Getting it right is hard

I'm working on a presentation about collaborative learning. It's leading me to think hard about when my teaching works and and when it doesn't. What are the things I can control, and what are the ones I can't. I can try to create an atmosphere or a vehicle or a structure, but student motivation is complex. What seems like an invitation to experiment and play for one student is perceived as a lack of structure by another.

By emphasizing multiple ways to engage in low-stakes writing activities, in which the evaluation is not based on such factors as grammar or correctness, but rather on effort and communication, I'm continuing with a philosophy of second language teaching called "the communicative approach." It involves active learning, a more student-centered approach, and support for making mistakes. But the fact is that most of my own language learning (and teaching) background ALSO emphasized repetition, drill exercises, and the internalization of correctness as essential building blocks for good (better) communication. Sometimes the tension I experience between these two tendencies makes me tired. But then I read this passage by Timothy Mason in this post on teaching grammar:

"Grammar is surrounded by similar anxieties. Grammar is, indeed, the fruit of such anxieties. Rules of grammar are rules of comportment and the grammar teacher is a dancing master. Like so many other aspects of language, good grammar is good posture.You cannot teach it without attending to social nicety. Which is to say that any such attempt needs to be fully sociologically informed."

So, some of my anxiety about correctness in communication comes from my awareness that I want students to be able to move between informal and formal registers, to have more control over how they are perceived by a variety of audiences. I want them to be able to code-switch, between slang and formal, written discourse. That's a lot for students to absorb, and takes a lifetime to learn. So maybe I need to lighten up.



Sometimes I find myself turning into a "tongue-clucking grammarian."


A mashup created by YouTube user saintblackangle using MC Frontalot's song "Tongue-Clucking Grammarian." Mc Frontalot is an exponent of nerdcore hip hop.

Three versions of "Spanish Buzz"

We went to see Toy Story 3 today, and cried at the end, along with the rest of the world.
*SPOILERS* Don't read this if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know what happens.

One of our favorite parts is when the gang tries to undo the Buzz Lightyear reset and ends up switching him to "Spanish mode." This little special feature about "Spanish Buzz" shows how the animators did the Spanish dance sequence at the very end, using Cheryl Burke and Tony Dovolani's choreography of a ballroom paso doble (to a rhythm that actually in Spain would be called a "rumba," not to be confused with the Cuban rumba or ballroom rumba). The song is performed by the Gypsy Kings and is the already existing Spanish translation of "You'll Have a Friend in Me." They did a superb job of rendering the movement of the dancers, and the body language of Buzz when he is in "Spanish mode" is spot on.


My daughter had already seen the movie in Spain, where everything is dubbed. I asked her how Pixar handled the switch to Spanish mode if all the characters were already dubbed into Spanish? She said they made his sound like a typical Andalusian.

I found this great little video (by YouTuber "vagoperesozo" from Argentina) that shows all three versions of this scene. In the U.S. English version, Buzz is supposed to be acting like a Spaniard (flamenco style poses, etc,) and he is voiced as speaking in a perfectly Castillian Spanish, with the same intonation as as all the dubbers of Spanish movies in Spain ("rrrounnnd tooooones" as they say in "Singing in the Rain"). In the Latin American version, in which all the characters speak Latin American accented Spanish, Buzz switches to an exaggeratedly caricatured and inconsistent "Spanish" accent (what Spaniards sound like to Latin Americans), sort of like Dick Van Dyke trying to do a Cockney accent in Mary Poppins. Finally, in the dubbed version as shown in Spain, the one my daughter saw, all the characters speak in a Castillian Spanish accent and when Buzz is reset, he is voiced by a REAL Andalusian,

As one commenter quotes him: "Bitacora Espasiá... Me dehpertao del hiperzueño."

Eyjafjallajökull, or "we said send CASH, not ASH!"

Well, I suppose if you are not stranded in an airport somewhere, you might find some humor in the ways that all of us are trying to learn to pronounce the name of that pesky Icelandic volcano! The New York Times has a great sound clip in which various people attempt to say the name, and then someone from the Icelandic consulate says it right. The NYT blog called the Lede has more links to great video and stories about the ash cloud and its impact on travel.
My favorite comment is the first :

A e-mail is going around in Norway written in quasi-Icelandic that says:

“Put 30 billion euros in unmarked bills in a bag by the gate of the Icelandic embassy in London, and we’ll turn off the volcano.”

Unfortunately, the joke is in reference to the fact that Iceland's economy and government have been wrecked by the financial crisis, leaving the citizens responsible for debt brought about by reckless financial institutions.

This a video highlights futile attempts by newscasters to say the name. The comments are full of Icelandic yuks.

