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

Funny Bird

By: Jennifer S. Holland | May 10, 2016

shutterstock_336230168 Here 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.

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You call that science?

By: Richard Panek | May 9, 2016

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.

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The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | May 7, 2016

May 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: 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