Those of us who haven't grow up speaking two languages I suspect have all asked ourselves the question "when do I get to call myself bilingual?"
I think this is a very personal question with as many answers as speakers and it's also something that's very important because ultimately we're not just asking about our skill level - we're asking about our identity.
My guess is that ~adult language learners who are primarily learning the language with the hope of one day speaking it - and this includes the majority of high school language learners - have a very high standard of what it means to be bilingual. I speak my first language with this level of (quite frankly extravangant) competency and ease; I can only be bilingual when I speak my second language with the same comptency and ease.
And this is a legit definition of bilingualism because isn't it basically what people who are bilingual from birth (or near enough) do?
Well, maybe. Without doing any empirical research whatsoever or even checking wikipedia I'm pretty sure that lots of bilingual-from-birth-ers do not actually speak both languages equally well. One language gets stronger from being used more often; one language has been used for academic things; one language is spoken with lots of code-switching to the other; etc.
Personally, I would love to be as fluent in Welsh as I am in English - which, let's be honest, is not exactly a perfect level of fluency at the best of times, let alone when I'm tired or excited or a little bit tipsy or wearing new shoes or its raining or I need to go to the toilet.
Nevertheless I am nowhere near that level of perfect dysfluency in Welsh. But, shortly after I came back from The Big Welsh Holiday Of 2013, I decided that I had had too many interesting conversations about a range of topics - regardless of how slowly I spoke, how slowly I was spoken to, how many repetitions I needed, or how many words I fudged - to not call myself bilingual.
My idea of what I considered necessary for bilingualism is different because I have been able to focus on "communicate now" rather than "speak one day".
I think of course there are some situations where you can sort of measure how fluent you are in your second language and there's a standard to be attained - for example, getting a job in your second language, or passing a particular language exam. But if you aren't fluent enough for that standard, it doesn't mean you're not bilingual - it just means you aren't fluent enough for that standard. (Yet.)
You can be bilingual with just a few words in your second language. I work with kids who are considered bilingual and who are pretty rubbish in both their langauges, and that's absolutely fine and it's also really important to acknowledge that they are still bilingual.
I think something happens when you call yourself bilingual - I'm not sure what yet, but it has something to do with how long some of us have been wanting to speak a second language and how it feels to be suddenly a member of the non-monolingual world and how important language is to our lives and given that importance, how we now see our linguistic identity.
So kids, when do you get to call yourself bilingual?
Friday 29 November 2013
Thursday 28 November 2013
Why Welsh II
Yesterday I wrote briefly about my reasons for starting to learn Welsh - I like learning languages, and also I wanted to go to Wales for a holiday.
(By the way, I thought I would write less frequent, longer posts, but I think I might have a go at writing more frequent, shorter posts. Not that it matters to my readership of one (my mother). So we'll see how this goes.)
But as people have objected - "they speak English in Wales, don't they?"
This is true; I think you'd be hard pressed nowadays to find a single speaker of Welsh in Wales who didn't also speak English. Of course if you went to the Welsh settlement of Y Wladfa in Patagonia, Argentina, you may find Welsh speakers who do not in fact also speak English, but Spanish. Ha! So in that instance, if you didn't speak Spanish but you did speak Welsh, you would be thinking "what a useful language this is".
But yes - primarily Welsh speakers in Wales also speak English, so what's the point?
The point is that both English and Welsh are - officially - the national languages of Wales, and that Wales is its own country. It's not actually England. I mean, duh, but although Wales and England have been very much intertwined after centuries of British colonisation and post-colonisation, in perfect theoretical and ideological terms Welsh is absolutely as important as English.
Learning tipyn bach o Gymraeg before going on holidays to Wales is a way of recognising that Welsh is an official language of the country. To me, it's a socio-political statement. It's a sign of respect.
I realise that may sound incredibly patronising for reasons I can't quite put my finger on and to be honest, I didn't get to speak that much Welsh in Wales (other than meeting up with other learners), so my respect doesn't count for tiddly beans. But I made an effort to start most of my interactions with shw mae and end them with diolch and on a couple of occasions the person definitely did a double take before answering croeso, and I feel like in that tiny way I had been able to also say, you know what, this language matters. Your language matters.
Because obviously that's what this is all about, me feeling good about making you feel good - oh, there it is, that's what makes this patronising. Oh well.
Guess what? That's not even the last good reason I have for learning Welsh! There's more!
