpose you plan on using it for.

 statistics taken from Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth

The argument then usually goes something like this. The purpose of language is to communicate, and I agree with that just fine, but from there it only follows that the language that allows us to communicate with the highest number of people is the most useful. There are a lot of Hispanics in the area; therefore, Spanish is the most useful. From there, it follows that we should all use the list above to determine which languages are worth learning and which aren't (and I know that Hungarian has no business on this list, but I'm going to use it later to prove a point). However, basing usefulness on the number of speakers is clearly flawed for a number of reasons. The example I share with my students whenever we discuss this is that I speak two foreign languages: Spanish and Hungarian. Spanish has some 400 million speakers whereas Hungarian has roughly 15 million. I then ask them which one they think I use more often, and they all invariably answer Spanish, which is 100% wrong. Spanish, I explain, is something I learned while I was living in Argentina. While I was there, it was incredibly useful, but since leaving there (and especially since moving to Qatar) I have had very little use for it. That is, though there may 400 million people who speak it, I don't really have any reason or occasion to speak with any of them. Hungarian may have fewer native speakers, but it is the language of my ancestry. My grandfather spoke Hungarian. It's a language I want to pass on to my children, so I try to speak it with them everyday. I try to follow the news and keep up my proficiency in the language pretty much everyday. There may not be many Hungarian speakers here in Qatar, but I actively seek out the few there are. The point is that it's not the number of speakers that made the language important to me. I chose to make it an important part of my life, and so it is. Another way I like to put it is that a language is only as important as you make it. There may be several 100 million people who speak a language, but it doesn't mean I'm going to ever have any reason or desire to talk to any of them.

Another argument I sometimes hear, especially in Qatar, is that maybe the number of native speakers isn't what matters, but the language's potential to be used in multiple countries. A year ago, I asked some of students if they had to learn another language in addition to English, which one would it be. I suggested that another language from the Middle East like Turkish or Farsi might be useful because they are also important languages within Islam and their countries shared similar business and political interests as Qatar, but one student disagreed. She said that Turkish wasn't an important language at all because if she learned it she would basically only be able to communicate with people in Turkey. She went on to explain that Dutch would be much more useful because it is spoken in both the Netherlands AND Belgium. (This argument is, of course, flawed even by her own standards, since Turkish is also an official language in Cyprus, and Turks have immigrated to several different countries. For instance, though it is not an official language in Germany, there is a large Turkish population. There is also a large Turkish population right here in Qatar, where she lives). Beyond all that, if she were to travel to either the Netherlands or Belgium, wouldn't she just speak in English, since she already knew that language? Does she need an additional lingua franca? The question I ended up asking her was simply who in the Netherlands or Belgium was she planning on talking to and about what? Or was she planning on traveling there sometime? In other words, I wanted to know what her purpose was. A twenty-something Qatari girl may very well have some valid reasons to communicate with people from the Benelux countries, but if the only reason is because they're there, and they exist, it doesn't seem like the strongest reason. Ultimately though, I couldn't convince her. In her mind, two was greater than one, even if there were more compelling reasons to learn something spoken in only one country. 

Population of Qatar by ethnic group, taken from an interesting article on urban planning in Qatar

To further demonstrate that language usefulness isn't necessarily related to numbers, with this same class I tried to convince them that learning Tagalog, Sinhala, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, or Malayalam might be useful since immigrant laborers make up the largest percentage of the population of Qatar from India (20%), Nepal (13%), the Philippines (10%), Pakistan (7%), and Sri Lanka (5%). Since they work as housemaids, cooks, and drivers, I'm pretty sure every single one of my students knows someone that speaks one of these languages, yet I could not convince a single student that learning the language of the people that served them would be of any use. The reason they give is one I so often hear: we shouldn't learn their language because they should learn ours. I think this really demonstrates that learning a language is about more than just being able to communicate with different people. It also has to do with the relationship you want to have with the people and the culture that uses that language, and if you want to maintain a hierarchical relationship, you can't very well learn the language of the help.

