The aubergine and the dictionaries

When I lived in Germany in 1989 (yeah, I'm that old, shut it), I was learning several languages at the same time. My school required me to take two foreign language classes. Since I already spoke English, I couldn't choose English. So, I was learning French and Russian in German. I didn't do all that well. I rememeber very vividly having 5 dcitionaries on my desk in my room and poring over them every night trying to figure out what was being said in German and then looking it up in my German-French dictionary or Russian-German dictionary or my German-Latin or German-Greek dictionary (I was studying philosophy at the time).
One evening for dinner, we had something I'd never seen or eaten before. It was a sort of stew of which the primary ingredient was aubergine. Don't ruin the story for anyone else if you already know what an aubergine is. I didn't and, when I wanted to find out what it was, I discovered a problem with most dictionaries. A problem I recently encountered again.
I went to look up aubergine in my English-German dictionary. It wasn't in there. That's odd. So, I went to my French-German dictionary. But, aubergine is a French word. So, I got a handy little entry that said, 'Aubergine - n. f. l'aubergine'. Big help. Could Russian help me? Nope, aubergine was aubergine. I asked people in Germany, I asked people in the States, I asked other UK students in class, I asked anyone I could think of and literally no one I knew had any idea what aubergine was in English (if they knew what an aubergine was at all) or they just knew it as aubergine. I remarked to my friend, Frank, at the time that perhaps we just didn't have aubergines in America. To which, he replied, 'You don't have the moon in the States but it's in the dictionary.' Arguably wrong, but his point was well taken. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. An aubergine is an eggplant. An eggplant. Common enough that it should have been well translated. We'll leave for another time a discussion about my ignorance of an eggplant.
Dictionaries are way too generic in some cases to be helpful and it's frustrating for me as an American to know that most language dictionaries cater to the UK than the States because we just aren't a polyglot or polyglot-interested country (present company excepted). The statistics for foreign language usage by native English speakers in America are scary and abysmal. It would be nice to have dictionaries that focus on American English. But, it's a question of audience and ultimately, I can't blame the publishers for making a dictionary that appeals to their audience.
That brings me to my dissappointment this week. I recently purchased the Hippocrene Compact Dictionary for Arabic. I was happy to find a very small tome that could fit in the side pocket of my backpack. Imagine my frustration when I found that some very basic things were missing from it. Months, days of the week, verbs like think and a list of other things were missing from it. But inexplicably it had words like kleptomania, lunar and optician. The one positive thing I can say about the dictionary is that it has a really good and straightforward verb conjugation appendix that shows how to conjugate the four types of Arabic verbs. But that's not worth the $9 I paid for it.
If I had the authors in front of me right now, I'd tell them the story I just told you and then finish with chiding them to think about who will use a pocket reference. It's not someone who knows the language well. Write for the audience. It will make your works much more enjoyable by your readers and bring them back over and over again, even if what you write is just a dictionary.

Reading and Speaking Arabic

Well, I've moved on to another reference for learning to read and speak Arabic. I've actually got the reading part down now (although I don't always know the meaning of the words I can read) but I don't know exactly how the letters sound. I am going to remedy that by using a very inexpensive book called Arabic for Speaking and Reading. It's got an audio CD to go along with the lessons. This is good because it repeats the alphabet, a few of the greetings and a few of the words that I know. I was a little dissappointed that the audio CD is only about 40 minutes long broken up into roughly 38 sections. However, I'm only using it to get a sense of the sounds so I can move on to listening to the news or formal podcasts. It also has a nice listing of the different diacriticals and their sounds. So, it's a good mid-term reference to get started making the sounds correctly once you have a few words under your belt.

I also started listening to the ArabicPod101.com podcast today. I have to say I was much more impressed listening to it than the Arabic Podclass podcast. The people on 101 are conversational, natural and comfortable. They weave in some history and culture and they are very straightforward in explaining things to the listener. They break down the sounds and the grammar as it occurs, not fabricating the lessons in some artificial way. It's a nice balance between following natural language acquisition theories and practical acquisition exercises. My iTunes downloaded the 8th lesson as the most recent one for some reason although I see on their website that there are at least 9 episodes. They also have some tools and programs to use for drills and flashcards. I haven't tried them yet but if they are anything like their podcast, I'll be checking them out soon.

