To study or to learn a language

With my first year as a language college student coming to an end I'd like to write a little more personal blog post to reflect on how I experienced learning a new language, as well as to what I mean by to “learn” and to “study” a language and tell you a little about my linguistic background.

So far in my life I have “studied” and also “learned” a language. By studying a language I basically mean what we do in College or school. We learn vocabulary but also especially the grammatical system behind a language and its rules for conjugation, declination, tenses whatsoever. By learning a language I mean the “sponge” method. You don't study a language's rules and grammar, you learn some words yes, but you mainly learn to speak and especially to understand the language by being around people who speak it, being exposed to it, incorporating it into your life.

Studying a language is more tiring, it takes longer and is boring once you get on a high level as grammar and syntax get more complex. Learning a language is easier, you often do it unconsciously, only have to study little, but you don't know why you apply certain words and suffixes . Now what is the better way to do it? I myself only “studied” two languages, Croatian and Spanish. Although I had English in school since the age of 11(not counting elementary, because come one lets be serious this was just as useful as the french classes I had in elementary) I don't consider it a language I have studied. Why so? The first four years of English in school were a complete mess. Soon after the first semester started our teacher left the school for some months and was only to return every now and then. While she was gone we had a variety of other teachers who never knew which level we are on and so on. So yes in these critic four years which I suppose are important when learning a new language especially when its the first foreign language you learn were not very satisfying. It was already back then that I was very fond of the English language and American culture, and I wanted to be a part of it by knowing their language better than my middle school classmates. So when I was 13 I started to intentionally expose myself to the English language. I read lots of articles and books in English, I tried to watch English movies even if I didn't understand a lot. It was especially the everyday and slang language I wanted to get to know so I would remember these things from movies and so on and use them. By the time I transferred to another school where we received a decent education in English language I found that I had it easier than most of my fellow students and didn't have to study for the tests. So although my first years of English were chaotic I think I mastered this language without school. When I speak it today it comes natural to me, I don't think of what to say or write and although I still have to look up certain words ( especially specialist terms) I consider myself fluent.

Currently I'm doing both, I'm studying a language (Croatian and now also English) at college and I'm learning one with the sponge method, which I'd like to compare now. In not even one year we learned a lot in Croatian. I am able to communicate in everyday situations and to produce new sentences I have not learned by heart, but the way there was not easy. It involved a lot of studying vocabulary and grammar as well as text production.

Now with my girlfriend coming from a bilingual family (raised in Greek and Albanian) I find myself exposed to a multilingual environment everyday. I started to learn Albanian some time ago and being around this language speeds up the process(I haven't studied a word since I started Croatian and yet I keep improving). Whether it's her talking to her family, Albanian facebook statuses or songs, with time you remember certain words phrases and structures that enable you to produce language without a clue about grammar like cases and conjugation. Then again most of our communication happens in English. As she is the person I talk to most this makes English the dominant language in my life, it's our home language if you want to call it that way for one and a half year now. English playing such a big role in my life has helped me a lot to improve my language skills as it doesn’t allow me to neglect it and that helps a lot, also for school.

So why study a language? Why wasting your time learning rules and grammar? Well if you want to professionally work with a language you have to know these systems. Since I learned English by doing I have no idea about its grammar. When I have a grammar test I just write what my gut tells me to. If my teachers would give me a sentence to transform into this and that tense (we all know the nice complicated names some English tenses have) I would have no idea which tense they might mean. This is something you have to know as a professional Interpreter and or translator. So I guess it always depends on what you want to do with language. If you simply want to be able to speak and understand it regardless of knowing the system behind it the easier way is to “learn” it. If you want to work with it professional you have to “study” it. So what's the best thing to do now? I guess first you should try the sponge method and then start to study why you do certain things the way you are doing them. I personally enjoy the multilingual environment I'm currently in and hope to gain as much from it as possible. Also I'm looking forward to the next semester since I'm planning to start yet another language.

Culture days

The upcoming week we are finally having the Culture days at College, and I managed to make up my mind on which presentations I want to attend. As for my “homeculture” I picked The Boston Tea Party,The KKK and Mafia in the USA as the titles seem quite interesting to me. Furthermore I want to attend The life of Native Americans: before and during the interference of the settlers.  I'm also going to see Undocumented: Illegal Immigrants in the USA because the topic of immigration is related to my own paper and therefore quite interesting to me. The last two presentation from my homeculture I will attend are The Origin of the Chinese American culture and Private prisons: The booming business in America. The second one because I already got to read Hannah's paper and found it interesting as well as shocking as she showed how prisoners are exploited as cheap work forces in American prisons.

