Shin nan da! I'm excited!

That is just one of the very few things I can say in Korean 신난다! "I'm excited!" or "How exciting!" I say this because I'm going to hang out with a real life Korean person next week to do a language exchange. The guy's name sounded familiar when he first sent me an email through Conversation Exchange... and then I realized that it was nearly the same name as that hunky Korean actor/pop-singer that I daydream about. The guy told me to call him by the American name that he chose, because his Korean one is "difficult to pronounce," but you know me... always up for a challenge:

We'll just have to see how hard it is to pronounce your name. I'm pretty good at pronouncing things, so you may be surprised. I just realized that your name looks and sounds to me very close to the name of that famous pop-singer guy, Kim Hyun Joong. If you ARE him in disguise, that's okay, too. I won't tell anyone.

A girl can dream, can't she? And man, I love how polite Korean culture is. It carries through in how delicately they word their English and how many times they tell you they are happy/thankful for something very small that you may not even be worthy of being thanked for.

I'm really glad to meet you. I really want to meet you in person. I think i will be a good Korean tutor for you and you will be a good English tutor for me.

I think it was good news that you can't speak in Korean a lot for me, because then i should speak in English, it will be very good for me.

I think it is also good for you that I can teach you not only Korean but also Korean culture and somethings.

I tell you I really want to meet you again.

That pretty much made my day last week. I mean, the kid's English is pretty freaking good... if you consider the fact also that I can't even say anything cohesive or sensical (my opposite of nonsensical, of course) in Korean at all.

Ya, pae-go-ppah! Chin-cha? Chin-cha. Ko-pee? Ne. Ara-sah.
Hey, I'm hungry! Really? Really. Coffee? Yes. Got it.


In other news, I wanted to share a couple of articles here:
9 Hard Languages for English Speakers (of which Korean is one)
9 Easy Languages for English Speakers (of which Spanish and French are listed)

And a fun video-learning source: How NOT to say "You're welcome," in Korean

I'VE BEEN SLACKING A BIT, BUT HERE ARE THE INPUT STATS
Current KDrama:
시티헌터 "see-tee-hun-tuh" (City Hunter)
TV hours (City Hunter): 24
Total TV hours: 68 (432 left to goal)

"This is so exciting, you can totally do it."

My sister has a friend who learned (as I recall hearing) Japanese by simply watching Japanese TV. I have been wanting to pry a bit into her process, as she eventually went to Japan and wound up being successful in her language-learning venture. Until I get anything close to a real interview, here is the majority of the conversation we had on g-chat today. It made me happy and hopeful:

Words in italics are words I have added to clarify things.

Me: question for you...

or... in fact... many questions

you learned japanese mainly through watching anime?

how did that process go?

just curious
Friend: I would say that the J-Dramas (Japanese dramas) help a lot more than anime because you can see the people forming the sounds.

Me: just wondering about how you did it. subtitles?

sometimes?
Friend: Yes, I watched subtitled shows and I listened to A LOT of J-Pop (Japanese pop music).

Sometimes my roommate and I would make subtitles for music videos as well.

Are you going to start studying Japanese?

Me: nope. i'm sort of addicted to the idea of korean

because i love the alphabet system

Friend: It goes in circles!

I mean each character is read in a circle, right?

Me: not a circle per se

as a block

each block is a syllable

and very phonetic

really clever, actually

and very easy to read

Friend: Yes, I love that exact thing about Japanese.

Me: is it phonetic too?

Friend: Yup.

Me: oh, how come i didn't remember that?!

cool

Friend: Well, they have three writing systems and two of them are phonetic.

Me: yeah, three--sheesh

well, technically, koreans have to learn a certain base number of chinese characters as well... just like the japanese

Friend: This is so exciting, you can totally do it.

Me: how proficient did you get?

just by listening all the time?

were you conversational before going to japan?

Friend: I got to the point where I could watch a drama without subtitles and understand almost all of it.

Me: nice!!!!!

how many years did that take? a whole year?

Friend: Yeah, about that.

But my speaking skills were only so-so until I went to Japan and started talking to actual Japanese people.

Friend: I'm told that the grammar of Japanese and Korean are very similar.

Maybe we can study it together sometime!

