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December daily meme - 04
Dec. 4th, 2013 08:31 pmmaster post here, still taking prompts!
04: studying languages
I have to say this: I do not remember a time when I have not loved language, loved learning new things about known languages, or been learning a new language.
If I could remember all the languages I've ever studied? I would be a serious polyglot. Spanish, French, Hebrew, German, Latin, some Russian, and a tiny bit of Japanese. And that's what I can *remember*, or have evidence of, studying.
Er, and then computer languages, of course, and I don't know if that's related or not.
Also music, ditto.
#
One of the things I've pretty much always liked about learning other languages is that it helps me provide structure for my native language; there are things that I know as a native speaker without being able to label them or have them make any sort of sense.
For example: My parents, my mom especially, taught me to say "if I were" instead of "if I was", but it wasn't until I learned the German subjunctive that I really grokked why.
Or: I knew that PDQ Bach's Throw the Yule Log On, Uncle John played around with language, with the difference between, say, "Put the pickle down, Uncle John" vs "Put the pickle (slight pause) down Uncle John", but it wasn't until a class I took in grad school that I finally got the tools to understand the difference between a phrasal verb and a verb followed by a preposition.
I really really like the "why" of things. This applies to all aspects of life -- I probably would have been a serious tinkerer growing up if I hadn't been more afraid of getting in trouble for breaking things, but still I liked to figure things out. Even with, say, a depressive funk, I like to understand the why of it.
So getting tools to understand the whys and wherefores of language? Utterly and completely awesome.
(which is also why I adored linguistics -- among other things I wish I could tell my pre-college self, "forget computer science, major in linguistics with a minor in some language or other" is very high on the list -- because it gave me a deeper understanding. The average person on the street thinks "linguistics" means "learning lots of languages", which generally makes linguists roll their eyes, but ... it does help for some aspects of language learning, if only for things like SVO order, or knowing that grammatical agreement is a thing that exists, or whatever, but it doesn't make picking up another language a snap. Heck, it doesn't even make pronouncing a new language that much easier, because being able to write the IPA for a sound doesn't mean you can reliably reproduce it. But it helps understand language at a more fundamental level, in some sense, and helps with native languages as much as (or more than) new languages.)
#
Randomly, but semi relatedly, I just had to say this: after 105 days of Duolinguo, I have finally gotten to the unit on numbers.
(we have seen a couple instances of uno and one instance of dos, but no other numbers. granted I can count, with some badness of pronunciation, from one to ten just by prior knowledge, but.)
04: studying languages
I have to say this: I do not remember a time when I have not loved language, loved learning new things about known languages, or been learning a new language.
If I could remember all the languages I've ever studied? I would be a serious polyglot. Spanish, French, Hebrew, German, Latin, some Russian, and a tiny bit of Japanese. And that's what I can *remember*, or have evidence of, studying.
Er, and then computer languages, of course, and I don't know if that's related or not.
Also music, ditto.
#
One of the things I've pretty much always liked about learning other languages is that it helps me provide structure for my native language; there are things that I know as a native speaker without being able to label them or have them make any sort of sense.
For example: My parents, my mom especially, taught me to say "if I were" instead of "if I was", but it wasn't until I learned the German subjunctive that I really grokked why.
Or: I knew that PDQ Bach's Throw the Yule Log On, Uncle John played around with language, with the difference between, say, "Put the pickle down, Uncle John" vs "Put the pickle (slight pause) down Uncle John", but it wasn't until a class I took in grad school that I finally got the tools to understand the difference between a phrasal verb and a verb followed by a preposition.
I really really like the "why" of things. This applies to all aspects of life -- I probably would have been a serious tinkerer growing up if I hadn't been more afraid of getting in trouble for breaking things, but still I liked to figure things out. Even with, say, a depressive funk, I like to understand the why of it.
So getting tools to understand the whys and wherefores of language? Utterly and completely awesome.
(which is also why I adored linguistics -- among other things I wish I could tell my pre-college self, "forget computer science, major in linguistics with a minor in some language or other" is very high on the list -- because it gave me a deeper understanding. The average person on the street thinks "linguistics" means "learning lots of languages", which generally makes linguists roll their eyes, but ... it does help for some aspects of language learning, if only for things like SVO order, or knowing that grammatical agreement is a thing that exists, or whatever, but it doesn't make picking up another language a snap. Heck, it doesn't even make pronouncing a new language that much easier, because being able to write the IPA for a sound doesn't mean you can reliably reproduce it. But it helps understand language at a more fundamental level, in some sense, and helps with native languages as much as (or more than) new languages.)
#
Randomly, but semi relatedly, I just had to say this: after 105 days of Duolinguo, I have finally gotten to the unit on numbers.
(we have seen a couple instances of uno and one instance of dos, but no other numbers. granted I can count, with some badness of pronunciation, from one to ten just by prior knowledge, but.)