Just a few notes, today, maybe more later. I’ve been grading my life away lately, and it’s finally that time of year when I have my evenings and weekends to myself, no papers to grade. What a concept. Enjoy the photos above.
My ading is kuatit. She wanted to set up a pole for pole dancing on her birthday, so she found a big stick on the beach and dug a hole for it.
I was skeptical, but it turned out that it did end up holding people’s weight. There are pictures somewhere of some people doing some pretty acrobatic things with the pole.
My sister and I were in Downtown Seattle today, and we came across this capoeira, right on Westlake Plaza.
This took me back, of course; back to when I was playing with Manhattan Samba and I played caixa at a bautismo. It was crazy hot, I was telling my sister, and we were in this building that had been a church. It was bright but the air wasn’t moving, and the bautismo ceremony seemed endless; we played for hours on end.
“Hours?” my sister asked… Then she started asking things like “When do you take a break?” or “What if you get tired?”
Belly laugh! There are no breaks in samba! Once we started the rhythm, none of us, honestly, had any idea when we were going to get the high sign that ends the cycle, except that it would be hours. God help you if you were the only one covering your part.
Samba isn’t a performance; it’s just the ambient sound of the neighborhood. And the neighborhood’s not gonna stop needing sound just because your arms are getting sore. Keep playing!
It wasn’t the plan. Tomorrow is going to be tough.
Things to remember about this trip:
Slow haircut. Hand, foot, and mouth disease. My new nephew. Native American flute. Long swords Inappropriate wrestling. Ocean beach. Missed flight. Bastos Yoda. Not getting a burrito. 那么可爰我
就要吃了! Disco car. Senegalese food. Family and good friends.
Things to forget: the visa office at the Chinese consulate general.
Mission accomplished, though… multiple entries to the people’s republic.
It’s not a secret to anyone who knows me or who has followed my teaching career: I hate flashcards, I discourage anyone and everyone from wasting their time with them when it comes to language study.
I know some people like them. I know some people swear by them, and swear that flashcards have been integral to their language acquisition; I call bs. On the SpanishPod website I was once chastised for allowing my limited personal bias to cloud my judgement and give terrible advice regarding a tried-and-true study tool that millions of people have meow meow meow meow meow meow. Regardless, I maintain that flash cards are a horrible waste of people’s lives; they do zero for language acquisition, and that advocating for flashcards actually victimizes people who could be using their time and energy on activities that are actually beneficial.
In my professional opinion, it is unethical to advocate for the use of flashcards. In my personal opinion, it is at best a waste of time, at worst a form of sabotage.
Ok, let’s all calm down.
I used to have a long, reasoned lecture about why flashcards were a stupid waste of time, but nowadays I’ve boiled it down to a couple of simple sentences….
Flashcards train memory recall; language acquisition is not memory recall.
Memory recall is great. It impresses people, it will help you pass quizzes and exams that reward discreet item recall. I wish I had better memory recall.
Language acquisition, however, might as well be a different organ. Multilingual people can feel the difference between recall and language acquisition… whether or not they advocate for flashcards.
Memory recall is trained; it is practiced. People use association and other techniques; to some people these are intuitive; others attend high energy seminars to learn how to build memory mansions and rhyme “one” with “bun” and “two” with “shoe” and to fixate on someone’s big nose to remember that their name is Nathan.
Language acquisition, however, is instinctive. When people talk about language acquisition, they say things like “pick up;” he picked up a British accent after two weeks; where did that kid pick up all those swear words? They’ve been in Japan for seven years and haven’t picked up a lick of Japanese.
Language professionals and experienced multilinguals will tell you… with words… that language acquisition is a function of meaningful communication; entire languages are “picked up” because humans are driven to be part of a conversation. That’s why your language teacher keeps trying to have real conversations in the target language about the vocabulary; that’s why students who are too cool to engage in real conversations suck at remembering the vocab. Suuuuuuuck.
Look at me, do you think I study vocabulary? Hells no. I use it; that’s the reason for all my language learning successes. If I don’t know vocabulary in a given language, it’s because I haven’t used it yet.
Anyway, some monolingual people are not ready to hear this yet.
Check out this video: 5 Canadian polyglots are trying to explain to a reporter that language acquisition is different from memory. The reporter remains incredulous.
Seriously, five polyglots… how many polyglots does it take before she will believe that memory is different from language acquisition?
This is the source of a lot of frustration in my professional life. People ask me who to become a more successful language learner, and then when I tell them, they disbelieve.
