Tag: languages

Nerd / Baseball

While I do enjoy watching a good – me sing active and well-played – baseball game, I certainly am not into it like the average person who watches professional sports is. I do not have a strong association with this group of people who are not from my town or neighborhood, often, even, country, and who are here merely to play a sport. I find nothing wrong with their doing that. But I only would have immense interest in their games if they were people either who came from the same exact background as I did, or if they were people I knew personally.

For example, when the hockey team plays well at school, I am very proud of them. I go willingly to their games. Why? Not just because they are at my school, but because I know several of the players. Same for cross country. Yet it changes every year. I once cared a lot about the football games, because my students played in them. This year, not a single one plays football, and I haven’t made it to more than about twenty minutes or so of the first game of the season. I don’t know the players this year. But I do know members of the hockey and cross country and water polo teams, and so I watch their season with interest and enjoy attending their events when I can.

Anyway, all this is to say that, though I don’t exactly go wild for watching professional baseball, I really do enjoy the part where it often brings family and friends together just to sit around and be together for several hours at a time. It is truly a great pastime, and I appreciate and am grateful for it.

(And I still don’t support people being angry or mean in any way regarding sports rivalries. Not a chance. Grow up. Be a kind human being. Period. Support your team, and stop being nasty to others just because you support one team in particular and they don’t.)

Okay, and the nerd part is that I got an A on my Mandarin oral quiz! And I didn’t even have the full amount of time to prepare for it. So, extra-cool! Yay!

Thank you, God, for my success and for this opportunity. In your name, I pray in gratitude. Amen.

Post-a-day 2023

Mandarin

So, I go to Mandarin class now on one of my off periods. Originally, it was because I was stressed after one particular class, and it helped me to release the stress by learning something new right afterward, just across the hall. However, that class is loads better and stresses me barely at all these days, and I’ve just continued going to Mandarin class, because I actually like learning the language. Not to mention that Houston is filled with Chinese folks, and Mandarin is not a useless skill to have here.

Anyway, so, I go. And I do as much of the work as I can, including the quizzes and such. I don’t always make it, but I go when I can. The teacher was at a conference last week, so I didn’t attend the class with a sub there, and I also totally forgot to look at whatever they were assigned while the teacher was gone. So, I only found out yesterday that there is an oral quiz tomorrow.

If I had known a week and a half ago, like the others, obviously, I would have done my intense studying and preparation a week ago, and be merely reviewing gently last night and tonight. However, I didn’t know. So, I’ve been doing some big studying the past two nights. Not crazy or anything, but enough to have a reasonable grasp of the questions and answers.

If the teacher does the regular questions and vocabulary in the interview, I should be fine. I seem to know my answers for all of that stuff. But I don’t know lots of vocabulary that don’t apply to my life much, so that could prove to be a struggle point. Naturally, I have back-up plans, though.

For example, there are only two vocabulary words that are for things I dislike. I have learned one decently and am working on the other a bit more in the morning. So, if he asks if I like or want to do something, so long as it isn’t one of those two things, even if I have no idea what it means, my answer can be a ‘yes’. So, yeah, I’m reasonably prepared.

I just wish I were more prepared. I don’t like the feeling of floundering. In another week, I could be very comfortable with these questions. But the quiz is tomorrow, so we roll with it.

With that, I go to sleep, so my brain can process and remember the stuff even better tomorrow. And so I can do well at my job, of course, though that doesn’t require the same level of sleep right now. 😛

Post-a-day 2023

A pause…

So, we do Duolingo every day, right? As we both sat in the living room just now, pulling up Duolingo, I begin my second lesson just as he clicks to start his, only a couple minutes behind my beginning with my first lesson. And what does his screen show him?

But what did mine do? Start my next lesson like nothing was different! As we sat right next to one another… bizarre and goofy, right?? 😛

Oh, well… so it goes!

Post-a-day 2022

le (gros) mot du jour

What could be better, more interesting, and more useful than simply the word of the day? The bad word of the day, of course. We cannot deny that, though we need not necessarily use bad words ourselves, it is important and valuable to know the bad words, so that we are able to recognize and understand what is being said in the world around us. Foreign language courses seem to avoid such things, but at what cost? Firstly, the individual is likely to be quite lost when interacting with a native environment. Secondly, loads of potential interest is lost without them. Because most teens and adults are quite interested in the bad words, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. And thirdly, such words and expressions share loads about the culture tied to the language.

