Every Struggle Has Setbacks

Despite taking many precautions after he tested positive, I unfortunately caught COVID from my husband.  It seems to be a mild case so far, which is understandable as I've had at least two or three vaccines and already had it once.  However, it means I might not have the mental or physical energy to keep up with my Spanish as much as I want to, to say nothing of my blog.  I do have some draft entries that function as background information, so I might fish some of those out and post them.  Watch this space for updates!

From Both Sides Now: Holy Crap So Many Apps!

 Back when I was still teaching, students would frequently ask me for my recommendation for apps for learning English.  I hadn’t really investigated the topic, but usually threw out DuoLingo as a name because it’s free and it’s gamified.  In truth, though, any language learning tool, be it beautifully engineered software or handwritten flashcards, is only as effective as long as you use it frequently and consistently.  Will you use it five or more minutes a day, every day?  Then it’s a good tool.  Will you pay a lot of money for it, binge use it for a couple of days, then stop?  Then it’s not a good tool.

One of the problems inherent in most language learning apps is that they try to be all things to all people for all target languages.  The problem, however, is that different languages present different challenges to different learners due to different factors.  To take my own current example: Spanish is a grammatically gendered language with extensive verb conjugation.  

For people not into foreign language learning, let me explain: nouns in a great many languages have a gender, typically masculine and feminine for Romance languages (German throws in a neutral as well).  This typically means that there are two different variants of articles (“a/an” and “the” are the indefinite and definite articles for English, respectively), depending on whether the noun they are with is masculine or feminine.  Adjectives attached to these nouns also get endings depending on gender and whether they’re singular or plural.

Furthermore, verbs in Spanish are EXTENSIVELY conjugated, with different endings based on number (first, second, or third, as in “I”, “you”, or “it”) and number (whether they’re singular or plural.  Plus whole different ways of doing the endings depending on the verb tense (where you are in time) and voice (whether you’re talking about fact or conjecture).  Fortunately, at this point I only need to learn present tense, but I want to make sure that’s solid before I have to throw in other ones.  

And just to make matters worse, even though 95% of verbs are likely to be regular, the remaining 5% are irregular (which means memorization rather than extrapolating from known building blocks), and language being language, the most common ones are the most likely to be irregular (like “be” and “have”).

So, to that end, I need apps that will help me learn those two classes of grammar challenges.  Genders dovetail nicely into just learning vocabulary, and I have a trick planned for that (which I originally designed for German genders, but never got around to using).  Vocabulary is something I will tackle with a spaced repetition system, which I will get back to in another post.  But for conjugations, I have identified a couple of different well-rated apps which are specialists rather than generalists: ConjuGato (love the pun!) and Ella Verbs (also a pun, but only when you see that the icon has an elephant in it).  Watch this space for reviews in the future!

Putting on My Linguist Hat: Logic? Internal Consistency? I wish!

If you expect any human language to be logical and internally consistent, or just generally to make sense 100% of the time, well, I’m torn between extending you my sincerest sympathies, and offering to sell you a bridge in San Francisco.

I didn’t even make it to the second day of Spanish class before the language presented me with a situation that made me think “that’s exactly backwards of what logic would dictate”.  Yesterday in class (with our delightful substitute Ana, as Rafael was flying to Spain to visit family), we learned some demonstrative pronouns, the equivalents of “this” in English.

Of course, as Spanish is a Romance language, these pronouns have to be modified for gender (whether grammatical or personal) and number.  So as not to give away the ending, I’ll tell you that the root of all of these variants was “est-”.  First we practiced by identifying people such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio (aka Pope Francis) and Penélope Cruz, which pulled in the vocabulary points of nouns for professions and adjectives for nationalities and regions, all appropriately declined for gender and number.

Then Ana introduced us to the neutral variant, which is used for identifying places and objects.  None of us recognized the picture of the Atacama Desert in South America, but had better luck with pictures of La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Constitution Square in Mexico City, and Easter Island by its obvious moai.  

(Dearest readers!  I had no idea the aforementioned plaza is known as the Zócalo!  I knew J. Michael Straczynski had taken the name of the market area on Babylon 5 from some notable landmark on earth, but that one was new to me!  I was hoping its etymology was from a Mayan language, but alas, no.  It’s apparently from the Latin word for “slipper”, and has a bunch of architecture meanings as well.)

