Language Confusion Buster: ‘Dried Fruit’ Is Not What You May Think It Is

On my arrival in Spain, I noticed that many local shops featured the words “Frutos Secos”, which, directly translated, means ‘dried fruit’, on their signage. It did make me wonder whether dried fruit was the equivalent of hot cakes in Spain, or why else would a little shop keeper spend his hard earned money on advertising this on his (surely quite expensive) shop sign? Here’s a corner shop close to my house in Toledo:

Whatch out! This is the most expensive corner shop in the Western hemisphere. Do not go in there. Ever. Not even for an emergency pack of chewing gum. You’ll come out with the shirt ripped off your bleedin’ back, missing an arm and a leg. (O un riñon, si eres español.)

But my bafflement over dried fruits’ powers of customer attraction isn’t really what I was going to talk about. (Besides, I’ve since figured out that “Frutos Secos” is a generic term for this kind or establishment, to which, in the UK, we’d refer to as a “corner shop”.) So, as I discovered a few months down the line, frutos secos are not what an English (or a German) speaker would naturally assume them to be, i.e. this stuff:

No, for a Spanish speaker, frutos secos is this:

Dried fruit, it turns out, is “fruta deshidratada”, which, at least, is not totally counter-intuitive.

The conundrum was not quite resolved, however. There was yet another twist in store for me.

If frutos secos means nuts, I wondered, I  what the hell are “nueces”?? I I took that to signify nuts. Nuez/Nueces sounds just like nut/nuts and Nuss/Nüsse in English and German, respectively.

Una nuez

Well, it turns out that nueces, in fact, are walnuts, and not nuts in general. Up to that point, I’d been referring to all kinds of nuts as nueces. Ooops.

As to the difference between fruto and fruta: Fruta is what you will find in a fruit bowl, while fruto is a more general term describing not only nuts and inedible fruits produced by all manner of plants, but also the “fruits” of one’s labours (el fruto de tus labores), the fruit of Mary’s blessed womb aka Jesus (el fruto de tu vientre), etc.

Have you been using a word in another language incorrectly for ages, only to discover much later that it was, in fact, one of those treacherous ‘false friends’?

Prepositions – So Much Depends Of Them

Nine out of ten times, when a sentence just doesn’t make any flippin’ sense, even though you know all the words, it’s because of the evil workings of a preposition.

Compared to the masses of verbs, nouns and adjectives that exist in a language, the number of prepositions is miniscule.  European languages have, on average, what, maybe thirty…? And yet, using those pesky little words correctly takes longer to learn than anything else. It’s also the first thing that goes when you lose regular contact with a language.

English phrasal verbs (which are, essentially, verbs married to prepositions) are infamous for making students despair. Take the verb “to look” as a random example: Look at, look for, look out for, look about, look over, look after… the preposition completely changes the meaning every time. English has thousands of phrasal verbs, including colloquial and regional variations that don’t appear in any dictionary.

To make matters worse, many have several, often completely different meanings depending on context. “To make out” is a prime example. Adding the preposition “on” to the phrasal verb “to go down”, gives it a completely new dimension… 😉

Other languages also have phrasal verbs, and plenty of them, Spanish being no exception. It took me ages to figure out, for example, that “dar con”, which literally translates as “to give with”, actually means “to find/encounter”. Makes no intuitive sense whatsoever!

When people are taught German as a foreign language, they are told that specific prepositions often correspond to specific cases, e.g. “mit” (with) always takes the dative. So, if you don’t know the correct preposition to start with, chances are you’ll get all the noun and adjective endings wrong as well, resulting in an irreparably screwed up sentence.

Even in fairly closely related languages like English and German, prepositions do not correspond. In German, you give “after”, not “in” and you depend “of” someone or something. Not all prepositions exist in every language, making translations cumbersome and learners tear their hair out.

It is generally drilled into students to learn prepositions in conjunction with a set of common verbs, e.g. “to concentrate on” and “to insist on” are a couple of classic examples, where only one preposition is viable, but in most cases, are just too many different possibilities for all of them to be learnt by rote.

