Michael Erard's New Book, Resident in My Library

When I am interested in a book I am reading, I get so riled up I find it hard to sit still enough to keep reading. That has caused me problems throughout my reading life. And this book was one of the worst ever in that regard.

Besides profiling various massively gifted language learners, both current and historical, Erard grapples with the question of who, exactly, qualifies as a hyperpolyglot. It is not an easy thing to assess. One working definition is a person with six or more languages, but a better number might be someone with 11, according to Erard.

What does it mean to have or to know a language, though? This is a recurring theme throughout the book.

I myself am constantly asked, "How many languages do you speak now?" It's funny, because I have a very hard time saying I "speak" a language other than English. My personal standard is native or near-native proficiency, and I am always painfully aware of deficiencies in any language that is not my native English.

I do not say I am bilingual, or trilingual, or whatever-lingual. Nor do I say I am monolingual, however; that wouldn't be correct, either. I will say I am "conversational" in one language or another, but to say I "speak" it reminds me of everything I cannot say, or that I do wrong.

In any case, as Erard discusses, even people who claim full-on proficiency in many languages tend to have pretty varied levels of skills in those languages, with a relatively small number of languages being at a very high level and actually including abilities across all four communication areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

If you can translate a text into English with the aid of a dictionary but can't comfortably carry on a conversation, do you "have" a language? I value all four areas of communication skills, but I personally privilege oral skills above all else, so I would say no for myself. But I certainly understand why others don't measure this way.

Indeed, one of the things I liked about Erard's book is that it gave value to different degrees and types of capability. It's not an all-or-nothing deal with language. Some degree of versatility in a language is very meaningful. This seems like an obvious point, I guess, but I struggle with it in my own brain a great deal.

I do find utterly mindboggling and captivating the idea of someone like the Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849), who was reputed to have mastered dozens of languages and be able to flip effortlessly in conversation from one to the next. It is of course hard to assess the true skills of someone who has been dead for 163 years, and Erard conscientiously seeks to ferret out the truth behind the mythology, but no matter what, it seems clear to me Mezzofanti was a pretty extraordinary man.

There was also plenty of discussion in the book about reactivation of languages. In general, even a language genius can't maintain a very high number of languages at a very high level. Some languages may go to sleep, only to be reactivated later when they are needed.

Some language superlearner types can reactivate languages very quickly, I gather. But the point is, you can't generally show up unexpectedly at someone's front door and expect him or her to be equally fluent in two dozen languages. Or even a dozen.

Most normal people also start to get confused pretty quickly among their languages. Language pollution! One of the most attractive and appealing notions to me is the idea of being able to switch from one to another all in a day's work. 

Erard writes about Helen Abadzi, who uses Greek, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese daily in her post at the World Bank. My idea of fun!

I did particularly enjoy reading about modern-day language accumulators such as Abadzi, or such as Alexander Arguelles, who lives in California and has an unwavering passion for this stuff.

Arguelles' learning approach is in many ways different from mine, and this three-year project is but a smidge of studying compared to the commitment he has made, but I couldn't help noticing some funny and random things we had in common.

I do admire his dedication. He is clearly motivated by a profound love of learning and language, and is generous in sharing his knowledge and experience with others. 

Looking through Arguelles' Foreign Language Expertise website, I noticed the following comment from him:

I am all too frequently asked how many languages I know, and I dread this question because I am truly unable to answer it. Having spent my life studying languages, I have such varying levels of knowledge about or abilities in different languages that I cannot give a simple answer, especially since the traditional borders between languages disappear when, as I have, you study many members of any given language family. When I stumble trying to explain this, people often then ask how many languages I can speak; they are trying to simplify the matter, but this actually just makes it all the more complicated. The only aspect of my foreign language knowledge that I can quantify in any way is my ability to read, for my main goal in studying foreign languages is to develop the ability to read the Great Books that have been written in them.

Such humility is refreshing. Much better than the far more common opposite tendency in this country to claim a language on the basis of very primitive skills.

Back to Erard's book: if you love languages and/or care about language learning, this is a must-read. I loved it. I can't say I didn't sometimes get a little jealous of some of those superlearners--the book made me wish I could pull a Mezzofanti--but such is life.

The struggle is fun!

Where I Got Off the D Train

According to Wikipedia, repository of global wisdom: "Borough Park is home to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel, with one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the United States and Orthodox traditions, rivaling many insular communities. Since the average number of children in Hasidic and Hareidi families is 6.72, Borough Park is experiencing sharp growth."

