Redux: Lost in the Cloud

By: | May 16, 2016

This post first ran on September 26, 2012.My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the letter Mom describes for her sister the tiny Eiffel village where we’d taken up residence. The letter’s contents are interesting in their own right, but its three-dimensional nature is what struck me first.

The letter was a physical object — a piece of paper that she’d scribbled upon and then neatly folded into an envelope and sent across the ocean to her sister in Kansas. It was a relic from a bygone age. In the age of email and text messaging, most correspondence no longer lives on scraps of linen that you can feel in your hands, but in the “cloud,” that nebulous modern ether. In fact, the letter Mom sent me was not the object itself, but a scan of it. I read it first on my phone, though I felt compelled to print it on paper for the second reading. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 14, 2016

shutterstock_336230168

May 9-13

This week, Richard set out to prove, unscientifically, that slow readers are slow language learners. When he failed, he realized his method was scientific after all — just not in the way he expected.

Jennifer discovered she was just fine with being woken up in the wee hours by hysterical laughter, so long as it was coming out of a particularly charming Australian bird.

Science fiction writer H.G. Wells was a bit less charming, Michelle writes, when working with “Darwin’s Bulldog.” But at least his writing critiques came in the form of a poem.

Meanwhile, drinking water treatment is essential when people pack tightly together, even in the remote Peruvian jungle. But the fix that saves kids’ lives doesn’t have to be techy and expensive, reassuring news for mom and regular guest poster Emma Marris.

The secret to the happiness of a one-eyed amphibian in a mayonnaise jar? Maximize her frog existence — by finding her some, er … friends, says guest poster Chris Arnade.

Kookaburra image from Shutterstock.

Guest Post: Pip, Part Two

By: | May 13, 2016

Pip too big(Pip too big for jar)

One year ago I rescued a one-eyed tiny frog, a spring peeper, from my pool.  Since then I have gone to lengths to not only keep it alive, but also to try and make it happy, as if that is something that is doable, rational, or admirable.

I have long been into frogs, and when I moved into my new home surrounded by marshes, I was attracted by the intense noise of thousands of tiny spring peepers chirping, confused why something so loud was so hidden.

When I found the tiny frog in my pool, it was the first time I had seen one. Excited to study it, and worried about his ability to survive with only one eye, I built a small terrarium from an old mayonnaise jar. I placed the jar near my computer, on the desk in my study, and gave him the name of Pip. One I.

My first goal was keeping him alive. Since spring peepers live amongst low lying grasses and mosses of swamps, I collected a small bit of swamp — mud, water, plants — to turn the mayonnaise jar into a familiar eco system.

That also meant catching what spring peepers eat, tiny spiders and insects. I caught bugs around the porch lights, which evolved into raising fruit flies in a jar, which as Pip grew, evolved into catching crickets, which when the winter came, evolved into buying crickets at the pet stores.

It had all started as a scientific curiosity, a silly hobby to pass the time and to bond with my kids, and then it started becoming an obsession. It was absurd, but I started worrying about Pip. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Water in Yomibato

By: | May 12, 2016
Alejo_GHS_5892
Alejo with his arrows, just in case. (c) Glenn Shepard

Last November, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic. (The story is out today). I focused on a group of indigenous people, the Matsiguenka, living inside Manu National Park.

One of these people is Alejo Machipango, a hunter, farmer, and member of the water committee for the village of Yomibato. Alejo is about 32, but I would have guessed his age at 22. He is married and has several kids. He is a jokester. He likes chewing coca, drinking manioc beer. He takes his arrows with him most places, just in case. I saw him shoot at some birds, but never hit one. And he always laughs when he misses.

One day, Alejo takes me to see the spring where Yomibato gets its water. The water system in the village was installed by a charity called Rainforest Flow* between 2012 and 2015.

