The borders of cultural references....

I'm currently teaching in Italy, and as they all speak an H-less language here, it's unsurprising that a lot of them make mistakes with Hs.

Many of them do try, but unfortunately this often leads to the phenomenon called "hypercorrection" -- ie. they attempt to correct things that aren't wrong to start off with. In the case of H, this means Hs inserted into words naturally starting with vowels.

And so it was today that I was teaching the future tense, and when I was looking for the answer "I will", a couple of my students said "h-I'll".

Now how's a teacher supposed to react to that? I spun round from the board, straightening my arm and shouting "HEIL!". Now what I had forgotten was that what most of the world thinks of as the "Nazi salute" is actually a pan-fascist salute, a neo-imperial confection claimed by its originators to be a revival of Roman tradition. And of course, Italy had plenty of fascists of its own.

Oops.

On the move...

Well there was a nice surprise... just as the window was closing on spring recruitment for TEFL posts, I got invited to a Skype interview and offered a job! At the moment, I'm packing for the flight to Sicily.

Between the job and my side project programming computer software, I'm going to be pretty busy from now until the summer, which can only be good.

From a language perspective, I'll be able to finally firm up my Italian, which I use so rarely that it's kind of stuttery and weak. It's better than I expected, though, and that's probably thanks to the Corsican I learnt last year. I even found myself speaking Spanish and Catalan last night, and accidentally throwing in a few Italianisms, so my brain's clearly getting prepped in the background.

Will I learn Sicilian while I'm there? Well, I'd certainly like to, but I'm going to have a pretty heavy workload to deal with, and there's also the problem of trying to manage two highly similar languages essentially simultaneously. Would I be able to keep the two separate...? I suppose I'll just have to try and find out.

It might be nice to go and visit the "Piana degli Albanesi", but I don't think I'll be able to dedicate time to studying the local Albanian tongue, sadly!

(Any pointers to good materials on learning Sicilian gratefully received.)

Language learning software: a continual disappointment

If I've gone a bit quiet of late, it's because I'm getting less comfortable writing about other people and companies. You see, I've been trying on and off for a while to develop some language learning software, so there's a risk that anything I write could later be construed as just another company bad-mouthing the competition. On top of that, I'm now becoming a bit cautious about going into depth in my criticism and giving away too much of the thinking behind my software.

Anyhow, at the weekend I was having a break from coding and decided to have a little audit of my competition, including a lot of projects on sites like indiegogo and kickstarter. In recent months, the number of language learning applications being touted on these sites and elsewhere has skyrocketed, but I can't say I'm impressed with the quality of the proposals.

For the most part, these projects are touted as "revolutionary", but to anyone with any awareness of the language learning marketplace, it's just the same old stuff everyone else is already marketing. Among the main "differences" that people try to use to sell their wares is "real, conversational language" and "language to help you as a traveller in real situations". Tied to that is "no boring grammar". Whether this is the right way or not is not my point (not yet -- I'll come back to that) -- what's most depressing that everyone is doing the same thing and calling it "new and exciting".

Now from listening to the pitches, I get the feeling that this isn't just shysterism -- they genuinely believe that they're doing something new and different, which means they can't have researched what's available, and they can't know much about teaching.

This does put them in good company, though. One of the world's biggest language software vendors was founded by someone with no background in teaching, but who had been overseas for a bit (putting him on the fringes of my "professional language learner" category).

Now, many of the proposals are too thin on detail to be investable, and true to expectations, these ones never pick up any meaningful number of pledges. It's all well and good to tell me it's going to be immersive and revolutionary, but what is it going to look like? What is it going to do?

Of those that go into a little more detail, many seem like glorified flashcards, and many take their cues directly from Rosetta Stone. Others still are just a blend of absolutely standard techniques -- translations, gapfills, word-rearranging, picture-word matching etc etc.

It's these ones I would be most interested in, because if teachers have been using these techniques for all these years, they must have some merit, and if we can improve on them with technology, then we should do so. Sadly, once we've seen a demonstration (in those cases where development has progressed far enough for there to be some kind of prototype), there's no real innovation presented. A cute picture of an animal to go with your new vocabulary does not an innovative pedagogy make!

