2nd languages

[caroljane]

As a teacher of adult ESL, I usually find that English is the third, not the second language my students are learning. Most of them have at least a working knowledge of one other language besides their own. My most polylingual student (age 80!)was learning English as his ninth language. A Cuban student knows only Spanish but her husband (a Canadian) speaks 5 languages and her father-in-law speaks 8.

Thank Gord English is the most necessary worldwide language so far or I would be sunk. I speak French too and basic Spanish (the abovementioned Cuban is really helping me improve that)but I feel like a real piker in the great big world I am living in.

How about you?

[kiaer.ts]

I am a native speaker of English, and have, on occasion, been mistaken by Spanish speakers for a native speaker of Spanish, which I speak, read and write with mastery. I read and am fully fluent in French, but rusty due to lack of practice, mostly using it with Haitians and African cab drivers. I have a full grasp of German but a more limited vocabulary than I do in French. I can understand written Dutch. I can read and understand Italian and Catalan and written Portuguese, but find Portuguese can be impossible to understand when spoken. I have a basic understanding of Zulu and Russian and have cracked some jokes that made Russians from Brighton Beach laugh out loud. I can speak some broken Ruthenian, and have communicated basic ideas with people who speak Polish and Croatian. I can read Latin and Ancient Greek with a dictionary handy.

I can parrot just about anything said to me in any non-tonal language and can identify dozens of languages by ear and sight. On one occasion I overheard a Japanese businessman mumbling "Puh-rinse-uh-ton-uh" in NY Penn Station and was able to direct him to follow me by saying, in very broken Pig-Nipponese, "You to Princeton is, yes? I to Princeton is" and gesturing to follow with my hands. He wanted to talk, but I shook my head and said, after thinking of the Lennon song and some WWII movies, "Aisumasen, watashi wa gaijin desu." ("Sorry, I am a foreign devil.") He accepted that and thanked me again as we exited the train later.

Edited February 24, 2011 by Ted Keer

[BaalChatzaf]

As a teacher of adult ESL, I usually find that English is the third, not the second language my students are learning. Most of them have at least a working knowledge of one other language besides their own. My most polylingual student (age 80!)was learning English as his ninth language. A Cuban student knows only Spanish but her husband (a Canadian) speaks 5 languages and her father-in-law speaks 8.

Thank Gord English is the most necessary worldwide language so far or I would be sunk. I speak French too and basic Spanish (the abovementioned Cuban is really helping me improve that)but I feel like a real piker in the great big world I am living in.

How about you?

Anee m'dabir evrit (Hebrew). Also a bit of German and Yiddish, some French and some Spanish (not much of French and Spanish).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[caroljane]

I am a native speaker of English, and have, on occasion, been mistaken by Spanish speakers for a native speaker of Spanish, which I speak, read and write with mastery. I read and am fully fluent in French, but rusty due to lack of practice, mostly using it with Haitians and African cab drivers. I have a full grasp of German but a more limited vocabulary than I do in French. I can understand written Dutch. I can read and understand Italian and Catalan and written Portuguese, but find Portuguese can be impossible to understand when spoken. I have a basic understanding of Zulu and Russian and have cracked some jokes that made Russians from Brighton Beach laugh out loud. I can speak some broken Ruthenian, and have communicated basic ideas with people who speak Polish and Croatian. I can read Latin and Ancient Greek with a dictionary handy.

I can parrot just about anything said to me in any non-tonal language and can identify dozens of languages by ear and sight. On one occasion I overheard a Japanese businessman mumbling "Puh-rinse-uh-ton-uh" in NY Penn Station and was able to direct him to follow me by saying "You to Princeton is, yes? I to Princeton is" and gesturing to follow with my hands. He wanted to talk, but I shook my head and said, after thinking of the Lennon song and some WWII movies, "Aisumasen, watashi wa gaijin desu." ("Sorry, I am a foreign devil.") He accepted that and thanked me again as we exited the train later.

Would you be a descendant of Sir Richard Burton by any chance?

Do you travel a lot?

You seem to be the living refutation of the insular American.