So, what do you think? How important would it be to you to learn a minority language in a bilingual country? How do you see minority languages in bilingual nations? How about Welsh national independence, huh? Ooh, now there's a can of worms...
(By the way, I thought I would write less frequent, longer posts, but I think I might have a go at writing more frequent, shorter posts. Not that it matters to my readership of one (my mother). So we'll see how this goes.)
But as people have objected - "they speak English in Wales, don't they?"
This is true; I think you'd be hard pressed nowadays to find a single speaker of Welsh in Wales who didn't also speak English. Of course if you went to the Welsh settlement of Y Wladfa in Patagonia, Argentina, you may find Welsh speakers who do not in fact also speak English, but Spanish. Ha! So in that instance, if you didn't speak Spanish but you did speak Welsh, you would be thinking "what a useful language this is".
 |
| "What a pretty flag this is" - Y Wladfa flag |
But yes - primarily Welsh speakers in Wales also speak English, so what's the point?
The point is that both English and Welsh are - officially - the national languages of Wales, and that Wales is its own country. It's not actually England. I mean, duh, but although Wales and England have been very much intertwined after centuries of British colonisation and post-colonisation, in perfect theoretical and ideological terms Welsh is absolutely as important as English.
Learning tipyn bach o Gymraeg before going on holidays to Wales is a way of recognising that Welsh is an official language of the country. To me, it's a socio-political statement. It's a sign of respect.
I realise that may sound incredibly patronising for reasons I can't quite put my finger on and to be honest, I didn't get to speak that much Welsh in Wales (other than meeting up with other learners), so my respect doesn't count for tiddly beans. But I made an effort to start most of my interactions with shw mae and end them with diolch and on a couple of occasions the person definitely did a double take before answering croeso, and I feel like in that tiny way I had been able to also say, you know what, this language matters. Your language matters.
Because obviously that's what this is all about, me feeling good about making you feel good - oh, there it is, that's what makes this patronising. Oh well.
Guess what? That's not even the last good reason I have for learning Welsh! There's more!
So, what do you think? How important would it be to you to learn a minority language in a bilingual country? How do you see minority languages in bilingual nations? How about Welsh national independence, huh? Ooh, now there's a can of worms...
Wednesday 27 November 2013
Why Welsh?
When people ask why I'm learning Welsh, I think I brace myself a little inwardly, knowing that whatever answer I give will never be quite the right answer - they will nod, and smile, and say “Yes, but why?”
In all honesty, there wasn't much thought to it in the first place; but much like I started being vegetarian because I wanted to be cool like my sister who was vegetarian and then later on found lots and lots of other (actually good) reasons to be vegetarian, I now have a swag of reasons to learn Welsh - so let's try and answer this question for good, shall we?
The first thing I usually say is "Well, I really like learning languages" or "Wel, dw i really hoffi dysgu ieithoedd" depending on who I'm talking to. I think this is supposed to make me sound like some amazing polyglot with language notches all over my belt, but what I actually mean is I've got a long line of failed failed failed language learning attempts and forays behind me - including Indonesian, French, Italian, Chinese, Estonian, Lithuanian, Bundu Dusun, Spanish, Autralian Sign Language, and the lyrics to Sich Offnen by Australian indie rock band 'Not From There' (so, German?) - so at least the idea of having a crack at Welsh wasn't completely out of left field.
For people who don't buy "I want to learn it because it's there" as enough reason in itself - which is most people - I then add that I was planning a holiday to Wales so why not learn a bit of Welsh?
(Apaprently some people need a reason for that as well - really? have you seen Wales? Why would you not want to go on holidays there? But then I mess things up by saying I wanted to go to Wales because I was learning Welsh, and it all gets very chicken and egg.)
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| DO YOU WANT TO BE HERE YES/YES? (Criccieth at sunrise, by me.) |
Of course the obvious objection to "I'm going to go to Wales so why not learn a bit of Welsh?" is "but everyone in Wales speaks English right?" That's when it gets very interesting and very political, very quickly. And that is the subject for another post.
Sunday 24 November 2013
how do you word?
Previously in my blog, I wrote about vocabulary explosions. Today, because I want to, I'm going to write about how I'm learning new vocabulary in Welsh.
The main thing I like to do is to read the BBC news in Welsh . The BBC have a really cute app on their site that allows you to hover over words that are highlighted in yellow to get a quick translation. I like to do this in the morning while I drink tea and look out at my balcony with the dead plants because I'm posh like that.
