Confessions of a language addict's Blog

I recently picked up Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code (3rd Edition) by Zed Shaw. Shaw’s approach to teaching you Python is to have you set up your computer to program in Python, then have you type in program after program and see what it does with a bit of guidance along the way. Says he:

At first, you will not understand anything. It’ll be weird, just like with learning any human language. You will struggle with words, and not know what symbols are what, and it’ll all be very confusing. Then one day BANG your brain will snap and you will suddenly “get it”.

One of the things he emphasizes is the value of making mistakes, typing in code wrong and having to debug it so that you can get a clear idea what is and isn’t important in making the program run, and making sure you really understand what you’re supposed to be typing. What’s striking though is that phrase, “just like any human language,” and joined up with the idea of “BANG“. It puts me in mind of my first time in France, where for two weeks, I knew all the rules and seemed to make sentences okay but then, one day, I was suddenly speaking French without thought or effort because I’d just done it enough that that was how my brain worked.
I recently did something similar to this with Sumerian, working through each passage in Hayes’ A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts and copying it down. A lot of the passages were like this:

For God So-and-so/His lord/King So-and-So/King of Certain lands/Built this temple/rampart.

Phrases like “nitah kalaga, lugal Urimak, lugal Kiengi Kiurik” (Strongman, King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkadia) get pretty ingrained in the memory after you’ve been doing this for a while. In a sense, the key may be “varied repetition”. That is, if you repeat or write the same phrase over and over, it becomes a mantra and becomes too automatic. But if you repeat or write a variety of sentences – be they inscriptions or lines of code – that often contain the same elements, then what you get familiar with is mixing and matching those elements.

I should mention why the author says his book teaches “the hard way.” He makes the point that we often look for an easy way, but that what is easily understood doesn’t necessarily stick. So for him, the hard way – exposing yourself, over and over, to what you need to know until it sinks in, is actually the easy way in the long run. Just so, you can learn a language quickly, but only if you are putting everything you learn to use by really speaking and/or reading and writing so that your newly found knowledge has time to become a part of your thinking.

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If you speak French, but want something more exciting than that dreary Parisian accent and all that goes with it, why not give Québecois a look? Actually, there’s long been a good reason not to… decent materials are virtually non-existent.

Alexandre Coutu, known to HTLAL members as Arekkusu, has made an effort to fill the gap with Le québecois en 10 leçons. You can preview the first lesson here. And you can buy the book from Lulu here. Note that the book is in French, and you’ll need an intermediate level to read it. If you want to learn to speak like a Quebecker, here’s your chance!

A little while back, I wrote about the question, Do you really want to be fluent? Here’s a chance to see where your language skills now stand. Just remember, C2 isn’t your automatic goal. If you only need to be a B1 to enjoy your language for the purposes for which you learned it, then a score of B1 is your indication to focus on maintenance and take advantage of being able to use a little bit of time and brainpower for other things.

Click here for the link.

(via Polyglossic)

I’ve previously written about the University of Texas’ Early Indo-European OnLine site as the place par excellence to get started with ancient Indo-European languages, especially languages like Avestan, Old Persian and Tocharian where resources are otherwise scarce. If you want to venture outside Indo-European, Polyglossic mentions Lexicity as a great place to click around, seeing what you can find. It includes Akkadian, Aramaic and Ugaritic (as well as Indo-European languages like Gothic, Greek and Sanskrit. But no Sumerian or Hittite, alas.

The other day, I got The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum, which collects a handful of articles from the larger Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ancient Languages. I got it, in particular, for the article on Sumerian, which gives an abbreviated grammar. Very often, when people start out in a language, there’s a temptation to look at a simplified sketch of the grammar. But in this case, I’ve found that it’s after working through 30 Sumerian texts or so that I’m getting the most value. Working through Hayes, I have found some of the material on verb formation to awfully ponderous, but it accounts for what is going on in the particular forms from the readings. Had I come to these forms with a generalized idea, I imagine I would have been quite baffled as I tried to fit them into the simple and elegant pattern I had learned at the outset. But coming to the grammar sketch with Hayes almost finished, I could see pieces of the puzzle falling together and could simultaneously take stock of how the generalizations made sense of things and why the exceptions would make learning the Sumerian verb the way you learn Latin paradigms problematic. In other words, sometimes the quick understanding of a simplified presentation of grammar would be misleading while the identical presentation is edifying if you’re using it to impose some order on what you already know.