Me: nice

Friend: We shall reconvene on this topic.

Me: YES

While searching online for videos to show her of some K-pop (Korean pop music), I came across a video of one of my favorite Korean actors speaking Japanese. He looks a little out of his element, but I have no idea what he's saying. I wish I knew whether he is actually cracking jokes, or if his Japanese is so bad that everyone's cracking up. It sounds like he says "piano" around 3:22 and "fried chicken" a few seconds later.

It made me wonder if it is just as common for Asians living in Asia to know neighboring Asian languages as it is for Europeans to know neighboring European languages... or for Americans to know European languages, for that matter. I suppose I always thought that there would be more of a barrier in Asia, since the writing systems are all very distinct and not shared across languages. At least with European languages, they not only share writing systems, but they share much of the vocabulary (in the form of cognates) as well. Cognates (English/Spanish/French)= Enchanted (to meet you)! ¡Encantada! Enchantée!

Quite on the opposite end of the spectrum, I stumbled upon the blog of a man named Benny whose language approach is the opposite of the TV Method I am trying with Korean. He starts speaking right away! He's very dedicated and makes a lot of sense. I invite you to check out his blog, Fluent in 3 months, and watch his videos. He's learning Mandarin.

Progress with French numbers

So, I sort of already learned the numbers 1-100... a week early. I was so motivated today that I studied them for, like, three hours. I think maybe the French "r" makes my throat go all wonky. I was saying quatre-vingt so many times, which is the beginning of all numbers in the 80s and 90s, and that silly "r" is very prominent there. When I finished my language lesson, I suddenly had to keep clearing my throat. I wonder what it feels like to try to speak French with post-nasal drip. Or maybe the French never get that.

I know that part of setting a "smart" goal is timeliness. That's why I took my long-term goal and broke it up into the component parts to make it happen. I've been making a lot of goals lately... but they are pretty helpful. I like them and they keep life interesting. I just have to be careful not to have too many. Then I get confused and never accomplish any of them.

Here is a fantastic page with audio quizzes in French numbers. I was actually doing really well hearing the spoken numbers and writing them down quickly. It's another About.com site. French Numbers: Listen & Repeat. If you scroll down a bit, you can click on "Listen" and a new tab will open up with an audio clip of a woman rattling off numbers faster than you can write them down on the page (if you're new to it, that is). Exercise 1 is slower than exercise 2. With another set of numbers (1-69, I think) there is an even faster exercise 3. Craziness. I got good at hearing and recognizing the numbers with this, though. It is a great tool for learning to hear the numbers. After listening and writing all the numbers down, you can click on "List," which is under "Listen," and you can check to see how many you got correct.

Then, once I had heard the way the numbers sounded enough times, I went to test myself with some Quia games that some nice person had cooked up. I was then able to say them on my own aloud. Hoorah.

BIG QUESTION. Who invented the French counting system? It's absolutely ridiculous. I wonder if that guy was shot or bowed-and-arrowed. Or clubbed over the head. Certainly deserves it, by the way.

10 = dix (ten)
20 = vingt (twenty)
30 = trente (trente)
40 = quarante (forty)
50 = quincante (fifty)
60 = soixante (sixty)
61 = soixante-et-un (sixty-and-one)
62 = soixante-deux (sixty-two)
63 = soixante-trois (sixty-three)

Up to this point, the French numbers have a number structure similar to both English and Spanish. Up to this point, things seem rather normal. Things quickly move downhill from here as the you-know-what starts to hit the fan.

70 = soixante-dix (sixty-ten)
71 = soixante-et-onze (sixty-and-eleven)
72 = soixante-deux (sixty-twelve)
73 = soixante-treize (sixty-thirteen)

Wait, really?
Yes.
Really.
It goes on like that for a bit until...

80 = quatre-vingts (four-twentys)
81 = quatre-vingt-un (four-twenty-one)
82 = quatre-vingt-deux (four-twenty-two)
83 = quatre-vingt-trois (four-twenty-three)

Awesome. Then it gets even better...

90 = quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten)
91 = quatre-vingt-onze (four-twenty-eleven)
92 = quatre-vingt-douze (four-twenty-twelve)
93 = quatre-vingt-treize (four-twenty-thirteen)

My roommate: "So you have to do math just to say the numbers? If you wanted to add, you'd have to add before you add?"
Me: "Yeah, makes me think maybe French people aren't that good with numbers."