One product that looked reasonably unique among the crowd (not found on the crowdfunding sites) was one that used Microsoft's Kinect hardware to track the user, to allow more "active" engagement. While the presenter was enthusiastically telling us about how this opens up all sorts of possibilities for "interactive environments", nothing in the demonstration was any more sophisticated than a Total Physical Response lesson, and while TPR is still used by some teachers, it never really took off as it was always a very limited technique. Anything in this package that wasn't just eTPR (to coin a phrase) was essentially vocabulary practise, selecting things that the computer asked for in the target language, and I imagine most users would find it easier to just use the mouse to point and click the item requested than to move about in front of a webcam. Furthermore, as more and more of the software market migrates to tablets and smartphones, the touchscreen really seems a much more mass-market technology to employ.  The limitations of the product prototype on display fulfil Wilfried Decoo's observation that "the medium makes the method" -- ie that most new movements in language learning are just the most obvious means of the application of a new technology to language learning.

I even came across one project for a learning game that recreated the "bad old days" of early "edutainment" software -- it was a fairly basic shoot-em-up game where the educational material wasn't really part of the game, instead being an interruption to gameplay: you walked up to a door and couldn't open it until you gave the correct translation.

But in my opinion, the single worst thing that I came across was perfectly harmless and ordinary until I got to the bit about what they wanted the money for: to translate the lessons. Yes, "template teaching" is alive and well in the computer world. Remember folks: every language is different!

The persistence of origin myths

It's quite hard to challenge the orthodoxy in most fields, and language is no exception. This only seems fair - you need a lot of evidence to disprove an existing theory... or do you? I suppose that depends on what evidence there is for the existing orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy of language origin theories is often distinctly lacking in evidence, as in many cases it is tied into notions of ethnic origin, most of which are being proven wrong even as we speak.

A great many national ethnic origin myths are based on the idea of conquest as an annihilation of the existing population. For example, take the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and south-east Scotland. Received wisdom is that the Norsemen started invading the territory roughly corresponding to modern Denmark, and started killing and displacing the locals, who fled across the North Sea and started killing and displacing the local Celtic Britons on the east coast of Great Britain.

That gives us the creation myth of England, that was built on hearsay.

I mean... did the Romans kill and displace the locals? No, they ruled over them. We were asked to believe they were the exception.
But did the Greeks kill and displace the locals? No, they ruled over them. Another exception, perhaps? The Moguls in the Indian subcontinent? The Mongols?
And more recently the Ottoman Empire? Or indeed the French or British Empires?

The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of well-documented "invasions" in history have simply involved the installation of a new elite over the existing population. The genocide perpetrated in the Americas and Australia is actually pretty unique in history.

So why are we expected to assume that all the poorly-documented invasions are so different from the documented ones? Why shouldn't the Anglo-Saxon invasion be more like the Romans?

Well, thanks to DNA, that old orthodoxy has been turned on its head. Genetic testing suggests that there's a heck of a lot of Celtic ancestry where the old kill-them-all theory of historical invasion would have left us with only Anglo-Saxon blood.  On top of this, in the old Anglo-Saxon homeland around Denmark, they still have predominantly Anglo-Saxon DNA, where we were supposed to believe that the Norsemen had killed or exiled all the Anglo-Saxons.

But we shouldn't have needed DNA evidence. We know that the Anglo-Saxon kings of England claimed descent from King Arthur, a figure not from Anglo-Saxon mythology, but from British Celtic mythology. This alone should have proven conclusively that a huge portion of the English population was drawn from Celtic stock. Not to mention that the Danes have never looked all that similar to the Norwegians and Swedish. The Norse Vikings that invaded the west of Scotland were towering red-heads, while the Danish Vikings that invaded Northumberland were normal height and had dark hair.

This naturally has direct consequences in the origin myths of languages.

The best documented case of language birth brings us once again back to the Romans.

We know a heck of a lot about Classical Latin, but we know very little about the colloquial speech of the common man in ancient Rome. We know it was different, but we don't know how much. We also know that when they went out and conquered other nations, the locals tried to learn Latin, but did so imperfectly. We know that these imperfect Latins eventually developed into the Romance language family we know today (French, Italian, Spanish etc). Crucially, while we know very little about the early stages of the Romance languages, this is because Latin remained the language of the elite, so all literature was in Latin.

This means that the single best-attested example of language evolution revolves around an elite language hiding changes in the common language.

