Hyperpolyglots on Saint Valentine's Day

Hi everyone,

Okay, here’s the thing… over the past few weeks I have repeatedly mentioned “a talk I’m working on”. I believe that I may have even touched on some of the points I mean to tackle in it. The weird part is that, well, I have neglected to share with you any details about the actual event (in this day and age anything that happens is considered “an event”). So let me correct that: I’m going to give this talk twice: on Tuesday (Feb 14) at 19:15 in Laredo. The day after I’ll make the same presentation in the Ataúlfo Argenta High School in Castro Urdiales at 19:00 (Room B3). What is it about? Well… It's about hyperpolyglots. Who are these people?

According to the official definition, anybody who can speak six or more languages qualifies as a hyperpolyglot. Don't frown like that. It's not such a bizarre thing. We all have heard some guy on TV casually mention that a certain supermodel speaks five languages and just a very quick Internet search will have you believe that the current pope speaks anywhere between three and eight languages (it depends on the sycophant). Some even claim that he is conversant in Latin, an assertion which is blantantly false. And yet language superlearners do exist. Yes, they do. Believe it or not, some people do manage to speak a dozen languages to a very high standard. If you want find out how they do it, come to the talk. It will be fun.

In the meantime enjoy this beautiful Saint Valentine’s song, written and performed by sir Paul McCartney. He even directed the video clip!

A glorious case of mistaken identity

Hello my dearest students,

First off, I feel that I owe you an apology for the long silence. I’ve been busy with a million other things.

Avanzado 1. Those of you who have not turned in their assignment remember you can still do so. The task is quite simple: just record yourselves on video for 60 seconds discussing any of the topics we have touched on in class and bring me the file on a USB drive.

Avanzado 2. I would like you all to write a 200-word essay giving advice to a sixteen-year-old person. Just remember what you were like at that age and try and bear in mind everything you have learnt ever since.

In these past two weeks we have been working in several interesting areas. Avanzado 1 students have been dealing with verb patterns (Sean regrets saying those things, She refused to acknowledge the problem, I deluded myself into believing it, etc). We have all brushed up on the use of modals to express uncertainty. We should try and fight that impulse to settle for Spanish-sounding expressions such as Perhaps I will go or Maybe he was Dutch because, even though they are grammatically okay they prevent us from ever producing more natural sentences like I might go or He must have been Dutch. 

A second reminder has to do with fixed expressions that you may plug into any conversation. How about I don’t remember all the details but I think he said… or The thing is… I think I’m in love with her. A third point to consider is that of lexical chunks like, for instance, I walked up to him or He ended up working in a soup kitchen. Ideally, the words in bold type should somehow “flow out of you”. 

The funny thing is that we have all discussed the hilarious case of Guy Goma. Bizarrely enough, it features in coursebooks. Avanzado 1 students check out your workbook. Avanzado 2 please take a gander at page 70 of your textbook. It seems that both Pearson and Oxford University Press think of it as a memorable blunder. I think you will enjoy the video below. In a very entertaining way it sums up the unforgettable BBC interview which turned the charming Guy Goma into an internet celebrity.

 

 N.B. After the exam week I will return ALL essays.

Hello everyone,

In my last post I mentioned the actual physical exercise that acceptable pronunciation requires. Today I will touch on something close to that: the way we pronounce English words in everyday Spanish. Why? Because it influences our pronunciation of those very words when we speak English.

Spain has a long, sad tradition of mispronouncing foreing terms. I’m fully aware that we are not alone in this respect but our particular situation is truly embarrassing. In the days where our country had no direct contact with the English-speaking world it may have been understandable to hear atrocious pronunciations of popular names like John Wayne. By the time Tom Cruise became a household name we were not that isolated. Still, nobody knew how to pronounce that surname and those of us who did were inevitably mocked. We then joined the Erasmus program, embraced the Internet and welcomed the launch of digital television. All of a sudden real English was just a click away and I figured everything would go back to “normal”. Boy was I wrong!