I am very much not a bad word person. And yet two of my favorite words in Japanese are manko and oshiri. It’s probably because they are such silly yet useful words that I enjoy them so much. They are fun to know, more than useful. Which makes them even more fun to know, I suppose.

So, yeah… the (bad) word of the day sounds like a kind of amazing idea to me… so long as the students can handle it, that is…

Post-a-day 2021

Learning

I began last week learning something entirely new to me. Okay, so it isn’t exactly entirely new to me – I first learned some foundations for it back in middle school. Mrs. N**** taught us in computer lab. I think most of the other kids, the girls especially, weren’t huge fans of it and didn’t really get it too well. But I was and I did. It was HTML.

Hypertext Markup Language, that is.

And, you know, though I didn’t ever realize that I could pursue learning HTML, I did pursue learning other languages. Remember, languages and math are all the same thing to me. So, a computer language just feels like a fun cross between the human spoken/written languages and the math ones. No wonder it was easy for me to pick up, and no wonder I loved it back in middle school.

But I never knew that this was the foundation upon which all of this ‘computer programming’ and ‘software engineering’ was based. Don’t ask me how – I don’t know how I didn’t ever make that connection. But, finally, I did last week.

And I’m doing beginner work on it all now, starting off with a course on HTML. Though I’m in this course to learn HTML, I kind of feel like reading the comprehensive list of code for HTML would be easier for me at the point. The blocks of text that attempt to explain things to me are often much more confusing that just looking at the actual code itself. I regularly go back to the text after reading the code, and decipher it that way – the code makes more sense seen than talked about. Does that makes sense, how I said that? I guess it is like just about anything else: you can talk to me for days about it, but, until you show it to me, it is just words and ideas, and doesn’t fully make sense or click.

But this stuff is clicking. And I’m liking it. A lot.

I’ll finish the HTML foundations course tomorrow or the next day, I think, and move into CSS or iOS app development training next. Or both…

It’s funny, though. I can tell this is important to me, because I won’t let myself cover too much direct information in a day, so as not to confuse it all later. And I am excited every night before bed, as I plan out when I will be working on it all tomorrow.

Man… did I mention that I’m a nerd? Well, it just got a bit more obvious. 😛

Post-a-day 2021

Pinky

…And The Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain…

Loved those guys when I was little.

Tonight, I was talking with my brother (the neuroscience one) about how language and math show up in the brain, specifically grammar and foreign language for the language stuff, and then algebra for the math stuff.

It turns out that, the algebra shows up with lights all over the brain, whenever we do it.

Language understanding and production are from specific, individual areas that interact with one another.

And the functional parts of language (think syntax) actually work more like the algebra does in the brain, with lights all over the place.

And so, it makes perfect sense that languages have seemed to me to be the same thing as algebra – I have always referred to them as math, and in various ways, and that is exactly how I see them in my head.

We even talked about how, algebraically, I personally see sentence structure across the languages.

Basically, we turned my nerdy question into an even nerdier conversation, and it was awesome.

Now, I know that I definitely want to see a brain lighting pattern test of my brain, especially around math and languages and grammar!

Post-a-day 2020

Toy Story for all languages

Playing on Duolingo, I crossed the following today:

Turns out Woody can exist in Italian, not just English…, but he is awfully proper-sounding in Italian, though I do say so myself. 😛

Whatever the case, I am looking forward to all of the fabulous images that are already forming in my mind of an Italian Woody (not unlike the changes that occurred for Buzz, when his Spanish version was enabled!)… yess… entertaining it shall be. 😂

Post-a-day 2020

My real voice

In college, I spent a summer studying in Germany.  It was a language school setup, filled with foreigners, but in such a small town that everyone knew that we were studying German, and so everyone always spoke to us all in German.  I had already studied abroad a few times before this adventure, and I had learned firsthand about what works and what doesn’t work, in terms of language immersion.  I was dedicated to learning German, and so I made sure that I only spoke in German with others, even if they spoke to me in English.  This made friendships hard among the people in my program’s group, since they all used English together; I came across a bit snobby, but I was just really committed to learning German.