Later they tell her that language keeps growing even when you stop using it, and she doesn’t believe that either. I’ll have to write another post about that later… but for now, you should know that that’s totally my experience as well… my French sounded like garbage while I was in France, but sounded great a year later.
That may not square with monolingual logic. Well, kids, if you want to stop being monolingual, you will have to start letting go of monolingual logic.
This is what pork adobo looks like. Boil the liquid all the way down; the meat will be so rich and juicy you won’t need to sauce up your rice. In fact, you’ll want that plain rice, as a counterpoint.
In this video, I served the adobo with rice mix and turnip greens, which I sauteed and then mixed with fresh tomatoes. I also like to serve it with my garlicy tomato salad.
If you still need closure after a big meal like that, you could try this leche flan CAKE.
I made this tortilla de patatas video this morning; another test shoot. This one turned out well… the tortilla itself was the best I ever made. There were some auto-focus issues with my camera, some lighting problems, and worst of all, I missed the money shot, where you flip the tortilla onto a plate.
I’m off to get an MRI now, and I’ll stop at the bakery for a baguette, so I can eat the rest of this tortilla…
A friend of mine wants to make a video of a tortilla de patatas later this week, so I made this little video as kind of a test run. It’s the tomato salad I always serve when I make Filipino food; it goes with chicken or porkadobo, lumpia shanghai, longganisa, or what ever -silog you can think of (and these people can think of a lot).
Shout out to DeliaChristina and Stephanie the Fancy Slavicist, two of my friends from Ann Arbor who are believers of the tomato salad.
I heard myself saying this phrase to my students recently. I had just told them they were going to learn something new, and as usual they all acted like they were going to die.
It doesn’t hurt to learn. It hurts to not learn; or it hurts to half-learn. It hurts to learn “the hard way.” I have made it my business to package content into modules that are easy to learn, but my students are not usually into it.
Anyway, I heard myself saying, “It doesn’t hurt to learn something,” and I thought, dang, that should be a fortune cookie or a t-shirt or something. And then I thought that I should learn something. Here’s what I’m learning…
This is the “traditional” system of describing Mandarin phonemes. In the 1950s the PRC adapted Pinyin Romanization, and stopped using注音符號. It’s still used in textbooks in Taiwan, where mainland reforms are never popular, as a rule. I doubt that I’ll have to use注音符號 ever, but since it doesn’t hurt to learn something (and it didn’t) why not, right?
I downloaded a few quizzey-quiz apps onto my phone, and then switched my Pleco dictionary to show me pronunciation in注音符號 rather than Pinyin. I’m not an expert at it yet, but I can now either read it outright, or guess right the vast majority of the time. When I’m not sure, I hit the audio button.
Up till now, I’ve been studying the “Simplified Characters” set, the writing reforms undertaken in the 50s by the PRC; they took about 200 characters and eliminated some strokes that seemed superfluous. The traditional characters, they say, are a) harder to read, b) tedious to write, c) only used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Chinatowns.
Well, I’ve spent plenty of time in Chinatowns, and now I’m going to Taiwan, so I told myself “it doesn’t hurt to learn something,” and switched my Pleco dictionary to the traditional characters setting (it still shows me both), and my Skritter to both traditional and simplified. At first, the traditional characters seemed so crazy and ridiculous that they made me laugh out loud. I quickly started making connections between traditional and simplified versions, and I’m starting to see why Chinese speakers from the mainland and diaspora alike say things like “traditional characters are more beautiful” and “they make more sense; you can see the meanings.” I’m still wading through them, slowly, but I’m already recognizing the characters in readings and music videos, and I’m kind of annoyed I didn’t start sooner.
Ok this has nothing to do with Chinese. I know it’s going obsolete, but I’ve always had a minor fascination with the minimal aspects of this system. I never cared much for alternate alphabets (i.e., Klingon, Elvish, etc.) but I always thought it was cool that you could send messages with a single tone or a flash of light. I’m pretty sure my sister and I learned Morse code when we were little, reading it off of her walkie-talkies. Some of that knowledge remained into our adult lives; one time someone attempted to beep out “SOS” on a door buzzer, and my sister and I looked at each other and said “that was SMS, actually.”
I actually do have as a goal to be able to text one-handed, the way we did in the old days with the alpha-numeric keypad. I knew this was meant as a joke, but a trip to the app store yielded the exact IME, available for free.