I took the D train. (That reminded me of how when I was in college a group called D Train had an R&B hit called "Something's On Your Mind.") As soon as I got off the subway at 50th Street, there was Hebrew everywhere. And although I can't confirm that birth rate, the ratio of baby carriages I saw to the number of adults walking around was very high. 

12th Avenue, Borough Park

Krausz Hatters

One thing I neglected to consider before heading to Brooklyn was the weather forecast. It has been so warm this winter it didn't occur to me to take a look at the temperature.

It should have occurred to me, however, because New Utrecht Avenue between 50th and 55th streets is one of those New York City wind tunnel streets. I think with the wind chill it might have been around 20 degrees. I was dressed for about 40 degrees, and while I have some degree of stoicism where grammar is concerned, I have none whatsoever for wintry weather.

Schick's

Kehila Butcher Store

I had to laugh at myself. Not good planning. Also, I got there too early, before most of the shops were open, but to be frank, even if they had been open, I would not have felt comfortable just walking in and shooting the breeze.

Women wore wigs. Their attire was very modest. Men had side curls, yarmulkes, and beards.

I wore jeans and a T-shirt and a fitted gray jacket: a Sunday morning uniform for me. I would have felt weird, and possibly rude and disrespectful, just going in and hanging out and asking a bunch of questions.

Maybe I am mistaken, but I think sticking to my external stroll was best. I saw cool stuff in any case. Neat signs. Interesting stores that are not what I would usually see in my own Upper West Side neighborhood.

Some stores without, but many with, Hebrew.

They Sell Schnitzl Here

The Wig Artist

Kolman's Monuments

This Store Has a Facebook Page!

Publications for Sale at VOOS IZ NeiESS

Mishpacha Means Family in Hebrew

13th Avenue, I Think

56th Street

I was shivering too much to last very long.

As I said farewell to Borough Park, I mourned the end of my Hebrew unit. I can just tell that the language does not have a tenacious hold in my brain. It's too different from English, for one thing, and I usually forget those languages at a much faster rate than the European ones. And they are for sure harder to refresh.

A Final View, Borough Park

When I think about Hebrew and the inside of my head, the image that keeps coming to mind is the houses they build in Malibu on cliffs near the ocean. And then I think of mudslides.

Some of that has to do with the fact that I never found a grammar book I really liked for Hebrew, at least not one with lots of good exercises.

Without grammar lessons, I have trouble remembering things. 

That's just me. The more experience I have with this language-learning stuff, the more convinced I am that different people learn differently.

Entrance, Columbia University

MESAAS? I had to turn to Google for acronym assistance: Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Dr. Kreitman (her students call her Rina) is a charming and energetic instructor. She arrived at high speed, dressed casually in jeans and with a youthful sweep of long light brown hair. She instantly began chatting and joking with the students, who were clearly fond of her.

For me it was kind of nostalgic to return to a university classroom on what is the eve of my 25th college reunion. The oldest student in that class was less than half my age, which is weird and does not correspond to my experience of reality or sense of self, but it is mathematically accurate in spite of my delusions. 

I counted 16 students, men and women. Upon entering the room, which was squarish and not overly huge, Rina busily began erasing a massive chalkboard covering the back wall. I was amazed, and happy, that there are still low-tech pedagogical tools such as chalkboards at colleges, at least at Columbia. I love low-tech. There's such a purity to it.

The class took place in Pupin Hall, which houses the physics and astronomy departments. Rina had to erase chalky references to "indifference curves" and "utility max" in order to make room for her own notes. Since I switched my major from applied mathematics to German halfway through college--which switch was accompanied by an immediate, dramatic shift from gloom to joy--I enjoyed watching her erase equations and replace them with language lessons.   

Early in the class was a discussion of how to render in Hebrew the t and th spellings in English names. I am about 90 percent sure Rina said that th in English (as in the name Thomas) becomes the letter tav in Hebrew, while a t in English becomes the letter tet. Both of those Hebrew letters are pronounced identically, as t.

This duplication often confuses students of Hebrew, I had noticed previously in various online postings. It's funny how accustomed we native English speakers get to our ridiculous surplus of letters and letter combinations for the same sounds. I mean, s, ss, c, sc, and ps all generate the same s sound in "silent," "ass," "cilia," "scene," and "psychic."

So really, it could be a lot worse in Hebrew!

We spent a couple of minutes sorting out how to write various names, including Tiffany of "I Think We're Alone Now" fame. As a not very scholarly type of person, I enjoy pop-culture references, but I think that reference was more meaningful to Rina and me than to the students.

