Category: Language learning

Gàidhlig

By Simon

This month I am focusing mainly on improving my Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig). I’ve been listening to Gaelic radio, reading various things in Gaelic, writing and recording things every day in Gaelic on my other blog, and speaking and singing to myself in the language. I plan to make another animation in Gaelic sometime this month (you can see the first one I made on YouTube), and will make one in Irish soon as well. I might even try to write a song in Gaelic. I have yet to meet with any other Gaelic speakers or learners round here, but hope to find some who are willing to chat with me.

I’m really enjoying it and I think that Gaelic is one of my favourite languages at the moment – I particularly like the sounds of the language, and the more I learn it, the more I like it. I have no practical reasons for learning it, and this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I would like to become as fluent in Scottish Gaelic as I am with Irish and Welsh, and if this takes longer than a month, I will continue with it and not switch my focus to another language at the end of this month.

Are you learning, or have you learned, any languages just because you like the sound of them, or because you find them interesting?

Learning by doing

By Simon

Today is the last day I focus on Irish after doing so for a whole month. That may not sound like much, but for me it is – I tend to flit from language to language and rarely spend very long on any one of them. Every day, with only a few exceptions, I’ve written something in Irish on my other blog and recorded it. There were a few days last week when I didn’t find time to write something, but I caught up later. I’ve also been listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta (Irish language radio) every day, and spent last week in Ireland speaking a lot of Irish. My ability to speak and write Irish has improved, and I think that the practice of writing in it every day made a big contribution to that. My listening has also improved. From tomorrow I will be focusing on Scottish Gaelic, and might continue writing in Irish, as well as Scottish Gaelic and English, on my blog, so that I keep it ticking over.

I know other people have probably had these thoughts, but I have come to the conclusion that regular use of a language you’re learning in writing and speech is possibly the best way to improve. When learning languages I tend to spend a lot of time listening to and reading, so I am usually a lot better at those skills than at speaking and writing. The way I’ve done it also gives me chances to practise speaking, or at least reading aloud.

Do you try to actively use languages you’re learning as you learn them? Does this help?

Summer schools

By Simon

I had a wonderful time in Ireland last week, which is why I keep going back every summer. This year was my ninth visit to Oideas Gael and my seventh time at the summer school. Gleann Cholm Cille is beautiful, the people are great, and there’s a lovely, friendly, helpful, supportive atmosphere there. Everyone is happy to help one another with the Irish language, with music and with whatever else is needed. People from many different countries go there, so I have opportunities to use a variety of languages – this year I got to speak not just Irish and English, but also French, German and Japanese, and a bit of Czech and Portuguese.

With many local and visiting musicians, singers and dancers musical mayhem can break out anywhere at any time – in pubs, in restaurants and cafés, in car parks, and on the beach – I even played a few tunes on my low whistle at the bus stop while waiting for the bus on Saturday morning. I’ll certainly go back next year, and maybe will spend two weeks there, as there’s a harp week before the summer school, and I’ve wanted to learn the harp for a long time.

There are a few similar summer schools in Ireland and Scotland, and I’ve been looking for others in other countries. I know that some language schools offer combinations of language courses and cultural activities, like dancing, cooking, etc., but I haven’t found any like Oideas Gael. Do you know of, or have you been on, any similar ones? Are there any other places where spontaneous musical mayhem is likely?

Focus

By Simon

This month I’ll mainly be focusing on improving my Irish (Gaelic). This is mainly because I’m going to a summer school in Irish language and culture at Oideas Gael in Donegal at the end of this month, as I’ve done every year for the past six years, plus two years going there in June. I plan to write something in Irish every day on my other blog, Multilingual Musings, which I set up as a place to practise using my languages, and will make recordings of the posts. I will also listen to Raidió na Gaeltachta (Irish language radio) every day and maybe find things in Irish to read as well.

I think the writing practice will be most useful – I’ve been doing the listening and reading fairly regularly anyway, but rarely write in Irish and often have to check my spelling and grammar. Doing the recordings will be a good exercise as well.

At the end of August I’ll be going to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on Skye, to do a course in Skye Gaelic Songs and Traditions with Mary Ann Kennedy, so will be focusing on improving my Scottish Gaelic in August.

I will also be keeping my other languages ticking over and learning a bit more Breton and Russian every day.

Do you have any particular language projects or goals for this summer?

Are you a hare or a tortoise?

By Simon

Hare and tortoise

When learning a language do you try to learn it as quickly as possible? Like a hare you hurry through the language ignoring anything that might slow you down, like good grammar and pronunciation, perhaps thinking that you can go back later and tidy them up.

Or maybe you take your time like a tortoise, trying to learn every aspect of the language thoroughly.

There are parallels with learning music – the other day a friend who is learning the violin said that she tends to focus on getting the notes of new tunes right at first, then goes back and pays attention dynamics, bowing and so on. She realised that maybe it would be better to learn those things from the beginning. I certainly try to do this when learning tunes on my various instruments.

With languages I like to take things easy and try to learn things quite thoroughly, though might ignore seems aspects of language that don’t seem relevant.

Studying or dabbling, or both?

By Simon

Do you think it better to learn many languages to a basic level, to concentrate on a few and learn them in much more depth, or to learn a few languages well, and to learn the basics of others – perhaps many others?

It will probably depend on what you want to do with each language.

In my case I’ve studied nine languages in depth, and speak four of them fluently (plus English), and can get by in the others, more or less. The ones I’ve spent most time on are Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, French, Irish, German, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish and Manx, and they’re the ones I know well or fairly well. I’ve been to and/or lived in places where they’re spoken, done courses, and do my best to maintain them and use them whenever I can, especially the Celtic ones and French. I’m also learning Breton and Russian at the moment. I’ve dabbled with quite a few other languages, for trips to other countries, to try different languages courses, and out of interest. I don’t actively maintain them.

