The Hex

I was once so prolific at blogging. Then I had to mark final exams and get ready to move out of the country, which ate up nearly all of my time. So if you'll excuse me, this will be quick. I was watching the 1943 Danish film Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath) directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. I thought overall it was quite excellent, and I even learned a bit of Danish too. The plot has a lot to do with accusing people of witchcraft, so they mention the word for "witch" a lot, which is heks. I thought this sounded a lot like the English word "hex," so I looked into the etymology to see if there was any relationship.

I read the word history from the Free Dictionary's website, and it turns out I was right about the relationship, though our word "hex" actually came more directly from German (where the word is hexe) and was borrowed into English from German and Swiss immigrants to Pennsylvania, back when it was a British colony in the 17th and 18th century.

So it's from this that I also ultimately learned the phrase: Min hustru er ikke en heks--my wife is not a witch. It should come in handy the next time we find ourselves in medieval Denmark and accused of witchcraft.

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.

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 Hard to Learn Part 2: Grammar

In my last entry, I discussed what makes a language hard to learn and focused on pronunciation, basically saying that a language having different sounds doesn't necessarily make it difficult unless those sounds involve minimal pairs, are difficult for me to find in my mouth, and are not clearly represented in the writing system. This time, I'd like to tackle grammar issues.

I've lived in Argentina, Hungary, and Qatar, and in each one I've had someone tell me that their language is the hardest one in the world to learn. I'll say right now that the argument that Spanish is the hardest language is pretty flimsy (I think it had something to do with Spanish having a lot of vocabulary words). It's much easier to make the argument for Hungarian or Arabic, though I want to say right here and now that I don't find Hungarian grammar to be terribly difficult. In fact, I find it to be quite logical and easy, so it really isn't very time consuming. Regardless of the language studied, you have to spend a lot of time studying grammar. I don't have too much of a problem with this, again, so long as the grammar seems fairly rule-based and logical. It's when grammar textbooks say "There is no rule for this and each instance must be memorized" that I begin to feel that the language is being needlessly difficult.

Formation of Plurals

Forming plurals in English is fairly easy. You add an -s to the word. Sure, there are a few irregular plurals (child/children) and sometimes you add -es, but I think in most cases if you don't do it one-hundred percent correctly, the meaning will not be affected. Saying something like "She has many childs" sounds wrong, but you probably have no problem understanding it, and I think that understandability is an important key in what makes a grammar difficult.

I know it's just going to come off like I think Arabic is hard, but this is one thing that really gets me about the language. A lot of Arabic nouns form plurals by an internal consonant change. Something like this:

كتاب [kitab] - book / كتب [kutub] - books
فندق [funduq] - hotel / فبادق [fanadiq] - hotels
هرم [haram] - pyramid / أهرام [ahara:m] - pyramids

These changes aren't completely random, but it certainly can feel that way. In reality, there is a set number of patterns that can be made. It's kind of similar to strong verb forms in English, like speak/spoke, eat/ate, drink/drunk. The difference being that in English it really is a limited list of verbs that are affected by this, while in Arabic it seems like the majority of nouns. What this means is that for any noun that is learned, the plural form must be learned with it. Part of this also demands a good quality dictionary that will list the plural forms. If the dictionary only lists the singular, then the learner will have a hard time figuring it out.

I've felt a similar issue with German, where plurals can be formed either by adding an ending (often -e, -er, -en or -s), by an internal vowel change, by both, or by neither. Consider the following:

Die Tasche / Die Taschen - The bag / The bags
Das Buch / Die Bücher - The book / The books
Der Wagen / Die Wagen - The car / The cars

Again, there are a fairly limited number of patterns that are used and knowing the gender of the word can help narrow it down even more, but at the end of the day, when learning a new word you also have to learn the plural form. There is rarely anyway you can figure it out on your own.

In this respect at least, Hungarian is rather easy. There are some a few simple rules regarding vowel harmony which dictates all word formation in Hungarian, but after that the plural is formed simply by adding -k to the word.

taska / taskák - bag / bags
könyv / könyvek - book / books
bolt / boltok - store / stores
kocsi / kocsik - car / cars

The point is, once you know the handful of rules that govern plural formation, you can apply them to any noun you see without having to learn the form separately.

Case

While I'm on the topic of Hungarian, something I hear a lot of people groan about is that Hungarian has a lot of grammatical cases. Depending on what you mean by a case, there are at least sixteen. People who have struggled through cases in German, or worse still in Russian, quiver at the thought of having to learn so many cases.

The thing is, it's nowhere near that difficult. In German, Russian, and several other languages, grammatical case is simply something that the grammar demands. That is, it doesn't generally contain any meaning of its own.

ein Bruder - a brother, der Ball - the ball
Ich habe einen Bruder - I have a brother (+acc).
Ich gebe den Ball zu meinem Bruder - I give the ball (+acc) to my brother (+dat).