By the way, this may have been a Hebrew class, but it was not a Hebrew-only class. Grammar explanations were sometimes offered in English, while conversation took place mostly in Hebrew. I like this approach.

As I have said before, in language learning I believe in taking advantage of the knowledge one has acquired as an adult. For me it is much more efficient and much less frustrating if someone gives me the English-language lowdown on how to handle, say, past participles in a particular language rather than giving me 300 foreign-language examples over a period of time and expecting me to work out the pattern for myself through osmosis.

After three months of studying Hebrew on my own, I wish I could say the class was a breeze for me. It was not.

Some of this had to do with the fact that I did not, in spite of the advice I was given by a reader of this blog, ever get around to learning Hebrew cursive. All I learned was the print versions of letters. Whenever Rina wrote on the board, it seemed as though she was going at Jaime Sommers-like speed. Not to mention backwards. And leaving behind a trail of squiggly wormy-looking things. (Some of the cursive forms really do not much resemble the print.)

During one conversation exercise where the students paired off, Rina told me they had learned the writing system in its entirety in two days back in the fall. That kind of stunned me. 

I don't know whether students had trouble reading what she wrote, but no one complained or burst into tears or anything like that, so I think they were okay. 

I am also under the impression, though it was hard to tell, that many of them were able to understand spoken Hebrew at a faster clip than I currently can.

One area where I did perhaps notice some room for improvement--and I mean no offense to these intelligent and hardworking students--was in the realm of accent. Some accents in Hebrew were conspicuously American. It reminded me of the very American pronunciation I used to hear in my college French classes and got me thinking again about the larger question of accents.

I have wondered before whether accent-related challenges for foreign-language learners include not only whether they have the ability to hear the details of pronunciation correctly, but also whether they have the lack of self-consciousness and embarrassment they need to try something new. Even if you have a good ear, there's a certain almost performance-like aspect to replicating accents in other languages. You are creating sounds that you do not normally create in your own tongue, and something about that can feel unnatural. 

In my case, although I didn't grow up bilingual myself, I had sisters and cousins and other close relatives who did, so it is very natural to me to hear people I know, and am in fact closely related to, speaking in two different accents, sometimes even three. Maybe this makes me a little more willing to try other accents, because I can imagine myself replicating them, even if my imaginings are not always perfectly reflected in what comes out of my mouth.

Despite this comfort with foreign accents, when I was studying, say, Arabic, I remember that certain sounds sounded particularly odd to me--guttural? throaty?--and I sometimes felt foolish trying to make them, so it was difficult to get myself to commit fully to the effort. On more than a couple of occasions I backed off to a "safer," more comfortable version of a sound.

When I hear what non-native speakers sometimes do to the r in English--certain native speakers of French, for example--I wonder if our r just sounds too inelegant, too plebeian, to their ears, and whether their version is more familiar and graceful and palatable to them.

In conclusion, are foreign-language students often just embarrassed, and if they weren't embarrassed, would they have better accents?

I have digressed, though. Many thanks to Dr. Kreitman for so willingly allowing this stranger to visit a class. It was great fun to go back to college, if only for an hour!

Multilingual Coffee at Aroma

I really have, and every day. I just didn't happen to blog about it, because life intruded, and while I love writing about language learning, if you don't actually do the learning, there is nothing to write about. So the writing is the thing that went out the window.

I feel bad about neglecting that aspect of this project (sorry, Hebrew) and am going to extend my Hebrew unit by a few days to try to make up for it.  

I am at present on lesson 89 of 90 Pimsleur lessons, so nearly done. Many of these have been completed at Aroma, the Israeli-owned café I have mentioned previously, which has caused my caffeine intake to skyrocket.

I am with great trepidation planning to stop drinking coffee altogether in a couple of days, because I am already hyperactive enough without adding stimulants, so I will need to come up with another good language-learning beverage accompaniment.

Me at the Jewish Community Center Doing Pimsleur

It will probably be tea. Maybe Chinese herbal tea, for my Chinese unit?

I have also been going regularly to the Jewish Community Center, known around these here parts as the JCC, but I have to confess, my main accomplishment there has been working out to disco music. I really don't do too much working out with language lessons anymore, because it's kind of stressful to try to grow your brain and your biceps simultaneously.

