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Making this site citable | ||
Tags: Citability | Alexander Arguelles | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6165 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 1 of 10 10 May 2008 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Professor, I would like to use the fact that Korean was on the top of the list for GI's as a source for "hardest language" in wikipedia. right now it is written as if japanese is hardest. But for a source to go to wikipedia, it has to appear on a personal website or a book or article...it can't be on a forum. Could you or anyone else have this on a website so that I could quote it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6374 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 2 of 10 10 May 2008 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Again, personal opinion. The quotation gives the impression that after years of study of Korean one would still be lost. My personal experience suggests that this is far from the case.
Apart from that... did the army really manage to train adults to be translators with the FSI manuals? It always seems to me that the knowledge necessary to be able to translate a language or act as interpreter is huge... and I wonder whether this is really possible with the content of the FSI courses... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6539 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 10 11 May 2008 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I remember reading articles that said the State Department had little success in training their staff foreign languages.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10 /15/AR2005101500104.html According to the article there are only 8 people in the State Department who can speak at level 4+ or 5 in Arabic. Naturally, 8 is not enough to cover the entire Middle East. If Arabic is easier than Korean, then I'd imagine the number to be even smaller than 8. How strange would it be to have only 1 or 2 people in the entire State Department who can speak Korean at the native level? If it makes any difference, the FSI doesn't go beyond level 3. The FSI texts, which were created in the 60s, may or may not even go to level 3. Edited by Kugel on 11 May 2008 at 11:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6141 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 4 of 10 11 May 2008 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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From what I have seen of the FSI courses, they certainly do not reach level 3. I am currently studying Urdu in the UK and we have 18 months to get to level 4 and we have the added bonus of having only two experienced linguists in the class. Needless to say, the study of Korean or Arabic is much more demanding and many students in the 12-strong Arabic classes don't reach level 3 after 18 months intensive training. Having said that, Level 2 is now all that is required to be deployed as a specialised linguist to Iraq/Afghan, so I depends what you mean by "Korean interpreters". It should be remembered that in a military environment you will often be speaking to people who are desperate to help you, in which case they will speak as simply as possible so intricate knowledge of Korean verbal honorifics wouldn't be necessary even at level 3.
Also, the level 4+/5 linguists are almost always "heritage" speakers or simply bilingual and it is from this pool of peolpe where most interpreters at, say, the EU or NATO are from. Check out the exams here. I think you'll agree that for most purposes Level 3 is a pretty good acheivement from scratch in 12 months. Note you get to listen to the radio article ONCE only! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 5 of 10 11 May 2008 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been told I should update my website to include more detailed personal information anyway, and if I can ever find the hard copy of the older statistics, I may well work that in as appropriate contextualization for the life-changing decision I made based upon it.
That said, I am wary of contributing further to “hardest language to learn” controversies, as they inevitably degenerate out of the realm of polite discourse. In point of fact, there is no answer to that question, even on a personal and subjective level, because we only live once and our subsequent experiences are always colored by our previous ones. As far as Korean and Japanese are concerned, whichever one you study first will be the more difficult, and there is no way you can undo that, nor is there any way to know whether your might have gotten to the same level in the other with 9000 hours of study rather than 10,000. They are both clearly the equivalent of K2 or Everest, and the ascent of either of those depends as much upon variable weather conditions as it does upon your preparation and equipment. The only further debate about them I would be interested in participating in would be a technical consideration of their verbal conjugation, comparing and contrasting the handbook of which I am a co-author for Korean with a much-needed but yet-to-be done comparable handbook for Japanese. As for FSI preparation, I do not know what level they had attained when they were sent