[Philip Coates]

I am fluent enough in French to make myself understood on almost any topic. Watching a movie would be often too fast for me, and in reading I need a dictionary if I want to get every little detail. My Latin is weak, having only had two years. I once spoke fluent COBOL, FORTRAN, APL, SQL, and BASIC with an IMS chaser.

Ted, how did you come to acquire all these languages?

Edited February 24, 2011 by Philip Coates

[kiaer.ts]

I am a native speaker of English, and have, on occasion, been mistaken by Spanish speakers for a native speaker of Spanish, which I speak, read and write with mastery. I read and am fully fluent in French, but rusty due to lack of practice, mostly using it with Haitians and African cab drivers. I have a full grasp of German but a more limited vocabulary than I do in French. I can understand written Dutch. I can read and understand Italian and Catalan and written Portuguese, but find Portuguese can be impossible to understand when spoken. I have a basic understanding of Zulu and Russian and have cracked some jokes that made Russians from Brighton Beach laugh out loud. I can speak some broken Ruthenian, and have communicated basic ideas with people who speak Polish and Croatian. I can read Latin and Ancient Greek with a dictionary handy.

I can parrot just about anything said to me in any non-tonal language and can identify dozens of languages by ear and sight. On one occasion I overheard a Japanese businessman mumbling "Puh-rinse-uh-ton-uh" in NY Penn Station and was able to direct him to follow me by saying "You to Princeton is, yes? I to Princeton is" and gesturing to follow with my hands. He wanted to talk, but I shook my head and said, after thinking of the Lennon song and some WWII movies, "Aisumasen, watashi wa gaijin desu." ("Sorry, I am a foreign devil.") He accepted that and thanked me again as we exited the train later.

Would you be a descendant of Sir Richard Burton by any chance?

Do you travel a lot?

You seem to be the living refutation of the insular American.

No relation to the explorer or the actor, but I am Danish in part (my last name is an anglicized spelling of a Danish name) and Danes are very over-represented among linguists classical and contemporary. My cousin has a doctorate in linguistics and speaks fluent Swedish. My great-grandfather jumped ship from a whaler in San Francisco after deciding not to settle in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada.

I studied French for four years and German for three years in high school. I learned Spanish by immersion as an adult working with Mexicans and Filipinos.

I am Ruthenian on my Mother's side, and heard it as a secret language of the elders during visits to my grandparents' in my childhood. My mother doesn't speak it except for prayers and food words and curses, but my Grandparents were fluent and I learned the basics from my Grandmother when she lived with us in her later years - enough to make myself understood to Poles and a Croat when taking orders for from clients over the phone.

I have only travelled abroad once, to Germany, Austria and Switzerland for 10 days at the time of Reagan's bombing Qaddafi. We were in Lucerne when it happened, and I listened to the news about it in Swiss French. None of the students among us could understand the German-language news announcer.

Languages come easy to me and I have been fascinated in them since childhood, but was never actually fluent in a second language until French in high school and Spanish after I started working as a cook.

I have to say I would love to study Hebrew, and Arabic, which I can parrot, but would have to take formal classes to master the alphabets and pronunciation and have not had the opportunity.

I do resent people who complain in their only language that foreigners speak their second or third or fifth language with an accent.

[kiaer.ts]

I am fluent enough in French to make myself understood on almost any topic. Watching a movie would be often too fast for me, and in reading I need a dictionary if I want to get every little detail. My Latin is weak, having only had two years. I once spoke fluent COBOL, FORTRAN, APL, SQL, and BASIC with an IMS chaser.

Ted, how did you come to acquire all these languages?

I learned BASIC on a TRS80 when I was 12. My parents always spoke to me grammatically and in an educated register. I never got any formal grammar training beyond very, very basic diagramming of sentences. But I came to realize after reading ItOE that I had grown up implicitly learning the rules of logic and grammar by means of analogy. When I started learning French at 14 I found it all very intuitive. Having learned a few past participles and the verb "to have" as vocabulary words I immediately assumed one could add the two together to generate the past tense months before we formally learned the passe compose and without knowing explicitly that it was called the perfect tense in English.