I was surprised to notice a television screen there the other day showing footage from CNN with Hebrew captions; I had never noticed Hebrew programming in the JCC gym before. But the television is close to the ceiling, and I tend to be so oblivious of my physical surroundings that I think it may be some kind of cognitive disability. If someone did a study of people who have lived on the Upper West Side for 10 years or more (which I have), looking at, say, their ability to recognize buildings within three blocks of where they live, I am pretty sure I would score in the bottom 10 percent.

CNN at the JCC with Hebrew

On another subject: a number of people have sent me notes about Michael Erard's new book on crazily gifted language learners, Babel No More, which came out last month--thank you for the tips! The book is something I am aware of, have read (enthusiastically), and will be writing about very shortly, I hope (but can't quite promise) tomorrow.

Recently I have been noticing an ad on the subway for the language-learning products of a company called Living Language. 

New York subway campaigns are often multi-poster extravaganzas. Well, "extravaganza" may be an overstatement, since we are talking about things that are placed in the innards of a subway car...so not exactly the status of, say, a half-time Superbowl spot.

Living Language, Promoting Chinese Studies

And Selling French, Too

I hate to say this, but I think this campaign is dorky.

One thing I find funny is the way they can't help sticking all their languages on each poster. The French poster reads, nonsensically, "Learn French on the subway. Claim you learned it in France. (Or German, Italian, Chinese or Spanish)."

Hmm, I Can't Even Understand the Lyrics of Songs in English

Speaking of ads, the most popular piece I have ever posted in this blog by far was an April 6, 2011, entry about another piece of advertising, for Burlington Coat Factory.

That one has gotten way more comments and traffic than any other entry on this site, though visitors are often motivated by things other than a love of language learning. Not long ago, someone sent me the following urgent query:

I saw a Burlington Coat Factory TV commercial about two dresses: a long-sleeve gold sweater dress and a sleevless Red/White/Black Tonal Sheath Dress and I can't find the dress in your stores in Albuquerque, NM. Where can I find the Red/White/Black Tonal Sheath Dress? Please answer as soon as possible.  

Thank you, 

Maria (name changed to protect the confused)

At first I thought it was food poisoning, but its persistence, and some epidemiological sleuthing, led me to the conclusion that I did indeed have a version of this year's influenza.

The Grammar Book I Am Reading Right Now

I did not leave the building for much of this week. It is now Saturday. I was not like the postman, undeterred by snow, sleet, or whatever else postpeople could be deterred by but aren't. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I did not study at all. I believe this is the only break I have taken during this entire project due to illness (I am not counting the long break last fall for rest and restoration).

Colds, stress fractures, plantar fasciitis, chipped fingernails...none of it kept me from working. I tip my hat to you, flu. You won.

But I am fighting my way back, and after those two days off, I returned to Pimsleur and to quiet contemplation of the Hebrew language, which is a challenging one.

There are some gifts, nonetheless. Here is one example, from page 17 of Lewis Glinert's book Modern Hebrew: "Generally, the same quantity word is used whether the noun is being treated as something countable (as in 'lots of e-mails, how many letters') or something uncountable (as in 'lots of e-mail, how much mail')."

I have been noticing that fact in my Pimsleur lessons. So for example, you can use the same word in Hebrew--harbe--to translate "a lot" in "a lot of sugar" as you do to translate the word "many" in "many books." I love that!

Can "fewer" (countable) and "less" (usually used with nouns that are not countable) be the same word in Hebrew as well? I hope so, because people spend way too much time arguing over those two words in English. The Fairway Market sign below has for sure generated much discussion among Upper West Siders. I have my own opinion, which does not coincide with the opinion of whatever grammarian was hanging over the hapless signmaker responsible for this one.

I Know Many People Have Debated the Word Choice on This Sign. That's Just the Way of the Upper West Side.

While harbe in Hebrew may be easier than sorting through "much" and "a lot" and "many" in English, there are things that most definitely do not seem easier to me in Hebrew.

Take, as one example, "my sister." That is simple enough in English: stick the possessive form in front of your noun and you're done.

In Hebrew, however, the phrase is translated as the equivalent of "the sister of me": ha-achot-shel-i. In addition, in Hebrew I believe it is written as one word (correct, Hebrew speakers?), a point that remains alien-feeling to my English-speaking brain. On top of which it runs right to left, in an unfamiliar alphabet.

A final observation: I feel as though I have learned about 50 ways to say "two" in Hebrew. I need a major review of how to count to three! Or at least "two" anyway!

Bus from Genoa to Milan. No Flash, Because I Didn't Think That Would Be Well Received by Fellow Passengers.

In the pre-dawn hours, I did Pimsleur lessons on a bus from Genoa to the Milan airport.

