Modern existence sometimes feels out of control. Economic pressures, personal differences, traffic, demanding schedules, and the uncertainties and dissatisfactions that arise from the high expectations we place on health and on love leave us, oftentimes, restless and discontent. Life seems unfair and monotonous.
Expressions of gratitude moderate stress and allow us to experience that ephemeral feeling of "happy" as we realize why we have reasons to be content.
Poetry is a retreat. Writing a poem requires slowing down, savoring, remembering, selecting, crafting, revising. When hateful words fly, when words like daggers leave me feeling isolated and wounded, the haven of a piece of paper all my own is a shelter from the collective denunciations of a culture turned harsh.
When I feel a need to escape, I find hope in the certainty that words are trustworthy and stable expressions, even when they describe sentiments that change. The right word brings a flood of endorphins, a rush of knowing that I expressed what I wanted to say, and that perhaps someone will read the word and we'll have communicated. The blank page is a space that invites discovery, creation, and communion. Poetry is a contract that puts faith in community. Let's meet there!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
...but I want to learn real Spanish...
Hoy un señor de familia puertorriqueña, que habla un poco de español, me preguntó acerca de una clase o una tutoría particular porque quiere aprender a hablar más, pero quiere hablar "bien". Me dijo que no quería aprender a hablar "puertorriqueño" sino que le interesaba aprender a hablar un español "auténtico y correcto".
Me vino a la mente lo que aprendí hace años en una clase de lingu:ísitica con una profesora peruana. Ella nos hizo entender que no hay maneras correctas e incorrectas de hablar, cuando se habla de los acentos y los dialectos de un idioma. Claro que hay una gramática, y esa gramática tiene sus reglas. Hay que conocerlas y respetarlas. Pero ella nos aseguró de que si la gente habla de tal modo, pues así se habla y así se debe entender su modo de hablar como un modo correcto de expresarse. El vocabulario y el acento de cierta región no se debe criticar ni intentar cambiar. Los españoles tienen algo hermoso en la pronunciación de las "eses" y las "zetas" mientras que los argentinos tienen ese sonido tan bello (lee: "becho") de pronunciar ciertas palabras, y los dominicanos se comen la mita' de lo' suyoj pero s'entiend'igual de todo' modo'... y así nos aprendemos los unos de los otros.
Tengo que pensar muy bien lo que quiero decir a mi nuevo estudiante puertorriqueño. No quiero discutir con él, pero quiero hacerle ver que su mamá habla bien y que él también puede sentir mucho orgullo por su acento boricua. Claro, como él es un estudiante nuevo del idioma, le quiero enseñar un poco de gramática...pero más que nada, quiero hacerle entender que el modo de hablar que aprendió de su mamá es una forma bella de expresarse, y con unas lecturas, un repaso de los verbos, y unas correcciones de ortografía, realmente no me necesita.
Lo que le hace falta es tener acceso a unas novelas y algo de poesía de su patria, y unos amigos con quien practicar el habla para que se sienta cómodo con el acento y las formas de expresarse de su gente. No hay dialectos "malos" ... aunque las diferencias a veces son muchas. Los varios estilos de pronunciar las palabras, y los dichos y el argot particular a cierta región realmente enriquecen el idioma para todo el mundo. Hay que conservar y apreciar las diferencias que nos distinguen. Y sobre todo, no hay que dudar de las palabras de Mamá...
Me vino a la mente lo que aprendí hace años en una clase de lingu:ísitica con una profesora peruana. Ella nos hizo entender que no hay maneras correctas e incorrectas de hablar, cuando se habla de los acentos y los dialectos de un idioma. Claro que hay una gramática, y esa gramática tiene sus reglas. Hay que conocerlas y respetarlas. Pero ella nos aseguró de que si la gente habla de tal modo, pues así se habla y así se debe entender su modo de hablar como un modo correcto de expresarse. El vocabulario y el acento de cierta región no se debe criticar ni intentar cambiar. Los españoles tienen algo hermoso en la pronunciación de las "eses" y las "zetas" mientras que los argentinos tienen ese sonido tan bello (lee: "becho") de pronunciar ciertas palabras, y los dominicanos se comen la mita' de lo' suyoj pero s'entiend'igual de todo' modo'... y así nos aprendemos los unos de los otros.