Now, if you’ve learned a bit of Spanish yourself, you may recall that most nouns ending in “-o” are masculine with most adjectives adjusted accordingly, with “-a” as the feminine variant.  Furthermore, if you are talking about a group of men (or a group of people of mixed genders with even one man in it, *cough* patriarchy *cough*), the third person plural pronoun is “ellos”, and a group of women is “ellas”.  If you read my blog post about gender neutral/inclusive language in Spanish, you will recall that “-e” is a common ending in adjectives that don’t need to be adjusted for grammatical or personal gender (e.g., “él es canadiense” vs. “ella es canadiense”, “he is Canadian” vs. “she is Canadian”), and thus many non-binary people, myself included, use it as their preferred adjectival ending, with corresponding pronoun “elle”.

So, all this said, you would expect the demonstrative pronoun to shake out like this, right?

	SINGULAR	PLURAL
MASCULINE	esto	estos
FEMININE	esta	estas
NEUTRAL	este	estes

Nope.  (I hope you saw that coming; I’ve been pretty heavy-handed with my foreshadowing.)

These are the demonstrative pronouns for people:

	SINGULAR	PLURAL
MASCULINE	ESTE	estos
FEMININE	esta	estas

And the demonstrative pronoun for places and objects?  ESTO.  And does it vary for plurality?  Nope.

Esto es La Ciudad de México.

Esto son bolígrafos.

Why?  Because language.  

What do I mean by “because language”?  Language is a human endeavor, shaped by times and distances, and disparate minds and population groups, and as a result, it’s never 100% logical or 100% internally consistent.  Hell, you’re lucky you get better than 50%.  Most of the time, it’s less.  Language doesn’t do rules without exceptions; language’s response to “but what about the code?” is to reply “they’re more like guidelines, you see”.  Language can be beautiful, profound, and strike awe deep into your heart at one moment, and make you so frustrated and enraged that you want to pull your hair out the next.

Why?  Because language.  Eso sí que es.

(Okay, I wanted to include a video of a commercial from my childhood that claimed you could “learn to speak Spanish by spelling ‘socks’, S-O-C-K-S”, but YouTube isn’t coming through for me.)

Images from Wikimedia, used by Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0

El Aula Digital: Día Uno!

Huzzah!  I’m in a language class again!  I really can’t stress how much this is one of my favorite places to be, regardless of what side of the desk I’m on.

My teacher is Rafael from Salamanca.  He’s probably my age or a bit older, and teaches for both the Cervantes Institute and University College London.  I really appreciate the fact that he didn’t so much as bat an eye at my wanting to use non-binary language to describe myself in Spanish, and he immediately did so without slipping up even once!  Despite the fact that he’s been living in the UK for yonks, he’s got a pretty heavy Spanish accent, but it does lend him a certain cachet as an instructor of the language.

Our class is quite small, just me, three men, and the teacher.  We have quite an age range, from a young man on his gap year to a recent retiree.  I can tell that I’m still quite dysthymic, because despite how much I was enjoying myself and that I had a slight leg up on my classmates in terms of how much Spanish I came in knowing, I didn’t have to rein myself in hard to keep from accidentally dominating the class.  (Which I definitely did when I was doing advanced German classes online in 2020, apologies to all my teachers and classmates!)  All of us have some background in French, and one currently lives in Portugal, so fortunately none of us are new to the idea of grammatical gender or having to conjugate verbs, despite all of us being native English speaker.

The wall between my Germanic languages and Romance languages seems to be intact – the only way I could see my German having any influence on my nascent Spanish is that I kept trying to capitalize things that didn’t need it, like nouns and nationalities.  For all that my German and my Danish love to do that whole “peanut butter on my chocolate / chocolate in my peanut butter” thing, it’s too soon to say whether my Spanish will have such an influence on my French whenever I use it next.

Here’s a small text using the language we learned in class yesterday.  I haven’t gotten corrections on it yet, but I’ll ask Rafael or a native speaker friend to do so soon.

Me llamo Mickey.  Soy de Estados Unidos, pero vivo en Alemania.  Tengo cuarenta y siete años.  Soy profesore freelance/independiente de Inglés, pero ahora estoy desempleade debido a descapacidad.  ¡Soy lingüista y bloguere tambíen!  En mi tiempo libre me gusta hacer punto y ganchillo, jugar videojuegos, y leer libros de ciencia ficción y fantasía.

