The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Divided By Common Languages

By: Helen Fields | 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.

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In Their Own Words

By: Cameron Walker | May 4, 2016

Inspired by guest Veronique Greenwood‘s three-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) about learning a foreign language, some of the contributors to LWON volunteered for a week’s worth of essays about their own encounters with the challenges of linguistics.

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This week, we’ve been looking at what it’s like to learn a new language as an adult. Kids seem to pick up languages easily, and I’d always hoped I could give mine a new language when they were young. (So far, my attempts have been less than successful—I spoke my poor excuse for Spanish to my oldest son until he was about two, and he finally said, “Mama, stop talking like that!”)

For some kids, the language they’re learning is more appealing than in my case—so much so that they start losing their native language. That’s what Joana Moscoso and Tatiana Correia learned was happening in the UK with kids whose parents came from Portugal. The two researchers had made the same journey themselves as adults—originally from Portugal, both came to the UK for their PhDs, Moscoso in microbiology, Correia in materials physics.

The two researchers were concerned—they knew that being bilingual could provide many benefits. People who speak more than one language may have greater mental flexibility, have better memories and better ability to concentrate. They also have may have better job opportunities. These researchers didn’t want students to lose their native language—but sometimes, they’d stop speaking to their parents in Portuguese. “They think their home language is obsolete, that it’s only used for boring things like brushing your teeth,” Moscoso says.

So the pair rounded up some colleagues and planned a science class for kids in an afterschool Portuguese class. They designed it to be like speed dating with a scientist; kids would get a chance to talk with every scientist about their research. They’d make it feel casual, so kids felt comfortable asking any question they had. And they’d do it all in Portuguese. Continue reading →

Parle français? Read English? ¿Una palabra a la vez? Oy.

By: Richard Panek | May 3, 2016

When my younger son was in high school, my wife and I realized we would need to hire a tutor for his French class. Sometimes I would overhear their lesson, and I would think: He’s hopeless. I didn’t mean that word in a critical or disapproving way. If anything, I invoked it out of empathy. I had been hopeless with high school Spanish. How hopeless? To this day it’s the course I avoid attending in my version of the nightmare where you wind up one credit short of graduation.

I was perhaps less empathetic about my son’s reading habits. His school-issued paperback copies of The Odyssey and King Lear were full of doodles. I printed out an essay I thought he might like—all of two pages long—and left it on the living room coffee table, where it sat unread for months, until I finally surrendered and threw it away. He never read for pleasure. He’s the son of two writers: How dare he not read for pleasure? Your parents are pleasure-givers. Here’s a book. Have some pleasure. Are you experiencing pleasure yet?

One day I decided to accept the fact: His brain just doesn’t work that way. Mine certainly doesn’t. How many times have I felt frustration at the slowness of my progress through a book? How often have I found out after finishing a book or a short story that I’d missed a major plot point? How often—

Oh, wait.

I asked my son if he was a slow reader. Yes, he said. Then I asked him if frustration feeds his disinclination to read for pleasure. Yes, he said.

And then I asked myself: Does a correlation between reading speed and a facility for learning foreign languages actually exist?

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All the Chinese You Need to Take a Shower

By: Veronique Greenwood | May 1, 2016

This is the third and final post in a series about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally (if you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here: part 1, part 2) . Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese.

The character for "study," which appears in the words "student," "university," and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr) — The character for “study,” which appears in the words “student,” “university,” and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)

On Monday evenings, I ride my bike into the leafy faculty quarter of the university and teach four ten-year-olds in English. Very suddenly one night, around 6 pm, I started to hear the particles in their speech. They holler and chatter at each other in Mandarin until I shush them and make them speak English, and now my own knowledge of their language is such that these specific parts of speech jump out at me. Even when I don’t understand the rest of the sentence, they tell me something about what the kids mean.

Particles contain information about the speaker’s desires and expectations—even the tense. They can transform the meaning of a sentence, but they’re simple, single syllables—ne, ba, le, la, among others—and so you can start to pick them out, the same way someone learning English might hear “the,” “a,” and “and” in my words. A “ba” often means that someone is asking for confirmation. A “le” often means they are speaking about something that’s past. A “ne” asks a question about something that’s already been mentioned. A “la” makes an order sound more like a request.