The first example demonstrates the accusative case. That is, since "Bruder" is the object of the verb "habe", and "Bruder" is a masculine noun, I have to add the accusative ending "-en." In the next example, "der Ball" is changed to "den Ball" for the same reason. There is also an example of the dative ending, "-em" because I am giving the ball to my brother (which is a dative construction). The thing is, the word "zu" is also there, which means "to." In addition, I'm using masculine nouns here. If I were using feminine or neuter ones, then different endings would have to be memorized. It's also different in the plural.

The other thing that strikes me in these examples is that the case ending doesn't really contain any meaning. It's just there because the grammar says it has to be. An example from English to demonstrate this would be the difference between "me" (which is used in accusative and dative constructions) and "I" (which is used in nominative constructions, or as the subject). If I ask, "Are you talking to I?" it sounds a little strange, but you still understand it. In fact, add another noun in there, and you might not know which is correct anymore. "Are you talking to John and I?" Or is it supposed to be "John and me?" Unless you're a real stickler for grammar, both probably sound fine because the meaning is identical in both (but so you know, "John and me" is correct).

Cases in Hungarian are almost entirely meaning based, which I think makes them really easy. Also, Hungarian doesn't have any grammatical gender, so you don't have to memorize endless charts. Again, the vowel changes based on rules of vowel harmony, but other than that the ending ends up being exactly the same.

az asztal - the table
az asztalra - onto the table (sublative case)
az asztalon - on the table (suppressive case)
az asztalról - off the table (delative case)

A   könyvet        az    asztalra        tettem
the book (+acc) the   table (+sub) put (1sing +past)
I put the book on the table

I personally don't feel that this functions the same as grammatical case in other languages and that it would be more accurate to simply refer to them as suffixes. Whatever you call them, they are fairly straightforward to use.

Gender

Similar to case, gender usually ends up being something that the grammar requires, but doesn't contain any meaning itself. Sure, sometimes it aligns pretty well. Words that describe men often are masculine in gender, while words that describe women can be female (unless you are a young girl in Germany, or Mädchen, which is a neuter word), but for the most part, grammatical gender has nothing to do with whether the noun being described is a boy or girl, but is just there to meet the demands of the grammar.

In some cases, like in Spanish, this is really no big deal because the gender doesn't do all that much. That is, if you want to say "the bread" and say "la pan" instead of "el pan," people are pretty much going to understand you. Gender in Spanish doesn't affect the formation of plurals (like it does in German) and Spanish doesn't use a case system, so there are no problems there.

As I've already shown, other languages do use different plurals and case endings for different genders, but this still isn't that big of a deal if I can figure out what gender the word is by looking at it. I'm sure most people are aware that masculine nouns in Spanish frequently end in an -o and feminine ones in an -a. But what about the many words that end in a different vowel, or in a consonant? How can you tell then?

In Spanish, you just have to memorize them, but in the Slavic languages I've studied (Russian, Slovak, Croatian, and Czech) they make it super easy for you. I'll use Slovak as an example, since that's the one I'm most familiar with, but it's all very similar in each of the languages.

Masculine - ends in a consonant
Feminine - ends with "a"
Neuter - ends with "o" or "e"

And for the most part, that's it. Sure there are some exceptions, but most of the nouns in Slovak follow this rule exactly, and if you can tell what gender a word uses just by looking at it, it makes it that much easier to learn.

I think the language that drives me absolutely up the wall when it comes to gender is Hebrew. Not only is there generally no way to tell what gender a word is just by looking at it, many masculine nouns take the feminine plural ending, and there's no way of knowing this unless you memorize each form individually. When I was in college learning these we called them "cross-dressers", though the joke really doesn't make them any easier to learn.

Masculine plural ending: ים- [im] / Feminine plural ending: ות- [ot]

דבר [davar] thing (masculine singular) / דברים [davarim] things (masculine plural)

מסעדה [misada] restaurant (feminine singular) / מסעדות [misadot] (feminine plural)
מקום [makom] place (masculine singular) /  מקומות [mekomot] (masculine noun with feminine plural)

So if I can close by making two points, it would be 1) though I might be biased, Hungarian grammar really isn't that hard, and 2) anytime I have to memorize forms individually because they don't appear to be governed by rules or patterns, I'm going to think that the grammar is difficult. In reviewing this article, I also noticed that I focused exclusively on nouns. In thinking about it, this might be because I don't really find verbs to be all that difficult in the languages I've studied (with the exception of imperfect and perfect verbs in Slavic languages). Adjectives and adverbs also seem to be pretty straightforward if you understand how the noun works, and prepositions don't follow any rhyme or reason, so there's little point in talking about it.

I also wanted to note that the issues I'm talking about here may make a language difficult to learn, but certainly not impossible. I'm simply sharing things that I have personally experienced that have frustrated me. Remember, every language is simple enough that a small child can figure it out simply by being exposed to it.