Dear reader, you obviously can’t see what is happening as I’m typing this, but I’m composing my blog entries in Google Documents before copying and pasting them into Blogger, and the program automatically detected that I was writing in Spanish and corrected words!  A bit annoying when I was trying to use the non-binary gender endings on nouns, but super useful for putting in accents when I didn’t realize there was supposed to be one!

Stuff to study and drill:

• The alphabet

• Numbers to 100

• Novel phonemes

• ‘v’ and sometimes ‘b’ /β/, the voiced bilabial fricative

• ‘j’ and ‘g’ before an e or i  /x/, the voiceless velar fricative

• ‘g’ in some contexts /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative

• ‘ll’ /ʎ/, the voiced palatal lateral approximant

• ‘ñ’ /ɲ/, the voiced palatal nasal (this one’s not really that tricky)

• ‘y’ /ʝ/, the voiced palatal approximant, or /ɟʝ/, the voiced palatal affricate

• Fortunately I can already do a trilled r and a tapped r, so it’s just a matter of practicing those in context and minimal pairs.

• Conjugation in present tense of:

• ser

• estar

• tener

• llamarse

• Common professions & workplaces

• Relevant countries & nationalities

Meta-level stuff:

• Find a good program/app for spaced repetition flashcards: Memrise? Anki?

• Find a good app for practicing verbs: ConjuGato?

Well, this is certainly enough to be getting on with, and I need to shower before a friend arrives at lunchtime.  ¡Hasta pronto!

Mi Cerebro Español: Fake Beginner

 I signed up for an A1 Spanish class, which means absolute rank beginner.  This makes me feel like a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because I already know a fair bit of Spanish.  First and foremost, I grew up in the United States, where you have to be really willfully ignorant not to pick up at least a little Spanish.  (Of course, many Americans are, but I’m certainly not one of them.)

This video from Babbel very nicely sums up the plethora of Spanish encountered by the average American.

Secondly, this isn’t my first rodeo with Romance languages.  Once upon a time, long long ago, I was actually fluent-ish in French.  Although it’s certainly the strange child of the group, especially with regards to the tenuous relationship between pronunciation and spelling that makes even English go “now hold on a minute!”, it’s still a descendent of Latin.  My online friend Josh over at NativLang made a fantastic video about how French got to be pronounced so strangely, and it’s great fun to watch, especially since he constructed it as a baking analogy.

Speaking of Latin, I actually learned it for a year during my sophomore year of high school – and this should tell you something about how old I am – by correspondence course.  Like literally in the actual postal MAIL.

Furthermore, I actually took Spanish for a semester in high school!  However, by that point I’d already had two and a half years of French and a year of Latin, so my undiagnosed ADHD brain was SO BORED because the class was SO SLOW.  I also really didn’t like the teacher, a white non-native speaker who ran down “kitchen Spanish”, so I bailed mid-year.  Still, this was over thirty years ago!  How much Spanish can I actually know these days?

For the sake of my own curiosity, I dug up a Spanish word list, the top 1000 most frequent words with their English equivalents.  Now, if you know anything about corpus construction or translation dictionaries, you’re going to be sputtering about the limitations and flaws inherent in lists of that nature.  (Me, it’s me, I’m the one spluttering.)  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just google the phrase “problems with word frequency lists”, and you’ll see what I mean.  

However, this is not rigorous academic research, just a first pass at getting a back-of-the-envelope feel for how much Spanish I know.  Now, if you know anything about language learning, you’ll immediately ask “active or passive vocabulary?”.  (Again, it’s me, I’m the one asking.)  So I had my husband quiz me with the English equivalents of the top 100 to see how many of the Spanish words I could come up with.  I managed about half, so just for a lark, I had him quiz me on the next 100, and I got about a quarter.  Now, two points barely make a line, let alone a curve, but I figured it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that my knowledge of the next 100 would fall off accordingly, so I stopped there.

I then asked him to print out single-sided pages of the remaining word list, and fold them in half so I could only see the Spanish words.  The toner cartridge crapped out a bit before 500, so I decided only to test myself on roughly words 200 to 500 to check my passive understanding.  I guessed correctly on about 40% of the words, guessed incorrectly on about 10%, and didn’t have a guess for about half.