Tengo que pensar muy bien lo que quiero decir a mi nuevo estudiante puertorriqueño. No quiero discutir con él, pero quiero hacerle ver que su mamá habla bien y que él también puede sentir mucho orgullo por su acento boricua. Claro, como él es un estudiante nuevo del idioma, le quiero enseñar un poco de gramática...pero más que nada, quiero hacerle entender que el modo de hablar que aprendió de su mamá es una forma bella de expresarse, y con unas lecturas, un repaso de los verbos, y unas correcciones de ortografía, realmente no me necesita.
Lo que le hace falta es tener acceso a unas novelas y algo de poesía de su patria, y unos amigos con quien practicar el habla para que se sienta cómodo con el acento y las formas de expresarse de su gente. No hay dialectos "malos" ... aunque las diferencias a veces son muchas. Los varios estilos de pronunciar las palabras, y los dichos y el argot particular a cierta región realmente enriquecen el idioma para todo el mundo. Hay que conservar y apreciar las diferencias que nos distinguen. Y sobre todo, no hay que dudar de las palabras de Mamá...
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Transiciones y tradiciones
A veces los niños se identifican como hijos de sus padres por las cosas que pronuncian…tan inocentes, pero tan puramente sacadas de las conversaciones diarias de sus casas.
Ayer, por ejemplo, nuestro hijo John se puso una pashmina de color azul que mi hermano Luke le había regalado a mi hija Anna el año pasado. (Una pashmina es un chal o un rebozo, una bufanda ancha que da color y abrigo—viene de la India, pero Luke lo trajo de Inglaterra donde vivió por varios años.)
Pues John se lo puso sobre la cabeza, y le dijo a su hermana mayor: “Soy la Virgin María, y te voy a capturar, así que, date prisa e intenta escaparte de mí.” Anna le dijo, “No, gracias, pregúntale a Mary si quiere jugar contigo.” O algo así…la verdad es que a veces no entiendo muy bien el objetivo de sus juegos.
Lo que sí sé es que en esta familia, con una madre medievalista y un papá que es historiador del arte y ceramicista, pues, los niños respiran el arte y la literatura clásica que les rodean. Ayer, antes de acostarse, Anna me preguntó, “Mami, ¿qué significa ‘barranco’?”—una palabra que había sacado de una lectura de Laura Ingalls Wilder. Paso por paso, los niños aprenden a apreciar lo que sus padres leen, comen, dicen, y adoran.
Tenemos la oportunidad de transmitirles una cultura alta o mostrarles mucha porquería … y al final, es nuestra responsibilidad asegurar que ellos sepan discernir entre lo bueno y lo malo. Son nuestro futuro, y no solamente por su genética, sino que llevan nuestras ideas hacia las generaciones venideras también.
Ayer, por ejemplo, nuestro hijo John se puso una pashmina de color azul que mi hermano Luke le había regalado a mi hija Anna el año pasado. (Una pashmina es un chal o un rebozo, una bufanda ancha que da color y abrigo—viene de la India, pero Luke lo trajo de Inglaterra donde vivió por varios años.)
Pues John se lo puso sobre la cabeza, y le dijo a su hermana mayor: “Soy la Virgin María, y te voy a capturar, así que, date prisa e intenta escaparte de mí.” Anna le dijo, “No, gracias, pregúntale a Mary si quiere jugar contigo.” O algo así…la verdad es que a veces no entiendo muy bien el objetivo de sus juegos.
Lo que sí sé es que en esta familia, con una madre medievalista y un papá que es historiador del arte y ceramicista, pues, los niños respiran el arte y la literatura clásica que les rodean. Ayer, antes de acostarse, Anna me preguntó, “Mami, ¿qué significa ‘barranco’?”—una palabra que había sacado de una lectura de Laura Ingalls Wilder. Paso por paso, los niños aprenden a apreciar lo que sus padres leen, comen, dicen, y adoran.
Tenemos la oportunidad de transmitirles una cultura alta o mostrarles mucha porquería … y al final, es nuestra responsibilidad asegurar que ellos sepan discernir entre lo bueno y lo malo. Son nuestro futuro, y no solamente por su genética, sino que llevan nuestras ideas hacia las generaciones venideras también.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Stopped in my tracks...