out, but I do have several acquaintances who did linguistic military service in past decades, and I know that they were specifically trained in this kind of course to do specific tasks, e.g., to listen in on certain kinds of radio broadcasts, listening out for particular code words or propaganda phrases. Well, this whole question raises a separate issue, namely the credibility of what it is we are doing here. On the one hand, I certainly hope that our discussions are viewed as an eminently reliable and creditable source of information about foreign language learning; on the other hand, I confess to sharing a professional prejudice against forums in general. The transmission of valid scholarly content just does not mesh well with anonymity, let alone colorful aliases, or with chat room style informal internet English. This is precisely why I call for a higher register of usage in “About this Room”: I do very much aspire for “Lessons in Polyglottery” not merely to have academic credibility, but to actually set standards for scholastic excellence. Thus, although I hate to be heavy-handed about enforcing it, I really would prefer if everyone posting here would both: a) only make substantive contributions (i.e., please refrain from one-liners with vernacular phrasing), and b) sign submissions with a full real name. I myself as a 3rd party college professor, if I did not know about this room, would be suspicious of the validity of information a student might report from it; however, if I were to examine the source and find not only Prof.A’s advice, but also all other contributions composed in the level of formality just described above, I would have no problem accepting “Lessons in Polyglottery” as a veritable virtual classroom and as a very valid venue of learning and information sharing. I have a feeling that most of you are so young as to have grown up with omnipresent computers, and that most of the rest of you have somehow acclimated yourselves to them faster and better than I have. Please let us all remember, though, that what we are composing here is really still new and uncharted territory. Depending on the style in which we write, we can either, in effect, compose a book together, or merely contribute to the infinite number of bytes out there in cyberspace. I am really only interested in continuing this project if we do the former, so please let us all collaborate in this endeavor! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| qklilx Moderator United States Joined 6187 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 10 12 May 2008 at 2:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Professor,
I agree with everything you just said and would like to offer a suggestion in order to improve the quality and credibility of this room. You are a very well-established member of this forum, a forum which is in the upper tier of intelligence, if such a thing can be measured. You are also a moderator of this particular area of the forum. I understand that you do not have an extensive knowledge of computers and internet applications, so perhaps being a moderator is somewhat irrelevant to you. However, given that you are partially dissatisfied with the tone and content of some of the discussions being held, you may look into sifting through some of it and removing posts or threads at your discretion. Alternatively, you could call upon the help of website and forum staff to do the job for you, although I have already noticed that they do aid in the cleaning on occasion. I would also suggest that some day in the future (I understand you are busy and this room is somewhat new) you or some selected forum members begin a project of selecting the most important and interesting discussions and compiling them into one collection. This could be posted on this website or yours, or even organized into a sort of book. This would be a way of filtering through information that may be deemed invalid for research or citations. I apologize for making a post that is completely unrelated to the topic, but I felt that I should respond to your request. By the way, I do not think in the least that you are being heavy-handed. This is a respectable forum and you are a respectable man and it is the least we can do to be just as respectable to you and anyone reading. - Evan McKinney 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 10 13 May 2008 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't contribute to the discussion about Korean or Japanese as the most difficult language to learn. However the title of the thread is "Making this site citable", and that is a problem for all of us. I restarted my language studies partly because I found this site, and it has been my constant companion ever since - not because I always agree with the opinions voiced here, but because reading about other study methods make me think about what I'm doing myself. Besides I have read hundreds, if not thousands of pages related to language learning on the internet and on paper. I have found several fascinating papers and home pages, but nothing that could keep me coming back again and again. So it is sad that some language learners never find it (especially if they intend to study languages in private), and it would be even more sad if the Administrator one day decided to close it.
