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 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 1 of 13 23 November 2005 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was born in the former Soviet Union. At the age of 18, I moved to the United States with my family, where I have now lived for 26 years. My wife is from India, and her native languages are Punjabi and Hindi, but all her schooling was in English since age 7 or 8, which is thus effectively a native language for her as well. At home, we only speak English, as it's our only common language, at least so far.
Soviet schools in the 1970's had 10 grades, with foreign language taught from 5th grade. There were also so-called English schools, where English was taught from 2nd grade, and with greater number of hours per week. My dad had somehow coached me in English enough that one such school let me join their 5th grade. I attended it through 8th grade, whereupon I transferred to a school specializing in math. I don't really remember how they taught English in the specialized school, but I do remember all too well that when in the 9th grade I picked up on my own an unabridged English novel, it was a disaster. What saved me were flashcards and a graded reader which went to about 5000 words. For a while I would try to get about 50 words a day on flashcards and flip these while commuting to school. That plus a book with grammar drills allowed for rapid progress, so by the time we were leaving for the US, I could converse in English and knew enough of it not to need remedial courses when I started college in New York. This experience had planted an erroneous idea in my head that the best way to learn a language is through reading, vocabulary, and grammar, and then speaking would just come. Some 6 years after my arriving in the US, my then fiancée and I tried to take a regular college French class for fun, but their approach just did not click with me, and I gave up after a few weeks. After that things lay dormant for me with languages, until I took up Spanish 8 years later, by pure accident. I ran into an old book by Chomski on linguistics, where he talked about his idea of there being a specialized grammar center in the human brain, for otherwise, according to him, processing something as complex as the syntax of a human language in real time would be simply impossible. This idea got me thinking about the fact that by then I could not detect any Russian in my thinking, which appeared to be directly in English, so I started wondering how it could be that a language can be learned by an adult to the point of becoming a self-contained medium of thought without any apparent recourse to one's native language. As I could no longer remember clearly how that happened with English, I decided, solely as a “linguistic experiment”, to just learn another language and see for myself how during the learning process one eventually comes to think directly in the new language. Living at that time in Houston, Texas, I chose Spanish, since there were TV channels in Spanish, which I thought would be useful at some point. The method I chose was rather old-fashioned and probably not the best. I chose "Spanish for Beginners" by Charles Duff, a reading-based course designed in 1957, as my main textbook, which was a fine choice, but just two 90-minute tapes with dialogues, called "Spanish on the Go" by Barron's, as my entry into spoken Spanish. Furthermore, I consciously decided to emulate Castilian and not Latin American pronunciation, on the premise that in Northern Spain they distinguish between “ce” and “se”, so I could always “downgrade” to Latin American, but that it would be harder to go the other way had I chosen to do so later. So there I was in October 1993, with an excellent textbook for what it does, but at the same time locked out of the FSI and Pimsleur courses because of their “wrong” pronunciation. Likewise, not to “contaminate” my “experiment”, I decided at the time to read only Spanish authors. Still, what I lacked in method, I made up in enthusiasm, tearing into the textbook, listening ad nauseam to the two puny tapes during my commute to work, speaking aloud to myself in the car, trying to read unabridged novels as early as possible and at some point to participate as best I could in the internet newsgroup soc.culture.spain. As added insanity, I tried to switch to monolingual dictionaries as soon as possible, since my goal was after all a linguistic experiment, so I wanted to see how Spanish in and by itself, uncontaminated by English, was to be turned by my eager brain into an independent thinking system. Then I got invited for a trip to Spain, which took place in April 1995, about a year and a half into my learning. Soon after I deposited a paper into a repository for physics preprints, I got an e-mail from Spain, asking for help with printing out the accompanying figures. In jest, I replied in Spanish, which after a number of exchanges resulted in my being invited to Zaragoza to teach a two or three-week intense course in my area (at the time) to their students. They originally wanted the course to be taught in Spanish, but I hastended to disabuse my host of that notion in my case, so the course ended up being taught in English. Still, I got paid to spend a few weeks in Spain and finally try out my castellano in real life. Surprisingly, it worked. I was able to make a phone call from Madrid to Zaragoza upon landing, buy train tickets, have a number of lunches with my host and even attend a dinner party at his house, where the only English word I heard was a polite explanation from one of the guests that the word “retrete” is akin to English “john” and is not quite the right way to ask the hostess where the bathroom is. The trip was a blast and boosted my confidence level with Spanish and languages in general. And yet, to this day there remains a strong imbalance between my reading and speaking skills. Yes, I can get across what I mean, but not fluently enough, and my oral comprehension of movies, as opposed to talking to someone, is severely lacking. So, I would regard myself as being at the intermediate level, in need of significantly improving before reaching he advanced learning stage. Soon after that trip my first daughter was born, followed by another one 5 years later, so I abandoned Spanish for many years. I took it up again a year or two ago, mostly just reading occasionally and sometimes watching a movie or listening to the radio. Now I am warming up to another serious push, going slow gets frustrating after a while. My current learning targets are vocabulary expansion and better oral comprehension. Afterwards, I will assess if I also need speaking drills and act accordingly. I have not, however, yet had the courage to give up the notion of “Castilian” accent and just switch to Latin American with all the wealth of audiocourses available to the unpretentious. Otherwise, in addition to Spanish I would like to learn French and Hindi. Just a couple of weeks ago, I started on the French with Pimsleur French I. I am determined not to repeat the silly things I did with Spanish and focus on comprehensive audiocourses, rather than on reading, in the beginning. I am also in the early stages of trying to teach my 10 year old daughter Russian, using college-level “Golosa” textbook. This may sound silly, but nothing else I had tried worked for her, while this one appears to suit her tastes, mostly because she seems to enjoy doing exercises in the workbook. Given that I am a native speaker of the language, this just might work, but the proof will be in the pudding. Edited by frenkeld on 26 November 2005 at 10:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7377 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 13 23 November 2005 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome to the forum David!
