The folly of trying to pronounce a place "like the natives do"

Well intentioned people often insist on trying to pronounce placenames in the "authentic" native form, even when there's a well-known variation in their own language.

At times, that change is remarkably successful, such as the change of "Peking" to "Beijing". There is an argument that this is futile, however, as the Chinese phonemes are rarely that close to English ones, and the tones of the Chinese are completely absent.

About a fortnight ago, the TV was marking the 70th anniversary of the brutal slaughter of the people of Hiroshima.

Now, most of us say "hiROshima", but a few people say "HEEroSHEEma". I thought about it a bit, and I figured that the first one is probably right, as the second one sounds like two words. I then looked up on the internet, and felt a bit sheepish when I read that the name means "wide island" in Japanese. Two words? Oh. But then I brought up Forvo and nope -- it's pronounced as one word.

So why do we end up with two forms in English?

It's all about perception. There are multiple things that you might detect. First up, there's word stress. In Japanese, Hiroshima is stressed on the second syllable, which is how I pronounce it in English. However, a knock-on effect of English stress is that adjacent syllables are weakened, so the Is are both I-schwa in English. However, in Japanese, vowels are generally clear, and vowel reduction is a matter of length, not vowel quality.

When the English speaker's ear hears Hiroshima, it either notes the correct stress, and fails to perceive the "EE" sounds, or it hears the EE sounds and fails to perceive the correct stress.

Which of these is further from the original? From an English speaker's perspective, it's impossible to say -- you need to make reference to the original language. I do not know for sure, but as Japanese has far fewer vowels than English, I would imagine hiROshima is readily recognised for the intended meaning, and that HEEroSHEEma would be pretty hard to process.

So it's a bit of a fool's errand trying to be "authentic", in my book.

Cross-language interference and failing to learn by exposure

Last month I was talking about the dangers of taking a hard-line view in your learning techniques. The specific example I used was spaced recognition software, and unfortunately my post focused too heavily on the example and not on the general principle I was trying to highlight.

Well, as it turns out, I stumbled across another example on a visit to a very wet and windy Edinburgh two days before Christmas. I waited for the worst of the rain to pass before leaving Haymarket station, then headed towards the centre of town. On my way, I passed a Turkish barber's with the following phrase in the window:

APPOINTMENTS NO-NECESSARY

Now the error here isn't as bad as you think, because this was in Scotland. In central and southern Scottish dialects, there is a distinction between the two functions that the English word not carries: negation of a preceding verb is carried out with nae and negation of a following adjective with no (as I understand it, in the north both situations use nae). The owner has obviously learned this use of no through spoken usage, and therefore has no explicit, formal knowledge of how it functions.

The use of the hyphen indicates that he views it as a prefix, closer bound to the adjective than it truly is. This is no surprise to me, as I know many Spanish people who pronounce phrases like no bad as though they are a single word. Given that this sort of colloquial speech is never taught, it is clear that the Turkish barber and my Spanish friends learned the structure by exposure.

Now I have always respected the role and importance of exposure in the learning of a language, but there are those who would exaggerate that importance and promote exposure to being the single determining factor of language learning, and that everything else -- study, teaching, practise -- is just window-dressing, a distraction to keep the learner motivated until such time as they accumulate enough exposure to "acquire" the language. but here we have an example of a feature that is learned in most cases with nothing but exposure, while all the study, teaching and practise is carried out using Standard English, and I have met precious few who have acquired the structure correctly.

Part of the problem is English's stress patterns. Spoken English has at least three stress levels: primary stress, secondary stress, and unstressed -- Spanish has only stressed and unstressed, as do many other languages. They just don't seem to recognise the three levels in English without conscious teaching. Worse: the opposite of necesario in Spanish is no necesario so they've got a pattern to match it to that misleads. Yes, innecesario also exists in dictionaries, but it's not the most common form (the presence of a double N marks it out as a pretty antiquated form), and there is a tendency for Spanish words to replace an in- prefix with no, and crucially, this no is spoken indistinguishably from a prefix -- it could just as easily be written nonecesario as no necesario. (The reason it isn't is probably just the usual case of orthography being a bit conservative and etymological, rather than a perfect model of the modern language.)

And Turkish, of course, is an agglutinative language, so prefers affixes to particles in almost every situation.

So as a soft-liner, I would say that a lack of conscious awareness or directed practise is to blame for the failure to learn this structure correctly, and that exposure, while a vital part of full language acquisition, couldn't correct for that, regardless of quantity and intensity.

A hard-liner would put it differently, claiming instead that these people simply aren't getting enough exposure. With my Spanish friends, I could accept that, but not with a barber. How many professions offer the same opportunities for exposure as this? Have you ever had a haircut without getting a long conversation thrown into the bargain?

The problem, as I've always said, is that all language has a high level of redundancy -- there's more information encoded in the language than we would need to understand the message. (It evolved this way in order to allow us to understand each other even with background noise. If you count up in English from 1, you'll be saying a different vowel every time up to and including 8 -- the numbers are so different that it would be very difficult to confuse one with another.) So if you don't need everything to understand the message, why would you even notice it? "Good enough is good enough," as they say, and the brain has no motivation to notice more when it has already got the message.

