Month: July 2008

Surprising Foreign Language Helps

4th Friday, so it’s an education-related topic. I originally started this article for my homeschooling blog, but never got around to finishing it. I’m putting it here because I think that plenty of non-homeschooling (and non-any-kind-of-schooling) readers may be interested as well. So many reasons to want or need to learn a foreign language.

***

In teaching the kids French, and in toying around with assorted languages on my own (I’m purely a hobbyist: I love to study languages, but I am only competent in the two), I’ve stumbled on a handful of little language-learning helps that don’t get much press. I wanted to share them, in the hopes that they could be of use to others.

1. The Joys of Bad Latin Last summer when I first began my long slow effort to learn Latin, I picked up a copy of a Latina Christiana CD at a used book fair. It was a bit surreal, hearing Latin spoken in a light southern accent. I imagine a meticulous homeschooling mother living in the suburbs Charleston, sitting in her tidy living room and calling out vocabulary words. Fitting, of course, for ecclesiastical Latin, the epitome of second languages – it’s supposed to be used by foreigners, why try to hide your inner barbarian?

I agree, of course, that a language program ought to include instruction on the correct (native) pronunciation; but there are times when it is helpful to hear that foreign language spoken by someone with *your* accent. The reason is that your ear identifies the sounds better. If you are having trouble hearing where one word ends and another begins, or telling whether that was an “r” or an “l” in the middle of that word, this method helps. Especially so in cases when reading the language is difficult, such as for young children.

With my kids I usually give them the normal (native) pronunciation of the word first. If they look at me funny and repeat back something horribly off-base, I give them the word again with a solid american accent, so they can clearly differentiate each sound. We go back to the native pronunciation once they have a better idea what they are trying to say.

2. Bad English: More Useful than You Knew Now it is painful to hear a language mangled. Even more importantly, learning good pronunciation and intonation is essential if you want people to actually understand you. So the second helpful technique is the exact opposite of the first: Listen to your own language (probably English, if you are reading this) spoken by someone who has a heavy accent in the foreign language you are trying to learn. [Ahem: you want a real fluent speaker of the language, not your dearly beloved doing a bad stage accent.] This trains your ear to be able to distinguish the sounds of the foreign language, and gives you a feel for the pace and intonation of the language. You can start learning the sound of the foreign language as spoken fluently, long before you are able to understand whole conversations. Bonus: What trains your ear trains your mouth, as well.

A series that does this is the Bonjour Les Amis videos for children. Not a perfect program, and the style of presentation would be frustrating to some types of learners — but its great strength is that the narrator speaks his English in a powerfully-Parisian accent. A good choice for accent-training as a supplement to whatever else you are using. Presumably the Hola Amigos series does the same, but I have not yet checked them out (our local public library carries both).

[Keep in mind that if you are trying to a learn a language spoken by residents of your own town, you can probably find real live people who would like to practice their English with you. Not that spending an hour with a DVD is somehow inferior to spending an hour with a real person . . . ]

3. Partial Immersion Around here a popular source homeschool-inferiority-complex are the outstanding academic programs available at some of our public schools. Several of our elementary schools have started early-years foreign-language-immersion programs. The children spend half their school day learning entirely in the second langauge. (The program begins in kindergarten – good timing, since recall that back in the day children used to only go to kindegarten half a day, anyway. So no real loss of academic time, by my reckoning.)

Immersion is a very effective way — I would say, the most effective way — to gain fluency in a foreign language. (You still need to study grammar if you wish to be literate, same as a native speaker). To that end, sometimes you read that families learning a second language ought to have a “French night” or “Spanish night” when only the new language can be spoken.

It’s a lovely idea, except you end up saying, “Paul, I present my friend Stephanie. Would you like a blue pencil? Where is the train to Lyons?” Fine things to say, but what you really wanted was the French for, “No you may not put ketchup in your sister’s water glass, even if she did tell you it is her favorite drink.” (And even if *you* knew the french, your young bartender would swear he heard you say, “yes, go ahead.”)