Learning languages was easy because, although I didn't necessarily have the self-conscious vocabulary of a grammarian in my use of English, I always integrated my concepts, could reduce them to concretes, could define them, and worked out contradictions. I never got to the stage where I started trying to memorize, rather than understand, and to skip steps without comprehending them. I constantly plaid twenty questions as a car game, not some portable video game. When grammatical concepts were introduced in French, and later German, I could immediately connect them to their analogs in English, even though I might not know the formal term. (If you think that all speakers understand rather than just memorize the rules of their native languages, consider the rise of the barbarous "with you and I" construction that has come from people memorizing by rote that one should use "I" after "and" not only when it applies for compound subjects, but in all cases.)

I also have to credit J R R Tolkien, whom only Rand and my parents ecclipse as intellectual influences. I first read the Hobbit at 10, and the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by age 12. His work, which is linguistically rigorous - he didn't just make up words without contexts, but crafted entire grammars and even thousands of years of developmental histories for his languages. His Quenya and Sindarin and the Black Speech of Mordor are fully works of high art in the Randian sense.

Edited February 24, 2011 by Ted Keer

[caroljane]

I am a native speaker of English, and have, on occasion, been mistaken by Spanish speakers for a native speaker of Spanish, which I speak, read and write with mastery. I read and am fully fluent in French, but rusty due to lack of practice, mostly using it with Haitians and African cab drivers. I have a full grasp of German but a more limited vocabulary than I do in French. I can understand written Dutch. I can read and understand Italian and Catalan and written Portuguese, but find Portuguese can be impossible to understand when spoken. I have a basic understanding of Zulu and Russian and have cracked some jokes that made Russians from Brighton Beach laugh out loud. I can speak some broken Ruthenian, and have communicated basic ideas with people who speak Polish and Croatian. I can read Latin and Ancient Greek with a dictionary handy.

I can parrot just about anything said to me in any non-tonal language and can identify dozens of languages by ear and sight. On one occasion I overheard a Japanese businessman mumbling "Puh-rinse-uh-ton-uh" in NY Penn Station and was able to direct him to follow me by saying "You to Princeton is, yes? I to Princeton is" and gesturing to follow with my hands. He wanted to talk, but I shook my head and said, after thinking of the Lennon song and some WWII movies, "Aisumasen, watashi wa gaijin desu." ("Sorry, I am a foreign devil.") He accepted that and thanked me again as we exited the train later.

Would you be a descendant of Sir Richard Burton by any chance?

Do you travel a lot?

You seem to be the living refutation of the insular American.

No relation to the explorer or the actor, but I am Danish in part (my last name is an anglicized spelling of a Danish name) and Danes are very over-represented among linguists classical and contemporary. My cousin has a doctorate in linguistics and speaks fluent Swedish. My great-grandfather jumped ship from a whaler in San Francisco after deciding not to settle in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada.

I studied French for four years and German for three years in high school. I learned Spanish by immersion as an adult working with Mexicans and Filipinos.

I am Ruthenian on my Mother's side, and heard it as a secret language of the elders during visits to my grandparents' in my childhood. My mother doesn't speak it except for prayers and food words and curses, but my Grandparents were fluent and I learned the basics from my Grandmother when she lived with us in her later years - enough to make myself understood to Poles and a Croat when taking orders for from clients over the phone.

I have only travelled abroad once, to Germany, Austria and Switzerland for 10 days at the time of Reagan's bombing Qaddafi. We were in Lucerne when it happened, and I listened to the news about it in Swiss French. None of the students among us could understand the German-language news announcer.

Languages come easy to me and I have been fascinated in them since childhood, but was never actually fluent in a second language until French in high school and Spanish after I started working as a cook.

I have to say I would love to study Hebrew, and Arabic, which I can parrot, but would have to take formal classes to master the alphabets and pronunciation and have not had the opportunity.

I do resent people who complain in their only language that foreigners speak their second or third or fifth language with an accent.

Fascinating. I know people who have picked up a new language in a few months, obviously there is an innate ability that most of us do not have. Sir RB was the obvious example.

