Update

Quick update, before J. and I hit the road.

Dostoyevsky
Finished Notes from the Underground, in the original, some two weeks ago. I can't really write anything meaningful about it. Suffice it to say, it was phenomenally powerful, even though it was my third time reading it. It has been many years. As despicable as the main character is, I saw myself in him more than once. I suspect this is true of more people than would be willing to admit it.

Georgia vs. Russia
Sad. Minds, and pens, far greater than mine have provided plenty of commentary. I have nothing to add. This seems to me to be on the money. It actually proposes a well-defined course of action, and a good one at that. Too bad we will never come anywhere close to doing this.

Translation
Finally started my long-delayed translation of St. Exupéry's Courrier Sud. Unbelievably difficult. When reading a novel in a foreign language for the story -- granted, the most superficial way to read it, but also the most common I suspect -- we don't realize just how much we get from context and how many subtleties we lose. When translating, every last bit of minutiae is indispensable, and then you have render it into something resembling decent prose. It took me an hour to get through two paragraphs of the opening chapter. This is going to be a long project. I will buy a beer -- nay, a single-malt scotch -- to anyone who comes up with an acceptable translation of this sentence, especially the second clause:

Sur nos fronts cette lumière de lampe qui ne livre pas les objets mais les compose, nourrit de matière tendre chaque chose.

Back on the 26th.

Spanish class

I am in week four of my second Spanish class. I finally learned how to say "What is this?" Is that odd? Is that no longer the second thing one learns in a foreign language, after "My name is...?" Has it ever been, or have I imagined this?

Spanish class

We're in trouble now. One student cannot hear, pronounce or understand the difference between nosotros and nuestros.

Spanish class

A couple of weeks of Spanish class to catch up on. Going well, mostly. Several people have given up, so the class is now noticeably smaller. This is a good thing -- everyone gets to talk more. Last week, more than half the class was spent on nothing but speaking. The instructor conducted a relatively extensive (by intro standards) interview with each student, using everything we have learned so far, plus additional words and expressions that he defined as he went along. Two patterns emerged.

One -- most students are extremely frustrated not to be able to say what they think. They are thinking in complex terms -- full vocabulary, past and future tenses, etc. Of course, they have none of this in Spanish yet. But they seem to be unwilling, or it just doesn't occur to them, to simplify intentionally and reduce their answer until they can say it, even if that leaves the nuances out. They try to say it all, and immediately get stuck. This is annoying, but I can relate -- my initial reaction is to go complex too, especially since I could say it all perfectly adequately in French, and some part of my brain somewhere must think "If I can say it in one foreign language, I ought to be able to say it in another." Takes some effort to accept that it doesn't work like that.

The other pattern is far more irritating -- when students can't say something in Spanish, they immediately blurt it out in English. To them, it's better to say it in some language than not to say it at all, and they are either too lazy, or just too overwhelmed, to pause and ask. To me, it's infinitely better to use ¿Cómo se dice? five times in a sentence than to use a single English word, but evidently others don't feel that way. That drives me crazy, but what can you do...

Last week's exchange of the evening:

Instructor to student: ¿De dónde es tu esposo?
Student: De Toledo
Instructor: ¿Si? ¿España?
Student (pauses): No... Ohio

Spanish class

Spanish class number four last night. Going pretty well in general, though this one was a bit of a slog. Like French, Spanish has three basic kinds of regular verbs, and we learned how to conjugate one of them. Memorizing the endings is the easy part. It's the concept of conjugation that about half the people in the class -- I'd wager it was the half that have not been exposed to any foreign language at all until now -- had trouble with. Trying to figure out, on the fly, what person and number the sentence they are trying to say is in, and remembering the proper ending. This is where my French helped tremendously, so I was bored trough about half the class. This, by the way, I think is evidence for my highly unscientific idea that foreign languages should be taught "situationally" rather than analytically. Having read, and said, enough phrases with enough occurrences of pagamos, viajamos and cocinamos, most people will make an intuitive connection when to use llamamos and tocamos, and will use them correctly, without having to reason through the fact that this is first person plural and therefore must end on an ...amos.

More generally, a curious pattern is emerging among students. Some people just don't get it. They can't put together the simplest phrase or answer the simplest question. Some people sound so awful when they talk, and their accent is so hopelessly American, that even I, who doesn't know the language yet, cringe. The two sets of people, however, are almost completely disjoint. A certain young blonde whom I mentioned in a previous post speaks with an accent that screams not just "American" but "Valley girl," yet she makes very few mistakes, answers questions with minimal hesitation, and absorbs most of the vocabulary on the fly. Examples in the opposite direction are less striking (people who can't put together a sentence rarely have really good pronunciation), but still, on a couple of occasions, once the instructor walked them through the answer word by word, they sounded somewhat convincing. Evidence that analytical and auditory information are processed by different parts of the brain?

Spanish class

Third Spanish class last night. Going well, for the most part, but I have to tell you – Washington, DC is the worst place to ask people for their profession. It's bad enough in English, never mind in a foreign language. I, with some plausibility, could claim to be an engineer (ingeniero). There is a lawyer in the class (abocado). Everyone else, however, was impossible. Policy analyst? Human resources coordinator? Web producer? Congressional staffer? Complete disaster. No one should learn how to say “non-profit organization” in an introductory foreign language class.

Spanish class

First Spanish class last night. Completely entry-level, for people with no previous experience with the language. It went well, and I must admit that while no foreign language is easy in objective terms, Spanish does seem to live up to its reputation of being relatively easily grasped by a beginner. To compare with French, the only other language I've studied in a classroom setting, Spanish is far easier not only actually to pronounce, but to understand and remember how letters are pronounced. Silent letters are always silent. Non-silent letters are pronounced the same exact way every time, or, at most, two different ways based on the letter that follows. Certain sounds that we have in English do not exist. The instructor claimed that there are only twelve basic sounds in Spanish – six vowels and six consonants. While that is a bit of an oversimplification, it is not that far from the truth. And before I am accused of overstating the case because of my knowledge of French which, like Spanish, is a romance language, I should point out that I am not talking about myself – I am talking about a class of about 25 people ranging in age from college student to retirement.

Sure, people did have the kinds of trouble that you might expect native speakers of American English to have. The rolling “r,” especially the double-”r”, which is actually a separate letter in the Spanish alphabet, gave people grief. Even those few who could roll their “r”s could not hear the different between the two. The distinctly emphasized “d” was a challenge – people tended to deemphasize it the way we do in English, which made it sound like the Spanish “r,” and claimed not to be able to hear the difference. There was one woman who, while she was catching onto the concepts relatively quickly, spoke with such a pronounced San Fernando Valley accent and inflection that it was difficult not to laugh. She looked the part, too – bleached blond hair, tanning-booth tan and a pink sweatshirt. To think that in most Spanish-speaking countries, she would be the archetypal American...

By and large, however, people were getting it. After about two hours of class, everyone was able to read simple prose from the first few pages of the textbook with minimal stumbling, and make themselves comprehensible. Try that with French or German! I attribute the success rate to the ubiquity of Spanish in our daily life. In any urban area in the US these days, there is simply no way to avoid hearing it – you hear it in stores, you hear it on the radio, you hear it blaring from low-riders on a Saturday night. And our brains absorb it, whether we realize or not, and become comfortable with its sound. It may be a foreign language, but it is a lot less foreign than just about any other.

From the “Only in Washington, DC” Department:
Only in Washington, DC, do you learn how to say “Environmental Protection Agency” in the first few minutes of an introductory foreign language class. For the record, it is Agencia de Protección Ambiental.