We can compare this to creole languages. Even today, many creole-speaking countries are run by elites that prefer to speak in French or English, and resist efforts to raise the profile of the local creole language.

All our most reliable data on language birth comes from languages where a large population have imperfectly learned the language of the elite, and where the elite language and the common language have existed in parallel for a significant period of time. It stands to reason that this should be our default assumption for all languages.

And yet our standard model of language development is still based on time periods: Old followed by Middle followed by Modern.

Given all that, it came as no surprise to me that someone recently published a paper proposing that a lot of so-called "Middle English" was actually contemporaneous with "Old English", and that the loss of grammatical complexity wasn't due to the Norman invasion (the Normans were a tiny minority elite ruling over a huge population) but rather the result of the Britons imperfectly learning the Anglo-Saxon of their rulers. The reason he gave for the apparent abrupt change was quite simple: the Anglo-Saxon elite were disenfranchised and Norman French became the language of literature. Middle English literature was not written by the descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon elite, but by the descendants of the peasantry, or people of Norman descent who learned it from the peasantry.

Shouldn't that have been our default assumption all along...?

Language learning professionals vs Professional language learners

The internet, they say, "democratises" human activity. We no longer need to go to the ivory towers of academia to learn; we no longer need experts as intermediaries: we can collaborate with one another.

This is true, certainly, but with it comes a certain set of dangers.

First, the "wisdom of the crowds" is generally fallacious, and we either get a mass of people who constantly contradict each other flat-out or we get little cliques that share and reinforce each other's views, to the exclusion of all new information.

More importantly, though, people want to defer to experts. This means that it's actually quite easy for someone with the right patter to set themself up as a "lay expert". Once they do so, they gather a little clique of the "wisdom of the crowds" type who will support and propound the self-appointed expert's proclamations.

There are many such "experts" in language learning. Typically they say they teach not on "dry, academic grounds" or the "received wisdom of the establishment", but "from experience". Their argument is simple and appealing: I have learned a language, therefore I know how to learn a language. But wait... haven't millions upon millions of people learned a language too? Why you and not them?

I call these people "professional language learners". Wouldn't we all like to learn languages as a job? Wouldn't that be great? I know I'd love it... except that's only of benefit to me, so really there's no reason for anyone else to pay me to do it. I find it difficult to stomach that there are people out there who make their entire living by writing and making videos about their language learning, and kidding themselves and their audiences on that they're giving some immensely valuable and unique insight into the learning process.

But they're not.

Their advice is at best vague, and very often even inconsistent and self-contradictory (eg Sid Efromovich's video that I discussed recently). Vague advice can be followed to the letter, and still have you doing something almost entirely the opposite of what was intended. As advice it's at best useless, at worst detrimental. Why am I failing? What am I doing wrong? Frustration sets in. Maybe I'm just no good at languages.

But why is the advice vague? Is it a fault in the author's use of English? His writing composition? Maybe, but mostly it seems to me that these people don't actually fully understand their own process. There is much to be learned from these people, but only if they're willing to discuss it, so that we can help each other tease out the details.

This is why we need to defer to language learning professionals, people who have trained, and studied, and (hopefully) taught. But most importantly, they are in a position to experiment. They can try something on one class, identify the weaknesses, then try it on another class in an adjusted form. Did it work better? Then it's better. A professional language learner only has a sample of one, and therefore cannot identify the changes that make things better.

That is not to say that all language learning professionals are always correct; sadly, language teaching standards are pretty poor at present. Many teachers and academics continue to parrot outdated and/or unproven theories as gospel, but if they can express their views more clearly, then at least you'll be better able to follow them if you choose to.

Of course, a lot of language teachers aren't really experts anyway. Most professional teachers of English as a foreign language have a four week certificate that is essentially a walk-through of typical classroom techniques, and no real in-depth analysis of what works, when it works, why it works or how. Simply being a teacher does not make you an expert, and very few teachers would ever try to claim otherwise. A real expert is someone who has dedicated multiple years of their life to both academic study of the topic and real life application.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of money to become an expert, and for those of us who are going through all the slog of trying to become genuine experts, it's kind of galling to see these guys walking the easy route and getting pretty handsomely rewarded for it. 