They say that Morse code was something that people learned in a day, so I found a coolposter, downloaded a quizzy app, and when I felt strong enough, I switched my cell phone interface to the Morse code IME. I’m still not super fast at it, and I haven’t learned numbers, punctuation, or the letters X, Y, and Z yet, but I’m getting better. Every time the Morse code buttons pop up, I think, “guh, I should change that back to swipe,” but then I give the Morse code a try, and I’m surprised every time by how much I already know.
What’s with all the quizzy apps?
JP, you say, knowingly, what’s with all they quizzy apps? Don’t they all smack of flashcarditarianism? Don’t you find that horribly hypocritical?
I’m glad you asked. No, I am not hypocritical. I am still firmly and unequivocally against using flashcards for vocabulary acquisition.
I will say what I’ve always said: flashcard and flashcard-like quizzy quizzes train memory recall; linguistic knowledge is not memory recall. If your goal is to speak a language, you’re better off practicing your conversation than drilling yourself with flashcards. If your goal is to read a language, your time is better spent reading.
However, if your goal is to recall items, e.g., for a quiz, then by all means practice quizzing, and you’ll become really good at recalling those items for the purposes of quizzing.
What I was quizzing myself on was not vocabulary words which number in the thousands, but scripts and codes, which are finite. Once I can recall those items, I put them into use immediately; i.e., switching my Pleco to bopomofo; switching my phone to Morse code IME.
As for my Skritter habit, I use a writing tablet. Yes, it’s still SRS and flashcardy, but I’m using it with visual, audio, and most of all kinetic input. So since I want to learn writing, and I’m actually physically practicing writing, I give myself a pass on that. Also, I’m quick to switch to paper once I think I own a character. When it comes to literacy in this language, there is really no substitute for ink and paper.
But just to reiterate, I still think flashcards, regardless of SRS or the bells and whistles of Rosetta Stone, are a gigantic waste of time when it comes to vocabulary and language acquisition. No question about that.
I feel bad for the folks hitting my blog for “chicken parts,” because they’re obviously looking for important food information, and they’re getting this post. This is a rambling post, mostly about the night me and the boys went to a Battle’s concert in Shanghai. At the very end there’s a picture of some chicken parts labeled, and me being annoyed that my Mexican coworkers could not tell a drumstick from a drumette, and my Chinese friend didn’t know a breast from a thigh. If you’re looking for chicken parts, folks, try this link. Or maybe this one.
drying cabinet dishes, astiankuivauskaappi
My own astiankuivauskaappi (a Finnish-invented dish-drying rack that drips over the sink) kind of pales in comparison to all the European ones I linked to on my original post, but for some reason “astiankuivauskappi” and “dish drying cabinet” searches on both Google and Bing will bring you to my little ol’ blog. I know that my friend the inimitable BitchPhD got inspired, and installed an Ikea rig in her kitchen as well. It bothers me that this technology isn’t standard in American kitchens; it’s not like it’s a difficult concept
pictures of poured jameson
A Google Images search of “pictures of poured Jameson” gets you the image from my pickleback post. Sweet merciful crap, I love that drink.
benny the irish polyglot
So it turns out that my blog post shows up on the first page of a google search about my fake nemesis, Benny from FluentIn3Months.com. Benny can’t be happy with that; I don’t think he was that impressed with me. I’m sure has he gets more famous my blog post will drop off of that search page.
By the way, Benny’s Mandarin mission is over… how did he do? Pretty good, I think, but I don’t think that he reached his goal of C1 proficiency. He made huge strides, though, that you can see in his videos. I have my guesses about why he didn’t reach C1, and I hope it’s not unkind to say… I think he studied in isolation too much for too long; didn’t get out there and really talk to people to the extent that he might have. Now I’m sure he did to that a lot, but not enough.
Remember, folks, when it comes to language instinct, I’m a true believer… that the human instinct to acquire language is triggered and fed by real, meaningful communication; not by studying, drilling down, “no pain, no gain” bullshit.
I don’t think Mandarin per se is “too hard” for someone to acquire through instinct, but it does require a lot at the beginning… things like breaking native language intonation habits. Actually, if anything is hard, it’s braking native language habits is what is hard; Mandarin per se is not harder or easier than any other language. At least that’s what fluent five year olds tell us.
what is galis
“Galis” is the Pangasinan word for “scabies,” and my post might be the only website on the whole internet that address that. You’re. Welcome.
Ok this has nothing to do with Chinese. I know it’s going obsolete, but I’ve always had a minor fascination with the minimal aspects of this system. I never cared much for alternate alphabets (i.e., 
JP, you say, knowingly, what’s with all they quizzy apps? Don’t they all smack of flashcarditarianism? Don’t you find that horribly hypocritical?