I did Pimsleur lessons while we waited for our flight in Milan.

I studied from Milan to Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, working my way as quickly as I could through Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar by Lewis Glinert.

This grammar is published by Routledge and last month was totally inaccessible to me. For it to make any sense I needed to know some Hebrew.

Now I can do okay with it, even though it is still too advanced, I would say. I had one of this series for Polish, too, and it is just not my favorite series--not for my purposes. These are responsible and careful books, and I like the design, but there are few exercises and much explanation.

It's all about the exercise-to-explanation ratio! I need a really big one!

Seeing Hudson News in Milan Amused Me

Therefore, I am still without a Hebrew grammar and exercise book I like. Which is significantly impeding my progress.

By the way, I find Pimsleur impossible on airplanes. The noise of the engines makes me have to turn up the volume so high that I get headaches--which is why I stick to grammar books when I am flying.

At Schiphol I dedicated myself to eating rather than studying.

On my KLM airplane from Schiphol to JFK, I kept reading Glinert's book, for hours, until I needed a break, at which point I discovered Berlitz games on the back of the seat in front of me.

I tried some basic games in Greek, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and I think Korean. The technology is pretty low-rent, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

Berlitz Word Traveler

Russian Dialogue Game

My Hindi Is Hopeless

Reading Greek Again Was Fun

Genoa Is Beautiful. Imagine Doing Your Banking in This Building!

Well, with one exception. I keep mixing up ma ("but" in Italian) and aval ("but" in Hebrew). Since they don't sound alike, I have no idea why that one concept is causing me so much trouble, but it is.

One thing I have not yet pointed out is that, although I have been to Italy previously, this is the first time I have ever been here since studying Italian two years ago! The difference is amazing. Every little thing becomes so much easier when you have some clue about the language.

Going through airports. Asking for a bathroom. Finding your way around town. 

Much more important: talking to family members. My sister-in-law's husband is Italian, and his family lives here in Genoa. Previously we had major communication problems. They didn't really speak English, and I spoke no Italian whatsoever. So communication at family events was difficult, despite some energetic and physical attempts to convey ideas through extraverbal means.

As I Study Italian, English Spreads in Genoa (and Globally)

Yesterday all the in-laws came over to my sister-in-law's home for a post-Christmas gathering. The event marked a dramatic and significant change in my communication fortune. I was suddenly able to talk to people! My efforts were far from perfect--I am not at the level I achieved two years ago--but I was still able to convey and understand a lot.

A sister of my sister-in-law's husband made me feel great by repeatedly extolling grammatical achievements of mine in real time, like a sports commentator at a football game.

For example, once when I started out a sentence, "Siamo stati..." (meaning "we were"), she burst in with detailed commentary about how impressive it was that I knew how to construct that idea grammatically in Italian.

It is not exactly advanced Italian, but you do have to know a number of things to get it right: (1) that the situation calls for passato prossimo (present perfect), (2) that for the first verb you must use a form of essere (to be) rather than avere (to have), and (3) that you then have to match the participle to subject in both number and gender. I appreciated being appreciated, and I found myself admiring her significant personal charm and perspicacity.

During the course of the evening, I participated in Italian discussions of language learning, English grammar, Italian grammar, theater, breast enhancement, fertility treatments, plastic surgery, pickpocketing, aging, Christmas caroling, and various other topics.

Nikon Ad in Genoa, with Pigeons

Having some ability in Italian completely changed my relationship to my sister-in-law's family. Our relationship has always been friendly, but being able to do more than smile and nod did a great deal to promote warmth and intimacy and camaraderie. At least that is my perception. 

So that got me thinking, not for the first time, about how I know quite a few people who are married to native speakers of other languages, but who don't really speak those languages.

And it occurred to me, also not for the first time, that one of the greatest gifts someone could give his or her significant other would be to learn that person's native language. It would be pretty amazing if it were a total surprise. 

You could show up at a family gathering next holiday season after years of monolingualism, suddenly able to express ideas in Arabic, or Spanish, or Chinese, or whatever, and dazzle in-laws who have looked at you suspiciously since your wedding date.

A Store in Genoa! Seriously!

That would be a very cool scene in a movie, I think, especially if the person were really, really good at the language. And especially if the person's wife or husband didn't know it was about to happen. (But only if she or he hadn't been left wondering for months, when the person kept disappearing for German or Russian or Greek classes, who they were having an affair with.)

Learning a language for someone: how much better would that be than jewelry or a power drill?