* * *

Just in case Sumerian isn’t obscure enough…

In the text mentioned above, one of the entries is Elamite. Like Sumerian, it is a language isolate – no known relatives, past or present. It was spoken in parts of Iran and at the edge of Mesopotamia in a timeframe not entirely dissimilar from that when Sumerian, then Akkadian, ruled Mesopotamia (indeed, the Sumerian king Ur-Namma was said to have known some Elamite himself). Resources for Elamite appear to be scarce, even compared to resources for Sumerian. But if you speak Spanish and you want to dig into transcribed texts (with aids for grammar and vocabulary), there is an excellent site out there: Textos elamitos. I wish I could find a comparable site for Sumerian. If you haven’t yet started your obscure Mesopotamian language explorations and want something a little more off the beaten path than Sumerian, this site is a great place to begin with the Elamite language.

It’s a serious question. Few of us take a painting class with the expectation that we’ll be able to do our own take on the Sistine Chapel when we’re done. Few of us take a yoga class with the expectation that after six weeks, we’ll be able to master the most intricate of poses and the spiritual attitudes of the teacher. Yet a lot of people think they ought to be able to read a book or go to class an hour a week for a month or two and be fluent in a new language.

To be candid, things like the Pimsleur ads about learning to speak a language in ten days don’t help. But honestly, becoming fluent in a language take serious commitment in terms of time, in terms of ego – you need enough humility to make mistakes and know your limitations and enough self-confidence to keep plugging at it anyway – and often of money, either to travel to the country or to speak for extended periods of time in the language with a teacher or tutor. And sometimes, it’s just not worth it.

Normally, an article with a title like “Do you want to be fluent?” will tell you the 20.5 things you need to do know, starting with clearing your calendar either for weeks at a time or for hours a day. But it’s important to start with the actual question, because if you want to read Dante, you don’t need to learn to order coffee, and if you want to hang out in Rome you don’t need to master the nuances of the subjunctive, at least not to start. Confronted with what is really involved, very few people want to be fluent, at least not as much as they want or need to do the other things that they do while fluency escapes them. So rather than striving for fluency, you need to figure out what you want to be able to do. If you want to get around for a trip, Elisabeth Smith’s Last Minute courses, Collins’ Easy Learning courses and Pimsleur Basic all have their pluses and minuses. If you want to read literature, you might be better off with an older Teach Yourself (from when they focused on grammar) and a dual language edition of classic short stories. If you want to read the Bible for yourself, you’re going to be using very different tools than if you are going to Israel.

Do you want to be fluent? Or do you want to learn a language for your own particular purpose? If if’s the second, don’t even bother looking for the “best” programs or materials. What you’re looking for are materials where when you start to study the content, you can hear yourself saying it or see yourself reading it, in the context where you want to use the language. It’s not always easy, of course, but in an age when Amazon has look-inside, Audible has short samples and reader reviews tell you the things people who bought the book noticed, instead of the things the people selling the book wanted you to notice, you’re so much better off than 20 years ago when a title in Books in Print and a page count was all you could find out for a lot of titles. So learn a language your way. Don’t look for the one-size-fits-all best way to achieve some one-size-fits-all notion of fluency. Look for things where when you dip into them, you start imagining how you’ll use the content within to do something in life that you couldn’t do before.

The other day, I took the opportunity to read Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners. It was an interesting read, not least because one of the featured “characters” is Alexander Argulles, a one-time regular on the how-to-learn-any-language forum. (One other bit from an anonymous survey was plainly from the poster known as Iverson.) Argulles is an interesting case because he has made it his life’s passion to learn enough of enough languages to survey the world’s great literature. If you haven’t, this is well worth the read for getting a sense of how polyglottism works, why people bother and where the lines get blurred between fluency and functionality and between achievement and bluster. By the end, you should have a healthy skepticism for anybody who boasts of speaking 50 languages fluently, but combined with a healthy respect for those folks who back away from such claims yet somehow seem to get things done in 15 or 20 languages, or even 5 or 6.

One of the nice things about the Babel book is it provides good explanations of Argulles two big techniques, shadowing and scriptorium, and why they seem to work. This has sent me back to copying out Sumerian texts as I go along, using a simplified and regularized version of the symbols. It’s amazing how much it helps: Slowing yourself down enough to capture the characters halfway accurately and staying at it till you are writing consistently turns symbols that you skim and recognize into symbols that you know. (I have found the same thing with respect to copying out passages in Sanskrit.) If you are serious about learning to read a new script, you really should learn to write in it too, so that you get a feel for how the letters go together and what distinguishes one from another. If you’re really serious, you should look for scriptorium on the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum and follow the directions.