Rap around the world video

I am absolutely fascinated by this video: it's a sampler of rap in 30 languages from all around the world. A testament to the power of hip hop culture as a world-wide phenomenon, it also shows--ever so briefly--how languages with different sounds, rhythms, and tone systems have taken what young people identify as some of the basic elements of rap, and made them fit their own circumstances. I would so love to have an idea of WHAT they are singing about!


The YouTube info lists the 30 languages and identifies most (but not all) of the artists. Two notes: the language identified as simply Chinese is, I believe, Mandarin Chinese (because Cantonese is a Chinese languge too). And there is no language called "Swiss" so I suspect it is Swiss-German but I have to listen again.

Language in contact; growing up with Yiddish

I didn't know when I was growing up that many of the expressions I learned from my family and friends were Yiddish. Some of them I knew because they've entered English in general (like lox and bagel) and some were familiar from movies, songs or books, but many were words we used daily because we picked them up from our friends: oy, oy gevult, feh! bubeleh, mensch, schlep, tsuris, meshugenah, dreck, nudnick, yutz, putz, schmendrick, shlemeil, plotz, megillah, kvetch, schlub, schmaltz, shmeer, kibitz, chutzpah, chazerai, cockamamie, schlock, shmatte, shpeil, mishegoss, shmo, shmuck, shnook, svhvitz, and more. I think the fact that so many of our friends were Jews from the East Coast meant that certain words were absorbed into our home vocabulary, even though both my parents were raised as Catholics. In college and graduate school, a dear friend continued my education in Yiddish by explaining some of the finer distinctions (schlemeil vs shlemazil, for example). So I get a kick out of this ad where a variety of people who "don't look Jewish" use so many of the Yiddish expressions I grew up with.

A Yiddisha Take on 2008
Transcript and translation

What do you think of a man who called our economy strong just weeks before it tanked?
There’s a meshugener (crazy person).

What do you think of McCain opposing funding for renewable energy?
Meshugeneh! (It’s crazy!)

Excuse me. McCain voted against the violence against women act.
What a shmendrick (fool).

McCain supports Bush’s plan to privatize social security so it can be at the mercy of the stock market.
Such a yutz (clueless person).

Ya know, McCain said he preferred that a president has a grounding in the Christian faith.
That gets me in my kishkes (guts). We don’t need that kind of tsores (trouble), honey.

Is Palin ready to handle complex foreign relations?
You think Bush is farblondzshet (bewildered), you haven’t seen anything.

You-hoo. You know, McCain didn’t support equal pay for equal work.
So women do all the schlepping (dragging), get bupkis (nothing) in return. Whatever.

John McCain says staying in Iraq is the only way to define victory.
That guy is such a nudnick (pest).

Hey. McCain supporters say we can’t trust Obama on Israel.
That’s total dreck (dirt). Obama’s a great friend to Israel. He’s got a perfect voting record.

What do you think about Pennsylvania Republicans implying that electing Obama could bring a Holocaust?
A shonde, it’s a shonde. (A shame, it’s disgraceful.)

You know McCain has 8 houses and 13 cars?
Oy gevault! (Oh for heaven’s sake!)

So what kind of leadership do we need for today’s world?
We need a mensch, a real mensch.(a decent person).

We hope you enjoyed our shtick (comic performance).

"Best" Quixote translation?

My mother is reading Don Quixote in English with one of her reading groups, and asked me what I knew about different translations. I had to reply that I knew nothing, as I had read it in Spanish, and had never had the occasion to think about "the best translation" before. I started poking around (hey, the Wikipedia entry is good!)and after looking at some scholarly and not-so-scholarly discussions of the history and quality of the very many English translations, I decided that the one her group is reading (the Edith Grossman translation with Alan Bloom's introduction) is probably, in fact, the best for their purposes; it is not a scholarly edition with footnotes explaining every proverb and reference and arguing with past translators' versions, but it is a accurate, and most importantly, a lively and FAITHFUL translation that captures the tone and spirit of the work. Here is what Edith Grossman herself says about translating literary texts (she has translated many Latin America authors, including Gabriel García Márquez):

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Why a new translation, when several were made right after its publication? Well, because English has changed a lot in 400 years, and Cervantes is, above all, a modern writer, and reading the original is an experience of great pleasure.
Without having looked at any of the texts myself it seems to me as if Grossman has done two important things: rendered the text in English that is colloquial and accessible, and captured the tone and multiples voices of Cervantes' text. Many people also had great praise for the audiobook read by Guidall.
Wikimedia has a lot of images of Don Quixote including the wonderful series of illustratioins by Gustave Doré.