These exist in part because Mandarin uses tones to convey meaning and thus cannot use them to convey emotion or expression quite as easily as English. Instead, a particle climbs on to the end of a statement and gives it the specificity that we would give it with the rising and falling of our voices. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | April 30, 2016

April 25-29, 2016

This week, Veronique Greenwood’s glancing knowledge of Mandarin becomes a daunting challenge, spurred on by some tentative communicative exchanges in China.

Some argue that Shakespeare couldn’t have written some of his plays because the author of the plays knew too much. There’s another explanation: Perhaps he acted like a journalist.

Helen bore witness to the passing of a gigantic snow bank in Washington, DC. Just look at it.

Test yourself: can you tell which of these photos are taken by an eight-year-old? Ann thinks her experiment is a failure (but I got 90%).

Starlings look to half a dozen of their flying mates to coordinate their movements. The result: a murmuration, and bliss for the viewer.

Image: Helen with the remains of her ice pile

Redux: Murmuration. The poetry of the morning walk.

By: Christie Aschwanden | April 29, 2016

This post first ran on January 15, 2013.

This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the sun was shining, and my day never feels quite right without our morning ritual.

And so we pulled on our snow boots, bundled up and headed out the door. The snow was squeaky cold, and the air had a briskness that put a hustle in our strides. Halfway up the hill to the lookout, a loud ruckus. Dave turned to me. “Stop. Shhhh…” We looked at each other. “Hear that?” A lush symphony of bird song. Starlings, from the sound of it. But where?

We looked skyward. Nothing. Upslope, only a crow in a nearby piñon pine. Then I spotted them in our neighbor’s willow trees down below. Starlings, yes. Hundreds of them. The moment I pointed to them, as if on cue, they rushed skyward in unison. The birds formed a rising crescendo, then swooped down, and then up and across the sky, like a ribbon, wrapping around itself.

If nature has ever produced a more perfect thing than the mesmerizing beauty of this starling swarm, I have yet to encounter it. No other phenomenon has ever stopped me in my tracks quite like this, made me forget everything else in the world except the brief moment of grace unfolding before me.

A flight of starlings in concert is called a murmuration. Murmuration–even the name is poetic. Continue reading →

Pictures with an 8-Year Old: A Failure of Citizen Science

By: Ann Finkbeiner | April 28, 2016

I’ll start this at the beginning. Recently Friend of LWON, Chris Arnade, posted a picture of himself — which itself was not unusual because Chris is, among other things, a photographer and posts pictures of himself right along with pictures of other people. But the picture was unusual. Chris is a very serious guy and always looks it. This recent picture, though, was something else.

Here are the pictures. The one on the left is the serious Chris, taken by another adult, the way I’m used to seeing him. But the picture on the right, the recent one? “Chris!” I said. “Look how delighted you look!”

“The picture was taken by an 8-year old,” he said.

I had an epiphany. I’d take a bunch of pictures of people, an 8-year old would take pictures of the same people. The ones I took would look sternly grownup. The ones the 8-year old took would look like they’d seen full-on blooming lilacs for the first time.

I couldn’t find an 8-year old, but Nora was nearby and she’s 10 — close enough. Then oh joy! Cameron generously said she’d add data; she has a 7-year-old. We conducted citizen science. Continue reading →

The Biography of an Ice Pile

By: Helen Fields | April 27, 2016

2016-01-23 08.35.06 I love snow and cold (although I hate ice) and, for the most part, this winter did not come through for me.

But there was one exception: a blizzard in late January that dumped a couple of feet of snow on Washington. I ran around in the snow with dogs and did snow angels and appreciated, yet again, living in an apartment where snow removal is someone else’s problem. Indeed, snow removal was a big problem for a lot of people. It took a long time; the commute was messed up for days after the snow stopped.

At the transit center in Silver Spring, Md. a whole lot of snow had to be removed from the top deck of the concrete structure. Someone apparently thought the best thing to do with all of that snow was to dump it over the side, onto a bit of land that was originally supposed to hold a hotel or something but is currently holding a very steep hill and a lot of weeds.

And that is where our story begins. Continue reading →