About
this time last year I rose to the challenge of attempting to learn a language, namely Swahili, in a week. With hindsight, I now look back at what went wrong, and why the only word I currently am able to remember in Swahili is
Jambo! This blogpost will identify what I can do next time to ensure that I would better learn a language in a short period of time.
One of the first things to consider when learning a language is motivation. If you don't really fancy doing it and find it a chore, you won't get very far with the language. That's why so many people in the United Kingdom, despite having learned French as school, don't speak a word of it; they just don't care for learning languages much. You must keep motivated when learning a language, and with my love for languages generally, that was not an issue. However, halfway through my week there were some personal family issues which heavily distracted me from my studies, so that had an effect.
In order to study well, you must also ensure that good learning materials are provided, and using a mixture of materials is a good way of ensuring this. In other words, get lots of materials, from children's books to news websites, and have a few different dictionaries and textbooks to read. I wouldn't recommend that you stick to one textbook alone or a single source, as I did. The text of the
Teach Yourself Swahili book dated from many years ago, despite being a 1980s print, and was leaning heavily on the grammatical side, with little to no emphasis on the practical aplications. I probably after doing my study week would be able to write that "the crocodile is on the hill" (but don't ask me to do it now, I've forgotten all of it!), but this is of little use in the market when bartering for a souvenir in Kenya. Naturally, in gathering various materials, you will of course want to get a mixture of materials from those that are heavy on the grammar side and those that are on the practical side, but it is important to mix the two approaches. Textbooks which combine both grammatical and pratical approaches are perhaps best. My Swahili book was of little use on that front, but I expect that the
Teach Yourself book series people will have updated the book or had it rewritten to make it more useful.
Also, in order to study well, you may also want to actually find other people who either speak it or are also studying it. I was studying alone and knew no speakers on Swahili. I made no attempt to locate speakers of Swahili, and thus my language practice really was limited to "the crocodile is on the hill" and other useless phrases in the antient Swahili book. You don't even have to travel to use the target language.
Cardinal Mezzofanti spoke dozens of languages, but never travelled outside his native Italy, and made use of the many visitors to Rome to practice and learn his tongues. You can practive either in person or online thanks to the internet, contacting other speakers becomes so much easier through sites such as
myhappyplanet.com. It is this reason, the lack of any application of the language, that has left me with a poor memory of what I learned, and the only practical word I did learn was
Jambo!You may also want to try and relate how the language functions with reference to your own language or other languages you may know, but don't do it too much or you'll end up finding your own language will get in the way of your thinking in the target language. Look for patterns of word and sentence construction in the language when studying, to aid you creating other sentences and words. Swahili is an agglutinative language, which means that it glues particles together to make words, and this is unfamiliar to lots of speakers of Indo-European languages; usually it's only through grammatical endings that we really 'stick bits on'. However, I have encountered Esperanto, which is particularly agglutinative, so was able to draw from my experience building words in Esperanto to aid me in my word construction in Swahili.
Finally, the time constraint of seven days was also a major impediment to my learning Swahili. The time constraint always was part of the original plan, because I was inspired by Daniel Tammet's ability to learn Icelandic in a week and, combined with seeing a copy of "Portuguese in a week" on my shelf, I thought it worthy challenge to attempt to learn a language in a week. However, in order to gain any real usage of a language, enveloping yourself in linguistic materials to do with the language for a lot longer can help develop you language skills far better. It is not impossible to learn a lot of a language rapidly, as Daniel Tammet has shown, and as I found when I learned Esperanto in a weekend and the basics of German in three weeks, but to develop further takes longer. (As an aside,
Daniel Tammet is a linguist hero of mine).
Would I do it again? Yes, I would. I have learned from my experience, and if I approached learning a language in a constrained time-period again, I would ensure that I made use of a wide variety of resources. In fact, I'm starting to feel I'd like to give it a try sometime again soon....
Last year, this blog and its author became a fan of the small islands nation of Tokelau, with extensive coverage of the referendum for autonomy, and I've been following Tokelau affairs via the news-wires ever since with great interest.
Y in the 2-handed BSL alphabet (see illustration; image source). However, I distinctly remember when studying BSL in Newport about fourteen years ago that there was a local sign variation for the semantic concept of "year", and that local sign involved clutching the lobe of the ear between the index finger and thumb of the predominant hand used for signing. This I would presume comes from the spoken pronunciation of the word "year", which in the local Newportonian pronunciation is homophonous with the word "ear", both pronounced [jɘ:r]. This is particularly curious as a Newportonian deaf user of BSL may not necessarily be aware of the homophony in spoken English due to hearing impediments, although may certainly be aware of a possible homophonic link through lip-reading, and through the spellings of the two words.
if Kim Jong-il really is dead, and if so, how he died....
Blimey. I go offline for the weekend, away Saturday lunchtime, back on Monday evening, and find that on Sunday, I had the highest number of visitors ever, 324 in one day (according to mybloglog.com), and 94 so far today. 308 of them yesterday were looking for news on whether Kim Jong-il is dead or not. I can only presume that a fair portion of them were in the cyber-cafés of P'yŏngyang, North Korea, checking on whether their great leader Kim Jong-il is alive or dead, and saw my blog as potential resource....
The only major news currently I know of coming from the North is that there is going to be a search by Americans, South and North Koreans in the demilitarised zone for war dead from the Korean War. That may possibly mean closure for this American. However in other North Korean news, there is speculation in Asia about whether photos of supposedly recent appearances by Kim Jong-il (such as this one, right) were faked.
News from North Korea is hard to come by, as when it is available, it's usually wrapped in useless Communist rhetoric. But further to speculation last month that Kim Jong-Il might have popped his clogs, it turns out that I may have been wrong in my proposing the idea that he was not dead.
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