A truly transcendent gift.

During my time in Italy, I confess I was pained by my grammatical mistakes. One thing I keep doing, for instance, is saying molto bene (very well) in situations where what I really need is molto buono (very good). I am sure I am not the first American to do this, but it really bugs me when it happens.

Despite my personal grievances with myself, I was on the whole basically ecstatic about being able to say things to people in Italian, and have them answer me in Italian, and understand them in Italian, and then say something back to them in Italian, etc. I love this language to pieces.

On the Streets of Genoa

When you really want to do something, you tend to go all out.

In Genoa, Italy, I found myself pulling out an Italian grammar book around 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve during a break in the action of It's a Wonderful Life, which I was watching with my sister-in-law's family. One of my nephews commented on this fact.

"I can't help it," I said. "I'm addicted. But better this than heroin."

He replied, "I don't know. Heroin would be lighter to carry around."

I looked at him. "You are advising me to become a drug addict?" 

Later, remembering how during another vacation I had gone off and done Pimsleur lessons on the floor of a dark airless closet so tiny I couldn't extend my legs, I decided to look online to determine whether I might have accidentally turned into an anti-social addict.

I found an American Psychiatric Association seven-question quiz to assess addiction, modifying the criteria as needed:

1. Have you developed a tolerance? Do you need more Pimsleur (or other language-learning resource) than you used to in order to get the same effects?
2. Do you ever feel withdrawal symptoms after stopping use, or do you ever use any other substance to prevent these symptoms (e.g., Rosetta Stone instead of Pimsleur)?
3. Do you ever study longer than you had intended? For example, do you go out for one Pimsleur lesson at lunch intending to get back to work, and end up doing eight and writing off a day at the office?
4. Have you ever tried to reduce your study time, and found that you cannot, or that you soon find yourself studying at the same level again?
5. Do you have a preoccupation with language learning? In other words, do you spend a great deal of time thinking about studying, then studying, and then recovering from studying?
6. Have you ever stopped participating in worthwhile activities that you used to enjoy, such as talking to other human beings, because of your studying? 
7. Have you ever continued to study even in the face of adverse social or health consequences, such as falling months behind on e-mail, or failing to eat until your blood sugar is so low that only two pints of Häagen Dazs can revive you, or falling asleep to Pimsleur lessons and then getting woken up throughout the night by said lessons, yet repeatedly failing to remove your headphones so that you can actually stay asleep until morning?

If you answer yes to at least three of the seven questions, you are supposedly an addict.

I do not find this to be a convenient moment to tally my score.

Trying to decide which language to study right now--Hebrew or Italian--has been causing me pain and suffering. I do not want to miss out on a chance to polish my Italian before I go to Italy, but my Hebrew is in a very fragile state right now, and I am worried it will end up in the language equivalent of an ICU if I suddenly drop it for some number of days to focus on a Romance language.

So far I have stuck with Hebrew while the following words loop repeatedly through my head: "You are a huge idiot not to be working on your Italian right now."

The other day I went to visit an Israeli shop I had heard about in the East Village, Holyland Market at 122 St. Marks Place, between First Avenue and Avenue A.

Holyland Market, St. Marks Place

Cereal in Hebrew

If you have followed this blog in the past, you may have noticed I like taking pictures of food with foreign languages on it. 

Spices in Hebrew

Hellmann's in Hebrew

Holyland is quite a small market, but with a very high Hebrew density. I can't say the Israeli guy working there overwhelmed me with his friendliness, but he tolerated my presence in any case, which is something.

Yaffa Cafe, St. Marks Place

On my way home, I stopped by Yaffa Cafe, an Israeli-owned restaurant down the street. I had never been there before, but I loved this place.

You might, too, as long as you don't mind eating at tables so close together you are practically sitting on your neighbor's lap and said neighbor might actually eat your food by mistake. That kind of thing used to bug me when I first moved here, but I learned long ago to pretend there is a great deal of space around me even when there isn't.

If you find winter dreary, Yaffa might be a place to counteract that for you. It has a warm, decadent interior and is the opposite of dreary. I studied while drinking a delicious latte and an orange juice. The place was jammed full of people by the time I left. 

Food for the Eyes and Also the Stomach

Studying on Zebra Stripes

I am packing Hebrew and Italian grammar books for my trip. And Hebrew and Italian Pimsleur. Just thinking about that language combination makes my head hurt a little, to be honest.

