Since I first learned I had got the job in Sicily, my Spanish has suffered. The day after the job interview, I was at a Spanish/English language exchange, and I kept dropping words of Italian into my Spanish. The weird thing is that my Spanish was a million times stronger than my Italian then, but somehow my brain had switched "mode".
Obviously, living in Italy for four months has only served to intensify this, with my Spanish now being half-hidden behind fairly broken bits of Italian. My assumption for a long time was that my problem was in my accent -- I still speak Italian with a bit of a Spanish twang. This belief was bolstered by the fact that my Catalan, while being very, very weak from lack of use, didn't seem so badly affected. The Catalan accent is very, very different from Spanish and Italian.
However, I was at a Couchsurfing meeting on Friday night which changed my mind. There was an Andalusian tourist visiting, and when I spoke to her, my accent was more different from the one I use in Italian than I had expected. My brain started playing tricks on me, and I had difficulty speaking Italian when she was in my line-of-sight, and for a while I was wobbling between Italian and Spanish.
But that's not the important thing.
When I was speaking Italian, I got into much deeper and more complex conversations than I normally would, and rather than jamming up as I hit the limits of my Italian, I was automatically switching to Spanish to fill in the gaps. Now, I wasn't just importing words or grammar rules from Spanish into Italian -- no, I was switching into Spanish; conjugations, pronouns and all. As I became aware I was doing this, it dawned on me that I'd been doing it for my whole stay, but normally I'd just not thought about it too much and fallen back to English.
This is a bit of a new sensation... or actually, no. The only new thing is the fact that I was unaware of it. When it was Scottish Gaelic and French, for example, it would be instantly noticeable. The difference here is that the similarity of the languages (including, but not limited to, accent) allowed it to slip through the net on occasions.
The trigger mechanism is the same, regardless of language: hit a gap in your knowledge in one language and the brain will fall back on another. The only difference lies in detection.
This makes me wonder if the only option I have now to get my Spanish back is... to learn more Italian. My theory is that filling in the main gaps in my Italian will not only stop me falling back on Spanish when I run out of Italian, but that as a consequence of this, it will reduce the strength of the linkage between the two, allowing me to speak Spanish without Italian interrupting me.
It looks like I might be practising my Italian a lot, even once I leave Italy...
Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts
07 July 2014
06 September 2012
Initial observations about Corsican
Before I came here, I did a bit of digging about on the internet, trying to find out about the Corsican language. There wasn't hellish much info in English, and even in French it was pretty sketchy. Now I'm here, though, and I've picked up a book of Corsican grammar (in Corsican, just for the hell of it) so I can start to puzzle it out for myself.
My first reaction from some of the free resources online was to describe Corsican as "Italian with a Catalan accent", because of the vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. However, vowel reduction in Corsican is not as extreme as that in Catalan.
One thing that wasn't described too well in the sources I'd viewed online was consonant changes, and in reality it isn't particularly difficult. I'd been trying to puzzle through single and double consonants, and my initial reaction was to treat them as in Italian, where a double consonant is lengthened (a process called "gemination". But the first pronunciation guides talked about consonant changes -- a T being pronounced as D for example.
As it turns out, in the south the model is more like Italian -- T is /t/ and TT is /tt/ -- and in the north these changes occur, but even these aren't alien to someone familiar with other Romance languages. It's a process called "lenition" (the weakening of consonants) and it happens frequently in many peninsular Spanish dialects (the archetypical example being the word "Madrid" in a Madrid accent) as well as in almost all other dialects in the letter V. A consonant is weakened with it occurs "intervocalically" (ie between two vowels). The strong form occurs when bounded on one side by another consonant. And if there's no other consonant, just doubling the same consonant gets round the problem (which is roughly analogous with the R/RR distinction in Spanish and several other languages).
So in the north of Corsica "atta" would be pronounced /'ata/, "ata" would be pronounced /'ada/ (as would "adda") and "ada" would be pronounced /'aða/ -- which is the same soft D as in Madrid (/ma'drið/).
So Corsican is just another point on the spectrum of Romance languages. The interesting part is how the north and south have such different ways of rendering the same consonants, but that in so many respects the northern and southern dialects are extremely similar and consistent. Before starting on Corsican, I would have assumed that such a large difference in pronunciation would have broken mutual comprehensibility and that the dialects would have diverged to the point of being considered completely distinct languages, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
My first reaction from some of the free resources online was to describe Corsican as "Italian with a Catalan accent", because of the vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. However, vowel reduction in Corsican is not as extreme as that in Catalan.
One thing that wasn't described too well in the sources I'd viewed online was consonant changes, and in reality it isn't particularly difficult. I'd been trying to puzzle through single and double consonants, and my initial reaction was to treat them as in Italian, where a double consonant is lengthened (a process called "gemination". But the first pronunciation guides talked about consonant changes -- a T being pronounced as D for example.