Here's an interview with Edith Grossman
on translating Cervantes.

welsh welsh James Bond welsh welsh

Three Welshmen on the loose in "Los Angelees"

Like Richard Burton, who grew up in a Welsh-speaking household, actors Ioan Gruffuth and Matthew Rhys are bi-lingual Welsh/English speakers.

Learning Japanese, again.

When I was 5,my father (a doctor in the Army at the time) was stationed in Japan. We lived there for four years, on an army base called Sagamihara. Everything on the base was done to minimize culture shock to those moving in and out, so we (as children) were very cut off from Japanese society. My father did learn to speak Japanese, and my mother did study Japanese arts, and we went on vacations and traveled, but for some reason my parents didn't decide to have us learn Japanese then. When we got back to the States, I was able to begin studying Japanese in high school, and later started taking classes while I was in graduate school. Unfortunately, I also had to satisfy a Latin requirement, and stopped taking Japanese to finish my degree. I've forgotten most of what I learned, but with my daughter's interest in anime and manga, and with a friend's experiences and knowledge of the language, I've been starting to remember.

The web is great for language learning. Here is a page I found that tells you what words are used for family members, or kinship terms. There are different words depending on whether you are talking about your own family (address terms) or someone else's (reference terms). Takasugu Shinji has a site for teaching yourself Japanese and there are also podcasts on ITunes.

Dialectology

I am not so good at recognizing the finer details of regional accents, but I find it fascinating. I absolutely loved the PBS series The Story of English. I didn't become a linguist because although I think it's fun and interesting, linguists need to be patient and precise, and those are not my strong points.

Since I didn't grow up in any one place, and heard many accents during my life, I never had the local accent. When we lived in El Paso, until I was five, I my mother would get exasperated when we would say "shigger" for sugar, and how we were made to marvel when Mrs. Heygood asked us "ha minny pinnies in a dahm? Tin!" In Japan, of course, the folks in the army who spoke English were from all over, and no one accent dominated. In San Francisco, where I went to Jr High and High School, a lot of people I knew spoke English accents from all over the world, not just all over the country. I do remember being told by someone who was actually born in SF that it was to be pronounced 'Samp'ncisco', not San Francico.

When I moved from California to Minnesota, I discovered that I HAD an accent because people would squint and say, "you're not from around here, are ya?" I know I've picked up some Minnesota sounds over the years, of the Praire Home companion variety. When I first took my baby girl to Spain, a graduate student from Madrid said, "Don't let her pick up the accent!" I had no idea what he was talking about, but when I asked around, I discovered that the regional accent of Aragón is sometimes used on TV in Spain to represent characters who are "country bumpkins." There IS a strong regional accent, sometimes affectionately called "maño" that I cannot imitate at all. (OJO: para mis lectores aragoneses, distingo entre el aragonés como lengua y el variante del castellanos que se llama "maño". Este es un tema que merece su propio post!)

Ron Sullivan over at Toad in the Hole posted a great clip where some out-of-towners are learning the finer points of the Scranton,PA speech patterns. As a language instructor, I truly appreciate the scenes of classroom dynamic.

Merry mayhem with Beckett

Last night, the skies were clear and the temperatures went below zero. It was that kind of cold evening when your cheeks start to go numb. We went out because we were joining a crowd of fellow lovers of the work of Samuel Beckett for Beckett 101, an event in honor of the 101st anniversary of his birth. When I taught French many years ago, we used En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) as the first literary text the students read at the end of their second year. I think I taught it three times. Later I read one of his novels, Molloy, for a class, and became enamored of it as well. This was during a time when I was immersed in the works of high modernism, and Beckett appealed to me, although I never became a fanatic.

The Beckett fans, or "Beckett Heads" as Maria called us, were out in force last night. There was Guinness, Jameson's, beer and wine, dried fruit and nuts, cheese and bread (challah because it was Friday night), clementines and apples, dates and figs, and a giant sheet cake from the local grocery store with chocolate frosting and "I can't go on, I must go on" written on it. Our meeting place was one of those odd corners on campus that I had never seen before: a very old fashioned reading room of the type one sometimes discovers in odd nooks on campus, a wood-paneled room with round tables, study nooks, and a grand staircase leading up to a book gallery that ran around the upper level Large portraits of the doners looked down on the crowd. I think there must have been 60-70 people there, many of them students, others professors, and a few teenage kids who'd been kind enough to accompany their parents and participate in the readings (the Russian kids were the most Beckettian in their dress and demeanor!)