A few generations ago, the Matsiguenka used to be more dispersed on the landscape. Each family lived apart, and households moved often. The whole community would gather together once a month, on the full moon, and have a big party with manioc beer. But many families decided to move to Yomibato to be near the school and clinic. As the community grew to several hundred, the local river and streams became contaminated with bacteria and waterborne illness became a chronic problem. Continue reading →

Funny Bird

By: | May 10, 2016

 

shutterstock_336230168Here comes dawn. The sky yawns and the sun flicks its lids above the horizon. But just before the lights come up on Virginia’s rolling hills, the sound of morning commences. Can we call it a song? That might be a stretch. There’s a certain musicality to it. You’re no doubt familiar with its silly refrain.

Loud and untidy, cock-a-doodle-doo is an enthusiastic drunkard’s karaoke. It’s also a wake-up alarm in much of the rural U.S. If you’re still asleep when this barnyard bird opens its beak, as you should be, you may start dreaming of rooster soup for breakfast. Few of us still have to get up to milk the cows, Cock, and regardless, your rise-and-shine call is awfully brash for a first act.

In parts of Australia, dawn has a very different theme song. Meet the kookaburra, specifically Dacelo novaeguineae. As a visitor, I found it hard to be irritated at the sound of hysterical laughter, even as a 5 a.m. alarm. These stocky, big-beaked birds laugh every day like clockwork around dawn and dusk—plus now and then in between—and they do so as a family. It’s kind of charming: One starts to crack up and then the rest join in, as if just getting the joke.

A not-a-morning-person Aussie may beg to differ on the charm thing. The dawn racket is probably just damn annoying. But as a tourist, I woke up extra early and sat by the window in the dark, waiting for the cackling to begin.

Continue reading →

You call that science?

By: | May 9, 2016

big idea

Last week I invited readers to participate in a little experiment. I’d had what I thought might be a big idea: a possible correlation between rate of reading speed and facility with learning foreign languages. My younger son and I are slow in both categories. My older son and my wife are quick in both categories. I had taken a few informal polls—friends, students—and found a correlation rate of 100 percent. Now I asked readers of LWON. The sampling wouldn’t be scientific, I acknowledged, but I still wanted to know whether, in their experience, the correlation held true.

I was wrong in more ways than one.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 7, 2016

a row of dictionaries on a shelfMay 2 – 6, 2016

Guest Veronique Greenwood’s final post in her series about learning Chinese ends with triumph: she not only argues with a Chinese cab driver, she wins.

Meanwhile the rest of the LWONers were inspired, got into the act, and voila! ecco! ¡mira! a whole Week of Learning Languages posts!

Richard proposes a grand theory: maybe the ability to learn languages is related to the ability to read fast.  He’s got an N of 14, and the commenters add 14 more.  It’s getting interesting in there, though no simpler.

Cameron found a program that encourages those pesky bilingual kids who won’t talk their home language, only their school language, by introducing them to scientists who talk only their home language.

Helen has learned a lot of languages, which means she has a lot of cultures in which she can be confused, awkward, and rude.  The comments get interesting again, this time about when to use polite “you” and when to use informal “you.”

Jessa’s Canada, which has two official languages, once considered a third, Gaelic.  A fifth of the Canadian senators spoke it but they decided it was too mythopoetic to be official.  And Gaelic in Canada died.

 

Divided By Common Languages

By: | May 5, 2016

a row of dictionaries on a shelf

I learned a lot of languages in my teens and 20s. I say “learned,” but don’t expect fluency. You shouldn’t try to have a very complicated conversation with me in any of them today. But there have been points in my life when I had dear friends with whom I only spoke Japanese or Norwegian. I can buy a watch in French and have occasionally exchanged very basic information in Spanish. Once I made a phone call in Italian—and the taxi showed up the next morning. At the right time!

But I’m not one of those people who can show up in a country, hang around in bars and youth hostels, and somehow magically “pick up” the language. All of these were pounded into my brain through large amounts of time spent in classrooms, going through flashcards, writing out sentences, memorizing dialogues, and so on.

All of that classroom-based learning meant that I often knew a lot, without really understanding how people really use these languages in the real world, and particularly how they avoid offending each other.

Continue reading →