Anyway, I knew the French numbers were severely messed up before I started. That's why I made it this week's goal. I'll keep plugging away.

Goal setting

I've been having a lot of success with goal-setting this year. Goals are fantastic if you do them right. There is a sort of "check" system you can run your ideas through to see if your goals are "smart" ones. Google "SMART goals" or checkout websites like this one for more information on goal setting.

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

Therefore, because of my success in my daily life attempts to keep my apartment fairly clean, I will make a language goal in French.

Long-term French goal:
By this time next year (2/6/12), I will have gone to a French language meetup group. I would like to be able to hold my own in a very basic conversation. Right now, I would never put myself in an immersion setting, because I simply don't have the means to express basic things.

Short-term French goal:
By the end of this week (2/13/11), I will be comfortable in the French number system, numbers 1-100. I will be able to look at the number form and both (a) say the French name of the number aloud and (b) be able to correctly write/spell the French words for the numbers on paper.

As I just mentioned, there are a lot of holes in my French knowledge. I am starting to really piece the puzzle together bit by bit, but need some of the basics. Here is a list of language tools/abilities I will need to be conversational in French (the list comes largely from what I find very useful conversationally in Spanish):

• Familiarity/practice with basic verbs: Need, want, be able to, think, make, do, like/love, wish, have, come, go, give, say, tell, see, hear, know, find, look for, study, teach, learn, etc.

• Knowledge of common small-talk expressions and questions as well as common responses to these comments and questions

• Topic-specific vocabulary to talk about my job, my hobbies, my life, my family, etc.

• Colors, numbers, alphabet, months, days, etc.

• Words/phrases that come in handy when vocabulary holes prevail: Stuff, something, thing, kind of/sort of, a little, you know, how do you say... ?, what is this called?, like this, etc.

• Very important, highly used words: Maybe, if, however, but, together, far, near, everywhere, everyone, everything, next, last, first, now, later, again, still, yet, yesterday, of course, etc.

• Already-constructed sentences to express facts about your progress (how much of the language you know and don't know) as well as ability to ask for clarification from others: What are you saying? Could you repeat that? What does _____ mean?

As you can see, I have a quite lengthy list, but I will add to it as I think of things.

I just took a multiple choice quiz on my knowledge of numbers 1-100 and got 88 (quatre-vingt-huit) out of 100 (cent) questions right. Fantastic.

Hasta pronto et au revoir, mis amigos.

Watching lots of movies in French

I've been keeping up the French lately... or at least listening to it. I know there is a language-learning tactic that involves watching movies repeatedly without subtitles. The good news about French is that I am already starting to get a feel for the pronunciation, and am able to pick out words in fluid speech. I have no idea what is happening in the movies, but I sure do enjoy listening to it.

At this point, I am having a whole lot of fun repeating things that I hear, but I don't know enough to say anything worthwhile yet. It sounds so beautiful, though.

I want to keep going, so I will continue to watch movies. Right now, I am watching "A Very Long Engagement" for the second time. The first time, this morning, I read the subtitles, so this time I already know what the storyline is, and I can relax and listen away. Perhaps that is cheating a little, but I don't really care. I've been studying Spanish for eleven years now and I still don't always understand movies without the subtitles.

The process is slow-moving, but fun. I would like to take a French class or do what (in Spanish) we call an "intercambio" with someone who speaks fluent, native French and wants to learn some English. Spanish and Portuguese speakers are easy to find around these parts, but I wonder how easy it will be to find French speakers?

I'm getting really good at pronouncing the French "r," by the way.

Au revoir.

Back to le Français...

Not sure exactly why, but I've taken a renewed interested in picking up French recently. Actually... I think it might have been spurred by daydreams of joining two of my friends on a trip to Norway this summer. I've got my fingers crossed that I can scrounge up the money to go. Naturally, I started to ask myself what the Norwegian language sounds like. So I started poking around online for some language information. That, in turn, reminded me that it had been a super long time since I'd practiced what little French I know. So I started back up.