* Note from January 10, 2012, the day I am actually posting this: I know, this entry is tardy, but may I just pretend it (and some subsequent ones, about to be posted) aren't? I am behind. Again. This time because of vacation and a bout with the flu. I know that posting belatedly is very unbloglike conduct, but I have some observations from the second half of December and the early part of January that I don't want to neglect.

Rosetta Stone at Time Warner Center

Far fewer people I encounter seem to have actually tried out the product, however.

As for me, I have benefited from many materials over the past two and a half years. Although I have logged a lot of Rosetta Stone hours, by far the most significant tool I have used has been Pimsleur.

Hardly anyone has heard of that. When I say the name "Pimsleur," the response in most cases is, "Huh?"

I then spell the name, but I can see they aren't processing it. I have to write it down before they register what I am saying. That name--which is, by the way, the surname of the originator of the Pimsleur method--is a marketing challenge in itself. 

Rosetta Stone has done a monster marketing job. In New York alone, it is all over the place: I've seen Rosetta Stone kiosks at airports, malls, Grand Central, and more. I see a lot of salespeople giving demos, though I don't think I have ever intersected with someone who was actually making a purchase.

The Originator of the Pimsleur Learning Method

Despite Rosetta Stone's fame, I find the program merely mediocre as a way to advance my actual practical, usable language skills.

Out of 5 points, I would give Rosetta Stone only a 2.5.

I would give Pimsleur a 5.

So I have decided not to use Rosetta Stone for Hebrew, or for future languages. I feel as though I tend to turn to it when I am being lazy. Pimsleur is fun, but it can be hard work. Rosetta Stone requires less brainpower. But when you use less brainpower for something, you have crappier results. (Compulsively multitasking people should keep that in mind.)

With Pimsleur, I feel as though each little piece of knowledge is carefully selected to advance your skills in whatever language you are studying. With Rosetta Stone, I feel that many elements are repetitious and only marginally useful.

What Rosetta Stone gives me is familiarity and handholding. With its inviting, colorful screens, it seems friendly, and it helps a language seem less strange, which can be especially helpful for languages with different writing systems. I found it kind of comforting for Japanese, for example. Also for Hindi, though I was often confused navigating their writing lessons for that language.

However, I would never consider using Rosetta Stone for a popular European language such as Spanish, German, French, or Italian. For major European languages there is Pimsleur, as well as tons of grammar books one can buy, and other comprehensive programs with which I am unfamiliar (in at least one case, because they didn't respond to my request for a review copy).

Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are, as far as I know, the only really comprehensive learning programs with offerings across many languages from different language families. I would guess there are not all that many people in the world who have spent as many hours on Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone in multiple languages as I have at this point. I think my impressions are pretty sound.

Rosetta Stone at Grand Central

Here are some of the many ways I find Pimsleur superior to Rosetta Stone:

1. Conversational skills. Pimsleur dances. It prompts, cajoles, teases, prods you into saying stuff. It is witty. It keeps you constantly on your toes, getting you to think how to use parts of one sentence you've learned in combination with parts of another sentence. It translates into legitimate conversational skills. Over and over I have been able to use what I have learned from Pimsleur in conversation in real life. And to build on what I have learned through Pimsleur with grammar books and other materials. That is my preferred method: Pimsleur plus grammar books plus real-life practice.

2. Accent. If you have a good ear for language, Pimsleur can help you develop an exquisitely good accent. You get to repeat words, phrases, and sentences, listening between each repetition to careful, correct pronunciations. You are on your own in terms of comparing what you say with what the Pimsleur native speakers say, so if you are language-deaf, you will face challenges.

Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, often relies on a language-recognition software that--while a nice idea--I found very far from perfect. You are asked to say things, and Rosetta Stone tells you whether you did it right. Although you can alter the setting of the voice-recognition software to make it fussier or less fussy (something that took me months to realize, by the way), there were many times I would end up screaming at my laptop because the software wouldn't accept something I said that was really, really close to what it was supposed to sound like. And many times where it weirdly accepted sentences I said that sounded nothing like the correct answer.

Rosetta Stone Shopping Bag

3. Confidence. By the time I get past around lesson 45 of Pimsleur for a given language, I start to feel really happy--confident that I am getting somewhere. And I can say some really useful things. And people ooh and ah about how far I've gotten. After a similar amount of Rosetta Stone time, I remain pretty much useless. No oohing. No ahing.

4. Retention. I remember better the languages for which I did a lot of Pimsleur. A profound understanding of how language-learning memory works informs every detail of the Pimsleur training. You return to words, phrases, etc., at intervals that are calibrated to maximize retention benefits. My Rosetta Stone skills were always tenuous and rarely lingered long in my brain, unless they overlapped conveniently with something Pimsleur or a grammar book had been teaching me. 