This is a very interesting account of your life as a linguist, I wish you every success with your Spanish and French. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7016 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 13 23 November 2005 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Indeed, a very interesting and detailed account.
I realise your reasons for NOT learning Latin American pronounciation but it would make more sense to me since you're likely (I would guess) to have more contact with that type of Spanish. Slightly "off-forum":
What area of physics is it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7104 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 13 24 November 2005 at 3:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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To repeat the earlier comments - absolutely fascinating.
I'd also like to say that I agree with that Patuco said about pronunciation. Being based in the UK, all of my initial learning was also focused on Castilian Spanish. However, for the past couple of years I have concentrated solely on "Latin-American" pronunciation. This is partly because of the wealth of US courses available (I did Pimsleur and I'm doing a FSI-based course at the moment) but also because I believe in the end it really didn't matter a great deal since my goal was to be able to communicate effectively. In addition, the moment I listened to some recordings of a young lady from Argentina on a BBC course that I have, I realised there was no point in pretending that there was such a thing as a Latin-American accent either. A curious by-product of this is that Castilian accents now sound a bit posh and overly refined when I listen to them :¬). Andy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7016 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 13 24 November 2005 at 6:17am | IP Logged | |||||
You've just summed up the main reason for learning languages (at least for me!).
Hear hear! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 6 of 13 25 November 2005 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the kinds words. It will certainly take some luck, for as you point out on your web site, attacking two languages at once is a rather dangerous thing. In fact, for family reasons, it would have made more sense to tackle Hindi prior to French, but I switched the order because of the availability of a Pimsleur course for French, with its manageable timeline of well-defined half-hour lessons. Otherwise, I would have definitely had to choose between learning a new language and getting off the plateau in Spanish. It still remains to be seen whether Pimsleur can spare me from having to make that choice. Edited by frenkeld on 25 November 2005 at 4:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 7 of 13 25 November 2005 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
It is even better than that. I live in Tucson, Arizona, which is very close to Mexico. So, yes, as far as the prevalent variety of Spanish around here, it is definitely Mexican. The rub is that having grown up in Moscow, I feel much closer to European than Latin American, or specifically Mexican, culture in many respects. (I suspect that this may all be reasoning after the fact. If truth be told, I just find Castilian accent incredibly cool, followed by female voices speaking with a Carribean accent, say, Venezuelan or Colombian. We in the US have been known to fall head over heels for the British Eglish accent, so I may simply be projecting this onto another language.) With all that, as Andy points out, many Spanish audiocourses are recorded with the Latin American accents, and this is a steadily growing consideration in my mind, given the rave reviews of the FSI Spanish courses on this web site and elsewhere. Better to speak decently with a Latin American accent than poorly with Casitilian. As for physics, I left the field in 1997, but at the time my area was high-temperature superconductivity. The course I taught in Zaragoza was a basic superconductivity course for their high-energy particle physics graduate students, presumably for their cultural enrichment. Edited by frenkeld on 26 November 2005 at 10:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 8 of 13 09 January 2006 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is just an update on my language-learning plans.
Reading this forum has made me more aware of the fact that many people emphasize learning languages as the means to communicating orally with native speakers, as opposed, for example, to merely having more reading opportunities. In light of that, I have revisited my old heartache, whether to learn Hindi or French next. Given that my wife is from India, I have finally made up my mind to learn Hindi before tackling French, so the next time we are visiting her family in India, I can follow the conversations and maybe even say a few things myself. My additional motivation is that I like wacky grammar, and the Hindi word order does seem a bit in that category - perhaps mastering Hindi postpositions will give me some insight into the possible origin of cases in my native Russian. So, the finalized language goals for 2006 are: 1. Commence a systematic study of Hindi. 2. Keep improving Spanish, even if at a reduced pace. 3. Find some workbooks for improving my English grammar. Some of the materials for learning Hindi that I have assembled are: - Teach Yourself Hindi. - Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi. - Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script. - Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary. - Colloquial Hindi from Routledge. - Say It in Hindi (Dover "Say It" series). - 10-lesson Pimsleur Hindi course (download from the public library). - Most of the materials listed at this web page for Hindi 102, 202, and 302. - Textbooks for K-5 grades currently used in the Hindi classes at my wife's old school in Hyderabad. - The Hindi and English versions of the same issue of a weekly magazine that appears similar to the US weekly magazine Newsweek in format and topics. - A newspaper issue in Hindi. - 3 Hindi novels. - Cartoon-based Hindu mythology stories for kids, with the text in Hindi. Conversation-oriented materials are not abundant for Hindi, so I will have to experiment to figure out the best way to study, and I will try to post updates on my experiences occasionally. Edited by frenkeld on 09 January 2006 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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