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Foreign Language Instruction
Too long for here
I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic as Prof “Pullman” (as one poster per forum inevitably seems to call him) about being able to choose a language related to the region you end up going to. People aren’t always sent willy nilly to random parts of the world.
Does it help to have had classes in a different language than one you end up having to use? I can think of languages in which I have had very little instruction (Spanish) and none at all (Dutch), which I find I can understand quite accurately in written form; Italian (a few classes) and Portuguese (none) I find a bit harder to decode; one course in Slovenian, which I usually attended in a state of inebriation, gave me a few clues to the Slavonic languages. My dishwasher by some fluke of logistics had evidently been intended for the Belgian market, but between French and Flemish installation instructions I had no problem setting it up. I do suspect all this – even the willingness to stare at a text for a minute or two in the hope that some sense will emerge – has something to do with having been taught 3 languages other than English at school.
A good question would be whether this could be better achieved by a general linguistics 101 / language awareness course, maybe with a bit of “global communication in simple English” or by courses in specific languages. I would make the following bet. A course in just one foreign language during one’s entire formal education is next to useless; Linguistics 101, etc. could probyly do better. But being exposed to 3 or 4 foreign languages would be better again, and I have an idea why.
To understand the differences between languages in terms of explicit linguistic descriptions, you would need to get a grasp of the grammar of your first language not too far short of the contents of the Huddleston & Pullum student book. This is simply too much to ask of undergraduates majoring in some other field who have not been bitten by the linguistics bug – quite apart from being too much to pack into the lecture time of that Lingustics 101 course. However, being confronted with a few different actual languages feeds the different structures of those languages, if in a slighly garbled form, into your brain. And there they lie, perhaps never consciously thought of or further analyzed, but that is not to say they are doing nothing. Even in the young adult brain, in which the ferocious Chomskiyan computer of early childhood has long since been run down, they leave an impression of the fact that languages differ, and a few inklings of how.
I might just as well have landed up in Spain; I was trying to get a grant there before the job in Germany came up. I can’t say for sure how easily I would have learned Spanish; but with Irish, French and German to some extent under my belt, I’d have had quite a few relevant concepts in hand.
Posted in Language, Learning English
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Fixing it
Tuesday, 4 October 2011:
The blog is undergoing a major rebuild to correct some bugs.
It may take a few days to fix all the posts; images have to be checked and reloaded, etc.
Posted in Uncategorized
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A passive we’d rather avoid
At the LinguaFranca Blogs of the Chronicle of Higher Education,
Geoff Pullum discussed using the passive in this sentence:
“But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed … with … terminal cancer.”
He asked:
Am I seriously supposed to say
1) “But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans”? And
2) “when an oncologist named P____ diagnosed her … ”?
Posted in Language, Translating, Uncategorized
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Arbeiten für ARGUS
Hier zum Download einige Papiere, Continue reading
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Chomskybot
Here’s the Chomskybot.
Periodically, I remember it and look at a paragraph and give thanks that there is writing about language that is easier to read.
For more explanation of the Chomskybot, refer to the FAQ page.
Posted in Language, Translating
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Welcome an, ätsch, willkommen on
Wenn schon englisch, dann konsequent … oder? Nein! Man kann the best of both worlds haben!
Wahrscheinlich fällt so was nur auf, wenn man schon länger Texte mit deutschen und englischen Einflüssen beruflich korrigiert
Posted in Caught in the wild, Learning English
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A kwik ssentwitsch
Hier eine interessante Schreibweise, in der Grazer Altstadt gesehen. Wer auch immer das geschrieben hat, dürfte in einer Sprache denken, in der ein V ähnlich wie auf Englisch ausgesprochen wird (also: wie ein W auf Deutsch). Umgekehrt: Sandwich ist für Deutschsprachige aussprachetechnisch schon ein einigermassen teuflisches Wort. Continue reading
Posted in Caught in the wild, Learning English
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Captcha talks back
A really nice little video from Scott Blaszak of Slate V. Enjoy!
Posted in Caught in the wild, Internet, Learning English
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The perversity of the stimulus
Brett Reynolds asked a set of questions that I can’t leave alone:
- Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is internally consistent? Continue reading
Posted in Language, Translating, Uncategorized
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Push efficiently outside
Hier ein Text in einem Zug der ÖBB, bei dem, wie so oft, die Übersetzung von Zufälligkeit, Beiläufigkeit oder Hilflosigkeit (oder allen drei) schwer gezeichnet ist. Dagegen habe ich wie immer nichts einzuwenden, wenn die Funktion des Textes nicht nach einer genauen und richtigen Übersetzung verlangt. Aber gerade diese Übersetzung könnte in zwei Hinsichten wichtig sein: Continue reading
Posted in Caught in the wild, City, Language, Signs & Designs, Spaces, Translating
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