I pick four or five words from an article, and plug them into my Anki SRS flashcard app on my phone. (My phone is quickly becoming a language learning dream. More on that later, perhaps.) SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System, by the way - it's intended to make sure that you only practice a word "right before" you're about to forget it, but that's debatable - I think of it as basically a way of practising hard words more frequently and easier words less frequently.
I try and go through my flashcards every day, and it only takes about five minutes, so no biggie there.
Anki also helps me remember what words I want to remember, if that makes sense - I'm reminded to use some of this new vocab. Well, that's the idea anyway, though I usually don't use a word straight away, unless I'm very deliberately going to be talking about a particular topic. What I've found instead is that I start using a new word after I hear someone else say it - maybe that's the last bit of the learning process that cements the word.
I also get new vocab from skyping in Welsh - usually by the end of a conversation I'll have at least half a dozen new words that I've asked to have spelt for me, and I put them in the Anki app as well. I've started downloading some Welsh flashcards for my Memrise app, but I'm not sure about that yet.
I don't get much vocab from listening to Radio Cymru, to be honest - usually because I listen to it in the car and then I forget the word before I have time to look it up.
....and this is an awkward end to a blog post.
Saturday 23 November 2013
on vocabulary explosions
As we aaaaall know, toddlers are linguistic geniuses who learn like 3000 new words every day whereas adults are veritable cretins who can't string two words together in another language to order a cup of coffee. (There were extenuating circumstances; I didn't know it was culturally weird to order a takeaway coffee in Italy; it all went downhill from there.)
Thing is, I don't think this is entirely true. Okay, yeah, most kids have the kind of capacity to pick up language subconsciously that makes the slow, laborous task of adult language learning seem, well, slow and laborous - except that actually I think we get a few breaks along the way.
I've been thinking about how much easier (easier? really? am I allowed to say that? it's a relative term; it's staying) it is for me to pick up Welsh vocabulary now than when I first started learning the language.
(People like to complain about Welsh mutations (treigladau), and sure, they're fun, but I just wish every word in the Welsh dictionary didn't start with a 'c'.)
As a totally unscientific observation, the more vocabulary I learn, the quicker I pick up new vocabulary. I have a few ideas why this might be so:
Thing is, I don't think this is entirely true. Okay, yeah, most kids have the kind of capacity to pick up language subconsciously that makes the slow, laborous task of adult language learning seem, well, slow and laborous - except that actually I think we get a few breaks along the way.
I've been thinking about how much easier (easier? really? am I allowed to say that? it's a relative term; it's staying) it is for me to pick up Welsh vocabulary now than when I first started learning the language.
(People like to complain about Welsh mutations (treigladau), and sure, they're fun, but I just wish every word in the Welsh dictionary didn't start with a 'c'.)
As a totally unscientific observation, the more vocabulary I learn, the quicker I pick up new vocabulary. I have a few ideas why this might be so:
- Words are related. When you can start to pull words apart - with prefixes and suffixes and the like - and you can see how those parts are put back together, suddenly it's not so hard to remember that anghyfreithlon means 'illegal' when you've seen the 'freith' bit in other words relating to law, and the 'ang' bit in other negative words, and the 'lon' bit in adjectives or whatever they're called
- Improved memory capacity/capability. Just throwing it out there. Right? I'm sure you improve your ability to remember things the more you use it. I read that somewhere, I just can't remember where. (ha ha.) But seriously, they (whoever "they" are) talk about neuroplasticity as something that continues throughout your lifetime and is not just the magical elixir of screaming three year olds so probably right now I am forcing my brain to make new neural pathways that are better able to retain new vocabulary - albeit at a slower rate than when I was a kid.
- More accessible grammatical structures within which to put your new vocab. Legit. What I mean is that through practising other language stuff, like grammatical structure, I get better at those things which means that when I'm speaking Welsh, I use less mental resources on trying to put a sentence together which frees up some room in my brain to dig up some new vocab.
Monday 18 November 2013
Linguistic Real Estate
or, the logistics of learning two languages at once.
So this is my metaphor for learning a language.
You start with a handful of words and a smattering of grammar, and you build yourself a little mud hut that may or may not survive an unexpected sneeze, let alone the winter. But slowly - or quickly - you build up this crappy little mud hut until it becomes a kind of granny flat, and then a tiny one by one house, and then when the foundations are a bit stronger you kind of start adding rooms with new areas of vocabulary and suddenly there's a whole new gable of the pluplerfect subjunctive blah coming off one side and you're doing a bang up job of decorating that place with all sorts of cute adjectives and expressions and everyday slang.
