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