My usual timetable of looking at multiple languages has been almost completely given over to Sumerian lately. Part of the allure of language learning, I think, is making the exotic familiar. And the more you explore languages, the harder it becomes to stumble across languages that are completely unfamiliar. But learning the oldest written language we know – that’s exotic! And who knows? If the Anunaki school of the 2012ers are right, I’ll be ready to talk to our alien overlords when they return. Granted, I’ll only be able to tell them things like “Ur Nammu, King of Urim, had this canal dredged for Enlil” or “Gudea, leader of Lagash, built this Girsu Temple for his Lord, Dumuziabzu”, but it’s a start!*

The other day, I learned the Sumerian and Akkadian words for pleasure garden (kirimah and kirimahu respectively). There was something exciting in knowing the term for this in the land of the once famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Just so, while I’m going to work at my Sumerian for some time more before drifting back to Akkadian and perhaps taking up Hittite, there’s something to be said for reading from among the first law codes ever written down.

In my last post, I talked about learning an ancient language like a child – picking up reading the way a child learns from picture books. I continue to find this the most effective way to deal with Sumerian. I recently got Volk’s Sumerian Reader, glanced at one of the readings and instantly recognized it as one I had worked through in Hayes’ Manual of Sumerian. It was a fun moment, realizing I had picked up enough that outside my regular study book, Sumerian still spoke to me and that it could even feel familiar. Other texts are more of a challenge of course, but a few minutes with the index and much comes. Of course, I’m still reading mostly dedicatory inscriptions, so I know what I’m looking for, but that’s the point. The key to using language – even an ancient one, and for reading, is to make it your own, and that means exposure to things you can figure out over an extended period of time till it becomes something you’ve lived, its words echoing in your brain, and not just something you’ve studied.

Trying to learn an ancient language? Don’t memorize grammar tables. Read texts, work through them till you understand how they work, and then read through them again and again until they ring as familiar as Dr. Seuss or the old nursery rhymes. In this way, be it Greek or Hebrew or Sumerian or for that matter a modern language, it won’t just be something you’ve studied and forgotten. It will be something you know and can feel inside you so that even if the words and grammar one day go, the experience of that language will be a part of your life’s story.

You often hear about the idea of learning language like a child with reference to speaking it in, say, a direct method. I haven’t seen much about reading in this vein, however. And yet, the reader, which has been with us for quite some time, represents another version of the direct method, does it not?

I have recently been fussing with short texts in Sanskrit, in Sumerian and in Akkadian. I jot them in my notebook for later reading; I pick through them as best in can, and when I do a familiar experience comes back: We often joke about the child who knows their favorite book better than their parents. It’s observed that a parent, reading from the text, will omit a word that the child, by memory, knows is there. In time, the child sits with the book and is able to “read” it aloud, or at least to give the appearance. And bit by bit, words become known. When working my way through Sanskrit, the familiar shapes of words like Agni, Deva and the elegant Vaishvanaro leap off the page among the squiggles I have to pick through. When looking at Sumerian, the frequently appearing asterisk shaped character DINGIR, indicating the next word refers to a god, instantly helps to give an orientation in the text.

I have complained in the past that it’s hard to find a good text like the Assimil programs for learning ancient languages. Yet I have to admit that I didn’t get nearly as much out of Assimil’s Latin course as I did the Italian one. And so it seems to me that maybe for ancient languages, that you mostly read, you need to learn to “read” like a child, gaining a solid acquaintance with certain passages and letting the words fill themselves in when you return to it until enough of the language feels a little bit familiar that you can start making other texts your own a little more easily each time.

It has long been a tradition to start Greek with Xenophon’s Anabasis. And it’s even been a tradition for close to a century to assert that there ought to be a better way. That goes back to Pharr’s Homeric Greek: A Book For Beginners (Greek Edition), a great book in its day. Even today it’s not a bad place to make your start in Homeric Greek, but if you’re looking for an introduction that goes a little slower, there’s another one out there: Beetham’s Beginning Greek With Homer. I just recently ran across Beetham’s book, though it came out in 1996. It’s a nice introduction, walking you through the bare minimum to make your start in and work your way through Book V of the Odyssey. That, incidentally, is a great set-up to continue with Steadman’s user-friendly Homer’s Odyssey 6-8: Greek Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary. If you want to learn Homeric Greek as your starting point in Greek and you’re undertaking it as a wannabe philologist, Pharr is probably still the place to begin. But if your interest is in getting a feel for the language and having the experience of reading Homer in the original, Beetham makes for a good place to start. Incidentally, I have not used Schoder’s 2-part Reading Course in Homeric Greek, but Amazon’s Preview left me with a sense that it was maybe too thorough a course for someone who just thought it would be fun to tackle Homer in the original (and a number of the example quotations for different points were not from Homer). If you like this text, or know of another easy gateway to Homer, you can mention it in the comments. And if you want to do this on the cheap, you can find a PDF of Pharr’s Homeric Greek at Archive.org.