Website: Chinese Lessons for Children

 My last few posts have definitely gotten into rant territory, so I wanted to move away from that for a moment and share a website I really like for learning Chinese. The website is designed with children in mind (but of course, adults who are beginners at Chinese can also get something out of it), which is no surprise since learning Chinese and Chinese immersion programs seem to be the new trend childhood education in the United States. This fun (and free) website contains 42 beginners lessons using interactive Adobe Flash videos, each centered around a theme. The first one, 你好 (How are you) mostly has school kids sharing some basic greetings. All the Chinese text is written in Simplified Chinese characters and includes pinyin above it to aid in learning the pronunciation (for more information on Chinese characters, you can read this previous blog post).

 

You can't tell from these screenshots, but each slide is animated. Besides the written dialogue, it also contains audio where the dialogue is pronounced. There are also sometimes sound effects or music.

  

At the end of each lesson is a screen or two that reviews the vocabulary used in the lesson. If you scroll over the character, it will pronounce it again, making it easier to repeat and review. It also helps to have an online Chinese dictionary if you want to look up any of the characters. Again, I recommend the one at zhongwen.com.

We were talking about putting my four-year old into a Chinese immersion program, so I started using this with him to see if he'd be interested. He seems to like it, though I must confess I haven't done it in a while and probably need to start doing it again more regularly. This is a crucial age to expose him to different things like languages, so I need to get back on that. What I really need to do is see if he'll enjoy using it and learn from it by himself, since he's also starting to discover the computer and wants to play on it all the time. Still, even without using the site for a while, he does remember the phrase 再见, which means good-bye, and he even pronounces it with the correct tones. So with that, I wish you all good-bye as well. 

再见!

Taking Offense

I keep seeing the above commercial, an advert for Emirates airlines, and something about it makes me feel uncomfortable. It's trying to show how their flight crews, like pretty much every flight crew on any international airline, is multilingual. It starts by showing a couple of different flight attendants getting ready for the day. One has a love note written in Italian, and another waves and greets someone "bonjour." Then, on the actual flight, one of the attendants greets a vaguely Asian looking man in Chinese, to which the man, who apparently doesn't speak Chinese, responds with an awkward, "Thanks. I think." They then both have a good laugh because racial profiling is funny.

Perhaps I'm simply overreacting to what is obviously meant to be a joke (though between you and me, I'm not). I had a friend who was of Korean descent when I was in college, and she told me all the time how annoyed she was that people were always trying to speak Chinese with her because 1) her family was originally from Korea, not China, and 2) she was American and spoke neither language. But to me at least, this all raises an interesting question: in an increasingly multilingual, multicultural world that doesn't remotely resemble a small village how do you decide which language to initiate a conversation with?

I first asked myself this question when I was taking a sociolinguistics course in graduate school. I had just come from living in Hungary for a year, and while there I would frequently visit museums in Budapest. I'd be, say, in the gift shop and want to ask someone who worked there a question. I would ask in Hungarian, and invariably they would answer me in English, which I found to be incredibly frustrating. I had, after all, initiated the conversation and chosen the language I wanted to speak in. I even took offense at this because I felt it was a judgement on my ability to speak Hungarian, as though they were saying that I couldn't possibly speak their language, so let's talk in English. The theory I ultimately came up with for why they did this to me was that it all comes down to context. I was, after all, at a museum frequented by tourists. Though I lived in the country, I was a few hours outside of Budapest, so I had a backpack on to carry some food with me, which made me look exactly like any other tourist who didn't really speak Hungarian, which is why they switched to English.

The context of this Emirates airlines flight is essential to determine whether the flight attendant's actions were borderline racist or not, that is, where was this airplane going? If it was a flight from Dubai to Beijing and a lot of the passengers were Chinese, then it was probably just an honest mistake. If, however, this was a flight from Dubai to, say, London, it seems a bit more like he was only speaking Chinese because the guy kind of looked Chinese. This is reminiscent of the experience I had when I was on a LOT Polish flight from Chicago to Warsaw, and the majority of the passengers were Polish. The flight crew would speak to me in Polish too, which at first I found annoying, but in retrospect makes perfect sense. After all, we were going to Poland, on the Polish national airline, and I easily look like I could be Polish. But then again, if I were to imagine a different scenario, where I were, say, flying to South America on Aerolineas Argentinas, and the flight crew began to address me in Polish, I would have to ask myself what it was about me that seemed to scream Polish. In a different context, choosing a different language would seem absurd.