One of the rich blessings of learning a second language is the joy of recalling exactly where you were and what you were doing when you learned certain simple words. There are words that will be with me forever, along with the context of their acquisition. These words are the special ones. I have this experience in my first language, also--but for bigger words, rare words, that entered my world in high school, words like "celerity" and "Hellenistic" and "indigenous."
In a second language, I have memories of very simple words and where I was when someone first said them to me. Take this one: La parada. The sounds stopped me in my tracks. My high school teacher, from Madrid, had a voice that was like bells over water. She read our vocabulary lists aloud, right before lunchtime, at the public high school where I studied Spanish under her tutilege. La parada. Bus stop. I can still picture the page in the textbook, with a winding train track (la vía) and the platform, (el andén) and a bus stop. La parada. The "p" sounded like a "b" and the "r" in the middle sounded like a "d" and the "d" was soft, like a "th". Something inside my soul stopped for a moment the first time I heard that word. My memory etched the sounds on a mental list of words that bring me back to reality when panic sets in. Along with a couple of Shakespeare's sonnets, and some kind words from loved ones that came at really low moments, this list of words can get my life back on track fast when I get struck by one of the "golpes en la vida" that make me, with the poet (Vallejo), say, "yo no sé".
There are other words, not quite heart-stopping ones, perhaps, but memorable. "Resbalar" is one. I was wearing muddy boots, up to my gills in muck, down in the bowels of the earth inside a cave in the Pyrenees. I was having my doubts about the quality and brightness of the headlamp that was supposed to be guiding and preserving my presence in the group. Mental gears were shifting from the headlamp issues to the words of a fellow traveler, and I was just inhaling to ask "¿qué quiere decir 'no resbales'?" when I hit my knees and slid into the darkness. I guess no one felt like stating the obvious. My bruised shins helped me remember that one.
Memory gets a boost from all directions while learning language. Some memorable words are false cognates, that woo us in only to rear their ugly heads in our moment of weakness, tinging the cheeks a faint pink: words like "embarazada" (pregnant); it sure looks like "embarrassed" and can lead to confusion. Or, "la americana," (in Spain it means a blazer or suit jacket), which caught a midwestern farm girl friend of mine off guard when a Catalan friend took her shopping only to say "la americana esa es muy fea" to another shopper, only to leave my friend feeling very judged and rejected. Those stories and the ensuing laughter when they are recounted over coffee make the words "inolvidables."
And there are others. "Vamos por partes" a phrase that belongs to someone I haven't seen in a dozen years, even though I hear others say it often enough: "let's take this one thing at a time." Another is "despejada" - meaning "bright-eyed, bushy tailed," or "the way the sky looks at dawn on a clear day." Despejada: I was on the deck of a ship, curled up in a sleeping bag, crossing the Mediterranean night on a lawn chair as a penny-pinching undergrad among a group of hostel rats, when the sun came up and I learned that word from a fellow passenger.
Trótola is Italian for top (the kind that spins)--and I was standing with my room-mate in the kitchen in my New York apartment in 2001. Krava is Bulgarian for cow (Silvia and I were drinking wine and eating fried potatoes). Crujiente is crunchy (Spanish--in Barcelona, with Susana, over a bowl of muesli) and "la solidaridad" is solidarity (in class in the Casa at Columbia, studying Blas de Otero). La nuca (nape of the neck) is one I guess I haven't forgotten (same classroom, different class, on the poetry of Claudio Rodriguez). "Solet" is the diminutive of "sunshine" in Catalan that I acquired from a children's song (Teresa Puig, BCN). And I am still holding the pieces of the word "saudade" that I picked up from a Portuguese short story years ago (Elzbieta Szoka's office in the Casa).
I can close my eyes and picture where I was, and hear another person saying the words as I savour the memories in my mind. These vivid recuerdos are a benefit of learning languages as an adult. It's never to late. And may your recollections be sweet and long-lasting, too.