As it turns out, in the south the model is more like Italian -- T is /t/ and TT is /tt/ -- and in the north these changes occur, but even these aren't alien to someone familiar with other Romance languages. It's a process called "lenition" (the weakening of consonants) and it happens frequently in many peninsular Spanish dialects (the archetypical example being the word "Madrid" in a Madrid accent) as well as in almost all other dialects in the letter V. A consonant is weakened with it occurs "intervocalically" (ie between two vowels). The strong form occurs when bounded on one side by another consonant. And if there's no other consonant, just doubling the same consonant gets round the problem (which is roughly analogous with the R/RR distinction in Spanish and several other languages).
So in the north of Corsica "atta" would be pronounced /'ata/, "ata" would be pronounced /'ada/ (as would "adda") and "ada" would be pronounced /'aða/ -- which is the same soft D as in Madrid (/ma'drið/).
So Corsican is just another point on the spectrum of Romance languages. The interesting part is how the north and south have such different ways of rendering the same consonants, but that in so many respects the northern and southern dialects are extremely similar and consistent. Before starting on Corsican, I would have assumed that such a large difference in pronunciation would have broken mutual comprehensibility and that the dialects would have diverged to the point of being considered completely distinct languages, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
12 November 2010
I was down in London with work, and I had a spare half-an-hour on my way to the airport. I was just about to head down into King's Cross-St Pancras underground when I remembered a bookshop I'd been meaning to visit.
LCL International Booksellers is on Judd St, under five minutes' walk from Kings Cross. I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I needed help. I didn't, so I told the shopkeepeer that I'd heard about the place and just had to see it for myself.
It was incredible. Every nook and cranny was jammed with a bookcase and every bookcase was full. There was every language course you could think of (except Rosetta Stone, which I think says something!) plus many you would never have realised existed, and many that don't exist any more.
I could bankrupt myself in a place like that. What particularly intrigued me were all the CDROM courses on offer. Now I know they'll all be rubbish -- all computer-based self-teaching packages are, but I'm just so curious about different people's ideas on how to teach languages with computers. What ideas were lost when Transparent Language and Rosetta Stone absorbed the market? What ideas did newer entrants to the market build on?
But in the end, there's no guarantee that I could get any of these older packages to run on a current computer, so I headed back to the "proper" book section.
So yeah, I did spend a bit of cash, but I only baught two books! (This is the first time I've ever been glad of draconian hand-baggage limitations on aeroplanes.)
This first is something I've been meaning to get for a long time -- Cronómetro. It's a book for preparing for the Spanish DELE exams, and I picked up the advanced version. I don't really put all that much stock in exams, but unfortunately the Open University recently aligned their marking scheme to the CEFR, and their final Spanish course is graded as B2/C1. Now that I've got an official rating against the CEFR, I feel compelled to better it -- my ego doesn't like not reaching the highest point. Also, I've found that various among the finer points of Spanish grammar are starting to slip away from me, so I really need to focus myself on something to get a better command of all those bits and pieces.
(I'm actually not a fan of the CEFR and I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline about the whys and wherefores, so I'll not bore you with that now.)
The second book was something a little different. It was Hippocrene Books' Beginner's Basque by Win Jansen. I really shouldn't have bothered -- I knew that at the time -- but my judgement was impaired by a cracking occular migraine that was constantly threatening to turn the world into shards of coloured glass like you'd find in a kaleidoscope. Talking to a shopkeeper whose head is trying to turn into a fountain of rhomboids is more than a little disorientating. (Crossing the road later was very disturbing, and walking through the tube station with a bloke from a stained glass window pacing me in my peripheral vision was also extremely bizarre.) This book has kind of inspired me to another post on one of the big problems with dialogues in language books, but that'll come later.
Right now, I'm more interested in the place of bookshops in the modern world. There is no specialist language bookshop in Edinburgh as far as I know, and I'm sure enough people know I would be interested that someone would have told me by now. Many of the books in there just wouldn't get space in even the best-stocked Waterstones, so there is no way for most people to discover them.
But what about the internet, I here you cry? I'm not hopeful. Years ago, the big buzzword in internet economics was "the long tail". They said that the internet would be great for the little guy by making things always available and available everywhere. It does, but that doesn't mean that folk will buy it.
The results have been disheartening. The internet seems to be concentrating more and more consumer power into less and less products.
Part of the problem is the problem of too much choice, and lack of the expert shop assistant. How do you decide what to buy? You get what everyone else is getting.
And it gets worse, because in a bookshop, you don't open up a book and see an advert for a rival book, but when I went to Amazon the other day and had a look at a course from the Michel Thomas range, I saw the following blurb in an advert for a rival product: " Tried Michel Thomas? New Spanish & French Audio Courses from Collins ". Almost everywhere I look for information on language learning, I see adverts for Rosetta Stone (a package which is almost universally derided by serious language learners). Hell, they even had their own display in the airport departure lounge I was in that same day.