Of course, the question is if this kind of racial profiling is really such a big deal. After all, when I was visiting Malaysia last month, I didn't mind people immediately speaking English to me because I was white. It really sped things up. If they kept addressing me in Malaysian, I would have constantly had to explain that I don't speak their language. The answer, I think, might have something to do with prestige, or the value society places on a language. Even if someone is vehemently anti-American, it's hard for me to imagine that person taking offense at being addressed in English because the language is very prestigious. After all, what I'm saying is that you don't look like you're from around here, but you look well-educated and cosmopolitan, so naturally you speak English.

Last year, I was in Slovakia with my mother visiting some of the villages where our Hungarian ancestry comes from, and I made a point of initiating conversations with the little bit of Slovak I know at first until ascertaining whether the people I was conversing with spoke Hungarian, the language I felt more comfortable with. This was probably a little overly cautious when we were in these villages since the majority of the population was Hungarian. But when we went to spend the night in Košice, a big predominantly Slovak city in the East, I refused to try and speak Hungarian even though it's possible that some of them knew the language because of language prestige. I don't mean to simplify over a thousand years of history, but there are at times a lot of tensions between the two countries. Not that the people are enemies today, they just in general don't like each other. So here, I was, clearly in their territory. I wasn't about to address people in Hungarian because it could potentially have been viewed as a language of lower prestige and have a similar to reaction to someone speaking Russian, or at least English with a thick Russian accent, in the United States during the Cold War.

Clip from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Ultimately, to answer my question it seems that using the local language if you know it or a high prestige language, like English in most cases, is probably a safe bet. Unless I'm talking to you at a museum in Budapest, in which case please speak to me in Hungarian. Airplanes are kind of places of nowhere, so the same rules may not apply. As such, I think Emirates would be better off highlighting their ridiculous first class perks than their multilingual staff.

I Am Not Stupid

Something absolutely horrible that I hear writing teachers occasionally tell their students is, "Imagine that your audience is stupid." This is generally said when the student isn't explaining their ideas clearly because they assume that their reader knows what they're talking about. If they think that their audience is stupid, then they'll make sure to explain everything in adequate detail and make it clear to the reader.

The reason I think this is so horrible is that I personally never write for stupid people. In fact, as I write this I'm assuming that you're rather intelligent and capable of understanding what I write. Likewise, what if I were writing something more advanced, like a legal document or my PhD dissertation? Should I assume that the dissertation committee is composed of morons? Of course not, and if I were to write to them explaining basic principles as if they were stupid, they would probably consider me to be pandering to them. In fact, I can't think of any situation why I would be writing anything to someone who I thought was genuinely stupid (I'd phone them, obviously). But joking aside, telling writers to imagine that their audience is stupid completely ignores the fact that they should be crafting their writing for a specific audience.

Part of the issue has to do with the difference between creative and academic writing. I did drama in high school and sometimes we would overly emphasize a joke in rehearsal to make sure that the audience would get it. Our teacher would stop us and say that we needed to be more subtle. Treat the audience like they're smart, she'd say. They can figure the joke out, and they'll enjoy it more if you don't hit them over the head with it. Academic writing is the exact opposite. You don't want to be subtle; you want to be concise and clear. You don't want the reader to have to figure it out, so you need to come right out and say it.

Again, this isn't because the audience is stupid. I like to explain it to my students this way: the audience can't read your mind. They can only read what you put on the paper. Very often, I mark students down for something in their writing that I simply cannot understand. Afterward, they talk to me about it and explain what they meant. After the explanation, I say, "I understand perfectly what you just said now. However, those ideas didn't make it onto the paper, and I only give the grade based on what's on the paper." That's part of the trick of good writing: getting ideas that make perfect sense in your head onto paper. It's one reason why we write multiple drafts.