Video commentary: 5 techniques to speak any language

Sometimes it's nice to run with a theme, and although I'm mixed it up with a few unrelated posts in between, I started discussing what we can learn from learners a couple of weeks ago, and followed up with a discussion on the limits of my own self-awareness. I figure it makes sense to build on this theme and have a critical look at what others say.

I came across the following video last month, where Sid Efromovich presents his "5 techniques to speak any language" at TEDx UpperEastSide. You can watch the video (~15 min) now to make up your own mind, or skip straight down to my analysis.



Now, the first thing to note is that the video blurb says that Sid grew up in Brazil, which tells us that either he is an exceptionally good learner (I never noticed any flaws in his English) or that he was a childhood bilingual -- unfortunately not even his personal website tells us which. Not knowing his starting point makes it quite difficult to evaluate how suitable he is as a model for any individual (if he's natively bilingual in Portuguese and English, that wouldn't be particularly unusual, but for those of us who were brought up monolingually, it doesn't match our world).

Now lets move on to the actual talk, and Sid's rules.

1: Make mistakes

My first reaction when he gave the title was "here we go again," as I expected the usual line about how we learn from our mistakes. Yes, we are more than capable from learning from our mistakes, from which the hardliners conclude that there is no learning without mistakes... and yet the things I've learned best were learned right first time.

Thankfully, that's not what Eric goes on to discuss. Instead, he talks about how we all have a "database" of sounds and structures that our brains identify as correct, and that everything outside that database is flagged as "wrong" by the brain.

This throws us into a little paradox where our fear of making mistakes causes us to make mistakes.

His example is the Spanish letter R, which he gives with the word "Puerta". The Spanish R is markedly different from the English R, but close enough that a beginner's brain will try to replace the wrong-sounding Spanish R with a correct-sounding English one, which Eric refers to as the "closest relative sound".


In this rule we have something of real value to the learner. I've discussed the difficulty of dealing with foreign phoneme maps many times, but I never made that last logical step and talked about perceived wrongness and correctness, so a big thank you to Eric -- this idea alone made the video worth watching for me.

Caveat emptor

However, in that same example of puerta, Eric starts to show the limitations of his language awareness, as he appears to be claiming that it is only the Spanish R that isn't in the English "database", which is simply untrue.

The P, though close, is subtly different, as Spanish is a language more typically distinguished by aspiration, and English by voicing (in the pairs P/B, T/D, C/G). It's a very subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

The Spanish UE doesn't exist in English, and any attempt at approximating it is going to be wrong -- one typical English pronunciation of Puerto Rico is /ˌpwɛərtə ˈriːkoʊ/, whereas the Spanish is /pʷeɾto ˈriko/.

Finally, there's that last syllable ta. This has a clear vowel, because all Spanish syllables do... but not all English ones. It is exceptionally difficult for an English speaker to pronounce a clear vowel in the syllable directly preceding or following the stressed syllable, because in English these are almost always reduced to schwa -- that feeble little "uh" sound.

So there's the first alarm bell... his pronunciation is good enough to show that he internally knows the difference, but he's not consciously aware of everything he does, which (as I keep saying) is the limitation of anyone who claims to speak from experience.

 

2 Scrap the foreign alphabet

Rule number 2 is a doozy. Eric reckons that the foreign alphabet "will give you wrong signals," at least for languages in the same script as your own, and he is correct. It is difficult for an English speaker to see the letter "I" as representing it's so called "cardinal" value (the Latin I) because that's not the sound it has in English.
So far, so logical. What is the alternative?

Some (not Eric) propose learning aurally first, ignoring writing completely. (I disagree, because there are differences that a beginner might not be able to hear in the spoken language, but they'll be seen in the written language.)

But Eric is in favour of writing down. Does he suggest learning the IPA? No, instead he proposes using your own pseudo-phonetics, based on the sounds of your own language.

His example for this whole section is the Brazilian currency: the Real. It's a great example, because it is immediately misleading, having as it does the same spelling as an English word. His suggested phoneticisation, though, is very troubling: hey ouch . In writing it this way, he's using the same "closest relative sounds" he warned against in rule 1, which is a total contradiction. A Brazilian Portuguese R is not like an English H: it's a guttural sound, more similar to the German/Scottish CH (Bach/loch)... but not even quite the same as that. The L isn't quite the w-glide of ow/ouch, and even if it was, you're going to have to find a different notation for it in different situations (in can occur after vowels that an English W wouldn't appear after). And there are other problems too, but that'll do for now.