In 2017 we still say U2 in Spanish [u:dos]. We’re probably the only country in the world that can’t say Spiderman right. The word meme (coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976) reached Spain in 2015 (in its “media” meaning) and, of course, it was pronounced [meme] pretty much like “memez”, but without the final interdental. Incidentally the English word sounds [mi:m], not exactly a challenge for a Spaniard. I’ve had many conversations about this topic and, quite typically, someone will always mention that we can pronounce a loanword in any way we choose to because, technically, the moment we borrow a term it is not foreign anymore. Even if they have a point I still believe that our pronunciation of Spiderman is just laughable but, okay, fair enough.

The troubling thing about this widespread approach to foreign words, however, is that it somehow bleeds into the English that students use in the classroom. Not only that, many Spanish people roll their eyes or make snide remarks whenever somebody dares to pronounce an English loanword in a way that, even using Spanish phonemes, attempts to reproduce its original sound. In my experience reality seems to be a faraway thing that belongs to native speakers and pretentious Spaniards. Therefore “regular people” resort to a kind of “fantasy English” in which Reebok rhymes with book, Gmail is read in Spanish but Hotmail is not, socialite is not even perceived as an English word and is often pronounced in French and LinkedIn becomes simply impossible for an English speaker to recognize. As a result of all this mess, time and again we, teachers, have to explain how to pronounce basic words like wi-fi or vintage to wide-eyed students who have never heard “the real thing”.

This article published on El País just last Monday, tackles exactly this problem. Is this depressing state of affairs going to change in the foreseable future? I’m afraid not. Only a couple of days ago a very young TV host made Yosemite rhyme with might.

The gymnastics of pronunciation

It is not easy to narrow down the multiple factors that explain successful learning but some of them are fairly obvious. Exposure to the target language is key and so is work on pronunciation as well as sheer frequency (every day). If you use English (in any way) on a daily basis you will get used to it. The force of habit will make you familiar with expressions that eventually will “sound right”. No grammatical explainations there, no logic, no reasoning. If you become accustomed to hearing I should have known one day you will simply find yourself saying it.

As one of you said in the classroom, speaking a second language involves a certain degree of “acting”. Yes. Acting. I totally agree. What should we understand by "acting"? Well, let’s see. What do actors do? One could say they pretend to be someone else for the duration of a show but an alternative description would point out the fact that actor do things on stage they don't usually do in their real lives. The same principle applies to a language learner. You are expected to do things that you don’t usually do in your “L1 life”. I’m not going to try and question the very concept of personal identity (which is complicated enough) but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you are the person that you usually are. It sounds like a stupid platitude but… think of it for a second. When somebody does something “out of character” we are quick to justify the person's behavior by saying “he did all those things but he was not himself because at the time he was going through a nasty divorce”.

He was not himself. What does it really mean? It means “he normally does not do those things” or “the Mike that I know doesn’t do those things”.

So let’s just assume that you are a person that has a certain set of skills, someone who enjoys doing certain things, etc… In short, you are used to doing certain things. You don’t devote your free time to melting plastic, practicing ninja moves or playing the theremin. That’s NOT “who you are”. So… placing your tongue in a way that allows you to sound out the only consonant in the word Asia (you have two options, by the way) is not something that you typically do because pronouncing the English sibilants is something that “your mouth is not used to doing”. Your facial muscles, your tongue, etc. need to learn to do something unusual and since you can’t possibly pronounce the sound [m] without closing your lips together, (ask your ventriloquist friends to verify that) I believe you should make a decision: “I’m going to act as if I was an English speaker”. You are going to be an actor.

Check out this video that my friend Antton sent me some weeks ago. Pay attention to the way he moves his mouth. That is exactly the kind of "gymnastics" I’m talking about.

N.B. Those of you who are not familiar with the theremin can click right here to become better acquainted with that instrument

Personal descriptions

My dear avanzado students. If my memory serves me correctly, we started the course by practicing our ability to describe people (I’m a people person, he’s a good laugh, I keep myself to myself, etc.). Remember?

Recently I have asked you to discuss whether opposites attract (as the cliché goes) or not. We have also talked about personal relationships (longterm commitments, summer flings, lifelong partners, etc.). In all these discussions psychological descriptions tend to feature prominently. I even posted a video explaining lutalica, a neologism that describes “the part of your identity that does not fit into any category”. In short, we have spent some time going over personality types and we've done it in many ways (using adjectives like outgoing or creepy and nouns such as daredevil or nationalist).