A more realistic method for those of us who can’t pull off total-immersion is foreign-language wading. Use the language, and use it all the time, but combine it with your own. As in, “Non, you may not put le ketchup in your soeur‘s water glass, even if she did tell you it was her boisson preferée.” Gradually it will contain more foreign vocabulary and syntax, but even at the beginning you can practice using what little you have learned. My kids have learned 98% of what they know from this approach.* (Though Mr. Boy is about to start a regular grammar book, now that he’s able to work from a textbook on his own.)

–> Another advantage to this method over total-immersion is that everyone can participate, even if there are widely-varying skill levels. People who don’t know how to ask for the train to Lyons can still get in a mention about the blue pencil from time to time. (“Please take my crayon bleu out of your mouth.”) Perfectly acceptable to use a word in the foreign language, pause to translate if your listener doesn’t get it, and then keep moving.

So you don’t think I made up this last approach myself: A program that effectively uses partial-immersion is the 10 Minutes a Day series, which are geared towards preparation for tourist travel. If you need to know how to ask directions and buy lunch, this is your course. Lightweight and compact, too. I have some of the older editions, so I can’t tell you how good the CD’s are – back in the day we just used the children’s-encyclopedia-style pronunciation guides in the text, and that got us close enough.

***

So there you have it, three handy techniques that may be helpful in your foreign language learning efforts. Next week we’re back to economics, continuing with the living wage series. Probable topic will be one of those “They can’t really mean that!” bits of the catechism — you know, the ones that make you think the pope must be a communist or something. (Hint: he isn’t.) TBD, though, as my nieces arrive from out of town on Tuesday, and you never know what will happen from there.

*Combined with method #2, my daughter has also learned how to fake the French language, causing her great-grandparents to be inappropriately impressed with her language skills. But I promise grandma, I am teaching her *real* French, too.

Book Review: A Day in a Medieval City

A Day in a Medieval City, Chiara Frugoni

University of Chicago Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-226-26634-6

(Originally published as Storia di un gionro in una citta medievale, Laterza, 1997)

Chiara Frugoni is a professor of medival history at the University of Rome, and this book builds on articles written by her father, Arsenio Frugoni, who died in 1970 and who was also, in his time, a professor of medieval history at the University of Rome.

The book begins with an introduction consisting of Arsenio Frugoni’s original work, which vividly captures the feeling of life in an eleventh or twelfth century Italian city, as well a brief perspective on how it reached its medieval form. Chiara Frugoni adds seven chapters that explore various themes ( “Inside the City” “Childhood Learning”, etc.) in more detail. It seems to me she draws the majority of her examples from the late medieval period (14th and 15th centuries).

The book is written for adults, both in reading level and content, but is very approachable for the hobbyist-historian. Someone who has never studied medieval history at all might be more comfortable reading some more introductory works first, and going to this one as a sort of ‘intermediate’ level text. Detailed endnotes add another layer of depth.

This is a book I can’t help but like, despite several reservations I’ll mention below. The vividness of detail is positively delightful, and with little to none of the gee-whiz snappiness that plagues many popular works on medieval history. For example there is an exploration of the role pigs played in the city (as garbage collectors), including period accounts of pig-related incidents. If you are looking for illustrations of medieval dress and furnishings, there are 153 images available for your perusal.

The most compelling feature of the book is this enormous collection of (period) illustrations it contains, and the explanations that go with them. A typical medieval history book might have a caption that gives the title, author, date and place of creation. Chiara Frugoni puts detailed descriptions in the text of the book, often describing a work panel by panel, to help draw the eye to details the reader would otherwise overlook or perhaps not comprehend at all.

[A note of caution: the illustrations include all aspects of medieval life. Including, say, the torture and execution of captured enemies. Not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, haven’t you always wanted to see a little toilet-related artwork, and the discover the story that goes with?]

One of the weaknesses of the book, though an understandable one, is that it flits back and forth through a broad time frame, even within paragraphs. Topics are arranged by theme (medicine, education, religious belief, etc), and often the entire medieval period is treated in the aggregate. It is helpful to have studied the timeline of medieval history elsewhere, so that you can parse apart references that mix and match centuries.

This is probably one of the first works on specifically Italian medieval history that I’ve read, and I think I probably missed a few jumps between cities as well. I liked the work because it dealt with a region I hadn’t previously studied (most lay-accessible english-language books on medieval “Europe” tend to focus on England), but as a result, I really didn’t have the capacity to know just how alike or different, say, Venice and Milan might have been at the time, and whether an anecdote from one city reliably shed light on the other.

