ETA: Also! If you have iTunes or another podcasting aggregator, look up KERA's Think (http://www.kera.org/think/) in the next day or two - they're interviewing McWhorter today (as I type this, even!) and it'll be up for download in the next day or so, for about a week.
Ah! This is what one of my professors was talking about with the theory of Celtic languages influencing our grammar and not having the virtually nonexistent influence that most people think. Gosh, it'd be exciting to read a popular book on English written by a linguist with some, you know, faint hint of actual authority to talk about what he's talking about. *makes rude gestures in William Safire's and Bill Bryson's general directions*
I listened to McWhorter's lectures on language (http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600) from the Teaching Company* - he's engaging, funny, and dynamic. His The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language is pretty much the same content as the lectures, though with fewer references to his cat.
* If you're not familiar with the Teaching Company, everything goes on sale at least once during the year, and it's well worth waiting for that. :D
ETA: Also! If you have iTunes or another podcasting aggregator, look up KERA's Think (http://www.kera.org/think/) in the next day or two - they're interviewing McWhorter today (as I type this, even!) and it'll be up for download in the next day or so, for about a week.
There's a bit more in the lectures than the book, but the lectures get a little draggy in the middle, it seems to me. OTOH I can't deal with pronunciations on paper, and so wouldn't have followed any of that if I hadn't heard it first.
I like cat references, but podcasts (and audiobooks) drive me straight up the wall insane, so maybe I'll look for the book. ;)
(Seriously, I'm, like, anti-aural. I cannot stand ingesting information through my ears unless I'm forced to, like in college. I know I'm missing out on lots of good stuff that way...)
If you're OK with classroom lectures, they also sell it as a set of DVDs. :D Just him standing in a small set lecturing, but if you need something to look at to focus your attention, might be worth it. :) (His new lecture series for them is DVD only, which drives me nuts as I like to listen to things while I'm cleaning, driving, and doing art.)
My problem is that I can't concentrate on aural stuff. My mind wanders and pretty soon I'm absorbed in reading something or drawing something, and then I don't actually comprehend anything I've heard. The DVD probably wouldn't be enough to help ... Driving is OK because I'm doing something that can't become more absorbing, but these days I don't drive far enough to listen to anything like that. But now that you mention cleaning, that might work--I noticed that comedy mp3s were a good change from my usual music during the pre-Thanksgiving Cleaning Death March. :) Might have to try it.
I'm not really OK with classroom lectures, it's just that I rarely had a choice since few professors offer, you know, a text-oriented course. :p Most of the online classes I've seen have been badly run and they don't tend to offer them at higher levels anyway. It's learning-style discrimination, I tell you. After taking a few pedagogy classes I was staggered, in retrospect, when I thought about how many professors I'd had who delivered information PURELY orally during their classes, never writing anything on the board or giving a single handout or anything. No wonder some classes seemed mysteriously harder than others.
Sorry, apparently it's It's All About Me Day, haha.
Hey, I'll talk about my learning style at the drop of a hat. :D I'm a kinesthetic learner, so I have to do things or to type them to incorporate it. I look at things like the Teaching Company lectures as things that entertain me while I'm doing other stuff and if some information happens to stick, bonus!
I can't listen without doing something, while my mom's the opposite - she can't listen and do anything else at the same time. XD
OMFG, kinesthetic learners are soooo screwed in this society! *patpatpat* It sounds like you've learned a few ways to accommodate yourself (e.g. typing) so that's good.
We learned a few kinesthetic techniques for teaching languages, which was cool. (And although I've had probably 10 language teachers in my life, I've only had ONE teacher USE kinesthetic techniques, EVER.) I try to ferret out whether new students are more kinesthetic, aural, textual, or visual by asking them a question about how they prefer to get directions to a place they've never been before... So many people have had their kinesthetic orientation (literally) beaten out of them that they don't have any idea it's their real preference.
Generally, I just wish teachers would go to the effort of mixing techniques more. I'm not very kinesthetic but the only time anything ever clicked in my horrible programming class was when the teacher had people get up and demonstrate a sort method. As a teacher, when you teach things using different learning styles, you just cover your bases more, get people more awake, provide more chances to learn the same material, etc. But it's a lot easier to just lecture all the damn time. Bah.
I didn't learn the typing thing until my mom told me she used to type all her class notes. She didn't tell me this until my last semester of (the first time through) grad school. AAARGH! Telling me that in highschool would have helped so, so much!
I have no idea how kinesthetic language learning would happen, other than by typing or writing everything. :) I have a side-dish of visual learning, put into high relief by getting a Japanese language tape that said not to write anything down or look at words, but to repeat these phrases and sentences. And all I could hear was Wah-wah-wah-WAH-wah, like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons. But let me see the romanization written down once and all of a sudden the sound is broken down into phonemes and I can hear it.
I suspect that method's good for the people who literally can't hear the differences in sounds if they see a letter. I ran into some of those when taking the short Italian course here a couple of years ago - they'd look at a word like famiglia and wouldn't be able to hear the teacher say "fa-meel-ya" and would repeat "fa-mi-glee-a" back over and over. Whereas I am aware of the concept that letters are used to represent all sorts of different sounds, not just the ones in the English language. XD
There's TPR, which is a method that sucks as a complete language-teaching method but is great for verbs and tenses and some other things (basically, it involves making physical movements to go with the words), and various specific techniques like a cool way of teaching passive voice in English where the words where actually rearranged on a string--it was so cool!--and some flexible tools like Cuisinaire rods where you can use the rods in all sorts of lessons. Lots of good stuff... if people go to the effort!
