Stopping and starting

Have been stopping and starting a lot of things this year without actually completing very much.  Japanese, Chinese, French, German.  All stuff that I've tinkered with many times in the past.  It's a destructive habit as it means I'm surrounded with reminders of unfinished projects, and re-starting is always a dismal reminder of a previous failure.  I get very enthusiastic about things for about three days—I'm a classic three-day monk—then it tails off rather rapidly.  I was really keen on getting my French up to scratch a week or two ago, wasn't I?

Jana Fadness has recently posted on the subject of Just Do Something; ie, don't be paralysed by choices.  Paralysis by choices seems a particular danger for Japanese learners, as there are several different and apparently legitimate ways to go about it.  Work through a romanised introductory book, or use a kana text?  Learn all the kanji first of all using Heisig?  Perhaps go further and even do the readings of the kanji too before doing anything else?  Stick to audio until the conversational language is mastered?  Try to do everything at once?  A lot of choices.

Le Figaro

Bought a copy of Le Figaro yesterday and read about 75% of it with about 75% understanding, which isn't bad; didn't bother with a dictionary, just ploughed on.  I tend to feel daftly guilty when skipping bits I don't understand in a foreign-language text, as though I'm wasting a resource.  I have to try to remember that I'm never actually going to run out of foreign stuff to read!  The Internet exists now!

I linked the other day to that Helen DeWitt article on reading Proust in French; it's something I wouldn't mind trying if my French got good enough - I'd want to read it in English first, but it'd be interesting to reread it in the original, trying to cling on but using the English as a crib when necessary.  A long-term goal.

Documentary on the Michel Thomas method

That documentary I linked to yesterday, in three parts starting here, is worth watching - 1997 (it seems) BBC documentary on his method.  None of it will be surprising to anyone who has tried using the Michel Thomas Method CDs that came out afterwards, but apparently the Method was very much a secret back then.  Startled to see Leo Marks, cryptographic maven for the wartime Special Operations Executive, chipping in with praise.  (Marks's memoir Between Silk And Cyanide is one of the very best books I've ever read).  Thomas is pickier than most British teachers would be on the matter of pronunciation, but then he has to be - nobody's writing anything down so the sounds are all that anyone has.  I'm embarrassed that I've tried and failed a few times to learn the IPA and understand that two-dimensional chart you put the vowels on, but to me languages really means books, not sounds.  And avoiding French orthography saves you a lot of time and worry; far too much of my school French was taken up with getting verb endings right that in fact all sound the same; they're just spelling rules of no interest if you're trying to get to conversational competence.

Someone will eventually 'gamify' language learning successfully and make a fortune out of it.  As someone who loves maths but dislikes combinatorics it always astonishes me that people who 'hate numbers' (their own words) can get pleasurably addicted to hardest-possible Sudoku.  There's a lot of psychology about challenge and feedback and sense of achievement that's only being uncovered right now in the games industry.

French (again)

Back-cover copy for Teach Yourself French, N Scarlyn Wilson, 1938 (1969 printing): "Anyone who studies this book conscientiously should be able at the end to read any novel or newspaper, to write understandable French, though it won't be faultless, and to find his way about France without choosing toothpicks on the menu instead of soup, or telling an astonished waiter that he has an enormous wife, when he really means that he is very hungry.  In other words, he will know quite a lot of French and something about France and be in a position to get to know a great deal more about both."

The book-reading claim is quite a specific claim; how believable is it?  To claim a text will give you conversational ability is one thing: conversations are full of give and take, and even a poor linguist can get the message across if the other person is helpful; books are different.  Are you allowed to use a dictionary on this test?  If I manage to work my way through this textbook, I'll have a go at reading a novel.  I picked up Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier in the charity shop today; the one thing I know about it is that it's about pissoirs; let's see what I get out of it.

N Scarlyn Wilson also wrote Teach Yourself Spanish, 1939 (I have the 1970 reprint).  Inside front cover flap: "By the time you have mastered its contents you will have acquired a really sound groundwork and will be able to tackle a book or a newspaper in Spanish."  Again, quite a specific claim.  Teach Yourself Books were still making the claim in 1960, with John T Bowen and TJ Rhys Jones's Teach Yourself Welsh, whose preface (in my 1967 edition) says: "When you have worked conscientiously through this book, you should be able to speak Welsh, understand Welsh conversation and read an ordinary Welsh book.  Is that a sufficient reward?  Surely yes, but more will be added.  If you are a Welshman, then you will be a proper Welshman, standing on his own feet, with his own language, his own heritage and not just a strange sort of Englishman.  Remember 'Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon' (a Nation without language, a nation without heart)."  Well, I'm not a Welshman, so I'll have to remain a strange sort of Englishman.  If I fail to get out of a textbook what the textbook claims I should, am I a bad workman blaming my tools, or should I just put it down to Wrong Learning Styles or a clash of personality with the author?  Michel Thomas used to say that there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher, but I've had enough education-related disasters to know that some of them were undeniably my fault alone.

French

Have left DuoLingo alone for a few weeks; fun as it is, I was getting irritated with its rough edges.  I know it's a work in progress but when one keeps getting penalized for not guessing correctly the exact English translation that's wanted as an answer, or the right one of two German pronouns to slot into the sentence, it wears me down a bit.  And being offered real-world translation exercises right from the start still strikes me as daft.

I was thinking of using it to brush up my French, but perhaps I'll just use textbooks instead.  Am listening to France Inter right now; we're getting music rather than talk as they're on strike against austerity:

It always surprises me when I stop dabbling in languages that are newer to me and return to French that my listening comprehension is a bit better than I think it is.  Listening to languages you really don't know very well makes listening to one you first heard thirty years ago seem much easier.  I took seven years of French at school, age 9 to 16.  The first years didn't cover much: "forced to exchange banalities in the language" as Helen DeWitt damningly said.  A lot of drilling of the basic irregular verbs, and then gradual introduction of the regular conjugations and not enough vocab to be able to read anything of interest.  I still remember a lot of it so possibly, as far as it went, it was actually taught quite well, but it was no preparation for dealing with genuine French texts.  Did I really study French for seven years and never meet with the past historic tense?

At middle school we all had to do French, but when we went to high school there was a telling bit of streaming depending on French proficiency: top set continued to do French and had to do either Spanish or Latin as well; middle set continued to do only French; bottom set abandoned French and started Spanish.  I did Latin, which was very instructive in terms of seeing a language taken to bits and examined analytically, but it's a shame that French and Latin weren't used to inform knowledge of one another.  One would think that they weren't related, so tightly-contained in silos the syllabuses were.

Apropos of that I recall this anecdote about Catullus in French and Italian: French for muck, Italian for absolute filth.

Textbooks.  I have copies of Teach Yourself French (1938) and Teach Yourself Everyday French (1940) by N. Scarlyn Wilson (that stranded initial at the start somehow evokes a lost world of affable bookish textbook-writers), the first being a standard TY textbook of its era covering all the grammar briskly, the second being a more wandering and discursive look at literature and 'situational' stuff (Motoring, At The Dressmaker's).  Working through the first one shouldn't be too hard as most of it is stuff that I've known for decades, more or less.  And the exercises are full of Thirties charm.  An older textbook still: William Cobbett's French Grammar, written in odd moments when he wasn't busy mislaying the bones of poor Tom Paine.  It's charming.