Last in my list of complaints, there were moments when I thought the generalizations needed a little more documentation. For example, at one point the author writes in a passage on women reading, “They used reading stands made for the men of the house (it is difficult to imagine that they were built to meet the particular needs of women)”. Now this may be entirely true, and yet it is a terribly bold statement to make – here we are looking at illustration after illustration of women reading, and we are to believe that in this time and place men didn’t give their wives gifts related to their daily activities? It may well be the case, but any time you accuse whole gender of utter selfishness towards their own family members*, it would seem appropriate to present a bit of evidence.

Likewise there were times when I wanted a little more context for a quotation. I found myself wondering, Is this preacher condemning something that is widely practiced, or is he largely “preaching to the choir”? Is his opinion widely held in the church, or was his sermon preserved because of its unusual nature? I also wish the references to witchcraft had been footnoted – so many excellent footnotes elsewhere had me spoiled, I suppose.

And I think these last examples sum up my mixed feelings towards the work as a whole. It’s a beautiful book, a splendid look into a region that isn’t as well known to English-speaking readers, full of detail after vivid detail about medieval life. But it is a book you would want to read with a bit of salt handy – hold onto the treasure trove of illustrations and anecdotes, but be prepared to want to question some of the interpretation.

|

|

*In our home the accusation tends to be kind of the reverse. “Oh honey, how thoughtful! A reading stand? For me? It’s just what you’ve always wanted!”

Nice post at Darwin Catholic on the habit of thinking large government programs are the best way to handle social problems.

Something that concerns me with large American-government programs, is that we tend to be too rich about it. We spend money we don’t have, hence the huge national debt. I’ve noticed in contrast that when help is provided by immediate friends and neighbors:

1) Recipients expect less, and seek to do more for themselves first

2) Donors have a better sense of what they can and can’t afford

–> this even though the giving can be downright sacrificial.

It is hard to ignore needs that are right in front of us, and easier to evaluate them. When the donor is our friend or neighbor, we are more aware of the sacrifice they are making.

But privately-provided mutual aid depends on us knowing each other. In a society where we don’t really live with each other, such a system simply can’t be. We can’t know each other’s needs, because our lives are too separated. And when our lives are separated from one another, it is harder, logistically, to provide for a need even if we know of it and want to help.

As I understand it, the Amish communities that Darwin cites really do live together. They work, socialize, recreate and worship all with the same people. I don’t think every element of Amish culture needs to be re-created in order for wider American society to depend more on mutual assistance and less on governmental programs. But I do think that particular aspect of community life is absolutely essential.

On a related note, Jim Curly at Bethune Catholic has a post up about Chesterton, automobiles, and small farmers. Another piece of the same puzzle.

Squeamishness

Next week I’m going to be putting up a review of Chiara Frugoni’s book A Day in a Medieval City. One of my cautions about that book is that it includes a number of very graphic images (all period) of the brutality of that era. She focuses on Italy in the late medieval period, and from reports I’ve heard elsewhere, it was a particularly nasty moment in the history of warfare. It was in reading this book that today’s topic came together.

***

When Mr. Boy was preparing for his first holy communion, the question of eucharistic miracles arose. We looked up a few, and as often happens when learning about miraculous events of the past, I found myself asking, “Why no more? Why then and not now?” I contented myself with the standard response, that God will send what is needed to those who need it, and if those miracles were what would really help our faith today we would have it, so on and so forth.

More careful thinking gave me another answer: Because it would make us vomit.

You can believe in the assorted miracles associated with the holy eucharist or not (regardless of whether you are catholic), but the sordid truth is undeniable: we are squeamish people these days, not of the type to find our faith fortified by seeing the sacred host turn into a slab quivering flesh and blood.

For the average American today, exposure to gore tends to be an all or nothing prospect. Either you’re in one of the corpse-tending professions, or you aren’t. Either you deal with raw sewage for a living, or you don’t deal with it all. The occasional small farmer excepted, slaughtering animals is either what you do all day long, or what you expect to be long since completed before ever your dinner makes its way to grocery cart.

