Stepping it up a bit.

All of a sudden I'm posting more often than once a month. How come? I'm not really sure, but I used to enjoy writing very much. When I stopped being able to actually write and was forced to dictate instead, I guess the pleasure of writing more or less disappeared, because dictating isn't writing. It's completely different. What was supposed to be unspoken, written words is all of a sudden turned into false spoken language, and spoken language is very much different from its written counterpart. So you see, it's a question of two worlds interfering with one another - and I would very much have preferred to keep them separated.

Plus, I don't like things I don't feel good at. Who does really? I have the impression from school that you are supposed to enjoy difficult things ("these exercises will probably be boring for you, they will be too easy" always seemed stupid to me), things that you are no good at, but I always hated physics, and I was crap at it, whereas I loved writing, because I was good at it. Then I grew older but my writing did not evolve with me and now it doesn't feel special in any way anymore. I guess everyone has those things, "I had so much potential when I was a kid, then it all went away".

But that was only part of what I wanted to talk about. I skimmed through some language blogs today, and I realized how much I miss reading them and how much I miss wasting too much time on language forums while thinking I should be studying languages instead. It also made me realize I should be more ambitious with my other studies and about my general culture, and no, all of that isn't really possible to combine, so I don't really know what to do. However, I felt there were two things I wanted to share on this blog. Two very basic things, those kind of things you actually know without really realizing it, and that become very obvious when someone puts it in plain writing.

The first is about READING. Many people seem to be very hesitant about reading in foreign languages. When someone catches me reading a Russian book in class they are always impressed for some reason. Why is it people think reading is so difficult? It's just a text, it's there, it's not going anywhere, you can read it for as long as you like and using whatever tools you have. What is so difficult about that? I think the important thing to realize is that you don't have to read a text in any specific way. It's perfectly okay to switch between strategies, to go from reading something very meticulously to just skimming through it. No one says you have to read an entire book while understanding 100% of the words - that's not the only way to read a book. You can just as well read one page where you make sure you understand all the words, and then read five more making sure you understand what it's about, regardless of how many words you understand. Books are friendly, don't be afraid of them.

Secondly, USAGE. If you never use a language, you will never know when you make mistakes. Apparently Stephen Kaufman said something about this recently, and this kind of surprised me because generally I don't like much of what he says, most likely because I think he looks too smug. Ehem. Anyway, this is absolutely true. While you are reading or listening, you aren't creating anything on your own, you aren't using the language actively, so you don't really realize exactly what you know and what you don't know. And usually, no one corrects your listening or reading unless it's some sort of a test. You may read something and understand it perfectly, but then try to say it yourself and get it all wrong. It's like only reading Russian books without stress marks and then try to speak Russian and realize you can't pronounce anything correctly, because you have always taken for granted that this or that word has that particular stress, whereas as a matter of fact... it doesn't. Or perhaps you never really noticed the difference between ничего and нечего, because when you read it, you read it all like ничего... Those are just small and simple examples. A big and horrifying example would on the other hand be Russian verb aspects. You read and you have no idea you are missing 500 nuances, but you can't really care either. It only becomes a problem when you have to use the damned things yourself.

But what am I doing here? I am supposed to be analyzing 19th-century texts on nationalism.

Courses & Writing

I have been thinking quite a lot lately about language courses. Some learners seem to stick to courses all the way through, they are always working on some course; beginner, intermediate, advanced… Perhaps this is the way to go, perhaps it's the fastest way - I have no idea, I have never completed a course in my life and I am not the fastest of learners. But I do find courses extremely dull. This is not necessarily because of the content; Assimil for example has enough odd lessons to keep it varied (or misogynic --> the Hungarian course), whereas TY with "Buying Tickets", "Buying Sausages", "Saying hello to Inga's mom and dad" etc. just makes me want to forget about the whole language learning thing altogether. Courses are unnatural and "dead". To me, that is. It is not language at its best use, it is not something someone wrote because they really had to or wanted to (fiction) or because they wanted to talk about something else they were passionate about (non-fiction): it is constructed bits of language with a goal other than that of existing for its own sake. When the words in themselves are of no interest to me, then why should I bother? Fine, if I have no alternative that's what I have to work with, but for anyone who can use Google these days (although those people do seem to be strangely rare) or who has a friend who can use Google, it shouldn't be that hard. Unless, of course, you like courses.

Without some sort of course to start out with you can easily get lost, especially if you do not already know how to teach yourself things such as languages. Someone starting out with their first language probably will need a bit of direction in order to know what to do. When you get to your fourth, fifth, tenth, usually you know what you need yourself. I only use courses as long as it is absolutely necessary. I don't even remember doing a whole lot of lessons for Russian. 16 Assimil lessons was as far as I got before boredom struck. I managed rather good on my own though, in my opinion. I believe that what you need (or can use) to learn a language is:

• A reference grammar (a grammar with exercises is also great)
  
• Native material of varying difficulty (Easy Readers, articles, books)
• ANKI (or similar)
• Audio input (radio, audio books)
  
• A platform for writing (lang-8.com, pen pals)
  

Some people argue that grammars are also unnecessary, but then I would like to see them try to write something in a grammar heavy language, something that is not just a collection of memorized sentences. Unless you don't always try to read and write things that are slightly beyond you, you are never going to learn much. I often get the impression among learners of languages that writing is kind of left out. Lots of focus on speaking, on listening, whereas writing is perhaps seen as… too easy? Or perhaps people just think you can't learn anything from writing? (That which you of course do when you search for ways of saying things, when you study the mistakes you made, etc.) Just think about how much time you spent at school writing in your native language; just because you can speak a language it doesn't mean you can automatically write it well.

Writing takes practice (and IRC or MSN is not the same thing, it's merely pseudo-writing, unstructured and spontaneous). When speaking French or Hungarian you can miss every other accent acute or perhaps mix up ü and ű and people will either not notice much or write it off as being your accent. When you write, and all of a sudden you show that you have no clue as to how to spell the French verb conjugations cause you learnt all your French from Pimsleur and MT, it will all of a sudden be a much bigger deal. Also, when you are writing things that are of concern to YOU, you become aware of what words and grammatical structures you frequently need. It isn't necessarily the same bunch of phrases TY teaches you.

Any thoughts?

I plan to try my own plan for Hungarian this summer. I have completed 44 Assimil lessons so far, and while I want to try to complete the course (as an experiment) I am going to try to use literature an LR rather intensively (Jane Eyre is first up!).