Too many cooks spoil the net....

When I first took up English teaching in 2007, the internet was an incredibly useful resource.  If I was stuck for a lesson idea, a quick Google search or a glance at one of my favourite sites would give me the inspiration and ideas I needed to build a useful lesson.

But now, the TEFL world and his dog are all posting their ideas on the internet.  A search that would have brought up a handful of useful links in 2007 now brings up a load of low quality worksheets and seemingly aimless tasks.  The act of searching for material is now arguably more time-consuming than just sitting down and writing your own material from the ground up, leading to the wonderful paradox that publishing more information leads to less reuse of material.  And this potentially snowballs, as all those teachers who're making their own material "because they can't find good stuff" start to publish their stuff too, further exacerbating the problem.

Now this is not to say that the authors of these materials aren't good teachers, but it is clear that the worksheets and activities don't fully encapsulate the spirit and methods of their class.  The warm-ups, the support activities, even the teacher's personality have a transformative effect on the material presented, and to take a list of a dozen questions and divorce them from that context robs them of their meaning and effectiveness.

People often compare the sharing of documents to the open-source software movement (well, it's getting less and less common now that document sharing is getting more and more common) but I've always considered that a falacious comparison.  Open-source is about exposing the underlying logic to the wider world, and allowing them to improve that logic; but a document is merely the conclusions reached by the author, not the logic he followed to make those decisions.

A very well designed learning exercise or test will follow a very strict process to ensure a sufficiently wide coverage of concepts and minimise the influence of luck on obtaining the correct answer, but as soon as you change one question in a set, you can end up breaking the balance of concepts tested and leave out something important.

If we're honest with ourselves, though, most of us will admit that we don't properly balance our tasks.  There will be times when we hand out a worksheet and realise that we've missed an important case, and I know that as soon as I started marking the last grammar test I set, I started spotting gaps where concepts weren't tested while other concepts were tested multiple times.

Which is, of course, why we look to other people to provide us with exercises and tests -- it is far more efficient to have one person spend all the time making a meticulously balanced question set and then have hundreds of teachers reuse those questions.

That's why books are such a great idea in theory -- it's just a shame that in practice a great many language teaching books don't live up to the promise; which is where the internet was supposed to help.  Unfortunately, the online material I've found to date isn't of great help.  There's two major camps: the let's-dump-our-worksheets-and-move-on crowd and the oh-look-what-I-can-do-with-technology crowd.

The first lot is basically what I've already talked about -- problem sets with little or no guidance on how to build a coherent lesson around them.

The second lot is people who have learned how to use some flashy little piece of software, but more often than not they find themselves being controlled by the software, rather than being in control of it.  This leads to a proliferation of pairing exercises (question halves and question-with-answer) and ordering exercises (sentence order or line-by-line conversation) because that's what the author knows how to do with the software.  It's a further weakening of pedagogy.

The last example I saw of this was for revision of conditional sentences (if...).  There was an introductory page that described the four conditional types, and then a selection of revision exercises, but each exercise focused on one type of sentence only, so the learner never needed to choose which type of conditional to use, just remember how to form the given type.  These sort of structurally-focused exercises are usually only recommended when initially teaching the form, with student scaffolding being reduced continually until they are able to make free, independent choices.  But as I said, this was allegedly a revision page... yet they were doing exercises designed for introducing the structure, because that was the type of exercise the author knew how to create.  And it looked nice, too.

So, yes, the internet is slowly becoming more of a problem, not a solution.

A way forward...?

This problem isn't really anything new -- it has been the perennial problem of the internet.  In the early days, the web was a collection of articles written mostly by academics, so it was high quality, low volume.  As more and more people started posting stuff online, the volume went up, and the average quality went down.

"No problem," the academics told us, "the network will self-organise, and the cream will float to the top."

The mechanism by which this self-organisation took place was intelligent linking.  A trusted source recommends other trusted sources, and surfers navigated that way.  It worked -- that's how I found a lot of information online at the turn of the century.

Then came Google, whose algorithm worked on the same principles -- links acted as recommendations, and the value of a link was related to the linking site's rating.  It was very effective.

But this network of links just doesn't exist in the language resource world.  Most resources are what we would technically consider "leaf" nodes in the network -- they are end-points that don't lead anywhere else.  Even when they do, it's normally only to other materials on the same site -- there are very few teachers' resource sites that aren't dedicated to keeping you on their site and their site alone.  Those that do link to other sites are (at least in my experience) pretty unfussy about what they link to, listing far too many resources and in effect simply echoing the results of a Google search in a different format.

This means that Google has very little to go on when trying to rate resources for language teachers, and this leads to a paradox from Google's point of view: Google has become so popular as the way to find resources that people are no longer building up the web of links that Google relies on.  This isn't true in all fields, where forum posts have started to replace traditional websites as the source of recommendations.

