How to be polite

Seasoned travelers recognize that cross-cultural politeness norms vary and respect is manifested through diverse expressions. Thus, members of cultures where communication is more direct are usually perceived as blunt or unrefined by those who have been raised in communities that value the so-called soft skills. Conversely, what is regarded as civil expression may be considered superpolite in societies which value group harmony and avoid direct confrontation.

In Spain, for example, much of the meaning of an oral message is often derived from non-verbal cues, shared understanding and context. Instead of resorting to phrases such as could you possibly...? would you be a dear and...? speakers will typically state what they would like and use few softening expressions, if any at all. Roughly speaking, in Spain we prefer honesty to extreme politeness, but there is an obvious downside to our frankness. Oftentimes we come off as abrupt or impolite to members of cultures in which explicit courtesy is a top priority. Personally, I think that a tactful opinion uttered with an unsmiling face defeats its very purpose and a friendly tone can sometimes (not always, though) make up for a slightly harsh statement. Still, you're probably reading this post because you want to know how you can be polite in English. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules regarding manners, at least none that can be applied universally, but as an advanced learner you should make sure that you have several different options to be... at least respectful.

Suppose a friend wants your opinion about their "objectively horrible" sweater, what should you do? Lie? (I think it is nice) Tell the truth? (You look silly in that thing). Be sarcastic? (It definitely sets off your eyes). Avoid a real answer? (It's very you). There is no clear-cut response. You may argue that it all depends on individual speakers, that everybody is different, that some people are diplomatic while others don't hold back. And all that is most definitely true. However, not everything depends on individuals. Whether we like it or not, we must accept that certain cultures promote certain modes of expression and if you're learning English you should not dismiss cultural conventions that happen to be prevalent in most English-speaking communities. Needless to say, there is significant variation among Anglophone people from different cultural backgrounds.

Generally speaking, Americans tend to be more verbally direct than British people. That doesn't mean that British people are more polite than the Americans. It simply acknowledges a proclivity. How can I help you? is a polite question you should expect on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, what do you need? is a colloquial alternative in the U.S. which is something of a no-no in the U.K. Likewise a statement such as Netflix needs to fix this problem is more likely to be heard in Wisconsin than in Dorset. Of course, when a speaker says that someone needs to do something they know that there is no pressing need involved. The speaker is simply voicing a opinion in a way that feels casual and "normal" in their dialect. A British speaker, however, might typically opt for a softer approach: I think they should fix that problem. Note that the second option includes two filters: I think (=it is my opinion) and they should (=it is my advice / they don't really have to do it). Now, being too courteous can also be problematic. Much like excessive irony, which morphs into sarcasm, politeness can become hypocrisy or involuntary self-parody. Also, is it fair to force your interlocutors to decode your constant euphemisms, understatements and white lies? I know that, to a language learner like you, tentative language can be tricky, but don't worry. Even Americans and Brits occasionally misinterpret each other. Their brands of irony, in particular, are poles apart.

Whatever your thoughts might be on the complicated question of politeness, I believe that an advanced English speaker ought to be attuned to the nuances distinguishing a pressing demand from a tactful suggestion. Play it safe and try to use polite expressions. So, when you're asking for a favor, for instance, remember that the phrase I need shows little consideration for the interlocutor and reveals a certain sense of entitlement. You can use it in certain contexts, of course, but it probably shouldn't be your default option if you're telling someone what you would like them to do. Just consider the difference between what you want is... (which is a casual way of giving advice in the U.S.) and if I were you I would.. (which reveals a more tentative approach).

The video below is a tongue-in-cheek explanation of how British manners work. Personally I find it delightful: the actor's tone, his voice, his over-the-top RP pronunciation. Everything is perfect. And even though it's obviously meant to be funny, there is a real message in it.

German words in English

A couple of days ago I was reading What We Can Know, the latest novel by Ian McEwan, when I came across the word zeitgeist, which, as you know, is a term I use quite often in my classes. Inevitably, I thought of Susana (not her real name), a friend of mine with whom I had been discussing that very word. At the time she was reluctant to believe that such a German-looking word was really used in English. After a brief explanation on my part she was ready to concede that it was an English word, but speculated that it might only be popular among language freaks... Bizarrely enough, the day after our conversation, she heard the word zeitgeist in a Spanish TV series and simply couldn't believe it.

I must confess I was surprised myself. The presence of zeitgest in English harkens back to 1835. So it is safe to say that it is well-established in the language. In Spanish, however, the term is still restricted to the elitist spheres of academia... or so I thought. Its appearance in a TV show might be a sign that the tide is turning. Who knows?