Here's another way to think of it. In language education, we typically say there are two functions of communication: transactional and interactional. Transactional language is used to convey a specific message, while interactional language is used to maintain and develop relationships. You can think of interactional language as when you ask someone "How are you?" In general, you don't really want a transaction of information, i.e. you don't really want to know how they are. You're asking simply because it's how you've been taught to be friendly, that is, you're trying to maintain an amiable relationship. This is kind of like my drama example. Actors aren't on stage simply to share information with the audience. If that were the case, they wouldn't bother to memorize their lines and would just read them out loud. Rather, they are there to make the audience feel something. I remember how much we thrived during a performance on building a relationship with the audience and feeding off of their energy.

Academic writing, on the other hand, is really transactional. That is, I have a message to share, and my goal is to make it as clear to the reader as possible. This is one reason writers should avoid vague words like "things" or "stuff." They don't mean anything specific, and I have to guess at what the author really means. When I first came to Qatar, I felt like transactional language was the kind of language that was greatly lacking, mostly from having to deal with absolutely horrible customer service. Very often, this dis-service has been due to the fact the individual had information that they knew and understood very well, but they were uninterested or unable to share it to me. In short, they didn't know how to use transactional language.

For instance, I remember having to pick up an official document for my son, and the woman at the desk told me to go upstairs to Mr. -----'s office. I don't remember the name, but I remember that was the entire message. I stood there quietly for a moment in the lobby of a multistory building, waiting for the next bit of information, like a room number, or some sort of direction telling me to take a right after the water cooler, but that was it. So I asked her how to get to the room, and she was not able to. She did not have the English skills, so I just went upstairs and wandered around until I finally found the office. The thing is, it strikes me that she knew exactly how to get there. Why, she had probably been up to his office several times, but she had never learned how to explain that knowledge to someone else.

Another example happened to me today when I got a phone call from my bank, asking if I "approved the transaction to beneficiary." I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. I said this, and the gentleman simply repeated the question, only slower, like if I were stupid or a dog. It was as if he had taken the advice of bad writing teachers and tried his best to dumb down the message. But again, I'm not an idiot. I simply had no context whatsoever for what he was saying, so I had to ask a few more questions. "Who is the beneficiary?" I asked. "Am I? Does someone want to transfer money to me? Or am I supposed to transfer money to someone, and if so, to whom? Who is my beneficiary?" After a few minutes of asking questions, we were able to straighten it out (well, kind of).

I'd like to share one more bad customer service story, but this one has more to deal with English ability than transactional skills (though maybe the two overlap). I was on the phone with my internet company because our wireless router was having lots of problems. The representative was talking me through restarting the system step by step when she said, "Now unplug the cable outside." I thought it was a similar situation where there was information she had that I didn't, so I asked, "Where is it outside?" hoping that she would clarify, but she simply repeated her instruction as though the location of the cables outdoors were common knowledge. "Okay, is it downstairs somewhere? Is it in some kind of a box? Is it near my building?" She couldn't understand my line of questioning and repeated herself again, which only made me more frustrated. As it turns out, the "outside" she was referring to was the outside of the router itself, the one that wasn't outside at all, but was on my desk in front of me. Had she said, "Unplug the cable from the router," I would have understood perfectly, but for some reason she wanted to bring "outside" into the mess.

I hope this clearly demonstrates how important transactional language is for formal writing, customer service, or any time when a message needs to be clearly conveyed to an audience. Just remember that the person on the other end may be incredibly smart, perhaps even a genius, but chances are they are not clairvoyant.

What Makes a Language Hard to Learn Part 3: Vocabulary

In previous entries, I discussed how grammar and pronunciation issues can affect how difficult it is to learn a language. In this post, I'll discuss some issues that can occur with vocabulary that I find to be difficult.

Grammar or Vocabulary Focused Instruction?

There is some discussion among language educators about whether language learning should be grammar focused or vocabulary focused. For the longest time, learning a language meant learning grammar. You would spend hours upon hours studying verb paradigms and case tables, then once you had mastered the grammar you could start plugging vocabulary into it. For many, this might seem obvious and intuitive, but the argument that language learning is more about vocabulary is quite compelling. For instance, I can make a sentence that is grammatically incorrect, but that is still comprehensible, like "I go store." It's missing aspects the grammar says should be there, like "I am going" instead of "I go", or "to the store" instead of just "store." Nevertheless, I'm sure most individuals who are familiar with English could decode the sentence's meaning despite the lack of grammar.