There is a continuing debate in ESL circles about whether adults learn language differently from the way children do. I haven't looked at the relevant studies, but my observation is that they learn in the same sequence at beginning levels: 1. nouns 2. prepositions2.adverbs/adjectives---verbs come reluctantly of necessity. Most of my classtime is spent reminding them that every English sentence requires a verb. Stop collecting the damn nouns already and learn your tenses! I need to know if you weren't here last Friday because you had a doctor's appointment, or if you won't be here next Friday, or what. You can't just say "No coffee." We need to know if we are out of coffee, or if your religion forbids coffee, or what. And so on.

I love it.

PS If my observed learning sequence has anything to do with Harriman and his horrible red singing ball I don't want to know anything about it.

Edited February 24, 2011 by daunce lynam

[kiaer.ts]

Anee m'dabir evrit (Hebrew).

Ani means "I". From memory and a little bit of Genesis, "dabber" or something like it means "word." and "evrit" is obviously the feminine noun for Hebrew, which you have supplied. Hence, I assume, "I speak Hebrew."

[BaalChatzaf]

Anee m'dabir evrit (Hebrew).

Ani means "I". From memory and a little bit of Genesis, "dabber" or something like it means "word." and "evrit" is obviously the feminine noun for Hebrew, which you have supplied. Hence, I assume, "I speak Hebrew."

Kayn, Kayn. Also Aramaic. Aramic is to Hebrew approximately as Portugese is to Spanish.

When I was younger and before I started going deaf, I could reproduce any dialect I heard. I could do Chinese pitch shifts and such like. But I never had any need to put that talent to heavy use. I learned enough German and French to read mathematical papers and had no need to learn how to speak it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited February 24, 2011 by BaalChatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I once spoke fluent COBOL, FORTRAN, APL, SQL, and BASIC with an IMS chaser.

Phil,

Is that a quip, or are you being serious?

Michael

[william.scherk]

How about you?

Fluent in English, near fluent in French, with Spanish a far-distant third in my language race, allowing me only terrifying duels with taxi drivers and muleteers. I also know some basic conversational Objectivese.

[kiaer.ts]

Fascinating. I know people who have picked up a new language in a few months, obviously there is an innate ability that most of us do not have. Sir RB was the obvious example.

There is a continuing debate in ESL circles about whether adults learn language differently from the way children do. I haven't looked at the relevant studies, but my observation is that they learn in the same sequence at beginning levels: 1. nouns 2. prepositions2.adverbs/adjectives---verbs come reluctantly of necessity. Most of my classtime is spent reminding them that every English sentence requires a verb. Stop collecting the damn nouns already and learn your tenses! I need to know if you weren't here last Friday because you had a doctor's appointment, or if you won't be here next Friday, or what. You can't just say "No coffee." We need to know if we are out of coffee, or if your religion forbids coffee, or what. And so on.

I love it.

PS If my observed learning sequence has anything to do with Harriman and his horrible red singing ball I don't want to know anything about it.

My experience has been as a learner and a teacher that there is no substitute for explicit instruction in grammar and rote drills for verb forms. For English I would have students do substitution drills such as:

I see him, I saw him, I have seen him

You see him, You saw him, You have seen him

He sees him, He saw him, He has seen him

We see him, We saw him, We have seen him

They see him, They saw him, They have seen him

Such drills can be done in class and then be assigned as written homework. The verb and subjects and objects can be varied, and the students should each be given a starter sentence, e.g., I read books, I eat dinner and be expected to recite the whole paradigm aloud in class. Then the paradigms can be modified to

Do I see him? Did I see him? Have I seen Him?

I will see him, I would see him, I will have seen him

and so forth.

This is the way I learned French. I went around mumbling paradigms to myself so much that I started inventing new irregular verbs for fun. One of my ninth-grade classmates put his fist in his mouth as a lark and then had trouble getting it out. We invented the verb s'appoir la main, to stick one's hand in one's mouth:

Je m'appois la main

Tu t'appois la main

Il s'appoit la main

Nous nous apodons la main

Vous vous apodez la main

Ils s'appoident la main

Il s'est apu la main

We even convinced some students at lunch time that there would be a pop quiz on this verb, and got them to practice it. I pulled the same stunt in English in the 11th grade, rehearsing the principle parts of dive as dive, dove, diven in the hallway before an exam on the English verb. I myself wrote the correct forms on the test, but most of the class followed what I had said and got it wrong. The teacher forgave the mistake when I spoke up and admitted the blame.