So far, so good. I'm surprised at how much it's starting to come together and make sense in little basic pieces. It's fun to be a beginner at something again. Floundering and flubbing up over the basics is sort of refreshing. And it has the added benefit of making Spanish feel comfortable like a pair of old, comfy pantuflas (slippers).

Here is my current level of French understanding: Téléfrançais. Thank you, Max, for turning me on to this.

Venice Beach Ultimate

Finishing up the story of last weekend: Once I took the train to Venice, I took one of the canal boats to this island called Lido. That's where the beach tournament took place. As the Spaniards I hang out with already had all of the slots filled for their team, I was on the pick up team, which consisted of a couple of American (USA) girls, some dudes from France, a guy from Belgium, at least a couple of Italians, and probably someone else that I am forgetting. This was my team.

How we were able to communicate at all was semi-miraculous. It was largely thanks to the great lengths that Europeans go to to learn English. It makes me feel very fortunate, mostly. At first, we had to get used to each other. Then, little by little, we started feeling and playing like an actual team. The rest of the teams we played against had two main advantages: (1) the advantage of having played together for awhile for months or years and (2) the advantage of all speaking a common language. Cheers and instructions from our sideline came in many colors and languages. At the end of one of our games, our elected "speech giver" was asked to give the end-of-game speech in French. I understood about ten percent of it. Or less.

This is what Lido looked like (partly), with cute, windy roads:

Most of us rented bikes and rode around the island like that, ringing little bells. Of course, they were old 1950's-style bikes with giant baskets in the front and reaaaaaaally bad brakes. The good news about the bad brakes is that the bike rental did not come with the option of a helmet rental. Everytime a car passed me in transit, I held on tight to the handlebars and sucked my breath in a little bit. Here is me on a bike.

Below, you can see the gorgeous beach we played on. The sand was amazingly soft. Stepping in the sand was like walking through granulated silk. Scorching hot granulated silk.

Did I mention how suffocatingly hot it was in Venice last weekend? I don't believe I did. I just asked one of the guys I'm staying with how many degrees it was when we were there, and I really loved his answer: Ehhhhh... trienta y bastante. Which translates roughly to "thirty degrees and some unnecessarily high number in the ones place" or "dude, it was hotter than it needed to be." For the "metric impaired" (and I know I certainly am), thirty-five degrees Celcius is about ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Now, ninety-five degrees in Madrid is pretty tolerable, what with the air being very dry and all, but keep in mind that Venice is on the water. So the humidity "adds ten degrees" as my friend over here commented, but as he was talking in metric degrees, perhaps we can assume that it felt like it was one-hundred ten degrees. It did, I assure you. It was one of those lovely climates in which the only relief is a shower, a swim in the ocean, or a leisurely dip in a plastic kiddie pool with seven members of Madrid's ultimate team (true story). And once out of the shower/ocean/kiddie pool, there is never the luxury of drying off. Even if the water eventually evaporates, it is replaced by sweat.

So I spoke English most of the weekend, unfortunately... but I had some opportunities to utilize the Spanish at Saturday night's tournament dinner and after-party. I'd tell you what kind of nonsense my crazy Spaniard friends provoked at aforementioned party, but I'll leave you wondering. Because it's more fun that way. I will say, however, that the limbo was involved.


When all was said and done, I left Lido and returned to the Venice "mainland" I guess you could call it. I spent a full twenty-four hours with my new friend from Colombia, during which, I was babbling on and on in Spanish, and wishing it had been like that all vacation. We stayed in the house of a really sweet Spanish couple (also in their twenties) who were living for a year in Venice. This is a picture of the downstairs of their house.

There, we hung up all of our wet things to dry for the night, all sat down at the red and white checkered table cloth, and ate dinner. This was one of the precious times this trip when I have been "in the groove." I was following normal-speed, slang-filled, conversation with four native Spanish speakers. Not only was I understanding everything, but I was participating like a normal human being, and even joking around. And they were laughing! Not at me either, but with me. I love those moments. I wish I could bottle them and let them out the next time I trip all over a verb conjugation and feel bad about myself.

Okay, I think that's all. Tomorrow, I'll have to write about today.

I went to Quebec City

... and now I'm hooked on French again!