The same isn't true if we reverse it, that is, create a sentence that is grammatically correct but where the vocabulary isn't. An example of this comes from the famous linguist Noam Chomsky: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It's a fun sentence, especially because the grammar is completely correct, but no real meaning can be derived from it.

Frequency

It is because of examples like this that those within corpus linguistics (i.e., those who study language using real world texts) argue that language should be taught focusing on language that people actually use rather than grammar for grammar's sake. For instance, in the English verb system there is something called the future perfect progressive tense. It goes something like "I will have been doing..." Ask yourself, just how often do you express this kind of idea? Probably not very often. It's generally used to express that in the future you'll have been doing something that you started in the past for a certain amount of time, like "10 years from now I will have been studying French for 11 years." It's a structure and an idea that simply doesn't come up very often. In fact, while I was teaching in Hungary, another English teacher came to me and said, "Be honest. You never real use the future perfect progressive." I told him that if you need to express that kind of an idea, it's the only way to do it, but we really don't need to express that idea very often. Nevertheless, it is generally given equal weight to other tenses and structures when using a grammar focused approach even though it is not used frequently.

This idea of frequency is important and suggests that we should be focusing on high frequency vocabulary and grammar instead of just treating all grammar equally. For instance, a phrase that entered modern parlance, say, about 10 years ago is "I'm on the bus," obviously because of the invention of the cellphone. (Before that, you would have seemed quite mad if you had uttered this phrase out loud to everyone within earshot).

So ultimately, what this means is when deciding whether a language has difficult vocabulary or not, we should be considering the most frequent vocabulary. I remember back when I was in Argentina, and someone made the claim that Spanish was the hardest language in the world to learn because it had a larger vocabulary than most languages. To which I simply ask, okay, sure, but how many of those words do you really need to know in order to use the language? 

Word Formation

I've spent most of this series badmouthing the Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew because of their seemingly random grammar and unhelpful spelling systems. Lest anyone think I'm anti-semitic (and I really want that pun to work more than it actually does), I'm actually going to say some nice things about both languages regarding their vocabulary. In general, if a language is hard in one aspect, there's usually another aspect where it's incredibly easy that makes up for it. In this case, semitic languages use a root system for forming their vocabulary, often where a 3 letter root represents a basic concept, then puts them in different structures to form new words. For example:

Hebrew                                            Arabic
root: ספר (s-f-r) "write"                      root: كتب (k-t-b) "write"
a book: סֵפֶר (sefer)                           book: كتاب (kitab)
library: סִפְרִיָּה (sifriah)                        library: مكتبة (maktabah)
writer, or author: סוֹפֵר (sofer)            writer, or author: الكاتب (al-katib)

My Hebrew teacher when I was an undergraduate actually gave this as an example to demonstrate how easy building vocabulary could be in these languages. While English has several different unrelated forms that have to do with writing, in Hebrew and Arabic they're all based on the same root. This makes building vocabulary in the language very quick, since once you know the root you're able to learn several other words with it. (By the way, I got the Hebrew script with the vowels written in by looking the words up on doitinhebrew.com. I really recommend it over Google Translate as an online Hebrew dictionary).

Cognates

When I was learning Spanish, I felt like once I had learned all the basic vocabulary, I was able to quickly learn more advanced vocabulary because of the high number of cognates. This is because both languages are part of different branches of the same language family, Indo-European. In addition, a lot of more advanced English words were borrowed directly from Latin, so there are again a lot of cognates. On the other hand, when I was learning Hungarian, which is a Finno-Ugric language, not Indo-European, I didn't have the same luxury because new vocabulary rarely has a cognate form in English. Here's some random words to prove my point:

Of course, I recognize that the more related languages are, the more likely it is that there will be some faux amis, or false cognates, between them. But even then, I'd rather take having to learn that "Soy embarazado" means that I'm pregnant (not embarrassed) instead of having to learn the majority of new vocabulary one by one because of a lack of cognates.

I know it's hard to believe, but I actually shared something I think is hard about Hungarian but is easy in Arabic. Absolutely shocking.