Recently I’ve been thinking whether I really want to learn any other languages – there are plenty I’d like to know, but I’m not sure whether I have time to learn them, and to maintain the ones I already know. I’m not interested in learning many languages just for the sake or it. I learn each one for a variety of reasons and don’t tend to get very far it I don’t have much interest in the language itself, and/or in the culture of people who speak it. With Breton I will finish the course I’m working on, but may not continue with my studies, unless I find an aspect or aspects of Breton culture that really fascinate me and/or appeal to me. The same is true of Russian.

As well as learning languages, I also play quite a few musical instruments, particularly guitar, piano, recorders, tin whistles, mandolin and ukulele. I used to play the clarinet, but have played very little since leaving school and have decided to sell it. When I mentioned this to a friend he asked me what other instrument(s) I will buy with the money from the clarinet – I haven’t decided yet whether to concentrate on the instruments I already play, or to do that and to get a new one.

Visual addiction

By Simon

There’s an interesting post by Idahosa Ness on learning languages orally over on Fluent in 3 Months today. It suggests that it is better to focus on listening and speaking until you have a good grasp of the pronunciation, rather than learning reading and writing at the same time. This can work even if you believe you’re a visual learning and need to have things written down in order to remember them.

Idahosa believes that you should concentrate on learning to recognize and produce the sounds of a language first, and on learning how they go together to form words and sentences. A knowledge of phonetics and phonology can help with this as it shows you what to do with your mouth in order to make the sounds, and this can also help you to recognize them. At this stage you don’t need to know how the sounds are represented in writing; in fact learning that can interfere with your ability to pronounce the sounds.

This approach seems to make a lot sense to me – I always spend lots of time listening to languages, sometimes before I even start learning them. So my listening abilities tend to develop more quickly and thoroughly than my other linguistic skills. Perhaps I need to spend more time practicing speaking as well.

One book which uses a similar approach to Idahosa’s is Blas na Gàidhlig: The Practical Guide to Scottish Gaelic Pronunciation, by Michael Bauer, which uses the IPA and lots of recordings to teach you the pronunciation of Scottish Gaelic, and only introduces Gaelic orthography once all the sounds have been explained.

The only language I’ve tried to learn mainly orally is Taiwanese. As Taiwanese doesn’t have a standard written form, I concentrated on learning to speak and understand it. I tried to learn everything orally at first, but started writing things down after a while to help me remember them. If I’d had something to record the things I was learning, I might have been able to dispense with the written notes.

Have you learnt or tried to learn a language entirely or mainly orally?

More on grammar

By Simon

The importance of grammar in language learning is often played down in language courses and by people who blog about language learning. They claim that you can learn a language either without actively studying the grammar (whatever they mean by the word), or that you only need to glance at grammar books and explanations now and then. This is partly a reaction against the grammar-translation approach to language teaching in which you concentrate on learning verb conjugations, noun declensions, etc, and on translating from and to the target language.

I think that grammar, i.e. how a language works, and grammatical terminology (if you don’t already know it), can be short cuts to achieving competence in a language. If you spend all you time learning nouns, for example, and don’t know how to put them together with other words to make sentences, then your ability to communicate will be very limited. Grammar provides the framework of a language and vocabulary provides the content. You need to learn both.

The question for me is not whether you need to learn/acquire grammar, but how you do so. Some people are able to read a grammar book, absorb the information and apply it – one friend, for example, spent nine months learning Finnish grammar, then moved to Finland (from Germany) and became fluent in Finnish within a few months. For most people though this is probably wouldn’t work. You can absorb a lot of grammar from extensive listening and reading, with some checking of grammar books, but some overt study can be useful as well.

What is your approach?

What do you mean by grammar?

By Simon

A lot of discussions on how to learn languages mention grammar – whether it should be learnt overtly at all; whether it should be introduced gradually from the start, or only after one has a some knowledge of the new language, and so on.

There are often asides about how English-speaking people, especially the younger generations of English speakers, don’t even know the grammar of their own language.

What people mean by grammar is rarely discussed or defined, as it is assumed that everyone knows what grammar is, don’t they?

The OED has the following on grammar:

“That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing.

In early English use grammar meant only Latin grammar, as Latin was the only language that was taught grammatically. In the 16th century there are some traces of a perception that the word might have an extended application to other languages; but it was not before the 17th century that it became so completely a generic term that there was any need to speak explicitly of ‘Latin grammar’. Ben Jonson’s book, written c1600, was applied the first to treat of ‘English grammar’ under that name.

As above defined, grammar is a body of statements of fact — a ‘science’; but a large portion of it may be viewed as consisting of rules for practice, and so as forming an ‘art’. The old-fashioned definition of grammar as ‘the art of speaking and writing a language correctly’ is from the modern point of view in one respect too narrow, because it applies only to a portion of this branch of study; in another respect, it is too wide, and was so even from the older point of view, because many questions of ‘correctness’ in language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.”

It seems that when people say that (other) English speakers don’t know their grammar, what they mean is that they might not be familiar with grammatical terms, such as subject, object, adverb, declension, etc, and/or that they do not always use standard language, or at least that they do not speak or write in the way that the critics believe they should.

In terms of language learning, grammar can refer to verb conjugations, noun declensions and other ways that words change to indicate such things as person, number, tense, mood, etc. So saying that Chinese ‘has no grammar’ indicates that it has no inflections.

What do you mean when you talk about grammar?