The main thing is that having presented only two rules, we already have a contradiction and fundamental incompatibility, throwing into doubt Sid's credibility as an instructor.

But setting that aside for a moment and looking at this rule in isolation:

Avoiding the native spelling is by no means a necessary step in learning a language.

Myself, I have at times learned to pronounce a language from its written form before making any serious attempt to learn the language, and to me that's far more useful, because I'm able to look at dictionaries and phrasebooks to learn new language, whereas if I'm stuck with my own idiosyncratic phonetics, I won't have access to any external sources whatsoever. I say learn the alphabet, but learn it right. Even if idiosyncratic phonetics did work (and I don't think they do), the cost in terms of isolation from materials is simply too high.

3 Find a stickler

He reckons you need someone who'll correct you, and you probably do, but he doesn't address the serious limitations of this, or how to avoid them.

First of all, correction is ad hoc. You say what you want, you get a correction. Fine, but language and a system, and therefore effective correction has to be systematic. A lot of the corrections you get from a native speaker are going to be extremely different from what your mistake was, and therefore don't really correct the source of the error, just the superficial form.

Secondly, if you make an error, you may be misunderstood. If someone says "I will do it yesterday," do they mean "I will do it tomorrow" or "I did it yesterday"? Where an error is ambiguous, the correction given has as much chance of being totally wrong as being right.

But worst of all, sticklers often teach things that are outdated. For example, the English you and I as subject isn't current in most parts of the English speaking world, but a stickler will "correct" you and me even if says it himself. Similarly for there's three things. Or he might "correct" can I...? to may I...?

How do you avoid these things? How do you choose your stickler? Well, for the first one, you're not looking for a language buddy, you're looking for a teacher. For the second and third, you're looking for a good teacher. You need someone who is an expert not only in the language, but in showing others how to become experts.

4 Shower conversations

Eric then suggests talking to yourself, a technique lots of people use. For many of us, that language practice is in the form of a silent internal monologue. The acknowledged limitation with this is that it's not practising pronunciation.

Eric's idea of having your conversations in the shower gives you a safe area to practice pronunciation, but the bigger point he raises is that by having a conversation as opposed to a monologue, you're more likely to identify gaps in your knowledge.

I'm not sure that this is actually true, and as a result he glides by what should have been his most important point, and worthy of being a rule in and of itself: mind your gaps.

When you're speaking, it will be your natural tendency to avoid and skirt round gaps in your target language knowledge, and doing so is part of being a successful user of the language. However, it is all too easy to become so proficient at avoiding gaps that you stop looking for them, and stop learning new things. The really successful learners continually seek out gaps in their knowledge and plug them with new information. Obviously it's less embarrassing to identify those gaps when you're on your own than when you're in a conversation, so it's a good starting point, but on the other hand, the reality is that you cannot say anything to yourself that you don't expect, so you can't find as many gaps speaking to yourself as you can when speaking to others. If you can be bothered, you can carry a notebook to jot down any gaps you come across, but while I had such a notebook for years (for Spanish), I only ever noted down 2 or 3 things in it...

5 Buddy Formula

Sid's final rule is a "formula" for finding the best "language buddy" for practise. Now I object to the trite, twee abuse of the term "formula" here, because it's just a rule that he chooses to write with an equals sign:

Target language = best language in common

He raises a very good point in his justification for this: that clear communication is the motivation for learning a language, and that if you know you can get your message across more easily in another language, you're going to switch to that other language.

You will get no argument from me on that -- I often find myself banging into that wall, and I often caution against so-called "immersion" classes where the class has a common language anyway (eg. immersive Gaelic for English speakers) because it risks conditioning people to view the language as a barrier to communication instead of a means of communication.

But more than that, Sid offers no advice to dealing with the big problem that all learner-learner conversations carry: learner errors. If one English learner says pod-ae-to, and the other says pod-ah-to, they're both wrong, and there's no stimulus for correction. Or perhaps one of them gets it right, then the other gives a well-meaning "correction" that teaches them the wrong thing.
...unfortunately, no feedback on errors.