It was amazing to be surrounded once again by a language other than English! My mind loves working constantly to solve the word-puzzles. Also fascinating to me was being able to actually see myself build from the ground up. The more words I acquired during my four-ish days there, the more I had in my artillery for figuring out new words from context. It builds slowly, sloooooowly, slooooooooooooooowly upon itself, but it does go up.

I don't think anyone else on the trip was as fixated on the street signs, restaurant menus, and conversation snippets as I was.

This actually means that I am not going to Mexico or any other Spanish-speaking country this year. Sad, yes. But I will manage just fine with the Spanish I already have.

More to come! I will upload some pictures with French words in them! Until then, à bientôt et au revoir!

Podcasts rock my MONDE

I've been listening to these free, downloadable podcasts to teach me French on my way to and from work. They are amazing and the woman who records them is great. She has a really thick British accent although her first language is **definitely French. I have to say, it has been making my commute so much more educational and enjoyable.

The only downside is that I got so good at repeating her when she says, J'habite en Angleterre (I live in England)--and it sounds so pretty--that it will probably slip out instead of the more difficult, more factual J'habite aux Etats Unis (I live in the United States), which I still haven't wrapped my tongue around quite yet.

**I'm only 97.3 percent sure of this. As long as she really is a French woman with a British accent, and not a British person who speaks French really convincingly, I'll be okay with it. I'm already bound to sound like a goofy foreigner in the first place, so last thing I need is to learn to speak French with a British accent that's not even mine.

Made friends with a gas station attendant from Colombia

... who says that I barely have an accent when I speak Spanish. I hear this a lot. I fear that continued feedback of this kind might give me a big head, but it certainly is good encouragement to continue. I still practice Spanish daily (it's easy when "studying" doesn't require dictionaries and/or learning software), but the French acquisition remains only a distant wish. Very sad. Very true.

I did watch a movie in French. I found that I could actually pick quite a lot of words out with my ears while my eyes read the English subtitles. Sweet.

Elle est mignonne.

During this week's French lessons, I found it slightly unnerving that the word for "tiny" that the guy used for the baby sister was mignonne. It sounded exactly the way you pronounce filet mignon. You know, the expensive non-vegetarian stuff people order at restaurants sometimes.

...which made it seem like the guy in the lesson was calling the baby a hunk of meat.

...which was unsettling at best.

And my biggest complaint is that I wish I could practice more.

Encore, je le fais...

Again, I am doing it. Or, I suppose I could also say, Je le recommence, but I'm pretty much just guessing that. I have no one to tell me, "No, Kristy, your writing is all sorts of wrong."

I just noticed how funny it is that the word "I" in English is capitalized, but nothing else is. What is it about "I" that makes it superior to "you," "he," "she," "we," or "them"? It's just strange, that's what. And speaking of the word "strange" I like being able to see how closely French and English are connected. The word for "foreigner" is étranger or étrangère... which only needs an S transplant, et voilà! it's a word not foreign to our eyes at all!

It's hilarious to me that words like encore and voilà already existed in my "English" vocabulary and I didn't even ever stop to think about how they weren't really English... yet I always knew what they meant.

Qué fracaso...

This week's French studying was a total bust. I didn't study it at all.

I had a rough week of it. Between being really worried about a friend for a few days and being terrified to write my first definitive lesson plans for student teaching (bursting spontaneously into tears several times at the thought of it, in fact), I didn't let myself do anything even slightly related to the study of language.*

And this is how it comes to be that many people live in this country for several years and never learn English. If they have no real need to learn, if they are in a protective, bubble community of other speakers of their first language (L1), then they can afford to "let life get in the way" as I have, and simply drop the notion of language learning altogether. Life does get in the way. Sometimes we have to fight to make time for things that matter to us.

*Okay, that's a bit of a lie... I read three chapters of Las telarañas de Carlota (Charlotte's Web). Fifth grade reading level, that's right. And I still don't know a lot of the words, but I'm not bothering to look them up this time... just guessing, so I'm sure I'll miss something crucial.

Hasta la próxima, chicos.

Est-ce que *la voiture... uh, uuuuh, le poisson...

