fresh from provence
considerably frustrated with my lacking progress since i've arrived (or at least that's what it feel like on the inside), i am feeling that an extensive amount of effort is about to come from me. i was content with my status on arrival, but after being here for a week and a half, i no longer see that as being sufficient. it was okay on arrival, it's okay now, but okay is not okay. the thing that frustrates me is not simply that, it lies within the fact that during instruction i can more or less translate (even comprehend without translating, an important difference) word for word what the professor is saying, simply because it is directed to our level as students of french. learning a language as an adult is so difficult and discouraging because it takes the exact opposite route of that of an infant learning language. a child starts by the sounds, making noises that his ears have become accustomed to by his surroundings. eventually noises turn to words, words turn to phrases, phrases turn to sentences, sentences turn to paragraph, and paragraphs turn into the final oeuvre, the most powerful thing in the human realm, our book (lexicon, pragmatic, syntactic). there are five typical sections with which ability within a language is usually assessed. grammar (in a mathematical sense), writing (creative execution of the mathematical basis), reading, oral comprehension, and then oral production. I listed those in the order in which my memory tells me they were emphasized during my prior education. a child seems suited to face those five in this order. Beginning with oral comprehension and then oral production, the child develops his first sense of the purpose of language; its function, communicative ability, a way to satisfy desires (want go home, baby want food). It is only later when a child is exposed to the symbolic nature of language in the form of words that one begins to understand what language really is. If I had to guess, I would say that reading is next, for within language shouldn’t one expect to have been exposed to something in order to be able to reproduce it of the self? The answer to that question is simply no, as Universal Grammar serves us to excuse ourselves of that idea - a child is able to produce an infinite amount of phrases without having been exposed to them. Universal Grammar (what I know of it) does a good job of recognizing the powerful undertones of language, but I still think that it can only explain so much, especially in the sense that as much as proves our freedom within language, it also ties it. The picture of a dog tied up on a leash in a backyard comes to my mind. The number of paths he can run is infinite, but no matter what happens, he is still never going to leave that backyard. Perhaps it is with too much hope that I give my dissent to Universal Grammar. Yet somehow all of progress within language was made by dogs who broke chains. For example, the word lonely does not even exist in French (you can be alone, in solitude, but you can’t be lonely). I often wondered how that came to be. I recently found out that it was created - fabricated - not surprisingly by Shakespeare, from whom there are many other words and phrases exist. Such an example also makes me ponder the deterioration the richness of language evolution (the verb ‘to google’ comes to mind). But to get back to my main point, it comes reading and then writing, while grammar has been in acquisitive stages throughout the development of each, but really makes forms itself under the reign of writing. As an adult acquirer, it first goes grammar (which was almost complete before I ever touched anything creative), writing (since it is always in your grasp), reading (since it is always just above your grasp [i+1]), oral comprehension (“since we all know you’re never going to need to understand it from a voice”) and then oral production (“why would you want to talk anyways?”). I have myself convinced that I am well equipped to handle those first four, but still certain of the weakness of the last one, for the past few times I have tried to talk to people whatever the situation may have been (ie. Buying a phone, asking for information about something), nothing coherent is coming out. It is pauses, stutters, misplaced filler words, awkward assemblage, and not communicative - I leave people guessing the words for me (pssst. It’s a problem of the lexicon!) I hate focal vocabularies. The main thing I’ve abstracted thus far is that there is nothing general about communication - nothing.