In a second language, I have memories of very simple words and where I was when someone first said them to me. Take this one: La parada. The sounds stopped me in my tracks. My high school teacher, from Madrid, had a voice that was like bells over water. She read our vocabulary lists aloud, right before lunchtime, at the public high school where I studied Spanish under her tutilege. La parada. Bus stop. I can still picture the page in the textbook, with a winding train track (la vía) and the platform, (el andén) and a bus stop. La parada. The "p" sounded like a "b" and the "r" in the middle sounded like a "d" and the "d" was soft, like a "th". Something inside my soul stopped for a moment the first time I heard that word. My memory etched the sounds on a mental list of words that bring me back to reality when panic sets in. Along with a couple of Shakespeare's sonnets, and some kind words from loved ones that came at really low moments, this list of words can get my life back on track fast when I get struck by one of the "golpes en la vida" that make me, with the poet (Vallejo), say, "yo no sé".
There are other words, not quite heart-stopping ones, perhaps, but memorable. "Resbalar" is one. I was wearing muddy boots, up to my gills in muck, down in the bowels of the earth inside a cave in the Pyrenees. I was having my doubts about the quality and brightness of the headlamp that was supposed to be guiding and preserving my presence in the group. Mental gears were shifting from the headlamp issues to the words of a fellow traveler, and I was just inhaling to ask "¿qué quiere decir 'no resbales'?" when I hit my knees and slid into the darkness. I guess no one felt like stating the obvious. My bruised shins helped me remember that one.
Memory gets a boost from all directions while learning language. Some memorable words are false cognates, that woo us in only to rear their ugly heads in our moment of weakness, tinging the cheeks a faint pink: words like "embarazada" (pregnant); it sure looks like "embarrassed" and can lead to confusion. Or, "la americana," (in Spain it means a blazer or suit jacket), which caught a midwestern farm girl friend of mine off guard when a Catalan friend took her shopping only to say "la americana esa es muy fea" to another shopper, only to leave my friend feeling very judged and rejected. Those stories and the ensuing laughter when they are recounted over coffee make the words "inolvidables."
And there are others. "Vamos por partes" a phrase that belongs to someone I haven't seen in a dozen years, even though I hear others say it often enough: "let's take this one thing at a time." Another is "despejada" - meaning "bright-eyed, bushy tailed," or "the way the sky looks at dawn on a clear day." Despejada: I was on the deck of a ship, curled up in a sleeping bag, crossing the Mediterranean night on a lawn chair as a penny-pinching undergrad among a group of hostel rats, when the sun came up and I learned that word from a fellow passenger.
Trótola is Italian for top (the kind that spins)--and I was standing with my room-mate in the kitchen in my New York apartment in 2001. Krava is Bulgarian for cow (Silvia and I were drinking wine and eating fried potatoes). Crujiente is crunchy (Spanish--in Barcelona, with Susana, over a bowl of muesli) and "la solidaridad" is solidarity (in class in the Casa at Columbia, studying Blas de Otero). La nuca (nape of the neck) is one I guess I haven't forgotten (same classroom, different class, on the poetry of Claudio Rodriguez). "Solet" is the diminutive of "sunshine" in Catalan that I acquired from a children's song (Teresa Puig, BCN). And I am still holding the pieces of the word "saudade" that I picked up from a Portuguese short story years ago (Elzbieta Szoka's office in the Casa).
I can close my eyes and picture where I was, and hear another person saying the words as I savour the memories in my mind. These vivid recuerdos are a benefit of learning languages as an adult. It's never to late. And may your recollections be sweet and long-lasting, too.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Dictations
I learned about dictations from a Catalan professor at Columbia, Xavier Vila, who wrote funny skits and invited us to write down what we heard in class on paper, and then put a sentence on the board for correction.
Dictation invites students to listen carefully. We are trained to understand, but not always to listen in detail beyond simple comprehension. My students are often challenged to write down the words to a song (or at least the refrain which repeats)--as we explore different accents and dialects in recorded language.
Dictation can also help students learn to listen for accent, stress, and punctuation in spoken language, and to learn to improve spelling as corrections are offered for immediate feedback. While dictation may seem like a very old-school learning style, it is a structured way to explore language through listening and writing. And when the dictation texts are well-written like Professor Vila's always were, or selected from a good reading, they are enjoyable cultural tidbits, an essential part of a comprehensive language-learning program.
If you do a dictation in class, I recommend:
Dictation invites students to listen carefully. We are trained to understand, but not always to listen in detail beyond simple comprehension. My students are often challenged to write down the words to a song (or at least the refrain which repeats)--as we explore different accents and dialects in recorded language.