I made friends with other foreigners rather easily, though, and especially ones in higher levels of German, which was even better for me.  My German was improving immensely.  But this led to a unique situation one day.

One day, near the end of either my time at the school or my friend Paul’s time there (he’s British), I found myself faced with a desperate Paul, actually begging me to speak English.  Why?! was my repeated question to his pleas.

“Because I want to hear what you sound like!”

I don’t know if he was pleased or not by how I sound in English, but I spoke a little for him.  And it was way weird, using English with him, despite the fact that I’d heard him speak English loads, and that it’s our common native language.  I had just never used it with him.

And then this brought up a unique and interesting sentiment.  He wanted to hear me, and that meant speaking English.  I can guess that my native tongue was the one in which Paul believed my identity to lie.  I know that it felt like I was setting aside a sort of mask when I switched to English with him.  I even felt a little called-out… as though I had been hiding somehow, and it had been behind German.  The real me (I) lay in English, in the English part of me.

Yet, years later, here I am, missing the parts of me that belong to these different languages in which I have lived.  A part of me, true me (I), exists only on German, and others in French, in Spanish, and in Japanese. So much so that the real me (I) is this whole combination of languages – I feel a huge emptiness and feel not myself when I am using only English in my daily life.  I listen to Spanish-speaking radio when I’m in Houston, mostly because I don’t get to use Spanish often enough.  I read every night in French, and trade off an English book for a German one at times for my evening reading, too.  I regularly pull out a Spanish book to read, or my German audiobooks.  And I have noticed that I have been searching for a tolerably satisfying way to have Japanese in my near-daily life, too.  (For now, it has just been the occasional music, and a perpetual repeat of a certain song being stuck in my head.)  When I don’t have them all, it is as though a part of me is missing, and suddenly getting to speak with someone in them, almost reminds me of that mask I was setting aside in Germany with Paul… like I am again setting aside some mask I have been wearing.

Perhaps it is now a mask of monolingualism, pretending that I only speak English, while I long for the world to talk to me in several languages, all the time.

Anyway… I’m exhausted.  And I miss Paul.  He was studying opera, and was a really great guy.  I wonder if he’s been really successful with opera these past several years.  Maybe I can go see him perform one day.  That would be awesome.  🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Normal or normal?

I guess that whatever we are accustomed to having around us, ends up being what feels like “normal” to us.  Like how my life never seems to feel very exciting or special – it has become my experience of “normal”, and therefore can’t seem exceedingly exciting or abnormal to me.  

I regularly feel as though everyone can speak loads of languages, and so I’m nothing but average (or even below average) in that field.  But who are my acquaintances?  Well, we tend to end up spending time with people who, in some way or other, are quite similar to ourselves, do we not?  It is no wonder, then, that I have so many friends who are bi- and multilingual, and who have not only visited but lived in at least one country other than their own.  This isn’t to say, of course, that all of my friends meet this criteria.  Certainly not.  I just happen to have a lot of friends who do.

So, when I have a night like tonight, where my friends and I sound to an on-listener like we can’t seem to pick a language, as we constantly switch around between English (our one common language), French, and Japanese, I all too easily forget that this is not normal in the world.  Sure, it is normal for me and for my life, but that doesn’t mean that everyone does it regularly.  It doesn’t even mean that half the world could do it regularly, even if they wanted to do so.

Or perhaps they could.  I think, nonetheless, that I severely underappreciate my language abilities, by subconsciously expecting that the people who most closely surround me are an average sample of the whole.  What is normal for one person simply is what is around that person in life.  And two people with closely aligned lives might find the same things as one another to be normal.  So, of course the people who are out doing the same things I live to do, tend to see the world in a similar way to how I see it, and hold a subconscious standard of “normal” that is similar to my own.  That’s why our paths cross in the first place – we’re all into* this particular kind of awesome.

Filing a room with awesome people doesn’t mean that they aren’t all still awesome, just because the standard in the room is about equal.  It just means that you have an extra-awesome room that is full of a ton of awesome people.

I guess what I am aiming to say here is that, despite my feeling below-average and utterly “normal” and boring at times, I realize now that I am not viewing things outside of my nearest surroundings (so to speak), and that I realize that I am, in fact, awesome.  And I’m proud and happy about that.

Peace, y’all. ❤
Post-a-day 2017