November 10th, 2011
English is famous for its dangling prepositions, and Winston Churchill spoke for lots of English-speakers when he said something like, “The rule of the dangling preposition is a rule up with which I cannot put.”
Some people debate whether he said those exact words, but if he was like most other people, he made good use of a good line when he found it, and he probably said it in many variations. It really is a great comment on English grammar.
Unless they’re weirdos, people usually use one way of talking and another way of writing. The rules of written language are considered the official ones, but most of us don’t care so much about them when we are talking, and it is truly WEIRD when people insist on speaking according to the rules of proper writing.
Spanish uses a few dangling prepositions. For instance, to say that one group of people is always the group working for another, we might say, “Siempre trabajan para.” They’re always working for. (Emphasis on “for”.)
Siempre tratan de. They’re always trying to. (Emphasis on “trying” with no success.)
Siempre vienen de. They’re always coming from. (Emphasis on “from”, never going “to”.)
These normal examples of Spanish, but they are not used often, nothing anywhere close to the every-other-moment way we do in English. You can almost say the dangling preposition doesn’t occur in Spanish, but only almost. If you want to talk like a textbook, that’s your choice. If you want to sound like you actually know the spoken language, you’ll dangle an occasional preposition like a real pro.
Tags: Academia, Speaking
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January 4th, 2011
Consumer advocate Clark Howard was talking about dieting last year on his radio program. He said Americans are generally too hurried, too short-sighted, too unrealistic for reaching the goals they want. He explained that he lost a lot of pounds by taking a steady view of weight loss, the way people need to do with money. He said Americans want everything fast and easy.
Then he took a commercial break and on came a software company advertising fast, fun and easy foreign language. Why, anybody could do it. Fast. Fun. Easy. I think it was indeed made for Americans! You could probably learn it while you lose weight and get rich. Multitasking like a productive American!
I agree with Clark. We don’t want to lose weight; we want to have lost it. We don’t want to save and plan; we want to have saved and planned. We don’t want to learn language; we want to have learned it.
If Americans stop to think this over, I believe they have it in them to approach language learning with a new attitude. They would make language a daily matter, not a fast and easy thing, but a daily thing. Ordinary. Practical. Daily. Encouraged in class. Spoken and sung around home, at play, in the car, on the bus, at the games, at bedtime. That is exactly the kind of feedback we get with Max and Max Spanish, and that’s why people who follow our lead do well. Anyone really can do this.
(Note: Clark Howard does not choose the radio commercials.)
Tags: learning like children
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December 21st, 2010
Supervised pacing is one of the smartest things you can build into instruction. A certain amount of self-pacing is good at the right time, but students need guidance, and instructors should have the kind of credentials that make them necessary to optimal learning.
As time goes by, students who are faithful to the supervised learning process are able to tell when they need to pace themselves in certain areas. However, the farther they go into the learning, the more new things they run into that require a supervised pace. Students need both a supervised pace and a self pace.
Designing supervised pacing requires a lot of skill, but most people think self-pacing is a glorious indication of high quality. A well designed supervised pace will yield wonderful results that self-pacing can never deliver.
Tags: learning like children
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December 7th, 2010
I used to work for a boss who returned from a trip out of the country and told me what he sort of learned in Spanish: “A beer, Miss.” Una cerveza, señorita. I repeated the sentence with Spanish pronunciation, and he said, “Oh, you’re just being technical.”
He wasn’t interested in saying even one sentence right. People who want to be fluent in a language usually want to sound like they’re speaking the actual language instead of a distant imitation of it. If you feel that fluency comes with difficulty, it’s because so much has to happen in the brain to get those words rolling out.
I tell students to be patient with themselves for at least three reasons when they are working toward fluency:
1. Fluent speakers have their mouths two or three syllables ahead of what they say at the moment. It takes time to rewire your head to process another language that way, but you most definitely, without question, certainly, no doubt can. If you will be patient.
2. Fluent speakers have learned to think in ways that a given language requires. They don’t put a new language into all the old patterns. Be patient with yourself while you rewire your brain to think new ways.
3. Fluent speakers master small amounts of vocabulary at a time. They may pound their head with more, but they master a small amount at a time, using it in daily life.
Language learning is not easy or fast or always fun, but it’s always good.
Tags: Speaking
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November 19th, 2010
Like other technology, our software and videos are tools that allow people to accomplish certain tasks better. A hammer is better than a fist when it comes to driving nails, yet it does not replace the human. The hand holds the hammer. Another hand made the hammer.
One of the biggest roles a classroom teacher plays in the kind of instruction we deliver is the interest that the teacher shows toward our instruction. The students take their cues from on-site adults.
Our instruction can put students past 1st-year high school Spanish in a relatively short time, if the on-site adults believe in the program. If they don’t, it doesn’t stand a chance even to make an average dent. Technology just can’t replace humans altogether. It will always be a tool. As people give us feedback, we adjust the tools. That makes the on-site adults that much more irreplaceable.
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November 1st, 2010
People who go through the typical U.S. education are pretty confused about Hispanic culture. Our schools teach some things that don’t really exist or don’t matter. The result is that people tend to think of foreign culture in terms of holidays, and in ways that aren’t accurate. I’m happy to give examples at this time of year.
