Yeah, but you're actually working at it -- the novel, and the skills -- and it shows, whether you already consider yourself to be a writer or not.
Me, I'm mostly just blurting. (Okay, blurting and then editing a little...) And, like far too many other people, thinking, "Gee, I'd like to be a writer. Maybe I should start doing something about it someday instead of just daydreaming about it."
I believe that Dante more or less defined modern Italian--there's vocabulary added since, of course, and some odd shifts, but it'd put you closer than you think.
What everyday exposure in adulthood is good for, in my experience, is maintaining a language. This is, I think, why I still have useful Spanish, and don't have useful Greek. But I haven't picked up Mandarin or Cantonese, or Haitian Creole, or Russian, or any of the other languages that are common around here. Of course, this is New York, where the Spanish is interlarded with English and Yiddish (and the Yiddish, for all I know, is picking up bits of Spanish, though the Yiddish-speaking community is more insular than some).
I have to think a bit more about the language exposure thing .. and figure out what questions to ask my polyglot European friends to test my vague hypotheses.
Regarding note 2cirith_ungolOctober 15 2005, 20:24:46 UTC
I have a friend who took a class in which they read Beowulf in the original. Old English is a heck of a lot closer to German - but that's not even it, since I took three years of high-school German and two years of collegiate German and I was struggling.
For the record, that was enough German to comfortably read the last half of a popular novel at the time (the first half was read with the aid of a dictionary) and to use a German mathematical text as part of my B.A. thesis research.
Re: Regarding note 2dglennOctober 15 2005, 20:44:59 UTC
Ah, I meant that to non-German-speaking-me, Old English looks more like "Germanic language I don't know at all" than "obvious precursor of the language in which I am fluent". While it is Germanic, I meant to describe how "close to Modern English" it feels to me, not how intelligible it is to a modern German speaker. (It figures -- in a journal entry where I admit to thinking I'm pretty good at communicating, I wind up having to clarify stuff afterwards. Serves me right for publishing a first draft.)
In my last year of French, the class was reading novels. Since the rest of my class seemed to have a much easier time of that than I did, I figure that with that much instruction and practice in French, I should have been able to keep up. That I struggled then is evidence that some people, at least those likely to choose to keep studying a foreign language as an elective after their academic requirement is fulfilled, are better at learning languages than I am
( ... )
Re: Regarding note 2cirith_ungolOctober 15 2005, 21:05:38 UTC
Although I have a fondness for dictionaries and languages in general, I usually manage to embarrass myself when dealing with non-Germanic languages. Once, I tried participating on an esoteric French language mailing list. I attempted to say that I joined the list because in addition to the subject matter, I liked languages. I ended up saying that it was because I liked tongues. In the anatomical sense. :blush:
My mother absorbed languages; it took me five years to learn two years' worth of French.
I would love to have the time to learn several other languages, but given the time strictures I have, I read the translations of things. However, I also looked at the question of learning languages to read things in the original. For me the choice came down to the time it would take me to learn them, as evidenced above, against possibly getting a warped sense of what the writer wanted to express. On the other hand, I know enough well-educated folks (and have enough access to libraries) that I can read the commentary on almost any work I would want to read.
That sometimes feels less satisfactory than I would like, but given that humans have limited life spans it seemed to make the most sense to me.
I'd be undertaking a huge amount of study just to read a handful of books. (Not that there wouldn't be significant beneficial side effects, of course, such as the ability to converse with living people who speak those languages
Conversational ability and reading ability don't completely map onto each other. (This is particularly true for languages like Chinese and Hebrew and Russian, which would entail learning a new symbol set to read, and in the case of Chinese a new way of reading.)
Hm, that makes me wonder - kids who know more than one language during the critical language acquisition phase end up with permanent changes in their brains that make it easier to learn more languages later. Does it affect the brain if a kid learns to read in more than one alphabet, or more than one writing system, during the same time?
Of course it does. Learning several alphabets at the same time has made me your very god, puny mortal. Bring me credit card numbers and pasta. Fly, my monkeys. I command you.:)
If, as many people (that I know at least) would claim, mathematics should be considered a language, then yes more alphabets (symbol sets with attendant structures) matter and help in both languages and general learning, at leat in my experience. Even the trivial bit of Russian I learned in high school also helped me in more ways than most things do. All I remember of it now is a ~dozen phases and words, but the underlying viewpoints of a considerably different culture have stuck better and help a lot when dealing with non-US citizens. Each additional set adds to it, but that first one after the initial set gives the most benefit. Not too surprisingly, it seems to be a declining exponential curve.
But while mathematics and, say, music are talents that are well-known to sort together, I haven't heard about mathematics and languages going together, other than as part of an old-fashioned classical education.
Comments 14
Talk to me after that first novel, baby.
Reply
Me, I'm mostly just blurting. (Okay, blurting and then editing a little...) And, like far too many other people, thinking, "Gee, I'd like to be a writer. Maybe I should start doing something about it someday instead of just daydreaming about it."
Reply
What everyday exposure in adulthood is good for, in my experience, is maintaining a language. This is, I think, why I still have useful Spanish, and don't have useful Greek. But I haven't picked up Mandarin or Cantonese, or Haitian Creole, or Russian, or any of the other languages that are common around here. Of course, this is New York, where the Spanish is interlarded with English and Yiddish (and the Yiddish, for all I know, is picking up bits of Spanish, though the Yiddish-speaking community is more insular than some).
Reply
I have to think a bit more about the language exposure thing .. and figure out what questions to ask my polyglot European friends to test my vague hypotheses.
Reply
For the record, that was enough German to comfortably read the last half of a popular novel at the time (the first half was read with the aid of a dictionary) and to use a German mathematical text as part of my B.A. thesis research.
Reply
In my last year of French, the class was reading novels. Since the rest of my class seemed to have a much easier time of that than I did, I figure that with that much instruction and practice in French, I should have been able to keep up. That I struggled then is evidence that some people, at least those likely to choose to keep studying a foreign language as an elective after their academic requirement is fulfilled, are better at learning languages than I am ( ... )
Reply
Reply
I would love to have the time to learn several other languages, but given the time strictures I have, I read the translations of things. However, I also looked at the question of learning languages to read things in the original. For me the choice came down to the time it would take me to learn them, as evidenced above, against possibly getting a warped sense of what the writer wanted to express. On the other hand, I know enough well-educated folks (and have enough access to libraries) that I can read the commentary on almost any work I would want to read.
That sometimes feels less satisfactory than I would like, but given that humans have limited life spans it seemed to make the most sense to me.
Reply
Conversational ability and reading ability don't completely map onto each other. (This is particularly true for languages like Chinese and Hebrew and Russian, which would entail learning a new symbol set to read, and in the case of Chinese a new way of reading.)
Hm, that makes me wonder - kids who know more than one language during the critical language acquisition phase end up with permanent changes in their brains that make it easier to learn more languages later. Does it affect the brain if a kid learns to read in more than one alphabet, or more than one writing system, during the same time?
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment