One of the things that learning Chinese (or rather, trying to learn
Chinese) has taught me is that learning English is incredibly
difficult. As I sit with my friends and try to explain to them the
differences between all the types of 'to' (two, too, to) one of them
out of the blue asks me about the word "O'clock". Then, my other
friend Tim is asking me about the word "wrote". He puts it through
the rules he has been taught about conjugation.
I can jump.
I will jump.
I jumped.
I am jumping.
(Wow at this exact moment, I just had one of those moments where I
thought... JUMP must be the most awful, strange word in the english
language. I actually just confused myself totally, wondering if JUMP
is even the word that my english speaking brain meant to say. Weird,
glitch in the Matrix. Be careful, do not say the word jump to many
times, it will mess you up.)
Then he says:
I can write.
I will write.
I writed.
I am writing.
I correct him about writed, "when you've written something and it is
complete, you must say wrote." and he follows up with the questions
"What is written?" I am by no means an English teacher, and I have no
training in how to teach language whatsoever. I decide that I will
give a few examples of sentances to show how to use the word written.
I realize as I am making these sentances up in my head, that the word
written is always coming after the word 'have'. I tell this to Tim.
"But you did not say have when you used the word before" he says.
"What do you mean?" I reply.
"You say to me, when YOUVE written something... YOUVE shen me yi si
(whats it mean)?"
Doh.
"You should visit my uncle's website,www.truespokenenglish.com", we
laugh together.
It is at this time that I give major props to all of my English major
friends, and friends who have taught English as a profession. I can
explain harmony, even difficult, advanced jazz harmony. I can teach
people about music, and why some notes fit together and others do not.
I can show people how to read music, and train their hands to play
the piano. What a crazy thing that is when I think about it. But
when it comes to language, I do not know where to begin in teaching
others grammar rules, and honestly, I feel like I need a refresher
myself.
My friend Jen teaches English professionaly at the UW, she is moving
to Tokyo soon. She told me this summer "Whenever you are down or
depressed, think about how good you are at speaking English!" It was
a half joke at the time, but I think back to that comment often
lately. All those years of english class really did teach me
something, and now it all makes me wonder, English is a very effective
language, but is it absolutely as effective as possible?
The organ was invented hundreds of years ago. At that time, people
did not know much about erganomics and posture. They created the
organ bench, a flat piece of wood to sit on while you play the organ.
Warp forward in time hundreds of years and what the hell am I sitting
on every night that is messing up my back? A piano bench, a flat
piece of wood, maybe covered in some fabric or cushioning, but still a
flat piece of wood. Tradition smadition, I am working on a new design
now.
Language has been around for thousands of years, and it is evolving
all the time. BUT - is it evolving in an effective way, and could it
be done better?
Somebody should design a new language, a world language, that
everybody on Earth learns. All of our current languages have spawned
out of these old ancient ways of speaking, but now we know so much
more about the brain, and the way people think - we must be able to
come up with something better! Deybis (my bassist) and I have
discussed this, think about it: If every day each person on earth
learned one brand new word, from a brand new written form of language,
(develepoed by earths 'brain bugs' themselves) learning words for the
most common ideas first, in a matter of 5 or so years everyone would
know 2000 words acrossed the globe. 8 years, 3000 words - and since
you learned all the most common words up front, everyone can
communicate, no problem.
Cool.
Hey Mack,
ReplyDeleteAwesome post! There are people who agree with your proposition. You should read about 'Esperanto' on wikipedia. It never took off, probably for the best. There was a large intellectual push at the time that 'many of the world's political problems' would be solved by people being able to accurately communicate how they feel to each other. Turns out people's native languages aren't even adequate for this, and miscommunication never was the problem, the irrational emotional systems were.
One difficulty about learning and teaching languages, (that you are intuitively banging your head against here) is that language is much more than 'vocabulary.' All human brains are equipped with the same 'syntax' machine. Chomsky calls this a 'deep structure' that is built biologically into the genome, the same way, say, building a nest with no roof is for certain birds. (A roof would be better, but they never build one.) Different languages have different rules about how this 'structure' is deployed. In Chinese, from what little I know, verbs aren't conjugated. Who did what to whom is determined by inference, word order, and sometimes subject/object conjugation.
English is also a SVO language; the order of our sentences most often starts with a subject, then verb, then the object. For example I (Subject)--Love (Verb)--You (Object). Remember when your writing teachers always nagged students about passive voice? That's when you write a sentence that goes against this natural 'grain' of English, inverting the subject and object to an OVS structure. (You are loved by me.) Anyway, all this is different for other languages, some of which (like Latin for example) can have nearly 100% variable word order because EVERY WORD is conjugated. It's not surprising that language is almost dead.
This is all more than you ever wanted to know, and mostly just to let you know you can be proud of English! There is enormous difficulty in learning across the syntactic differences between English/Chinese/Korean/Japanese. But it can be done. I'm sure you've started learning to write in Chinese. Or maybe you haven't, from what I've learned it's incredibly difficult! (Not so with English. I have Chinese students in my composition classes write proficiently all the time! That's the beauty of a phonetic writing system.)
Miss you man.
T
This post has brought back so many memories for me back when I was learning english as a kid. I used to get so confused with the word mean... 2 definitions but pronounced and spelled the same. And so many words that sound the same but obviously are written differently and have different meanings, like write/right, ears/years, pale/pail. And the rule of i before e except after c. How can a kid at 8 years of age from another country suppose to comprehend this? Obviously I progressed and eventually learned the language. But if i had to choose an "easy" language to learn, I'd choose English. I can't imagine learning chinese as an adult! I have a hard time as is and it's my language!!
ReplyDeleteHope you're doing well:)