Anyway, zeitgeist is, by no means, the only loanword that English speakers have taken from German. Wunderkind, for instance, is a noun that you may stumble upon every once in a while. A wunderkind is, essentially, a child prodigy. This should surprise no one, since Wunder means "wonder" and Kind is, of course, the German word for "child". So, now you may wonder (pun intended) why an English speaker should feel the need to employ such a foreign word. Don't we already have the expression whizz kid, which means the exact same thing? The answer to that question is pretty obvious. We sometimes prefer loanwords because their impact on the listener or reader is different. Rendevouz and tryst have the same meaning but feel different. Consider the differences between lingerie and underwear, safari and journey, or aficionado and devotee.

Remember that, at the advanced level, the semantic content of an expression is only part of the full meaning it conveys. A sophisticated speaker is expected to think about the register of a word as well as its connotations and even its phonetic associations. Wunderkind happens to carry a certain sense of excitement and marvel that "whizz kid" just doesn't have. It is more dramatic and, let's face it, slightly literary. You can use it to refer to someone young (not necessarily a child) who excels spectacularly in areas such as chess, finance, music, literature or sports, but if you don't usually discuss young little geniuses you might not need to use the term.

Other German words that you may come across in English are:

• Doppelganger (from Doppelgänger:"a person who looks exactly like someone else")
• Delicatessen (literally "fine foods")
• Angst ("anxiety and insecurity" as in the collocation teenage angst)

One that I frequently use is flak. I know. It looks like a typo or a misprint, but it is an actual word and it is quite popular in the media even if it has a rather sinister origin.

Flak is an abbreviation of FLugAbwehrKanone (or FLiegerAbwehrKanonen), which means "air-defence cannon". These days it is mostly used to refer to heavy criticism directed at some public figure. You can say, for instance, that "the president took flak for her recent comments on immigration". If you don't feel comfortable with an expression that originated in WWII, just remember that the English alternative also happens to have militaristic overtones. Indeed, you can come under fire for doing or saying the wrong thing.

Is that it? Of course not.

In scholarly contexts you may come across a panoply of German words. Off the top of my head I can think of Weltanschauung ("worldview") and Ursprache ("ancestral language"). However, you don't need to be an intellectual to make use German vocabulary. In certain areas of the Unites States loanwords from Yiddish are quite common. Terms like schmuck ("unpleasant idiot") or shtick ("comic performance") don't feel foreign anymore while others (schlep, schmoe) will be easily understood in New York, but might raise eyebrows in Ireland or New Zealand. I know what you're thinking. Yiddish is not German. And you are right. It is not even a dialect of modern standard German. That said, it shares a lot of its vocabulary with German, to the point that sometimes we don't know if a particular German-sounding term was poached from standard German or it came to English via Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

The great thing about the German influence in the English language is its pervasiveness. In the U.S. the German word for "health", Gesundheit, is sometimes said when someone sneezes. Wanderlust (not frequent at all in present day German) designates the "desire to travel". The English word foosball (futbolín in Spanish) is actually an adaptation of Fuβball, which is what Germans call "football". And I don't need to explain words like kindergarten, poltergeist, kitsch or Oktoberfest, right?

One German export that some people seem to overlook, though, is the prefix über-, which English speakers use as a glorified version of "super-". Its first use was rather academic and referred to the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, the notorious Superman (or super person, to be more exact), but these days you can be übercool, for example, if you're "too cool for school", or über-stylish if you're some kind of trendsetter. Similarly, something can be über-secret. It definitely sounds cooler than top secret, doesn't it? The prefix looks less intimidating when you realize it's the German equivalent of "over". By the way, the name of Uber, the famous transportation company, is precisely a version of this prefix. Understandably, the marketing department of the firm chose to dispense with the foreign-looking umlaut (¨). I can't blame them. After all, the very word umlaut is German!

Anyway, my favorite German / Yiddish word in English is mensch. As I have mentioned above, it means "person". In English, however, it keeps the meaning that it has in Yiddish. A mensch is not just a human being but rather "a person of integrity and honor". Isn't that a word we should use more often? Come on. Help me make it more popular. Go out there and mention mensch. 

Spain's Music Day

 Hi you all!

I am aware that International Music Day is October 1. However, I grew up in Spain, where Music Day is observed on November 22nd, in other words, today. So I've decided to celebrate this special day by sharing an a cappella cover of a song that I happen to like. And, yes, there's a didactic side to it. The song deals with one of the experiences that most humans can relate to: breaking up with a romantic partner, which is something we discussed in a recent C1.2 class. Allow me to refresh your frazzled memory... We talked about the perils of the current dating scene, one of them being the dreaded experience of getting ghosted. Remember? No? Seriously? You don't remember I played Someone That I Used to Know by Gotye?