So far so good? Okay. That’s why we are now going to sail in rather shallow waters: physical descriptions. Whether you like them or not, physical descriptions are necessary and can be explored from a virtually endless number of angles.

For those of you that need a vocabulary fix I've decided to share this short list of basic phrasal verbs that may come in handy:

Bear in mind that, when we discussed risk-takers, we focussed on a particular kind of person and when we considered holiday options we ended up explaining how "certain vacations are for certain types". It is somehow inevitable, isn't it? I do hope you get used to this because we're going to do a lot of revising.

N.B. Avanzado 2 students: don’t forget the essay (“Do opposites attract?”) is due before the Xmas break.

Beautiful concepts

You know what a standalone episode is? Yes. It's an episode of a TV series that "stands alone on its own". It has a self-contained story is not necessarily connected to the rest of the series. Well, this post is going to be just that: a post that has no connection to our English classes at EOI Laredo. Okay? So here goes.

As you all know I’ve always been fascinated by words. I remember the first time I saw mamihlapinatapei in the Guinness Book of Records. I was twelve years old. It really opened my eyes, mostly because it allowed me to understand that not every idea, feeling or thought could be captured in one single word. Later in life learning a second language helped me appreciate some wonderful vocabulary. It must have been then that I realized that my own mother tongue has some amazing words that nobody ever uses. Some are incredibly specific (himplar) some others are just stimulating (ucronía). So I started learning other languages and woke up to some great vocabulary in Basque, German, French and Italian. It became quite obvious that every language was a treasure trove of dazzling concepts. Thanks to this newly found awareness I decided to look for interesting ideas in languages that I didn’t speak. So I bought as many books on the subject as I could possibly find. The process turned out to be quite a humbling experience.

Today everything is a little easier. The Internet is chock-full of sites that claim to offer endless lists of untranslatable words. Some of those magic terms are truly impossible to encapsulate in one Spanish or English word. Think of ilunga, a noun in the Tshiluba language, which describes a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time. Some other hard-to-translate words, like the Portuguese feeling of saudade or the Russian toska, have been glamorized out of proportion.

I still collect beautiful concepts trapped in beautiful words and have even tried my hand at inventing some of those myself. So I’m used to all kinds of neologisms: quirky, whimsical, technical, poetic and, believe it or not, I’m not alone. There are many word inventors out there who coin terms they feel are missing from their own languages. One such creator is John Koenig.

On his website he publishes lots of thought-provoking made-up words. The thing that sets him apart from other word creators is his decision to write poetic explanations of those neologisms and then edit beautiful inspiring videos that perfectly illustrate those terms. His concepts are, for the most part, quite relatable: who has not experienced the desire to disappear or the feeling that time goes faster as you grow older? I don’t know if you are as fascinated by language as I am, but I personally find the discovery of words to be an enriching, mind-broadening adventure. Every language is an attempt to describe human experience. It goes without saying, no language has ever been successful in that regard. They all fail and yet artists like John Koenig keep trying to fill the gaps, reach further and fail again, fail a little bit better. The video below these lines is about lutalica, a word he coined to describe the part of your identity that does not fit into categories. Enjoy.

The most beautiful places in the world

Bonan tagon!

So far we have discussed personal descriptions in a number of ways. The grammatical approach helped us realize that we can define somebody by using a noun (she’s a genius) and adjective (he’s trustworthy) or a whole phrase (Jo is someone I can talk to). We have also tackled character traits and physical appearances (just remember the clip about women’s beauty throughout history and men’s beauty in different cultures). For those of you who are willing to go the extra mile and pick up some more vocabulary here is an interesting video that presents some beauty standards that may seem shocking in this part of the world.

Anyway, soon we’re going to deal with beautiful places. Not people. In anticipation of the inevitable classroom conversations here is one of the zillions of lists that clutter the Internet. The actual contents of the list are, of course, debatable but the vocabulary it shows may come in handy.