So what is the future for language learning materials? Will we see increased consolidation on the market leaders, or will there be greater diversification? And in the end, does it really matter?
LCL International Booksellers is on Judd St, under five minutes' walk from Kings Cross. I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I needed help. I didn't, so I told the shopkeepeer that I'd heard about the place and just had to see it for myself.
It was incredible. Every nook and cranny was jammed with a bookcase and every bookcase was full. There was every language course you could think of (except Rosetta Stone, which I think says something!) plus many you would never have realised existed, and many that don't exist any more.
I could bankrupt myself in a place like that. What particularly intrigued me were all the CDROM courses on offer. Now I know they'll all be rubbish -- all computer-based self-teaching packages are, but I'm just so curious about different people's ideas on how to teach languages with computers. What ideas were lost when Transparent Language and Rosetta Stone absorbed the market? What ideas did newer entrants to the market build on?
But in the end, there's no guarantee that I could get any of these older packages to run on a current computer, so I headed back to the "proper" book section.
So yeah, I did spend a bit of cash, but I only baught two books! (This is the first time I've ever been glad of draconian hand-baggage limitations on aeroplanes.)
This first is something I've been meaning to get for a long time -- Cronómetro. It's a book for preparing for the Spanish DELE exams, and I picked up the advanced version. I don't really put all that much stock in exams, but unfortunately the Open University recently aligned their marking scheme to the CEFR, and their final Spanish course is graded as B2/C1. Now that I've got an official rating against the CEFR, I feel compelled to better it -- my ego doesn't like not reaching the highest point. Also, I've found that various among the finer points of Spanish grammar are starting to slip away from me, so I really need to focus myself on something to get a better command of all those bits and pieces.
(I'm actually not a fan of the CEFR and I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline about the whys and wherefores, so I'll not bore you with that now.)
The second book was something a little different. It was Hippocrene Books' Beginner's Basque by Win Jansen. I really shouldn't have bothered -- I knew that at the time -- but my judgement was impaired by a cracking occular migraine that was constantly threatening to turn the world into shards of coloured glass like you'd find in a kaleidoscope. Talking to a shopkeeper whose head is trying to turn into a fountain of rhomboids is more than a little disorientating. (Crossing the road later was very disturbing, and walking through the tube station with a bloke from a stained glass window pacing me in my peripheral vision was also extremely bizarre.) This book has kind of inspired me to another post on one of the big problems with dialogues in language books, but that'll come later.
Right now, I'm more interested in the place of bookshops in the modern world. There is no specialist language bookshop in Edinburgh as far as I know, and I'm sure enough people know I would be interested that someone would have told me by now. Many of the books in there just wouldn't get space in even the best-stocked Waterstones, so there is no way for most people to discover them.
But what about the internet, I here you cry? I'm not hopeful. Years ago, the big buzzword in internet economics was "the long tail". They said that the internet would be great for the little guy by making things always available and available everywhere. It does, but that doesn't mean that folk will buy it.
The results have been disheartening. The internet seems to be concentrating more and more consumer power into less and less products.
Part of the problem is the problem of too much choice, and lack of the expert shop assistant. How do you decide what to buy? You get what everyone else is getting.
And it gets worse, because in a bookshop, you don't open up a book and see an advert for a rival book, but when I went to Amazon the other day and had a look at a course from the Michel Thomas range, I saw the following blurb in an advert for a rival product: " Tried Michel Thomas? New Spanish & French Audio Courses from Collins ". Almost everywhere I look for information on language learning, I see adverts for Rosetta Stone (a package which is almost universally derided by serious language learners). Hell, they even had their own display in the airport departure lounge I was in that same day.
So what is the future for language learning materials? Will we see increased consolidation on the market leaders, or will there be greater diversification? And in the end, does it really matter?
12 October 2008
You may have heard of the POOLS project, funded by the Leonardo II scheme during 2005-2007. They collected short videos on permissive and open licenses in a number of less-studied languages.
Well, now they're back with POOLS-T. The focus now is on tools, not materials; hence the T. Things are only just starting off, but there's already a lot of material from the first round of work as well as donated videos in a variety of languages.
Gordon Wells made some excellent and very professional videos under the title Scottish Island Voices. These are available in two versions, English and Gaelic, and have been included in the Pools project. You can hear an interview with him regarding the project courtesy of the Irish National Digital Learning Repository.
Finally, I've been playing with some of these videos, trying to figure out how best to use the materials. I've uploaded one of Gordon's sets of Gaelic films to YouTube, and I've been playing around with annotation and subtitling options. You can check them out on my YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/NiallBeag.
The Pools project currently hosts videos in the following languages:
Basque
Danish
Dutch
English
Gaelic
German
Lithuanian
Romanian
Spanish
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