Overall

So what can we take away from Eric's advice? Even if his rules were all unarguably correct, they alone are not going to teach you a language -- in fact, they're pretty peripheral to the main learning process.

But his rules aren't correct. Rule 2 is a dogmatic assertion that glosses over a very complex issue.

Neither rule 3 or rule 5 is wrong per se, but neither is essential, and Sid's description is inadequate as advice for the learner, because it doesn't give any concrete advice on how to circumvent any of the problems a learner will face.

Rule 4 fails on similar, but slightly more interesting, grounds. Again, he has failed to really give enough advice on how to avoid potential pitfalls, but in rules 3 and 5, those were pitfalls I don't believe he'd really thought about himself. With rule 4, he does talk briefly about the pitfalls. He identified a problem, and identified a suitable solution. He has used that solution and it should be useful to many others. But there is nothing unique in the shower conversation that forces you to identify your language gaps. If his rule had been "Mind the gap", his shower conversation could have been given as one possible technique to address it, and then he would have been forced into providing a description of how to structure a shower conversation such that it addresses the goals of a "mind the gap" rule.

Is language like science...?

Quite often, when I talk about the rules of language, I find I get hit with the response "Language isn't like science!" When I talk about teaching language systematically, people say "Language isn't like science." When I talk about language in schools, I'm told it's destined to fail because "Language isn't like science."

Well, I'm in the middle of trying to sort through a lot of old stuff that had been stored in the loft, and I came across a piece of paper on which I had hastily scrawled the following:

Language isn't like science.

Why?

It's about choosing the rules, not knowing the rules.

Now this is not a statement of my belief; rather it's my attempt to understand the logic behind the statement, so for anyone other than myself to get my full meaning requires a bit more explanation.

The reason people say "language isn't like science" is because of their misconception of the nature of science. To them, science has been presented as a series of rules to be memorised. They have been conditioned to think that the end goal of science is to be able to regurgitate the rules on demand, because that's all that was required of them in school.

That is not science.

Science is the art of investigating natural phenomena and finding explanations and models for them. These explanations and models are mostly a combination and application of existing scientific rules, and sometimes of identifying and creating new rules.

Or to put it another way: science is not about the knowledge of rules, it's about the application of rules.

But would the same statement not hold for language too? Language is not about the knowledge of rules (we can all agree on that) but the application of rules, surely?

Science is very often taught badly, in that there is such a focus on the rules themselves that students never get the chance to integrate those rules into a working body of scientific knowledge. This leaves the student able to recall the rule or law by name, but not recall the rule when addressed with a problem that requires that rule in order to reach a solution. You cannot solve a useful scientific problem this way -- the only type of problem that can tell you explicitly which rules are required to solve it is a problem that has already been solved, and science is about creating new knowledge, not repeating the known ad nauseum.

A good course in science will instead train the student in identifying the characteristics of a problem domain and noticing patterns that relate to particular laws or rules: they will teach them how to select the appropriate rule for the given situation.

That, I contest, is the very same process we go through when we try to formulate an utterance. We have a bank of words and grammatical rules at our disposal, and we have to select the appropriate items from it to express the message that we want.

So language is a lot like science, and the objections typically raised against grammar teaching are systemic problems that also affect science teaching. It's a problem that the late, great Richard Feynman recounted in his memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?, when he talks of his experience on sabbatical placement in Brazil. It's a problem that affects all education systems to a greater or lesser extent.

But the problem comes when reformers attempt to throw the baby out with the bathwater: "rules teaching has failed," they tell us, "so we need to do away with rules."

That, to me, is a ridiculous philosophy. How can you choose which rule to apply if you don't know what rules exist? How can you search for it if you don't know what it is?

Let's be clear, I do not have to be able to recite the present tense endings of regular -ARE verbs in Latin in order to usefully "know" the rule, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be taught them. I initially learned Spanish, for example, by the explicit teaching of the endings, and the explicit teaching of rules like 2s = 3s+"s" and 3p=3s+"n" (NB: this is my notation, not the way I was taught the rule!), and not by memorising the list of conjugations or a table. But that was still explicit teaching. I did not learn by osmosis, I did not learn by exposure, I did not learn by magic. I was told what my range of choices was, then given sufficient opportunities to make those decisions that I eventually could make the decision subconsciously.