However, most fields have a certain sense of simultaneity -- TV programmes, for example, are broadcast at a fixed time, and their importance fades.  Most spheres are subject to such fashions, so people will be talking about the same thing at the same time.  But language points don't come into or go out of fashion.  Every teacher in the world teaches them... but not at the same time.  Although there are forums related to the topic, it's not a topic that is really suited to the medium.

So there's not enough information out there to let Google separate the wheat from the chaff.  It's a mess.

What's needed is for teachers who find genuinely useful material to start cataloguing it selectively, publishing a useful collection of links to a small number of resources that cover the major language points that most teachers need.  Sites that favour quantity over quality.  And we need to start sharing the links to those sites.  And we need to start using those sites, rather than Google.  If you know of any such sites, feel free to add links in the comments section!

Collaborative materials

More than that, though, if we genuinely want to share our materials, we need to make sure that they can be updated and improved upon.  Millions of man-hours are wasted by producing multiple flawed worksheets, when we could make minor modifications to each other's and produce something of lasting value.

I doubt I'm the only teacher who alters the free materials I've downloaded from the internet, but like all the others, I keep my modifications to myself because the author's given me permission to use the material, but not to redistribute it.  This is a shame, because some of the best designed materials I've come across have been from non-natives, and fixing one or two little non-native errors would make them into something valuable... but I refuse to use or recommend anything with even one non-native error in it.

But just permission to republish isn't enough, because that wouldn't stop the proliferation of materials -- it would worsen it.  A dozen different sites with slightly different versions of the same worksheet... that would be a nightmare.  We have to look at the software world again and look at how they control their edits, updates and revision; how they resolve differences of opinion... or not (projects often "fork" into two versions when people can't agree on a single way to progress, and quite often these forks are merged together a few years down the line).

Or...

We could stick to the books and materials we've produced ourselves.  Your choice.

An unfunny joke

An Englishman, a German, an American and a guy from Barra walk into a bar.  "Tha Gàidhlig cho cudromach," says the Englishman [Gaelic is so important].  "Tha Gàidhlig cho sònraichte," says the German [special]. "Tha Gàidhlig cho breagha," says the American.  "I'm going for a slash," says the Barrach.

Not funny at all, I'm sure you'll agree, but you might not fully appreciate just how unfunny it truly is.  In order to understand it, though, you need to know that the Barrach is a native-speaking Gael.  So why did he speak in English?

It's something linguists like to call "divergence".  We use language to indicate social distance from, and proximity to, others.  When we speak like someone, we show variously agreement, respect or even affection.  I find my accent when speaking any foreign language varies depending on who I'm talking to, as I try to match them (particularly if it's someone I fancy).

The Barrach in the "joke" isn't rejecting Gaelic, then, but is indicating that he doesn't associate himself with the three foreigners.

What we have here is the core paradox of the current Gaelic revival.  While everyone says that the goal is for Gaelic to be considered normal in all contexts, the act of attempting to achieve this is actually making Gaelic into a far more self-conscious choice.  Gaelic is at risk of developing a sort of "personality" based on the feelings of the loudest advocates of the language, and therefore people who do not identify with this personality will therefore find themselves subconsciously pushing away from the language.

Well, I say "at risk", but I actually think that this is already the case in many parts of Scotland.  While not a statistically significant portion of the population, there is a reasonable number of native Gaels in Edinburgh.  Yet when there is a Gaelic-related event put on, it's often mostly the learners that turn up.  The natives will happily sit and talk to each other in their own language, but Gaelic in a public setting seems to be overly politicised for most to identify with.  (The association of Gaelic with nationalism has no real basis in fact - Gaelic is a language and is spoken by people of every political allegiance.)

The problem is that the domain of the well-meaning learner is stretching further and encroaching into the few remaining Gaelic heartlands.  Adult learners are gaining ever-increasing air-time on television and radio, as well as positions at all levels of Gaelic education.  Even several prominant members of the Scottish Government's Gaelic language agency are adult learners.  People are even being encouraged to learn Gaelic in order to teach in Gaelic medium schools, despite it being self-evident that the education available is insufficient to bring anyone close to a near-native model.

It is now often said that Gaelic's future is in the hands of the learners.  This is true, but it does not mean what it is supposed to mean.  We as learners cannot save Gaelic, but we do have the power to kill it within a generation.

If we want Gaelic to continue, then we must be humble.  We must accept that:

1. we are not "Gaelic speakers", and we never will be;
2. the books we study do not, in fact, contain "correct" Gaelic, but someone else's guess about what Gaelic is - the natives are the only real model worth following;
3. Gaelic is not "ours" or "our heritage" - it belongs to the Gaels;
4. and the most difficult of all: we shouldn't put ourselves forward as representatives of the language, either in a professional or amateur capacity.

In fact, I think it would be far more healthy if no-one even defined themselves as a "Gaelic learner", but instead as a "language learner".  Gaelic is a language, just like any other.  Learning another language or two will not only help you see this, but it will also actually improve your Gaelic.