Dictation can also help students learn to listen for accent, stress, and punctuation in spoken language, and to learn to improve spelling as corrections are offered for immediate feedback. While dictation may seem like a very old-school learning style, it is a structured way to explore language through listening and writing. And when the dictation texts are well-written like Professor Vila's always were, or selected from a good reading, they are enjoyable cultural tidbits, an essential part of a comprehensive language-learning program.
If you do a dictation in class, I recommend:
- Start with something short and sweet; literature is good; dialogue can be fun;
- Allow students to self-select which sentence to write on the board for corrections
- Encourage mistakes--explain that learning involves making corrections and taking guesses
- Read the dictation twice, so students can make corrections and self-check on the second time
- After all sentences are on the board, ask each student to read his or hers and invite students to correct each other. Then, the instructor can make corrections as well.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Throwing fits about getting a language to fit
Deeply exploring a second language for the first time often leads learners to question why the language they're acquiring doesn't match up neatly with their first language. I have had students throw a fit about such challenges as syntax and gender. For English speakers, the idea of nouns having to be feminine or masculine can be daunting and even confusing. Students ask why are some of the body parts on a female body not feminine nouns. If it's a woman's breast, why is it "el pecho"? Or, how can there be two words in Spanish for ideas that only have one word in English; for example, how can Spanish have words like "anaranjado" and "naranja" that both mean "orange"--isn't that confusing? How can the words "there is" or "there are" in English get translated into just one short word, "hay", in Spanish? Why does the verb "gustar" work backwards from the way "to like" works in English, so that we say "me gusta el queso" and literally mean "cheese is pleasing to me"; and why does it have romantic associations to say that a certain person "me gusta" when in English we can say "I like so-and-so" in an entirely platonic way?
We cannot get inside the mind of the anonymous "founders" of a language, any more than we can get inside the head of our favorite author to know "why did s/he say that?" and "what did s/he mean?" Scholars puzzle over these questions while knowing that the real answer will always evade us. We wonder, how many people does it take to get a new language system up and running? Where will our language take us in the centuries to come? We can look toward the past, and must respect the fact that there is a future for the language(s) we speak that we may never know. Languages evolve over space and time, and they are influenced by such diverse effects as geography (what grows where the language is spoken? what are the weather, countryside and waterways like?), religion (what do the speakers fear? what or whom do they trust?), and economics (how do speakers earn money and spend it?)
Understanding that languages do not fit neatly over each other is an essential concept in language acquisition. The ultimate goal of learning language is to create a seamless fabric in the target language, so that thinking in, say, Spanish, becomes second nature. Having to translate every idea and every communication through a series of memorized equivalents weighs speaking and writing down. A small victory comes when a student can say, "Hmmm...I can't define it, but 'el arrullo'... has something to do with rocking a baby, or humming softly, or the sound the ocean makes." When you can feel your way through the language by instinct, you're starting to get a really good fit. Keep in mind that your favorite pair of jeans probably wasn't your favorite in the dressing room the day you bought them. Falling into a comfortable linguistic place takes time and patience. Savor the journey.
We cannot get inside the mind of the anonymous "founders" of a language, any more than we can get inside the head of our favorite author to know "why did s/he say that?" and "what did s/he mean?" Scholars puzzle over these questions while knowing that the real answer will always evade us. We wonder, how many people does it take to get a new language system up and running? Where will our language take us in the centuries to come? We can look toward the past, and must respect the fact that there is a future for the language(s) we speak that we may never know. Languages evolve over space and time, and they are influenced by such diverse effects as geography (what grows where the language is spoken? what are the weather, countryside and waterways like?), religion (what do the speakers fear? what or whom do they trust?), and economics (how do speakers earn money and spend it?)
Understanding that languages do not fit neatly over each other is an essential concept in language acquisition. The ultimate goal of learning language is to create a seamless fabric in the target language, so that thinking in, say, Spanish, becomes second nature. Having to translate every idea and every communication through a series of memorized equivalents weighs speaking and writing down. A small victory comes when a student can say, "Hmmm...I can't define it, but 'el arrullo'... has something to do with rocking a baby, or humming softly, or the sound the ocean makes." When you can feel your way through the language by instinct, you're starting to get a really good fit. Keep in mind that your favorite pair of jeans probably wasn't your favorite in the dressing room the day you bought them. Falling into a comfortable linguistic place takes time and patience. Savor the journey.
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