We began with a mass reading of the first scene of Waiting from Godot, with one half of the room taking the part of Vladimir and the other half Estragon. This got us warmed up for the main attraction, readings in 17 or 18 different languages. My dear friend Maria had sent out a call, and there were people who had volunteered to read the first or last scenes from Godot, passages from Watt, Krapp's Last Tape, and the last passage of The Unnamable in various languages. We proceeded in more-or-less alphabetical order: Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese (alternating lines), Danish, English, Finnish, French, French and Latin, German, Greek (ancient) Hungarian, Irish and Korean, Mongolian, Papua New Guinea Talkpidgen, Russian, Spanish (us!), Swedish and Norwegian, Turkish and Urdu. I think I remembered all of them! Some people had done their own translations, as none existed in their language; a few people had memorized their parts, some acted out scenes while others just read. I had never heard several of these languages spoken before, and it was thrilling. Because many of us knew the texts intimately, and because we had all read one of them together, we could recognized and follow along with the shape of the text.
We ended with a mass reading of the end of the Unnameable, which was hilarious--some read along with the loudest voice, others read to themselves in their own rhythms, a few formed little groups that ended earlier or later than the group. Someone recorded the whole thing, and took picture--I hope to get to see them!

We had a few props--a branch for "the tree" that is part of the opening of Godot, a bowler hat that evoked the Chaplin/French clochard characters, even a tape deck for the two performers who did bits from Krapp's Last Tape. One reader had directed Godot in China, another was an actor who had performed in a version of Godot.

I was happy that my daughter was willing to come, and willing to stand up with me and read a scene in Spanish. We bought the souvenir T-shirt that has "I can't go on, I will go on" because she enjoyed the energy, the glorious sounds of all these languages, the enthusiasm and charm of each of the readers, and the chocolate cake.

Well, excuuuse ME!

Sometimes when I was a child, my mother would say to me, "That's an explanation, not an excuse." It took me a long time to understand that she was trying to help me understand the difference between making a sincere apology and defensively arguing that I was justified in say, hitting my brother because he hit me first.

This hilarious article in the New York Times illustrates how often public figures go through the motions of apologizing but end up compounding the original offense.

Things that make me want to take out my red pen

For that anal-retentive writer or teacher in your life, here are some hilarious blogs:

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks "making fun of bad punctuation since 2005."

Literally, a weblog
An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word "literally."

Apostropher Abuse. Because its everywhere! and an apostrophe can't defend it's self!

lowercase L. This one was new to me, but now that I've seen the photos, I will be looking out for those signs that say PlEASE.

Do you know any other snarky language sites?

A bit of Fry and Laurie

A Bit of Fry and Laurie, "Tricky Linguistics"


"soupe de poisson IS soupe de poisson"


"Kicking Ass"

Don't shoot the piano player

I love histories of words, and some friends gave me a great book for Christmas called Word Origins and How We Know Them by Anatoly Liberman. He also has a blog which looks like a lot of fun. It is hosted at Oxford University Press. I had no idea that university presses had blogs! As the kids would say, Duh.

I found this wonderful online etymological dictionary! Here's the entry for scapegoat. Sometimes this idea is closely connected with "shooting the messenger." Where did this phrase come from? Wikipedia tells us a version of it was used by Sophocles, and Shakespeare used it a few times as well. Tom Tomorrow gives us a contemporary update.

disambiguation (is that really a word?)

I had a hard time coming up with a name for this blog. Once I tried to come up with a middle name for myself (I don't have one) and it stumped me. So I decided to go with a name my daughter gave me when she was very little; she was writing messages to mama and it came out momo. She also sometimes calls me "mude" (mom + dude), but that means "tired" in German.
I already knew that momo means peach in Japanese because we used to have a book about the adventures of Momo-taro (Peach Boy), a Japanese folk hero. I also remember the song that goes with the story.

What are some of the other meanings of momo? Well, you can try to Google it, but going straight to the Wikipedia "disambiguation" page for momo is much more fun.

word games

I loved the movie Word Play, the documentary about crossword puzzles and the people who love to do them. The American Crossword Puzzle competition was as gripping as a horse race or the Tour de France without the testosterone. It inspired me to buy one of the Will Shortz crossword puzzle collections. Even though I love words and word play, I haven't been particularly good solving at the NY Times puzzles after Wednesday, let alone the harder ones at the end of the week, so I thought that if I practiced and picked up some tips, I could improve. I am now up to puzzle 15 in the book, and the satisfaction of persisting and completing a puzzle is getting me hooked! Today I learned that a 14-letter word for "crossword puzzle devotee" is cruciverbalist.

I stumbled across this word play site yesterday, and I think I'm going to add it to my Morning Coffee menu.