MY First 100 Words

So, my list for the first 100 words makes a lot of sense when you think about how you use language everyday. It's a healthy mix of the right pieces of language that get you moving quickly and also introduce you to some simple concepts and the way those concepts are executed. On this list, when learning a verb, the verbs should be learnt in the present and simple past tenses first. I'll explain at the end. There is no particular order to these. So, without further ado, my list of the most important words to learn first.

1. I
2. You (informal)
3. He
4. She
5. It
6. We
7. You (formal)
8. They (informal)
9. They (formal)
10. Be
11. Have
12. Go
13. Walk
14. Ride (whatever form is for going by vehicle as opposed to walking)
15. Come
16. Think
17. See
18. Write
19. Read
20. Hear
21. Learn
22. Find
23. Want
24. Need
25. Can
26. Will (sometimes not a separate verb)
27. Yes
28. No
29. Not
30. Maybe
31. Today
32. Tomorrow
33. Yesterday
34. Pen
35. Paper
36. Who
37. What
38. When
39. Where
40. Why
41. Him
42. Her
43. Them
44. Us
45. Mine
46. Yours
47. Hers
48. His
49. Ours
50. Buy
51. Pay
52. Become
53. Send
54. Get/Receive
55. Take
56. Give
57. Friend
58. Brother
59. Sister
60. Mother
61. Father
62. Family
63. Numbers 1 - 20
64. With
65. Without
66. Because (of)
67. From
68. To (as in direction)
69. Until
70. Against
71. Through
72. Over
73. Under
74. Beside
75. Between
76. Behind
77. In front of
78. Before
79. After
80. Left
81. Right
82. Except
83. However/But/Rather
84. For
85. Around
86. In
87. Out
88. Up
89. Down
90. House
91. Car
92. Work (place)
93. Work (verb)
94. Book
95. Website
96. Thing
97. This
98. That
99. Those
100. These

With these 100 words, you can start learning much faster once you have them down pat. And adding nouns is easy when you have them in context of an event. What makes it easier to learn is that you have an experience in which you put pieces together to come up with a memory that is unique to you. This is why learning by immersion is the best method; it's a string of memories associated with language acquisition that you can recall and use to get better.

So, why learn the present and simple past first? Something like 70% of all daily language usage falls into these two tenses. This is especially true if you are talking to someone for the first time. You will very often tell a story, whether that story is about what happened to you today or what you once did when you went to Beirut. Learning the past tense also gives you some idea of what the verb conjugation rules are. When you factor in that Be and Have are usually irregular verbs for most languages, you get introduced to at least one form of irregular verbs. So, you're picking up grammar without really realizing it. At least this is how I learn.

I'd be very keen to get feedback on the list. What words would you put on your first 100 list? Which ones do you think I got completely wrong?

First 100 Arabic Words - FAIL

So, I was just saying how I had gotten the book called Your First 100 Words for Arabic. I had taken a good look at the first few pages and generally flipped through it for content. What I failed to see was how useless their list of the first 100 words actually is. There are no pronouns, no verbs, few adverbs, no prepositions, the list goes on of what is *not* on the list. For me, there are certain words that you must learn first thing in any language. You just don't feel like you're making any progress by just learning a list of 100 nouns. At most, you can point at things and say the word. That's just playing at learning in my opinion. If I wanted to sound like a 3 year old, I'd drink a whole lot more at inappropriate times. So, I'm going to put together my own list of words I think you have to learn first in any language to feel like you're making any progress. I'm going to put them into a separate post so it's easier to find when searching.

Some Progress on Reading Arabic

About two weeks ago, I bought a book, Your First 100 Words in Arabic, that would help me learn to write and understand the arabic script. It's not a bad book and it takes a practical approach. The carry cards in the back are worth the $12 or so for the book. But I just was struggling a bit with the first few letters because I couldn't keep straight some of the letters that are similarly shaped but differently diacritically marked. Like the letters 'sheen' and 'seen'. Just couldn't keep them straight. Then, I was returning from Qatar on Qatar Airways and I watched the in-flight map for a bit before landing as it switched from showing place names and shipwrecks in English to Arabic. Invaluable! Since most of the place names were cities around Washington DC, I could easily start putting together the sounds with the letters and figuring out the right sounds for the letters that were most confusing. From that 20 - 30 minutes of staring at the screen and sounding them out, I picked up the usage of about 12 - 14 letters (maybe 6 root letters but I'm counting the medial and ending variants as well). It wasn't too long before I was able to figure out a couple of letter sounds I wasn't sure of like the final 'n' sound. The word Washington in Arabic is now imprinted on my mind. Also, the shipwrecks were similarly phonetisized so that I was able to pick up most of the sounds of Titanic as well and worked out the 'taa' and the 'thaa'. As an aside, does it make sense for an airline to mark out where transportation had gone horribly wrong in the vicinity of the passengers?