1. Spanish classes teach that Las Posadas are a central religious Christmas tradition in Mexico. But people in Mexico will tell you that the tradition is no longer widely observed in the way our schools tend to teach. In fact, I just listened to two well-educated men in Mexico say: “Las posadas ya no son nada.” (Las Posadas are nothing anymore.) They were referring to the way the tradition has turned increasingly into parties and dancing. It’s not that nobody observes the tradition in its religious form, but its meaning continues to disappear from Mexico’s cultural landscape. Schools just need to keep things in perspective and up to date when they teach about holidays.
2. Día de los Muertos is another Mexican tradition that our schools teach as the BIG deal in Hispanic culture. In most places in Mexico, the holiday is still celebrated, but in different ways and with different theologies. On the other hand, almost all Mexicans who come here leave the holiday behind, except as a memory. It is pretty doggone hard to find many immigrants who still celebrate it the way our schools describe and reenact it. Whether I check in with Hispanic bakeries, party supply stores, or individuals as I travel around the U.S., I get this answer: “Really, I don’t know of anyone who is actually celebrating the holiday anymore.” This doesn’t mean schools are wrong to teach about it, but they should stay up to date on it. For instance, there are very interesting reasons why most Mexican immigrants do not continue the tradition, and these are sometimes the same reasons why many people in urban centers in Mexico have a difficult time continuing the tradition.
3. I’ve said it before, and so have Mexicans: Hardly anyone in Mexico celebrates or cares about Cinco de Mayo. Yet our schools continue teaching it as a point of cultural contact with our neighbor to the south. Cinco de Mayo is not a Mexican national holiday. Somehow it has stuck like glue to the curriculum, whether in regular schools or homes.
There are many other Hispanic countries and customs to talk about. Max and Max Spanish lessons give kids all kinds of insights into daily life. Holidays, whether accurately portrayed or not, are a relatively small piece of culture. Students like to learn about the several hundred other days of the year too.
Tags: fiestas
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October 17th, 2010
Americans are famous for saying they aren’t good at learning languages. They tend to give me the same joke: “I’m lucky if I can speak English.”
The many people who say that always think it’s funny.
No wonder language software companies tell Americans that learning language is fast, fun and easy. How else will they get them to buy?
I suggest our citizens encourage themselves by noticing how many languages people in other countries learn. Take the African employee I met in a hotel lobby in St. Louis. He and his family have four languages in common. To illustrate to you how ordinary this is to them, I asked him if he also spoke tribal languages. He hadn’t thought to mention dialects.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I know four of those because my friends speak them.”
Seven languages and dialects…and English. And Americans joke that they’re lucky if they can speak English. Americans can learn to speak and understand something besides English. It helps to look at modern language primarily as something you use rather than as a subject area.
Tags: Academia, Speaking
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October 2nd, 2010
Language drills are often said to be a bad idea, but they are highly motivating and highly effective if you make them right and use them right. Nothing beats a good drill.
One thing is to match the amount of response time to the difficulty and complexity of the drill. How do you distinguish between difficulty and complexity? That takes too long to explain here, and you might not be interested in knowing, anyway.
Another thing is to put the right number and the right kind of items in the mix. This affects the difficulty and complexity. This too takes too long to explain.
But Max and Max Spanish uses drills whenever it seems good to do so. Students will eat a drill alive when it’s designed right. When drills are poorly designed, people and companies say mean things about them.
Tags: Academia
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September 13th, 2010
I just finished posting a four-part series on the culture of family bands in one region of Tennessee. The Minton family plays traditional music of the South–bluegrass, folk, gospel and Irish styles. On the way back to Indianapolis, I stopped at a store somewhere in the heart of Kentucky to take a break. I heard a woman speaking Russian on the store telephone.
“Hey,” I thought to myself, “I can’t understand a word that woman is saying. She’s either speaking Russian or Norwegian.” I’m not sure I can actually tell the difference between those two languages, but I have been wanting to include a sample of Russian in our lessons. So the woman caught my attention.
She finished the call, and I asked her where she was from.
“Right here in Kentucky,” she said. She said it in English that sounded just like the Russian she was speaking on the phone. She doesn’t speak anything but a regional Kentucky English.
Max and Max Spanish lessons include all kinds of angles to reveal the variety and beauty of language here and afar, to help people fall in love with language, any language.
Tags: Pronunciation
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August 29th, 2010
The smart way to promote language learning inside the school schedule is to build a climate of use. It’s kind of strange that so many Americans complain about languages besides English being spoken inside this country, and yet language courses are traditional in our secondary schools. In other words, people complain about languages being USED, and then expect school courses to make students competent in the languages. But hardly anyone actually is competent in them.
It’s still socially unacceptable among a large part of our population to converse publicly in languages other than English. “Speak English. This is America,” people say.
So where can you get any experience with a language while studying? You better get it all along the way, during class, outside class, mumbling to yourself, talking with others.
School administrators and lots of other people continually tell me they took years of language coursework and can’t do anything with it. The main problem is that there is almost never a climate of use that matches the tons of vocabulary and grammar that are piled on you during the courses. Piles of language take even bigger piles of practice.
Make practice the big item, and you will be really good. Anybody can do it. Humans are tailor-made for language.
Tags: Academia, learning like children, Speaking
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