Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "language"

Coming soon: How Not To Learn A Foreign Language. In 10 easy steps. Watch this space.

HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps

Step 5. Develop avoidance strategies

Reduce your need to use the foreign language.
Get a job in which you use your own language all day (such as teaching it or writing it), preferably one in which you are surrounded by fellow speakers and/or by local people who are happy to speak your language and expect you to do so, too.
If you're in business, get your company to hire a competent interpreter for you.
Make sure you live with, or close to, speakers of your own language.
Socialise with people who speak your language and are happy to do so.
Shop in supermarkets, where silent transactions suffice. Eat at home or in self-service places or places which cater for tourists and their strange languages.
Do not initiate exchanges in the target language.

HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps

Step 9. Do not persevere

Be influenced by this article.

Rosenthal and Rubin (1978) showed the strong impact that one’s own and other people’s expectations can have on learning.

So expect to fail, and let other people know you expect to fail.

When you have a frustrating experience, take it to heart.

My experience has brought home to me the fact that motivation is dynamic, not static. When it ebbs, let it go.

In the last resort: [see step 10]

I guess I’m not the only person here working on their first novel. In terms of the target I set for completing a first draft, I’m well ahead of schedule. Now, here’s the strange thing. Because I have a background in psychology and linguistics, I imagined my characters would be deep and my language scintillating, even if I sometimes lost the plot. Yet the opposite is happening. My inner critic tells me that the characters are shallow and the language ordinary, though the plot skips along nicely. It turns out I am primarily a storyteller. Should I be happy or distraught?

A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.

When you come “home” after years spent far away, you have to steel yourself for some reverse culture shock. Last time, there was less than I expected (though the rampant ageism in England was a surprise) but this time I got zapped in a place I didn't expect: language. Blimey, they don't half talk funny in England these days! Particularly the young, though more so on television than in the streets of Kent. Well, it's only natural that language should evolve, but the area of greatest innovation seems to have switched from vocabulary to sound. One phenomenon I've noticed is a restriction of the vocal chords, especially at the end of an utterance. It's something I've tried and failed to imitate, but thanks to Ian McEwan, I now understand what it's about. In his new, intriguing short novel, “Nutshell”, he mentions it and gives it a name: “vocal fry”, which means you can Google it. It turns out to have originated in the USA and to be prevalent among young women. Unlike young people's slang, which is intended to keep us oldies out, “vocal fry” aims to impress other youngsters, apparently by giving the speaker an air of sophistication. It is also a technique used by singers. One thing I've noticed in various languages is that people often constrict their vocal chords when they want to sound posh. This all begs the question of whether people fry their vocals deliberately or unconsciously. It also turns out that a lot of people dislike the sound. However, the reaction of my better half, a native speaker of Chinese, to one disdainful You Tube video, was that she preferred the sound of vocal fry to to the high-pitched whine of the young lady denouncing it. Personally, I'm just happy to have got a handle on it, and to know that it's not just my hearing aid playing up.

In William Gibson's The Peripheral, a policewoman in the future London confirms her British identity for American readers by exclaiming “Bloody Hell!” Sadly, on a recent return to these shores I noticed the disappearance of the word “Bloody” from the contemporary British vocabulary. Cultural subservience to Hollywood and HBO now sends us straight to the F-word. Even in Grimsby, it seems, we want to gab like gangstas.
What's sad about that? Well, a couple of things. First, the purpose of swearing was to shock. But if you use a taboo word as though it were nothing unusual, it eventually loses its power to shock. It will retain little more than its ability to signify that you belong to a particular group: people who (imitate people who) would like to shock if only they could think of a ruder word than the F-word has become. Second, dear old “bloody” was useful in that it had just a little power to shock, because it was rude but less rude than other taboo words: you could break the taboo without breaking the vocabulary bank, leaving yourself options if you wanted to shock more later on. Now, I guess if you say “bloody”, it marks you as a fuddy-duddy. Maybe that's the real reason I want it back. Bloody hell fire!