Reviewing all the Rosetta Stone lessons from long past, so that I can finally move forward. I'll tell you, my favorite part about this is that it drills things, words, sounds so firmly into my head that they stick. The only problem is that I get very used to certain words following each other. For example, when it starts asking me, Est-ce que *la voiture est rouge? I get that pounded so definitively into my head, that every time I go to say something that starts Est-ce que... I start to immediately follow with *la voiture, which means "the car," even if I am looking at a picture of a fish and I am clearly reading, comprehending, and staring straight at Est-ce que le poisson est bleue? It's as if my mouth betrays my eyes, and I'm all of a sudden asking if the car is blue instead of the fish. Curious. I wonder if the speech patterns started by Rosetta Stone will continue to affect my spoken French once I have anything slightly resembling that skill.

*EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that I had written le voiture instead of la voiture in this entry. I've fixed it. Problem solved, merci. (Although I still can't claim to have enough of a feel for the language that le voiture sounds wrong to me yet.) We live, we learn, we make mistakes.

As it turns out, my Spanish this week seems to be spiraling down el inodoro ("the toilet"). On the plus side, I now know of a new YouTube show to help me with some listening practice: Aquí no hay quien viva. I'd be lying if I told you I knew exactly what that means. Literal translation leaves us with: "Here there is not one who lives." But from some online forums I discovered, it seems to roughly translate to "Nobody can stand living here," which is a heck of a lot funnier, so that's where my vote goes.

Additionally, their accents are very Spainish. Like, Spain-Spanish. It's marvelous.

And just one more thing...

This is absolutely terrifying. I should have never looked at it. How many pages of vowel combos is that?! Three? Shudder. Sometimes it's better to be blissfully unaware of what lies ahead.

Disenchanted...

I can already see that the BBC 12-week language "course" that is free online, will not really give me the tools I need to succeed. Sure, I am developing a good ear for French dialog, and I am learning a few basic words, but I am exceedingly frustrated that I cannot simply click on one single word in the dialog to hear it sound out repeatedly. Sometimes, I just want to hear one word, verify one vowel sound, concentrate on one sound-spelling relationship without the barrage of all of the other words around it. But I can't. I must patiently wait for the rest of the sentences to finish, and then click the button to repeat the whole thing. It's terribly ineffective.

I need a native French speaker to act as my walking dictionary/official word pronouncer. Unfortunately, those are a lot fewer and farther between than Spanish speakers around these parts.

Not that I'm complaining about the abundance of hispanohablantes in this state. You should know by now that that's what I thrive on. It's my air.

Un quiz fatal

I quite like the word fatal because it happens to exist in both French and Spanish (pronounced "fah-tahl" in the latter). It's perhaps funnier to me because the same word in English, of course, means "deadly" or "resulting in death." This, I think, causes me to use the word quite frequently in Spanish anyway because it produces in me this immense satisfaction that I am expressing something dramatically and in a rather colloquial manner that they don't teach you in school. ¿Cómo te fue la noche? How was your night? ¡Me la pasé fatal! It was awful!

What a fabulous word.

So I call attention now to the terrible quiz mentioned in the title of the entry. I was trying to take an end-of-unit quiz for the French stuff that I am studying on my own as part of the BBC 12 week online lessons (free). But they, for some reason, were asking me to answer using words they had never taught me. And even more interesting is the fact that, where doubt or confusion existed, I turned to Spanish. The quiz attempted to prompt the following answer (in French) from me, "Thank the man [for giving you directions]." To which I immediately replied in my head with, "Gracias, señor... oh crap, that's Spanish... uh, uh... Merci!... Merci, señor... I mean, oh god... monseiur. Merci, monseiur."

This was quickly followed by the word fatal popping into my head as I quietly shook my head in defeat, and went meandering off to find out if fatal or its rough equivalent existed in French. Excitingly enough, it does, although I have no idea how the French say it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pronounce anything past the first A. That's just how they roll.

Apparently, the second language does start replacing the first one as the go-to language for learning the third. This is going to be fun to see how messed up my brain gets and how it sorts itself out.

La Place de la Fontaine

You know, I think the intro phrases and words that they give you to learn French purposely have lots of Rs. The crafty people who cook up these lessons want to make you have to grapple with them at an early stage. As for me, well... right now I've got the sound alright... I'm just trying to make the right level of sound. So far, it seems to me that I either overdo it and sound like I'm trying to cough something up, or the R is a no show, and leaves just a trace of where it ought to have been.