In short, the only way to get your prepositions down to a pat is by knowing what sounds ‘right’ and what doesn’t. And this, as some of you will have found out, takes aeons of exposure. In fact, I’d say, that it’s impossible to achieve unless you’ve actually been living for years and years and years in a country where the language is spoken.

I Hate Verbs

Spanish is a verb-driven language, I remember reading that somewhere. No kidding. I’m looking at a verb table right now, and every Spanish verb has about 50 versions (not including the compound tenses). English has … what… like…three… or six…?

Basic stuff still has me stumped. In particular, the many baffling incarnations of very common irregular verbs. One quick example to illustrate: Take the verbs dar (to give) and decir (to say). They look very different in the infinitive, right? Apart from starting and ending with the same letter, they seem to have sod all in common, and you’d be unlikely to confuse them. But you wait…

If you want to say “tell me!”, decir suddenly morphs into “dime!” (imperative) or “digame!” (subjunctive), and when you want to say “I gave” and “we gave” then “dar” turns into “di”  and “dimos“, respectively. All over sudden, dar becomes decir‘s evil twin! This kind of thing happens all over the place, and even after over a year and a half in Spain, confusion abounds.

But I’m not alone. One of my longstanding language exchange partners mentioned a couple of days ago how her three-year-old son was getting most of the verbs wrong by tarring all of them indiscriminately with the regular-verb brush. That poor little blighter will soon enough have the last remaining shred of common sense corrected out of him.

And yes, those red flecks on the white cover are, in fact, blood.

Over the years, I’ve been poring for countless hours over gaps in textbooks demanding to be filled with the correct form of a verb. I’ve never enjoyed it, not even one little bit. It was a necessary evil. And despite all this effort, these endless permutations refuse to stick to my Teflon-plated brain.

I’ve about 90+% comprehension at this point, and I can discuss complex topics, but I still grind to a halt regularly while struggling to produce the right flippin’ version of a verb.

I had not foreseen this. A couple of years ago, when I decided to move to Spain, I thought that by now, it would just be a matter of accumulating more vocab and fine-tuning my diction. The biggest challenge, I thought, would be hitting the right prepositions, which, speaking from my previous experience with English, takes several years.

I know there’s no point complaining about how hard it is to learn a new language, especially when your standards are high. They are not going to change it for me.

If you’ve been dipping into this blog for a while, you will know that I made a start on Portuguese recently. My heart sinks every time I contemplate the verb nightmare stretching out in front of me.

But after this, I’m done, you hear me – DONE. I’ll never touch another language with flippin’ mutating verbs ever again. Japanese it is for me. It may take me a hundred years to get to grips with their impenetrable three-script writing system, but at least Japanese verbs don’t transmogrify all over the place.

Coming up (eventually): A rant about prepositions. Brace yourselves.

My Last Portuguese Class – A Debrief

Today I had my last Portuguese class. There were only two of us left, which meant that my first excursion into the territory of one the most melodious of Latin-based languages folded due to lack of numbers.

I already fessed up in a previous post that language classes are not exactly my forte. And this time, I had the (for me) novel experience of being taught almost exclusively in the target language from the very beginning, rather than via another language I’ve got at least a reasonable command of.

I can’t say I liked it. Not being able to understand the teacher’s explanations is surely the most frustrating experience on Earth, right after trying to suck water from a bowl of wet sand. I would have gotten way more out of this experience, had the teacher switched more readily to Spanish to drive home the salient points. Instead, she was bent on reiterating the same unintelligible monologues over and over again. She may as well have been harping on at me in Tagalog. Not what I call a satisfying classroom experience.

I realise that a lot of people learn English that way, because TEFL teachers, by and large, rarely speak the languages of the countries where they do their teaching. I’ve often wondered how this works exactly, especially with students who are starting from base camp. Do they all just point at each other and make animal noises? And why isn’t the TEFL teacher murder rate on a par with that of nurses in psychiatric hospitals…? So many questions…

I’ve had Spanish classes in 98% Spanish before, but I was already at intermediate level, so it wasn’t such a struggle. I don’t think that monolingual language classes are an ill-fated concept full-stop, but for total rookie, it’s pants. How do other language learners feel about this? Or, for that matter, TEFL teachers? If any of you with experience at either end of the beast would care put forward an opinion, I’d sure love to hear it.