From the Irish culture I will attend The popularised Leprechaun, Irish as an official EU language and Is Irish a dying language? Because I'm interested in the Irish language and want to know if and how it is still practiced today.

I really enjoyed working on my culture project because we had the possibility to freely write about a topic we found interesting. I just wished we would have had the presentations a little earlier and not in the week of finals. There are so many more presentations I would really like to visit but frankly I cant even afford visiting the obligatory number of presentation without getting into time management issues for studying for my finals which unfortunately spoils this really great idea a little.

Eye exams on the smartphone

While there are tons of useless apps in the world out there like a virtual zipper or a watch that measures how long you can touch your phone with a finger, also some smart developments have been done in recent time.

Andrew Bastawrous has been working on apps dealing with diagnosis of eye diseases and I want to

introduce you to this idea. Now before one of you yells that's crap and should be left to a doctor, better keep on reading first. The app peek vision was not developed for the sole use at home without any professional supervision, no it was developed to improve health care in countries such as Kenya and other Sub-Saharan nations. Studies have shown that 80% of blind people in Africa could easily be treated and brought back to vision if resources allowed it. Another major reason is that more people in Africa have access to a smartphone than to clean water To know what surgery to perform one of course has to know the problem first, which requires a scan of the retina. Bringing bulky equipment to Africa requires a lot of money, people and effort, overall only checking the retina comes to 25.000 dollars. Andrew Bastawrous and his team developed a small adapter that is connected to a smartphone and only costs 5$ in production. In combination with the app and the adapter your phone is able to give you a scan of the retina and inner eye. The good thing about this is it only requires a single person and a smartphone, overall it comes to a cost of only 500$. The app also allows you to check the eyes reaction and to simulate what the world looks like for the patient, meaning how they sees it with their current vision. Furthermore the devices are linked with specialist all over the world, allowing them to send the diagnosis to doctors far away who then can start making plans for treatment. Once they are done they message either the patient or a local leader who is in touch with his people, to inform them about dates and details of their surgery. I think this is a great of modern technology and that this idea could change a lot. If you are interested in the topic here is the link of Bastawrous presenting the app: http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_bastawrous_get_your_next_eye_exam_on_a_smartphone#t-182806

The languages of South Africa

!ke e: ǀxarra ǁke, meaning Unity in Diversity,- the motto of the Republic of South Africa, a country I have always thought to be very interesting. South Africa is an multi-ethnic country that encompasses a big variety of languages and cultures. First time I got in touch with one of the languages spoken there, called Afrikaans was when I heard a song of the South African band Die Antwoord. My fellow German speakers will already notice this band's name looks very German. German in South Africa? How so? Well Die Antwoord is not a misspelled version of the German word die Antwort, but its actually really means the same, die Antwort- the answer. The reason is the following; Afrikaans which is also refereed to as “Cape-Dutch” is one of the official languages of South Africa. It is indeed a variety of Dutch brought to the country by the former colonial rulers from the Netherlands. The African country's language's resemblance to my own mother tongue got me curious, so I started to do a little research about it. Although we might not be able to speak Afrikaans or understand it when it's spoken really quickly to us, we are actually able to understand it if we read it and know the context. I read some Wikipedia articles in Afrikaans and could understand a lot of the words since they were similar to German, just that we would maybe consider some of them to be archaic.

But Afrikaans is not the only language spoken in South Africa. The country actually has 11 official languages(Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.), the most common of them being English, Afrikaans, Isizulu and Xhosa. So how does this work? Is every South African a polyglot that speaks 11 languages? Or do different people know different languages and can't communicate at all? No. In fact English is wide spread over the country and known by almost everyone. Most schools there are English and teach Afrikaans, Isizulu or Xhosa as second languages. There are some schools which are an Afrikaans or Isuzula medium and teach English as a second language. Generally home languages are Afrikaans for the white and Isizulu or Xhosa for the black population. To sum it up, almost everyone in South Africa is fluent in English so there are no language barriers in between the different natives.

                               Don't some of these words sound familiar to German natives?

„Fake“ fast-food

I'm currently in Tirana  and made an observation that I thought might be interesting for the food related topics we dealt with in class. Walking the streets of the city one will soon realize the fast-food restaurants here are not like the ones we know in western Europe or America.. but then they still sort of are, they are just made the Albanian way.