When we look at history, it is important to remember this. We who live the sanitized life are the exception, not the rule, to the human experience. We’re kidding ourselves if we think every one else throughout the millenia were the ones who were so disgusting; rather we should remember that our special label in history is going to be “those really wimpy people”.

I sometimes think our underexposure to gore – in particular, the shortage of brutality that we modern americans run into in day to day life – is a good thing. Perhaps because we are more sensitive to the yuckier parts of human existence, we are more sensitive to human suffering, and thus more compassionate, more peaceful, more kind to others. But lately I think not.

Rather I think that we’ve gotten ourselves into the habit of whitewashing. It isn’t that we mind abortion – and now torture – it’s that we don’t want to see images of it. So long as these practices are hidden from view and referred to with euphemisms, the same way we use modern plumbing and clever nicknames to gloss over our excretory functions, we are, as a society, really okay with them. The offensive person is not the one who supports the right to abortion or torture, but the person who has the nerve to discuss what those procedures actually entail.

There is an important distinction here for those of us who enjoy studying history: the acceptance of brutal practices, verses the acceptance of the viewing of that same brutality. If two societies both rejoice in the executing of enemies, it doesn’t make much difference whether the one rejoices at what happens in a discreet prison room far from view, and the other rejoices when it happens in the public square where everyone can see. Either we execute our enemies or we don’t; either we derive a certain pleasure from it, or we don’t; whether or not our stomachs are strong enough to view the actions we so approve is rather besides the point.

If we can be honest with ourselves about our own societal weakness, we can have more compassion on our ancestors and their particular versions intolerable brutality. Not to excuse them, but to see their world through their eyes and at least have a little pity on them, the way hopefully they are having pity on us.

Structures of Justice

The Living Wage – Structures of Justice

From CCC 2425: Regulating the economy soley by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it soley by the law of the marketplace fails social justice, for “there are many human needs which cannot be satisfied by the market.” (CA34). Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended.

In the land of social justice activists, sometimes the terms “just structures” or “structures of justice” gets thrown about. And when I used to hear those terms, good student of classical economics that I was, I would shudder. Because I was certain – certain – that what the speaker really meant was “we should all be socialists”.

Now the sordid truth is that sometimes – sometimes — talk about “structures of justice” really is codespeak for “You should pass this disasterous piece of legislation that sounds good but is completely divorced from reality and will harm us more than it helps us.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And the purpose of this article is to look at what a “structure of justice” might be, and how it fits into a morally sound, economically efficient society.

So what is a “structure of justice”? For our purposes today, a “structure of justice” is anything that is: a) firmly established by society b) that is actually *optional* and c) that changes the balance of the social and economic system.

a) “Firmly established” because it is, after all, a “structure”. It can be a legal structure, such as the tax code or the right to vote, or a physical structure, such as a bridge or a hospital.

b) “Optional”: We often fall into the rut of thinking that because something exists, it must exist. We currently fund the public hospital via property taxes, therefore we *must* fund the public hospital through taxes, and we must have *property* taxes to do it with. Not so. Hospitals can be privately funded, or publicly funded through some other system. Another example, laws against homicide: Now we really must have a law against homicide, nothing optional about that. But we are in no way required to have the exact particular organizational structure and funding system for enforcing that law that currently exists in our community. We could do things differently, and that would . . .

c) . . . change our society. We tend to think of “how things are now” as being “neutral”. No, no. This is the great blind spot of “laissez-faire” economics – the notion that you can somehow have a neutral set of laws and institutions. The various structures we have in place in our society right now are having a constant impact on how our society is – what it is like to live here, who benefits, who suffers, all of that. What we have now is not neutral, and we cannot get to netural. There is no such thing as an economy or a government that is “hands off”, that lets society run its “natural course”. No such thing. Every government, or lack thereof, has its impact.

Here’s an example:

Sidewalks

Where I live, there are almost zero sidewalks. Therefore, children who are zoned to “walk” to the local public school, do not have a safe way of getting to and from school. People who are unable to drive a car for whatever reason (financial, physical, etc) do not have a safe way of getting around town. Even where there are sidewalks, wheelchair (and stroller, and children’s bicycle . . .) accesibility varies from poor to horrendous. How does this change things?:

-Even if you live within walking distance of the place you want to go, you cannot walk there.