Yeah, the problem with "no writing stuff down!" or "always write stuff down!" is that "one size fits all" just doesn't work. My Taiwanese language course was torture because Taiwanese doesn't HAVE a standardized writing system. *dies*
But after 3 quarters people were still pronouncing "manga" with the English word "man" in it, or worse. Anyway, that's why, despite some really reasonable objections to the the notion of making my poor Japanese students learn a fifth writing system, I've made some of them learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. Otherwise they either write every new word down in katakana, or they write it in roman letters but pronounce it in katakana anyway. Forcing them to learn IPA means I can write down "wreath" and "lease" in IPA (completely different) and katakana (written exactly the same, リース/riisu) side-by-side and show them why katakana is a dangerous crutch to use in an English-dominant environment. (Hence the awesome pine "Christmas Lease" I saw for sale last week.)
My Chinese teacher wouldn't let us write down spelled-out sound equivalents for Chinese sounds when we first started Mandarin; I guess for fear that we'd wind up with bad English approximations. If only the whole world were taught IPA at birth.
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ETA: Also! If you have iTunes or another podcasting aggregator, look up KERA's Think (http://www.kera.org/think/) in the next day or two - they're interviewing McWhorter today (as I type this, even!) and it'll be up for download in the next day or so, for about a week.
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I'll have to get it.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-English/dp/1592403956/
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* If you're not familiar with the Teaching Company, everything goes on sale at least once during the year, and it's well worth waiting for that. :D
ETA: Also! If you have iTunes or another podcasting aggregator, look up KERA's Think (http://www.kera.org/think/) in the next day or two - they're interviewing McWhorter today (as I type this, even!) and it'll be up for download in the next day or so, for about a week.
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(Seriously, I'm, like, anti-aural. I cannot stand ingesting information through my ears unless I'm forced to, like in college. I know I'm missing out on lots of good stuff that way...)
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I'm not really OK with classroom lectures, it's just that I rarely had a choice since few professors offer, you know, a text-oriented course. :p Most of the online classes I've seen have been badly run and they don't tend to offer them at higher levels anyway. It's learning-style discrimination, I tell you. After taking a few pedagogy classes I was staggered, in retrospect, when I thought about how many professors I'd had who delivered information PURELY orally during their classes, never writing anything on the board or giving a single handout or anything. No wonder some classes seemed mysteriously harder than others.
Sorry, apparently it's It's All About Me Day, haha.
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I can't listen without doing something, while my mom's the opposite - she can't listen and do anything else at the same time. XD
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We learned a few kinesthetic techniques for teaching languages, which was cool. (And although I've had probably 10 language teachers in my life, I've only had ONE teacher USE kinesthetic techniques, EVER.) I try to ferret out whether new students are more kinesthetic, aural, textual, or visual by asking them a question about how they prefer to get directions to a place they've never been before... So many people have had their kinesthetic orientation (literally) beaten out of them that they don't have any idea it's their real preference.
Generally, I just wish teachers would go to the effort of mixing techniques more. I'm not very kinesthetic but the only time anything ever clicked in my horrible programming class was when the teacher had people get up and demonstrate a sort method. As a teacher, when you teach things using different learning styles, you just cover your bases more, get people more awake, provide more chances to learn the same material, etc. But it's a lot easier to just lecture all the damn time. Bah.
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I have no idea how kinesthetic language learning would happen, other than by typing or writing everything. :) I have a side-dish of visual learning, put into high relief by getting a Japanese language tape that said not to write anything down or look at words, but to repeat these phrases and sentences. And all I could hear was Wah-wah-wah-WAH-wah, like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons. But let me see the romanization written down once and all of a sudden the sound is broken down into phonemes and I can hear it.
I suspect that method's good for the people who literally can't hear the differences in sounds if they see a letter. I ran into some of those when taking the short Italian course here a couple of years ago - they'd look at a word like famiglia and wouldn't be able to hear the teacher say "fa-meel-ya" and would repeat "fa-mi-glee-a" back over and over. Whereas I am aware of the concept that letters are used to represent all sorts of different sounds, not just the ones in the English language. XD
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Yeah, the problem with "no writing stuff down!" or "always write stuff down!" is that "one size fits all" just doesn't work. My Taiwanese language course was torture because Taiwanese doesn't HAVE a standardized writing system. *dies*
But after 3 quarters people were still pronouncing "manga" with the English word "man" in it, or worse. Anyway, that's why, despite some really reasonable objections to the the notion of making my poor Japanese students learn a fifth writing system, I've made some of them learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. Otherwise they either write every new word down in katakana, or they write it in roman letters but pronounce it in katakana anyway. Forcing them to learn IPA means I can write down "wreath" and "lease" in IPA (completely different) and katakana (written exactly the same, リース/riisu) side-by-side and show them why katakana is a dangerous crutch to use in an English-dominant environment. (Hence the awesome pine "Christmas Lease" I saw for sale last week.)
My Chinese teacher wouldn't let us write down spelled-out sound equivalents for Chinese sounds when we first started Mandarin; I guess for fear that we'd wind up with bad English approximations. If only the whole world were taught IPA at birth.