Also, I watched a fair number of movies on the way back. I should point out first that I was able to have dinner with a couple of Lebanese people (Thanks, Tamara and Kamal) who live and work in Qatar and the UAE. Listening very careully to them ordering for me in Arabic, I figured out that 'wa' is the Arabic word for 'and'. Excellent word to know. I usually concentrate on pronouns and prepositions first in a language because they are easy demarcations in speech that are easy to use to figure out what came before and after in a sentence. So, now armed with 'wa', I watched the movies on the way back home. Every movie had Arabic subtitles. Every one of them. It was kind of wierd listening to a movie in Cantonese and seeing Arabic subtitles. Anyway, the word 'and' pops up a lot in langauge and it's often used by itself as a prompt for someone to continue. 'Your sister's been shot.' 'And?' That means that 'and' will show up in subtitles separate and distinct. A great help to anyone learning the language. So, that's how I figured out the Arabic letter 'waaw'. 'Waaw' is a single letter that is used to write 'and' much like in Spanish 'and' is 'y'.

So, all in all, a pretty good day for my Arabic. Now, I just need to get some focus on the rest of the alphabet so I can start using the Arabic dictionary I bought while I was in Beirut last November.

So, What Languages?

The next step is to pick my list of languages to learn. Keeping in mind that I need to pick 10 languages from four families turns out to be much harder than I thought. I didn't know so many languages were in the Indo-European family. Just look at the list from Wikipedia. Who knew that Punjabi and German were considered part of the same language family?? I mean, I knew they all descended from PIE but I didn't know that they were still considered part of the same family.

I've decided on Chinese and Arabic for sure. So, there are 8 slots left. I'd like to get a Slavic language in like Russian. But that's an IE language and I need to be sure of it before I definitely commit to it.

I'd love to get some suggestions from people as to what might go on the list and why. Anyone?

I'm Going To Become a SuperGlot

So, I have a new goal. My goal is to learn and be daily proficient in 10 languages. It's a lofty goal but one I think I can achieve with a bit of work. It's not just learning the languages that is part of the goal. I have some specific requirements for this goal.

1. The languages must represent at least four distinct language families.
2. Dialects of a language don't count.
3. I have until September 14th, 2015 to finish.
4. I must be tested and approved by 2 native speakers of the language I learn.
5. Only one dead or dying language. All others must be living languages.
6. At the end of the period, I must be able to still have daily proficiency in all languages.
7. Any languages I already speak in daily proficiency, don't count.

Those are the only rules I've set out for myself. They don't seem too difficult but I've picked them for very specific reasons. I know I can do it. I've already learned German and French so I know the mechanics of learning a language. The challenge is going to be putting away the time to learn them. I also suspect it's going to be difficult to find the right resources for learning them.

I've already discovered with the other languages that I've learned is that the usual books for learning a foreign language are very often geared for people who don't know much about language and the constructs of langauge. That makes the first 4 chapters very boring, not to mention the fact that they tend to cover things very slowly and laboriously making it a tedium to read through the first half. Still, you have to read them all or they will invariable spring something on you in the middle that you don't know about and then, well, you're screwed.

So, there will hopefully be a couple of things that will come of this. First, I hope to be able to come up with a system specifically for superglots that will speed the third and higher language acquisition. Second, I hope to be able to make tools for superglots that will help them streamline the early stages of language acquisition without making them feel like they are back in third grade starting completely from scratch.

I encourage you to join me in my goal. Learning a foreign langauge is a crucial skill and one that everyone can do. Your brain is hardwired to use language and to learn new language all the time. The only obstacle is your conception of language and the reward is incredibly high.