Despite wanting to bang my head repeatedly against the razor-wired end of the Wailing Wall, it was still worth it. I knew no Portuguese at all when I turned up for my first class at the beginning of March, and now I know *something*. That’s the nice thing about starting from zero, I suppose, you can only stand to gain.

This is by no means the end of Project Portuguese. I’m going to continue studying on my own accord, there’s plenty of material on the interwebs. Any suggestions about good learning materials are very welcome, please drop me a comment.

We’ve all survived the experience… that calls for a round of cakes!

Project Multilingual: Two Timing Troubles

I’m worried that it’s too early to be doing this… too soon into a new relationship.

I know that some of you are getting on top of two, three or even four(!) at the same time, and I do wonder how people are managing this.

I moved to Spain primarily to get to grips with Spanish. I’d been studying the language before, for years, on and off, and I knew that I was never going to reach a (for me) satisfactory level of competence without actually going to live in a Spanish-speaking country.

So I did. And I put in a lot of effort to improve. For the first nine months, I took classes to plug the remaining grammar gaps. I listen to teaching podcasts every day, and to the radio, for hours and hours. I engage in 1-2-1 intercambios (language exchange) sessions with a number of people every week. I spend time with Spanish friends. I’ve just started reading novels in Spanish, which, thanks to the integrated dictionary on my Kindle, is going quite well. I’m not yet where I want to be with it – progress is a lot slower than I expected.

I’ve harboured an interest in Portuguese since my teenage years, and it was next up on my list of languages to tackle, but, to be honest, I’d rather have waited another year for my Spanish to solidify a bit more. However, an opportunity arose to go to Brazil for a few months with a friend at the end of this year. I don’t want to miss out, and I also want to get the most out of that experience, so I started learning Brazilian Portuguese a month ago, from zero.

Pronunciation is tricky. To stop it from sounding like Spanish, I figured, after watching a whole slew of podcasts on the matter, you have to speak like a 13-year-old Italian boy with a stonking cold whose voice is breaking. The fact that Portuguese is so close to Spanish is helpful and confusing all at the same time.

But grammar is grammar is grammar, in any language. Suddenly, I find myself once again filling in endless gaps on photocopied pages, requiring the right articles, pronouns, verb tenses. Because there is no other way, at least in the beginning. I’d only just left this phase behind me. (In Spanish.) It’s like the terrible twos all over again.

At the moment, I’m trying to do a bit of Portuguese each day, spending maybe between 20 minutes to an hour, and, overall, I am enjoying it … but…. I do feel terribly guilty for not investing that time in my Spanish instead. Even before starting on this new language, I felt that I wasn’t giving my Spanish the attention it deserved.That’s because I have to do other important stuff like work for a living, and for that, my head needs to be in English mode.

Any tips from anyone studying multiple languages at the same time…? At some point, I’d quite like to get back to my Japanese, which I abandoned four years ago… but that would be totally crazy, right?!?

Inauspicious Beginnings of a Wanna-Be Polyglot

I’ll be forever envious of people lucky enough to have grown up in environments that fostered multilingualism. I was dealt a rather poor hand on that front. Nobody in my family had had any significant exposure to foreign languages, nor had anyone continued their schooling past the age of 14. Sure, they supported the concept of learning enough to get a ‘good’ job that would earn you a steady living, but education was not seen as an end in itself, and the kinds of  professional jobs requiring higher education were not for ‘people like us’.

Shunted onto the wrong track aged ten
Things started going pearshaped for the dormant linguist in me when I completed primary school. At that stage, your scholastic performance thus far determined whether you had above average academic ability or not. If so, you then had the choice of attending a certain kind of school which would eventually lead you to university, and in line with this aim, it also offered high quality foreign language teaching. I had the right grades, but unfortunately, none of my friends did, and when I asked my parents what to do, I was told that it was up to me. Well, when you’re ten, you just want to be with your friends, and I was no different. Back then, the German education system was rigid as hell, and there would be no coming back from that ill-fated decision.