So, certainly not a rank beginner, but as I don’t remember what little grammar I ever knew, I think it’s fair to put myself in A1 to solidify my understanding.  My class starts tomorrow, and I’m pretty excited!  (As much as I can be while deeply dysthymic, anyway.)  I even heard from my teacher today, and warned him about the whole non-binary issue.  He replied with a cheery “no problem”, so I imagine it won’t be a big deal.  Hasta mañana!

Mi Cerebro Español: Learning a Gendered Language While Non-Binary

I haven’t even started my Spanish classes yet, and I am already faced with my first linguistic conundrum: how to describe myself as non-binary in a dualistic Romance language.   I know enough about Spanish to know that, were I to go down the path of least resistance, my pronoun would be “ella”, and adjectives used to describe me would end in “-a”.  Unfortunately, I know enough about myself to know that the very idea absolutely grates on me, vastly more than being called “she” in English (which I’m still sort of okay with, though I’m also good with “they”, and may end up using it exclusively).  

“Ella es norteamericana”, as applied to me, makes me squirm even more uncomfortably than “sie ist Amerikanerin”, for deeply seated linguistic reasons that probably have to do with my earliest exposure to gendered language being exclusively members of the Romance family.  (I knew practically no German until learning it in college, despite it being the language of over 50% of my ancestors.)  Therefore, I have decided to use the opportunity of my impending Spanish lessons to go full balls-gonads-to-the-wall non-binary.

Of course, the non-binary community and proponents of gender-inclusive language in Spanish-speaking countries are even less in agreement on the subject of how to go about this than their counterparts in anglophone countries.  These include unpronounceable options that would make the late Artist-Formerly-Known-As arch a perfectly shaped brow, such as the “-x” ending in “Latinx”. Other options include using the at sign “@” to represent a cross between the masculine ending “-o” and the feminine ending “-a”, pronounced “ao” (presumably as in the common word ending in Portuguese).

However, as Spanish does have nouns designated as “common gender”, and one of the key signifiers of such a word is that it ends in “-e”, the most commonly-used alternative seems to be writing inclusive nouns and adjectives thusly.  Therefore, I am ready to introduce myself on day one as follows: Me llamo Mickey, y soy no binarie.  Mi pronombre es elle.

Gender Schmender: I identify as ‘apathetic’ or ‘meh’

For all that I was assigned female at birth and suffered through my childhood with one of the most appallingly girly nicknames imaginable, I only ever felt nominally like a girl.  (The fact that I looked so much like my father since birth that people would always say “What a cute little boy!”, even when my mother dressed me in pink and ruffles, is purely coincidental.)  My parents were remarkably gender progressive for mainline Protestants in Iowa in the 1980s, so in addition to my Strawberry Shortcakes and Barbies, I also had Lincoln Logs, a Tonka truck, and a set of Castillos (rounded marbled building bricks, essentially the Legos of Spain).  My mother has sported short hair for her entire adult life, and while I don’t think that her gender identity has ever been in question, my primary female role model was never the femmiest of women.  

Neither was I particularly much of a tomboy, though.  My father would have loved for me to be an honorary son who loved to fish and hunt as much as he did, or watch Nebraska football with him.  (The closest I got was having “Go Big Red!” as my first complete sentence.)  A pity, truly, as I might have had a better relationship with my father if I’d been such a kid.  Alas, like my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s sister, and both of my mother’s nieces, my childhood archetype was “bookworm”.  I brought my career as Daddy’s Apprentice Fisherperson to an abrupt end in my late childhood, after a wild cast on his part resulted in a fishhook stuck in my cheek.

Since entering perimenopause about a year ago, I have felt increasingly unmoored from my putative gender.  I often joke that I should get a brooch made that says “ich bin _____ Mickey”,  with a slider or rotating wheel for “der” (the, masculine), “die” (the, feminine), or “das” (the, neuter).  If I had such a beastie, it’d be squarely centered on “das” most days.  Although I have days where I feel female, and even days where I feel male, most days I just feel human, gender unspecified.

Mi Cerebro Español: New Brain Who Dis?

In trying to find a witty title for this category of posts, I went looking for quotes about language learning, as looking for funny quotes about Spanish just gave me funny phrases in Spanish.  (All in good time –  I will happily return to those later!)  A great many proverbs across disparate cultures refer to learning a new language as gaining a new soul, or even a new brain.  I could really use a new brain! Mine hasn’t been functioning too well since I had covid.