But is that enough to make it citable? Citability is not just a question of being interesting and not even of being correct (in so far there are claims here that can be verified on an empirical basis), but also about making an independent, complete statement which can be used outside its context. There are indeed items here that could be used in isolation, and there are items that contains hard facts and maybe even sources, but not much that really have all off these things in one post. In other words, there aren't many scientific articles here, but lots of material that could be changed into scientific articles (and no, I don't claim that all sources used by Wikipedia deserve to be called scientific or even valuable). So to get quoted it would probably take some rewriting, and then the result would have to be published in another form. And even then there would certainly be some selfrighteous 'professionals' out there who would frown upon the use of any material written by people without an academic degree. Maybe it is better just to let people find this site through Google or blogs and then make it easier to navigate it? I think that the best thing we can do is to make at least some of our contributions in the form of small selfcontained units where we try to make a comprehensible, complete statement about something. The logical place to put these would be either as the first item in a thread or in our personal profile threads, and it might even be worth keeping a special links list to those posts that have this character. The 'Forum dictionary' might also be a relevant place to put such lists. I know that there are several places in this forum where someone has made a list of something (for instance of some of ProfArguelles' old contributions under the name of Ardaschir), but it is a problem in itself to find these lists. Personally I have made a Word file with those of my own writings that I would be very sorry to loose if suddenly this forum disappeared. If I need to reference some of my own writings I look there first, because most of the more substantial of my contributions are found in that file. But it only covers one member here (me), and it is not accessible, and I'm not going to publicize it. Nevertheless having such a collection serves to take out some of the ephemeral quality about forum postings. Those that have plans about getting scientific recognition (or recognition by Wiki, which may be even more important) will certainly benefit from thinking about their postings as something that has an existence outside a narrow and short-lived discussion, and the rest of us will at least benefit from having our thoughts organised in something like a 'My ideas album'. Niels Johs. Legarth Iversen Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2008 at 7:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 8 of 10 19 May 2008 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Mr. McKinney and Mr. Iversen,
Thank you very much for your suggestions on this important issue. I am sorry for my scanty and belated posting this week, but, quite frankly, I just could not summon the enthusiasm to write for the forum yesterday precisely because of the unresolved state of this very matter. In all honesty, it rather irked me to find that certain people have continued posting in an undesirably familiar and off-hand fashion—indeed, have done so in this very thread and about this very subject! We cannot imagine that our discussions will ever be quoted in real reference works as an authoritative and scientific source of rigorously researched information. They should not be, as they are not that at all. However, there are many other contexts in which they could be cited: student research papers, textbook planning and other applied linguistic “soft” data gathering about language learners, other intellectual discussion arenas, even more serious “print” essays and articles, etc., etc. In fact, we are already sometimes cited and discussed in these contexts, and we are sometimes read, either there or directly here, by credentialed scholars who probably would not only cite us more often but also perhaps be more willing to sometimes actively enter into our discussions if only they would take on and maintain the more respectable format that I repeatedly call for. Personal correspondence is legitimately quotable. I am a known and definable individual, and the purpose, indeed the very raison d’être of this room is for others to be able to correspond with me so that I can share my extensive experience in exploring foreign languages. It would be impossible for me to respond privately and individually to all the queries for advice that come my way. However, if I do so in this public format, I can manage the time better, and many can benefit from my answers to one. Yes, the time has come for a general editing of submissions to this room. Digressions do slip into many discussions, digressions which may be pertinent at the time, but which are not after the fact. I hereby ask all who have posted in this room to imagine that they are newcomers and to go through their own old contributions and delete all that is unnecessary and edit anything remaining that is not properly polite so as to make the whole more readable. Furthermore, if those who do have more computer expertise could look into the compilation of the more important and interesting threads into an easily linkable source, I will give thought to classifying and identifying that kind of thread. Once again I, as the moderator of this room, call for all submissions here to be: a) Substantive. b) Written in formal, correct, proper, high-register English. c) Signed with a full real name. I recognize that these requirements are different from most other forums, indeed, even from the other rooms on this forum. If you are more comfortable with the notion that a forum should be a completely free and open discussion in which anyone can anonymously say anything at any time in any form he chooses, then please post there, not here. As the point has now been stressed so much, when reading through future submissions, I will indeed more frequently delete those that do not conform to the above format. Until now I have not signed my own name as it seemed like overkill given my identity, but henceforth I will do so, as an example and a reminder, and because, upon reflection, it will make our correspondence and discussions all that much more authentic and easy to document. Alexander Arguelles 1 person has voted this message useful |
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