Singing red ball?

Edited February 24, 2011 by Ted Keer

[caroljane]

We had that kind of fun in Latin, too. There must be something about the 9th grade. "does Ericus's sister have two heads? No, she has three," and so on. One classmate "just felt" we would have a test one day and we did. Her nickname is Sibyl to this day.

Howlers night with ESL staff are the best. Even the school custodians get some good ones, usually involving washrooms. Two of my own faves are

"From birth to six months, Russians are in the infantry."

(on a TOEFL essay, "Describe your favourite room in your home.")

"My favourite room is the living room, because that is where the host takes his hostages."

This guy was from Iran!

[kiaer.ts]

"My favourite room is the living room, because that is where the host takes his hostages."

LOL!

[kiaer.ts]

Singing red ball?

[caroljane]

Singing red ball?

It is a logical leap between Harriman and Peikoff and like I said I don't want to think about it.

[caroljane]

How about you?

Fluent in English, near fluent in French, with Spanish a far-distant third in my language race, allowing me only terrifying duels with taxi drivers and muleteers. I also know some basic conversational Objectivese.

You say you "know" some basic Objectivese. Define Know. Are we to infer that you understand it, that you grasp it firmly, that you promise not to misunderstand, wilfully misunderstand, or misrepresent it? Hmm?

[Philip Coates]

> Is that a quip, or are you being serious?

Michael, those are computer languages, so obviously you can't speak them.

[caroljane]

On reading in French - usually the book has a whole different "feel" in French than in English. But I found 3 who felt the same in both -obviously with excellent translations, Mme Bovary, En Attendant Godot, and Cartes Sur la Table. The last was an Agatha Christie, obviously English-French but same principle.

I wonder how Wodehouse comes across in French?

[Philip Coates]

In the last six months I have started reading Wodehouse in English for the first time. He comes across very well in that language. One problem is that Worcester comes across as Wooster and Chiefs as Jeeves, but I blame both of those on the translator.

[caroljane]

In the last six months I have started reading Wodehouse in English for the first time. He comes across very well in that language. One problem is that Worcester comes across as Wooster and Chiefs as Jeeves, but I blame both of those on the translator.

Philip, my Gmail does not want to do anything for me, it just keeps saying it is loading, sorry it was blank. Probably reflecting the contents of my mind all too accurately. So I am answering here.

Good deal on the discount eh? A reminder that you cannot start reading Hugo until you finish your Renault chapter. There will be a test!

a la prochaine, C

crunch...oh NO, nooo...

Just kidding.

Edited February 25, 2011 by daunce lynam

[Philip Coates]

> There will be a test!

Daunce, I use that line a lot on OL. I hate it when people steal my witticisms as I have so few to spare

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael, those are computer languages, so obviously you can't speak them.

Phil,

I meant--are you serious that you actually are familiar enough with these programming languages to use them?

Your level of computer ignorance is way to high for that to be true.

As a quit, OK. (Cute... )

If you were being serious, I was going to call you on it.

Michael

[kiaer.ts]

Michael, those are computer languages, so obviously you can't speak them.

Phil,

I meant--are you serious that you actually are familiar enough with these programming languages to use them?

Your level of computer ignorance is way to high for that to be true.

That's ridiculous and, frankly, insulting. The difference between being able to write programs in the languages Phil mentioned and being able to use end-product Web 2.0 bells and whistles is like the difference between understanding car engines enough to change the belts, and fluids, check the timing, and identify various knocks and pings and facility with reading warning lights and pressing buttons on the dashboard (labelled with silly "universal" pictograms, rather than words in plain English) in order to change the radio, defrost, and heated lumbar support settings. Ignorance of where the cup holders are hidden is hardly ignorance of the mechanics of an internal combustion engine.

Edited February 25, 2011 by Ted Keer