Linguistic real estate, right?
But as home owners know, when do you ever stop? You don't stop. It's never finished. You'll be doing home renovations and touch up jobs for the rest of your life, if you let yourself.
The question is, then, when do you redirect some of the energy you're putting into beautifying this one piece of lingustic real estate, into a whole nother pile of sticks and mud? Can you work on both places at once? What if you put all your energy into this new shack of language and then you go back to your old place and now your interior design is so last year and also the whole west wing has collapsed because your supporting wall wasn't that supporting after all?
Okay, enough with the analogies, you get the picture.
So here's my problem in real terms. I'm feeling pretty good about my Welsh ar hyn o bryd. I can have an interesting conversation without relying too heavily on English and without asking for every second word to be repeated (just every third) so long as my conversation partner is... talking... like... this... I mean, I really feel like I've come a long way. I'm even sometimes starting to think of myself as bilingual (NO WHAT? ADDING THAT to the list of things to blog about).
And now I'm starting to dip my toes into Lithuanian (there's a reason, legit) but I don't want to stop learning Welsh but I'm not sure I can do both at once or you know, hey, how do I do this?
So this is my metaphor for learning a language.
You start with a handful of words and a smattering of grammar, and you build yourself a little mud hut that may or may not survive an unexpected sneeze, let alone the winter. But slowly - or quickly - you build up this crappy little mud hut until it becomes a kind of granny flat, and then a tiny one by one house, and then when the foundations are a bit stronger you kind of start adding rooms with new areas of vocabulary and suddenly there's a whole new gable of the pluplerfect subjunctive blah coming off one side and you're doing a bang up job of decorating that place with all sorts of cute adjectives and expressions and everyday slang.
Linguistic real estate, right?
But as home owners know, when do you ever stop? You don't stop. It's never finished. You'll be doing home renovations and touch up jobs for the rest of your life, if you let yourself.
The question is, then, when do you redirect some of the energy you're putting into beautifying this one piece of lingustic real estate, into a whole nother pile of sticks and mud? Can you work on both places at once? What if you put all your energy into this new shack of language and then you go back to your old place and now your interior design is so last year and also the whole west wing has collapsed because your supporting wall wasn't that supporting after all?
Okay, enough with the analogies, you get the picture.
So here's my problem in real terms. I'm feeling pretty good about my Welsh ar hyn o bryd. I can have an interesting conversation without relying too heavily on English and without asking for every second word to be repeated (just every third) so long as my conversation partner is... talking... like... this... I mean, I really feel like I've come a long way. I'm even sometimes starting to think of myself as bilingual (NO WHAT? ADDING THAT to the list of things to blog about).
And now I'm starting to dip my toes into Lithuanian (there's a reason, legit) but I don't want to stop learning Welsh but I'm not sure I can do both at once or you know, hey, how do I do this?
- is there a point where I can say "yup, my Welsh is at this level and this is a good place to take a breather"?
- can I learn two languages at once?
- if so, how?
- do I study them on different days of the week? different settings? one at home and one at work? (no I don't sit at my desk going through vocab what who said that?)
- do I even have the energy to start over with a swamp hut?
- what if one language inteferes with the other?
Sunday 17 November 2013
so close, so far
After having spent four and a half years at university (bachelor of science with honours in linguistics thank you very much) telling anyone who would listen and anyone else as well that I would not, could not, was not ever going to be a speech pathologist - I found myself a few months after graduation, applying to do a masters of speech pathology.
There was a good reason for this change of heart. I'd been working with a little autistic kid who was having a bit of difficulty with language and in the structure of the programme that I was given to follow, I was basically teaching him English - first pronouns, then nouns, then present tense verbs, until one very exciting day when I looked at the updated programme and saw that we were going to be starting on past tense verbs.
I don't think the kid cared much to be honest but I thought it was probably the best thing ever. It meant that he was going to be able to tell me not just what he was doing in that moment, but what he had done every moment before that. Like this whole world of conversation - heck, this whole world full stop - was going to open up for us. Very exciting.
So then I thought, hey, yeah, I want to do this for a proper living. Not really knowing what speech pathology was - yes, I decried an entire profession without knowing very much about it and now you should know to expect that sort of thing from me - I decided that being a speech pathologist was probably the best way for me to get to do this language teaching thing, like, all the time. For a living and stuff.