By this I mean that although there are no Western Fast-Food chains like McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken Tirana has it's own version of them. For instance they have a place called “Albania Fried Chicken” in lieu of “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. The logo is the same but just with an A instead of a K and the whole restaurant is practically built to look like the original KFC

The closest thing to McDonalds is “Kolonat”, and well it comes pretty close. Basically Kolonat offers the same Burgers as McDonalds but additionally also serves Pasta, Pizza and Souvlaki. The biggest difference might be the prices as restaurants in Albania tend to be pretty cheap compared to the ones in Austria ( A big

Pizza at Kolonat costs 290 Leke which is about 2,90$).

The for me best Fast-Food restaurant chain there was “Goody's” a Greek restaurant chain with burgers, Souvlakis, sandwiches etc--

Although Albania and it's Capital might be the last European place to come to ones mind for traveling I say it's worth a visit. Tirana is an exciting lively city with lots of young people that offers a big number of shops and places to have coffee, lunch or dinner.

The problem called θ

What is the thing that most likely gives away your native language is not English? Most of my

fellow German speakers will probably agree it's the th (θ) sound. After studying English for a long time now I feel pretty confident speaking it but this certain sound still gives me trouble (I was just told yesterday how cute it is that I Say f whenever I'm supposed to say th)

I have to admit I'm not trying hard pronouncing this sound correctly, but frankly I don’t hear that much of a difference between th and f. I guess this comes from my native language not knowing this sound and therefore my hearing not being sensitive to it. It's the same when my Croatian teacher tells me there's a difference between č and ć as well as between š and ž. They sure are there but I have trouble hearing them especially when in a word or sentence.

There also wasn't a big focus on pronouncing that certain sound correctly in school. We were told if we cant manage the th we should say f instead, and never z like a lot of people here do which lead some kind of cliche. If we are honest what will an American do trying to mimic a German accent? Exactly they will put a z wherever a th is needed.

“Excuse me can you give me ze water? I'm zirsty. Zänk you very much.”

But well since German is one of the few Germanic languages without that sound I guess the only thing we can do is practice practice practice if we don't wanna sound like that.

How French is Canada?

Always interested in bilingualism I did some research on bilingualism in Canada and thought I might share it

with you. Enjoy :)

So I always knew that Canada had a french speaking population but I never really knew what this was all about. Is  it an official language? Are those a lot of people? Is french their mother tongue? Or did they just learn it in school as and that's what remained of “New France”? And most of all is it used in every day life?

Those were the things I had been wondering about so I did not hesitate to ask all these questions when I met a girl from Montreal. Speaking with her I soon noticed that although she spoke fluently and without mistakes she wasn't an English native. So I asked if English was her mother tongue and she said no.

She told me that French was along with English the official language of Canada and the sole official language of the province of Quebec. Quebec is the largest province of Canada and the second most populous. The province's capital is Quebec-City and the largest city Montreal.

So what about French now?

Well since Montreal is a big and multicultural city with people from all over the world English is wide spread there. It is established in services and everything, but she also said that this is something many French Canadians look sceptically towards. She made clear that French is the official language of the province and that if she didn't feel comfortable enough in English she would insist on being served in French.

79% of Quebecois listed French as their mother tongue, like the girl I have the information on all this from. They are raised completely in French, speak it at home and in everyday life and then learn English in school. This was something that really surprised me. I always thought those people were raised bilingual. She even said a lot of her friends don't speak good English at all and hers was just so good because she attended an English school. Also there are still tensions between the French and English speaking population, and Quebec even passed several laws that shall guarantee the importance and preservation of the French language. Also she said that Quebec City was completely French speaking and that some people might get unfriendly towards English speakers.

Also Canadian French is said to be different from European. One thing is that European French is more likely to use or borrow words from English which Canadians don't in order to protect their language. Here are some differences between Quebec and European French:

Quebec French	Metropolitan French	English gloss
abrier	couvrir	to cover
astheure (à c't'heure)	maintenant	now
chum (m)	copain (m)	boyfriend
magasiner	faire des courses	to go shopping/do errands
placoter	papoter	to chat/chatter

Here is a very interesting video on the differences:

I was really surprised by what I learned about Canada and in the End it turned out to be much more French than I thought. But I'm really glad my confusion about this was cleared up as I'm always interested in bilingualism in several countries, but most of the time also confused about it.

Montreal