Anyway, the song you're about to listen to is about just that: being "erased". Enjoy the Havard Opportunes performance of Lizzy McAlpine's 2022 hit Erase Me and you'll understand that pop music can indeed be glorious. It just doesn't get any better than this. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Connected speech

Consider the following phrases: Do you know what I mean? Whether you like it or not. Bizarre though it may seem. They all have the same thing in common: you don't have to construct them. You just say them.

These are sometimes called stock phrases or lexical chunks and the reason why they are so popular amongst advanced foreign language learners has to do with the fact that (as I explained in my previous post) they allow us to speak without thinking because, in a certain way, your brain can't tell the difference between a chunk and a very long word. If you think about it, it makes sense, doesn't it? After all, how are you is a three-syllable sequence just like Hawaii. Pronouncing the first sentence is every bit as difficult as articulating the place name and those who don't speak English might not see the difference between a phrase and a word. I still remember the time a student asked me what festival I kept going on about in a class. lt took me a while to realize that she had misheard the expression first of all.

The great thing about lexical chunks is surely that they allow a learner to sound natural, but there's also a less talked about advantage: chunks also help you speak faster and, therefore, more efficiently. I know what you're probably thinking. Saying a simple sequence like how are you is far easier than uttering a really long sentence such as I wouldn't go so far as to call them sleazy. Still, the key to saying those two sequences lies in the same skill: your ability to master transitions. In the video below I explain just how you can do that.

Collocations and chunks

As I was saying yesterday… I don’t really know how to teach English. I just try and share with my students whatever I find effective: strategies that once worked for me as well as techniques that appear to work for students now. So, anyway, I have decided to get back to blogging. It is my hope that my posts will be helpful you, advanced students out there.

Today I'd like to type a few words about one of the keys to fluency: chunking.

We are all aware that one basic learning strategy consists in memorizing collocations, right? It's no secret that certain adverbs tend to go with certain adjectives (deeply religious, abundantly clear, highly skeptical, etc.) and some verbs favor certain nouns (set the bar, paint a picture, collect taxes, etc.). So... what can you do with the freedom of the press? Well, you can certainly promote the freedom of the press or, should you be of the fascistic persuasion, you can suppress it. Linguistically, those two options work equally well. Of course, things don't have to be "either or".When you don’t quite obliterate the freedom of the press but weaken it you may say that you undermine the freedom of the press. Those are natural combinations. Again... they are called collocations.

If you want to take your game to the next level then you should try and expand a collocation into a chunk, which is just a series of words that work together. "It goes without saying", "believe it or not", "as far as I can tell", for example, are chunks. So, if you take a collocation like "sweep the globe" and tag it onto an idiom such as "a rising wave of"  you get the phrase the rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe. That is not a conventional turn of phrase. And by that I mean that you can’t find it in a dictionary. However, you can deliver it as if it were one "expression" and that is one of the secrets to actual fluency. Precisely because you know the whole phrase you can say it as a whole unit, just like you do when you say do you know what I mean? You don't build that sentence, do you? It simply comes out.

By the way, there is another marine-themed metaphor which you can also use to express the idea of stopping something: to stem the tide of. Think about this sentence: governments should strive to stem the tide of authoritarianism that seems to be sweeping the globe. There you go. It's longer. It's classy. It works! Then you may want to try using variations on that theme . Instead of sweeping the globe you can say, for instance, taking the world by storm. Whatever you choose to say, just make sure that the combination has a history in the language, i. e. it has been agreed upon by millions of speakers and, therefore, feels natural. Otherwise you may find yourself breaking new lexical ground, which is always tricky when you’re a students. Let writers and poets engage in the art of invention.

The excerpt below, taken from a cnn article, contains some of the phrases I’ve mentioned.

On teaching

So I'm about to wrap the whole thing up. The school year is almost over and I have the distinct feeling that I may not be returning to this blog for a long, long time, which justifies a glance back at what I've done professionally over the past few years. After some seconds of serious consideration, I find myself facing a bewildering realization, namely, that I don't know what the best teaching method is.

Before I elaborate on that, let me drop some truths on you. Teaching is not as straightforward as some of you might think. Expectations are as wildly varied as the so-called "learning styles" (of whose actual existence I'm not quite convinced). I do know, though, that not everyone learns things in the same way and certainly not because of the same reasons. Does that mean that brains are hardwired in radically different ways? I really don't know.