Like all German pupils at that time, I started learning English as a second language aged 11. And I liked it! But we only had English lessons a couple of hours a week, with teachers who, despite being well qualified as teachers, would probably have struggled to hold a decent conversation in English in a real life setting. Some were downright incompetent. I remember one particularly hopeless individual whose ‘lessons’ consisted of making us copy grammar chapters from the text book into our exercise books. Years later, I learned that she had killed herself. Twenty years too late, I remember thinking when I read about it in the paper.

French foiled, Russian GO!
When I was 14, the school gave each of us the choice to study either French or IT.  My father convinced me to opt for computing, as he thought this was going to be more useful in the future. I could see his point, but it turned out to be a complete waste of time. My heart wasn’t really in it,  and we had to share one computer between three people. I didn’t learn squat, and promptly gave it up in the coming year. By then, I had missed the French train 😦

Something else did come up, however: Russian. Ironically, it was offered by the neighbouring school that I could have been attending, had I not made that crappy decision a few years back. My Dad, supportive of my linguistic exploits as ever, refused to give me the money for the book I needed. It was 14 bucks 80, the price label will be forever etched into my brain. My aunt bought it for me, and I spent a couple of glorious years learning a few scraps of Russian on Friday afternoons.

Miraculously, my parents did fork out so I could go on a school trip to Moscow in the spring of 1988 with my Russian class

English boost
In the meantime, it had dawned on me that I wasn’t going anywhere with my English. Classes at school consisted of drumming in grammar and vocabulary by rote. There was no opportunity to practice either speaking or listening. Bizarrely, the school had an expensive ‘language lab’ into which we were ushered once a year, to stare in reverence at the booths equipped with headphones and mics. Nobody did anything in there the rest of the time.

How the hell was I ever going to learn to talk and understand spoken English?!? Something had to be done. Luckily, I had managed to get myself a job babysitting for some neighbours. The mother of my two charges was a lovely, educated woman from South Carolina, who could clearly see all of my life’s frustrations. A deal was struck. I would help her son with his German homework in exchange for English conversation lessons. We remain good friends to this day.

Around the same time, I developed an interest in learning Spanish and Portuguese, but there were only evening classes available in a town just a few miles away. I could have gotten myself there on the bus, but not back home again – there was no public transport after 7pm in the Bavarian outback. I asked my father if he would collect me, but making a 20 minute round-trip once a week was just too much of an imposition.

Scuppered one last time
At 16, my full-time schooling (geared towards producing paper-shuffling office monkeys) came to an end. It was decision time once again.

What I really wanted to do at this point was to get into a specialist language school so I could train as a translator. One small problem… there was only one state-funded school within geographic reach, and it had an entrance exam. I was competing with people who had gone to the ‘right’ school, studied English for three years longer than I with far superior teaching. I sat the exam, but it was futile… I failed.

There was also a private school I could have attended, charging a fee of 800 bucks per annum, which was well within my family’s financial means. (I calculated once that my father spent three times that much on cigarettes each year). But of course, he refused to spend a dime on something he deemed to be a complete waste of time. (I.e. any kind of further/higher education for girls.)

Being a minor with no accessible funds of my own, I had little choice but to take on a mindnumbing but ‘secure’ office job. This entailed attending school once a week for the three longest years of my life – a hallmark of Germany’s famed dual-track education system – where I was bombarded with more boring tosh, like how to file alphabetically and enter numbers into an accounts ledger. This being Germany, there was an exam to pass at the end. Two days after taking that blasted exam, on 15 July 1991, I was on a plane to the UK to start a job kindly arranged by the kind people I’d been babysitting for and who had taught me the basics of English conversation. Oh yes, we had been busy plotting my escape.

It was another decade before I actually saw the inside of a university, but I had flown the coop, in direction of an English-speaking country! That was good enough for now.

(As an aside, I am a smidgen consoled by the fact that I did grow up ‘somewhat’ bilingual. My native language, if you will, is Bavarian, a dialect of German that is virtually unintelligible to people from outside the region. I even met somebody from my neck of the woods in Toledo where I live now, the owner of a small bar, and every time I walk in, he insists on speaking Bavarian, because there’s nobody else in town who can indulge him.)