Also interesting to note, was my momentary difficulty with the word "fountain" (la fontaine). I kept wanting to say "fon-tain" (like, rhyming with "pain" or "rain"), but it actually sounds like "ten" in English. "Font-ten." It's pretty amazing how the mind works and how the spelling of a word (if it breaks conventions already set in the mind from an aquired first or second language) will disable it from correctly processing what it is hearing. When I was thinking "tain," I could tell that the sound I was hearing was different from what I expected it to be, but it wasn't until I closed my eyes and listened to it, that I could say, "oh, that sounds like 'ten'!"

This immediately reminded me of the Stroop Tests that list off a bunch of color words, some of which have the same color as the word and some of which have a different color. Like, it might say "blue," but the word "blue" is actually red in color. So automatic is our ability to read words, that it becomes hard to name the actual color of the word, if the word itself names a different color.

BLUE
GREEN
RED
YELLOW

See what I mean? You have to think a bit first when you have to name the actual color. When you read the words, it's nearly effortless. Give it a try for real with the Interactive Stroop Effect Experiment. It's a website for kids, but it is a perfect example of how powerful our mental connections to literacy can be once we've fostered them. This, of course, would be a much different test if taken by young children who are still struggling to read and sound out simple sight words. They wouldn't have all the written words interfering with their ability to name the color. Wouldn't phase them at all. Could this have something to do with why young children can catch on to new languages so fast? Nothing about their own language has been so solidified that it interferes with their ability to process subtle differences in the second language. Experts are still out to lunch on this one and don't know the answers to the millions of questions about second language acquisition, by the way, but that certainly doesn't stop them or anyone else from having very strong opinions.

Ça va, merci.

It's going well, thanks.

The French, I mean. It's not like I can say that I'm bad at it, since I just started, and I pretty much have to be bad at it. Can't be good at a language you've never studied, right? I think that comforts me the most right now... that it's not humanly possible to be awful at something you just barely began. Talk to me after several months of plugging away at this daily. If all I can say at that point is How are you, Mr. Fish. Do you drink milk? No, the car is not blue, it's white. Thank you sir, goodnight. then it will be safe to say that I haven't progressed too terribly much, and we can start to contemplate the idea that I should stick to things I know. Like art. And being a procrastinator. I'm good at both of those things.

The French R is going to keep me up at night. I can already tell.

Ooh la la: So, French it is, I guess...

I have this vague and nagging feeling upon entering these uncharted waters, that I have no freaking idea what I'm getting myself into. After all, haven't I been practicing Spanish for eons now and still feeling like I have a super long way to go? Really. I have. And now it starts all over again. The strange sounds I have to try to create that don't exist in my first (or second) language, new letter-to-sound relationships (i.e. knowing that more or less French orthography does not correspond to what any of the words sound like), trying to pick out individual words in a confusing flurry of melted-together speech as it flows out in one continuous blend of noise... that sound all the same to me, frankly.

Le sigh.

So I watched some YouTube videos that this guy named Remy puts together every so often (link is in the side bar). I like this guy because he has an extremely soothing voice and sort of makes me feel like the task of learning French is totally no big deal. Nothing to be alarmed or worried or hurried about. He talks about simply acquiring little building blocks that you keep adding to as you make a foundation and just practice and practice, build and build. Sounds so lovely, doesn't it? Don't get your hopes up too much if you decide check his lessons out. You'll see that the video runs for a super long time, and you might think that the guy is going to teach a whole lot in that ten minutes, but he usually only gets around to a couple of things that he covers really thoroughly. He just spends a lot of time explaining and informing, which I think is important if you are missing out on being in an actual class where you can ask questions. And, hey, this is totally free, so I ain't complainin'.

In one random posting about things to say to your lover in French, he taught how to say I can't live without you. Which actually was pretty fun to say. All I need now is a French lover. Which should be about as easy to find in this city as a parking spot in Harvard Square. During rush hour. On a Friday evening. For a tractor trailer.

Je ne peux pas vivre sans toi. Sounds so nice.