The thing about speech pathology is - well, it's a lot of things. It's one of the most broad ranging and varied and misunderstood jobs I know (doesn't everyone think they're the most misunderstood?) - but it really is at least broad ranging, from stuttering and accent reduction to articulation to language to voice to swallowing to literacy to sensory stuff and as far beyond that as people will stretch your job description.
But the one thing it kind of really isn't, is language teaching.
I can help a kid acquire language. I can help an adult regain their language. But what I was doing with the autistic kid, sitting with him and giving him words and showing him how to use them and stuff - teaching language - I just don't really get to do that as a speechie.
And maybe there's something in that. I mean, there is. Language educators could take a couple of pages from the old speechie guide book and instead of just teaching languages in this sort of provisional manner, they could be supporting people to work out how to get language themselves. There's a lot to be said for that approach and I'll put it on my list of things to blog about.
In the meantime, though, at least for me in my situation, it feels like I'm so close but so far from doing that thing that got me going with that little kid. So here we go, then; this is what the blog is all about, with a few meanderings along the way. Me, our loveable protagonist, getting back - no, going forward - to language education.
There was a good reason for this change of heart. I'd been working with a little autistic kid who was having a bit of difficulty with language and in the structure of the programme that I was given to follow, I was basically teaching him English - first pronouns, then nouns, then present tense verbs, until one very exciting day when I looked at the updated programme and saw that we were going to be starting on past tense verbs.
I don't think the kid cared much to be honest but I thought it was probably the best thing ever. It meant that he was going to be able to tell me not just what he was doing in that moment, but what he had done every moment before that. Like this whole world of conversation - heck, this whole world full stop - was going to open up for us. Very exciting.
So then I thought, hey, yeah, I want to do this for a proper living. Not really knowing what speech pathology was - yes, I decried an entire profession without knowing very much about it and now you should know to expect that sort of thing from me - I decided that being a speech pathologist was probably the best way for me to get to do this language teaching thing, like, all the time. For a living and stuff.
The thing about speech pathology is - well, it's a lot of things. It's one of the most broad ranging and varied and misunderstood jobs I know (doesn't everyone think they're the most misunderstood?) - but it really is at least broad ranging, from stuttering and accent reduction to articulation to language to voice to swallowing to literacy to sensory stuff and as far beyond that as people will stretch your job description.
But the one thing it kind of really isn't, is language teaching.
I can help a kid acquire language. I can help an adult regain their language. But what I was doing with the autistic kid, sitting with him and giving him words and showing him how to use them and stuff - teaching language - I just don't really get to do that as a speechie.
And maybe there's something in that. I mean, there is. Language educators could take a couple of pages from the old speechie guide book and instead of just teaching languages in this sort of provisional manner, they could be supporting people to work out how to get language themselves. There's a lot to be said for that approach and I'll put it on my list of things to blog about.
In the meantime, though, at least for me in my situation, it feels like I'm so close but so far from doing that thing that got me going with that little kid. So here we go, then; this is what the blog is all about, with a few meanderings along the way. Me, our loveable protagonist, getting back - no, going forward - to language education.
in which I write my first blog post and try to think of just one thing I want to say
my blog, take two. I tried to do this all over on wordpress but apparently it and my computer don't get along so here we are, back on the ol' blogger, and I've just spent 15 minutes tyring to extricate this blog from all my other google stuff (include other, older blogs I've written - oh, the horrors) so this better be the one.
It feels silly to rewrite my last first blog post even though y'all don't actually know that this is the second first post. But I know. So instead, I'll just finish this post quick smart with the list of possible things I might blog about and then we'll tally ho onto the third first post in which I actually write something with, you know, content.
THINGS WHAT I MIGHT WRITE ABOUT AND STUFF
It feels silly to rewrite my last first blog post even though y'all don't actually know that this is the second first post. But I know. So instead, I'll just finish this post quick smart with the list of possible things I might blog about and then we'll tally ho onto the third first post in which I actually write something with, you know, content.
THINGS WHAT I MIGHT WRITE ABOUT AND STUFF
- language learning
- language teaching
- teaching English
- Welsh/Cymraeg
- Lithuanian
- also Estonian
- and possibly Spanish?
- hiraeth
- travel
- stupid nicknames
- the power of public accountability
- bilingualism
- (you get the picture that there’s going to be lots of language stuff, right?)
- tiny houses
- music
- breaking kettles and sinking boats
- hiding under my bed and wishing this was all over
- does that give you any idea of what I’m going to be doing this year?
- this is the end of the list now
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