 

You may also be interested in my specialist language blog, see here: http://multilingualbychoice.blogspot.com

 

 

Project Trilingual: I Can Reach The Handle Now!

This Spanish learning business does make me want to bang my head against the wall, repeatedly, morning noon and night. But sometimes, the ghost of Cervantes turns in his grave – either in despair or with mercy, it’s hard to tell which – and tosses me a scrap of hope. I’ve talked before about acknowledging the little successes, and I remain committed to posting them, no matter how piffling.

So, a couple of days ago, I went to the Museo Sorolla in Madrid with an old friend visiting from Germany. (Joaquin Sorolla Bastida was a Spanish Impressionist painter, born in 1863). We asked for audio guides, available only in English and Spanish, which was a bit inconvenient for my friend. As for me, there I stood, in front of the desk, dithering for several minutes over which one to go for. In the end, I opted for Spanish. As we trailed through the building, I kept pressing the litte buttons that explained the wonderful paintings, and… to my amazement, I understood everything.

Why did I even hesitate to ask for the Spanish audio guide? Well, only a few months ago, listening to guided tours in Spanish was a supreme effort. I understood maybe 30-40% if I was lucky. Thanks to “operation radio”, however, I no longer have problems with comprehension.

Curiously, at the point of choosing the audio guide, my conscious mind hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that my listening skills had improved greatly since my last tour. With hindsight, it seems silly now that I thought I might struggle with the Spanish audio guide, when I manage to understand just about everything else – people talking to me, films, the TV, etc. I guess, my initial doubts were like those of a kid looking wistfully at the doorhandle it couldn’t reach the last time it tried, not realising that it had, in fact, shot up a couple of inches in height since then.

The steps leading up to the entrance of Sorolla’s villa, now a museum

And a close-up, coz the tiles are soooo pretty 😉

Project Trilingual: Feeling Chuffed About The Little Successes

I usually whine on about how hard this language learning malarkey is, how frustrated I am and that I need to do better.

As everybody who’s been through this process knows, it’s impossible to get a sense of your own progress on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

So, more often than not, it’s other people commenting on your level of linguistic competence which triggers the realisation that you might actually be getting somewhere, and I’ve had a couple of heartening pronouncements from unbiased strangers recently.

The first one tumbled out of the mouth of a friend of a friend when the three of us were having a drink together. The guy (who I hadn’t met before) asked me how many years I’d been living in Spain. That’s right, he said “YEARS”. I realise I’m willfully  misconstruing his choice of words into compliment on my Spanish, but,  I reckon, if he thought I’d been in Spain for a long time, then my Spanish must be getting quite good, right? On the other hand, he may have such rock-bottom expectations of foreigners acquiring a serviceable level of the language that he was impressed by me ordering a a bottle of tonic water.

A slightly less ambiguous appraisal from another complete stranger came last Tuesday, during a flight form Madrid to Miami. I got chatting to a chirpy Nicaraguan lady in the seat across the aisle from me. Although I’m unlikely to meet her again, I shall nevertheless love that woman for ever and ever, because she asked me if I was Spanish! Oh my, if I’m managing to fool a native Spanish speaker into thinking that, I must be making some serious headway!

As an aside, even though I’m not in Spain at the moment, Project Trilingual is by no means on hold. Key West is a stone’s throw from Cuba, and the island (the whole of Florida, really) is full of Cubans and other Latin Americans. Spanish is spoken everywhere, and I keep listening to people in the street speaking it in their various regional accents, and I don’t miss any opportunities to converse in Spanish with the staff in shops and restaurants. It’s great to be able to understand what’s going on around me. Only a year ago, this would have been impossible, and I find it very satisfying 🙂

Getting More Out Of Language Exchanges

The start of a new year lends itself to doing a bit of strategy revision on up-and-running projects. In this vein, I’ve already told you in a recent post that I’d committed to reading more in order to crank up my Spanish vocabulary.

Besides tackling the reading issue, what’s also been on my mind is that I could be working my intercambios (language exchange sessions) a lot harder than I currently am.