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, I think I needn't explain why I can't teach in, say, eleven different ways. So, what am I to do? The answer is simple: choose. Indeed, I have no alternative but to choose one method and then try and make the best of it. I am aware of the fact that, to some students, my approach to teaching may seem chaotic and confusing. I'm prone to referencing pop culture, recounting personal experiences and resorting to all kinds of obscure vocabulary (e.g. "regolith" and "coulrophobia"). Admittedly, this can all be slightly disconcerting to students expecting a standard type of by-the-book class. Yet, one thing is glaringly obvious to me: life is a miscellaneous affair. And there's precious little scaffolding to it. Just think about it for a second. You watch the news or listen to a podcast and all kinds of terms, accents and topics are thrown at you in no particular order of grammatical complicacy, which is absolutely normal because, well, because... that's life. The funny thing is that it is precisely that kind of confusing experience (which you get, for instance, by spending some time abroad) that makes you learn better. Ask anyone who's lived in an English-speaking country for a long enough period of time.

Say what you will about general systems and specific strategies, it is my firm belief that a truly sophisticated speaker should be ready to face unexpected situations and understand out-of-context texts. Can you get that from adapted books or watered-down versions of a news reel? Maybe not.

At the advanced level, a perfectly organized, step-by-step lesson plan, one with increasing degrees of complexity can be easy on the students, but fails to live up to reality. Something of that sort can certainly be useful in the early stages of the learning process. However, at the advanced level (C1 and C2) it can be more of a hindrance than a benefit. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making a case for aimless instruction and a rejection of textbooks. In fact, I do pay attention to the textbook... but in my own personal way. That said, I'd rather start conversations and refer to apparently unrelated snippets of information than do exercise 8 right after finishing exercise 7. Shockingly enough, my system appears to work. At least, sometimes. Every once in a while I receive an email from a student who tells me how happy they are about the progress they've made. The whole thing is quite miraculous to me, which is the reason why I never take any credit for my students' learning. They do the learning. I just given them some pointers or, as I usually phrase it in the classroom, I show my students the way but they do the walking.

The unvarnished truth, however, is that, after many years teaching English, I still don't know how to do it. I guess I try and turn my classes into a conversation, probably because that's how I learned to speak English: by experiencing stuff. If you're a student of mine you know full well that in my classes, topics, words and references appear to simply "come up" (even if I often bring them up deliberately). You're also aware of the fact that I like to overexplain things, put them in a context, connect seemingly unrelated ideas, go off on a tangent, whip up a conclusion, etc. and I try to do all that within the boundaries of what "looks like" casual banter. After all, if one learns to swim by swimming, it stands to reason that we should learn to speak a language by speaking it. So, even if it doesn't look that way, "there is a method to my madness". That said, if I had to give you all a piece of advice I would simply ask you to practice. Practice as much as you can as often as you can! Copy expressions, imitate accents, borrow turns of phrase, listen hard, read a lot and speak whenever you find an opportunity. Seek exposure to the target language. Remember that attending classes alone doesn't really cut it anymore. Classes are just a part of your "diet", but you should also find your "nutrients" elsewhere.

But I digress.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm never sure if my teaching really helps my students. Quite frankly, I can only hope it does. So, imagine my surprise when I came across the video below and I saw the great Richard Feynman, whom I admire deeply, discussing his experience as a teacher and saying "I really don't know how to do it". Not only did he win the Nobel Prize in Physics (1965), but he also taught at the highest level imaginable. Students were invariably enthralled by his explanations (there is footage of him teaching and lecturing). Yet, he claimed not to know how to do it. Well, that might just be the only thing he and I have in common. I don't know how to teach, either. Anyway, I'm afraid it's time for you to listen to the master himself. My dear students... Mr. Richard Feynman.

It feels "artificial"

Yes. That's what I often hear whenever I discuss the importance of using idioms. "It feels artificial" say some of my students. Well, allow me to paraphrase. What you really want to say is probably something like this: "I feel weird because I've never done it before".

Does that get too close to the bone? Eating with chopsticks, playing a new chord on the guitar, wearing a business suit, saying "my husband"... All those experiences feel "strange" at first, right? Only the first time we do them. But it's not because they are intrinsically odd. Some Asian peoples have been eating food with chopsticks for millennia. English speakers have been using idioms for centuries. Your mother may have been saying "my husband" for some decades now. There's nothing odd about those habits.

So, yes. Speaking natural English may be a little "strange" only when you do it for the first time.

If you don't feel comfortable using idioms maybe you should reevaluate your whole learning process because, the way I see it, the change from intermediate to advanced level can be defined as a transition from "grammatically correct English" into "natural English". And being natural involves some serious use of idiomatic expressions. So stop feeling weird and embrace what's real. The payoff is definitely worth the effort.