-Therefore, you must drive a car.

-Therefore, in order to participate in ordinary social functions such as shopping, working, going to school, visiting friends and relatives, you must be able to afford your own car, and be able to drive it, or find someone to drive it for you.

-Because everyone drives everywhere, obesity and its resulting health problems are becoming widespread. (And because there are few places to walk safely, it can be quite difficult to get out for exercise.)

-Because everyone drives everywhere, pollution is a problem.

-Because businesses must provide large amounts of parking for customers, it is more expensive to operate a business.

-Because businesses must provide large amounts of parking for customers, all the resulting asphalt creates storm water drainage problems.

-Because of all the pavement, our commercial districts tend to be about 10 degrees hotter in the summer than what our normal climate ought to be. Which means we spend more energy on air-conditioning to compensate.

-Because many people must walk (because they cannot drive or cannot afford to drive), even though there is no safe place for them to do so, a certain number of pedestrians are killed every year by motor vehicles. [Though as it happens, in our city, once the proper number of school children have been killed, the local government will, eventually, put in a sidewalk for the survivors.]

Now before you get too excited about my sidewalk rant, let’s reverse it.

Roads:

-Provide us a way to move large quanities of goods efficiently.

-Allows emergency vehicles to access the community quickly and efficiently.

-Allow citizens to travel longer distances with more flexibility than either mass transit or walking and cycling permit.

-Therefore local neighborhoods can remain more stable, even as economic conditions fluctuate – you don’t need to move if you get a job across town, you can reasonably hope to commute. Both spouses can work outside the home without needing to find jobs that are in the immediate area. [Mass transit does this to a certain extent, but tends to favor certain routes, and tends to offer less flexibility than an expansive road network.]

-Makes it possible for institutions [churches, schools, dentists, grocery stores] to set up a single location from which to serve people from a wide geographic area.

You could build your own examples. For example, how does your local property tax structure change the incentives for holding onto different types of real estate? If you had to pay tuition to attend your local public school, would it change your educational choices? [Most of my catholic friends send their children to public schools, which are already ‘paid for’. I balk at high parochial school tuition myself.] What about if there were no public library? [As a homeschooler, I’d be sunk. I live for that place.]

—> The point is this: As a community we tend to fall into the assumption that how things are now is how they have to be, and that any change is ‘extra’. In reality, how things are now is how we are actively choosing them to be.

Now what does this have to do with a living wage?

This: Structures of justice are going to change the living wage. If your workers must own a car in order to get to and from work, you are going to have to pay them more than if they can walk or bike to work. If your local land use policies discourage local agriculture, food prices are going to be a lot more sensitive to fuel prices – which means that when fuel prices go up, the living wage will go up, even if food production itself is not affected.

And in this way, the living wage provides something of a feedback loop. Say, for example, that the local laws lend themselves to concentrating most land ownership into the hands of a few wealthy landowners. Well in that case, employers are going to have to include in their living wage income to cover relatively high rents for their employees’ housing. (Monopolies and oligopolies tend to charge somewhat higher prices.) Which gives employers an incentive to change the local legal structure to encourage more small property owners, so that the wages employers must pay can be lower.

–> When employers are obligated to pay a living wage (whether by law, by social pressure, or by personal moral conviction), a kind of solidarity develops between employer and employee. And then the most basic economic force – personal self interest – can do its job to wake us up to which structures in our society are helping us, and which need to be changed.

July is here, time for me to start putting up new articles.  Since tomorrow’s the first Friday, look for an economics article.  Topic will be “structures of justice”, and will tie into the living wage articles I’ve put up from my old blog.  Forecast is for the article to go up later in the day rather than sooner, so smart money says plan to come read Saturday morning.

See you then.

****

Hey and here’s the tentative schedule of articles for whole month – subject to change, but I don’t think it will:

First Friday, Economics: Structures of Justice

Second Friday, History: Squeamishness

Third Friday, Book Review: _A Day in a Medieval City_ by Chiara Frugoni

Fourth Friday, Education: Surprising Foreign Language Helps