Like most people, I’m a bit lazy. I turn up for my intercambios, we have a chat over coffee or a glass of wine. I might even scribble some notes on loose bits of paper. Usually, both parties end up learning something, and we go away happy, mission accomplished. Well, sort of.

It would a big difference, I’m convinced, if I actually prepared for these sessions, for example by keeping a notebook throughout the week, jotting down specific questions and queries which come up while I’m working on my Spanish by myself, i.e. during reading, studying grammar, working through podcast material or listening to the radio.

It would also help if I made a specific point of practicing new vocabulary and expressions that I’ve come across during self-study by foisting it onto a native speaker.

I do actually keep a notebook for recording new words and expressions, and I occasionally re-read them, e.g. while waiting for the bus, but so far, I have not been making a conscious effort to practice the new material with a live victim, and I never retain what I’ve heard or read just the once. This strikes me as a major missed learning opportunity.

I think my laziness is down to having a virtually unlimited supply of native speakers at my disposal. It’s one of the paradoxes of human nature that we often don’t fully appreciate what we’ve got when there’s an abundance of it.

There’s a myriad of uncertainties about grammar and vocabulary usage swirling around in my head, but I fail to resolve them efficiently. I just take it for granted that these questions will eventually resolve themselves in time,  by virtue of the continued exposure I get just by living in Spain. And they will, but I could make progress so much faster if I made a smidgen more of an effort in honing my approach.

So, the plan is this: I’ll be keeping a notebook dedicated to language queries, taking care to write them down as and when they occur, ready to be inflicted upon the next intercambio. Watch this space…

Project Trilingual: The Reading Challenge – No More Chickening Out!

It’s that time of year when New Year’s resolutions run riot. For me, forcing out valiant resolves for no other reason than it being the start of a new calendar year is not the way to go. However, I find that there’s never a bad time to check in on projects that are already up and running, to assess my progress, hone my focus and maybe do a bit of tweaking.

‘Project Trilingual’, aka as learning Spanish, is my biggest WIP right now, and one area, where I definitely need to step up my efforts is reading. Because… frankly… I’m barely doing any.

This may sound paradoxical, because I love, love, love reading. I love it. Besides being tremendous fun, it’s by far the most effective way of expanding one’s vocab. Reading has always been a favourite leisure activity of mine, and in my twenties, I even had a job where I got PAID to read books! I worked as a Braillist for the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind), and so my job was transcribing books into Braille.

During the six years I worked there, I read books that I’d never have picked off the shelves in a bookshop or a library in a million years, like advanced (for me) Mathematics, triathlon training guides, Teach Yourself Albanian (containing the oft-used sentence “how many stalactites are in this cave?” – I’m not making this up!), Aran knitting, and the Koran. I don’t think there’s a subject area I haven’t read at least one book about.

I’ve consumed hundreds (maybe even thousands…?) of books in English and German, but, so far, I’ve shied away from those scary Spanish books. Sure, I’ve been doing some reading, but it’s been limited to short texts, like teaching podcast transcripts and the occasional article, plus dull day-to-day stuff like phone bills and pesky letters from my bank.

The sticking point is that I primarily read for pleasure, and having to stop to look up every fifth word does my head in. But there comes a time when you’ve got to push beyond your comfort zone in order to make progress and get to where you want to be. And I’m at that threshold how. In order to get better, and be able to read Spanish books for enjoyment, which has always been my goal, I need to step up my reading, even it it hurts right now.

So, here’s the task I’m setting myself: Besides my daily dose of podcasts, I’m going to read at least one article in Spanish and/or a couple of pages of a Spanish book every day. This may not sound like much of a challenge, but I know I can commit to this. It’s an achievable goal, and it’s more than I’m doing now. It’ll get easier, less painful and more rewarding as I go on, which will make me want to read more.

To make it as easy as possible for myself, I’ve downloaded some books in Spanish and a bilingual dictionary onto my e-reader,  so all I have to do as I stumble from one unknown word to the next is to tap on it and the definition/translation comes up. No tedious thumbing through dictionaries like in the old days, nor typing words into a search engine. Really, I have no bloody excuse!!!

I’ll be leaving this one till last, methinks…