5. Customization. Pimsleur seems more customized to language variations--tailored based on the idiosyncrasies of the individual languages. Rosetta Stone has a massive amount of computer programming that is deployed across languages in a way that strikes me as inflexible and sometimes inappropriate. For example, certain concepts seem to get the same amount of time in different languages, even when they are supremely easy in one language and supremely difficult in another. 

6. Variety. I felt as if I kept doing the same things over and over again in Rosetta Stone. It was kind of boring, and often felt mindless and not very useful.

7. Simplicity. In Rosetta Stone I found it difficult to understand where I was and where I was going and why I was seeing the same damned picture with the same damned vocabulary that I had already seen five gazillion times. This is largely a consequence of repetition across the grammar, writing, reading, and other units. They just don't always seem all that different from one another.

In addition, the software takes over your language-learning life in a way that I find unpleasant and perplexing. For example, it decides for you that you need to repeat certain lessons if your score is too low the first time, and then forces them on you unexpectedly again in the future. The problem: it usually wasn't clear to me when this was happening. Often it just seemed as though Rosetta Stone was incorrectly taking me back to an earlier stage in my language-learning travels. Not knowing where I was, or why I was where I was, made me feel less confident that the software itself knew where it was.

8. Explanations. There is no English whatsoever in Rosetta Stone, and sometimes a simple little explanation would have made my life a whole lot easier. Pimsleur doesn't stop a lot for explanations, but it inserts them appropriately, and until you get to a certain level, many prompts are in English, which I find helpful.

Rosetta Stone Has Pretty Pictures

8. What's the opposite of unwieldiness? Rosetta Stone is a sprawling package with many elements. It was too much for me. I never even got to a number of TOTALe elements, including the online language lessons with an actual native speaker. I just really didn't want to take a language lesson via computer with other people. That would have required scheduling, and planning, and being on a computer instead of on the streets of New York City. And, by the way, I also found the Rosetta Stone setup to be a pain in the butt. Not horrible, but there are discs to install, and it was nowhere near as easy as downloading an MP3 file and pressing Play, which is what I get to do with Pimsleur.

9. Price. Hmm, I was going to say how much more expensive Rosetta Stone is, but it appears they have slashed their prices dramatically since I last looked, from $999ish to less than half that. Self-help language learning is definitely getting cheaper! Since I began this project in 2009, Pimsleur prices have dropped a lot, too. You can now get 90 Pimsleur lessons for $335. So the pricing between the two offerings does not appear to be radically different, but the benefit per dollar is in my opinion way higher with Pimsleur.

10. Portability. Rosetta Stone really ties you to the computer. The company has clearly tried to get more mobile, but fundamentally, its meat-and-potatoes elements are computer-based and require constant clicking. I hate that. Pimsleur is primarily audio and travels everywhere around the city with me. I hope Pimsleur doesn't succumb to the pressure of a video-game universe where everything needs graphics. I don't need graphics. I don't want graphics. I want to close my eyes and be one with a language.

11. Humor. Pimsleur is often sly and funny. Rosetta Stone has games (which I confess I never tried; I hate that kind of thing), but the main content is dead serious.

12. Consistent difficulty. Sometimes I found Rosetta Stone too easy, and sometimes it was way, way too hard. In multiple languages, certain modules were phenomenally difficult. Normally I would get between 95% and 100% in most modules, but then in their writing modules and in review units called Milestones I would get scores like 25%. It was extremely irritating.

Me with Rosetta Stone, 2010

The program simply didn't prepare you for those modules. The Milestones were poorly constructed. In them you would follow a series of photos illustrating a narrative (one involved people riding a bus, for example) and have to guess at what the people depicted were saying. The voice recognition software would tell you if you succeeded. However, it just wasn't possible to anticipate and say what would come out of their mouths quickly enough or correctly enough. I can't anticipate what people are going to say in English, much less Hindi or Japanese!

I would be very interested to see data on how other users performed on those units. They can't have done well relative to the other lessons. For me this kind of unnevenness was a massive flaw that really damaged my confidence in the product. It suggested a lack of attention to language-learning efficacy and an inability to respond quickly to and change problem areas in the program, perhaps because it had been set up across a gazillion languages already in precisely that way.

A caveat: Pimsleur is difficult, and I would not recommend it for the linguistically faint of heart, but it is reliable and consistent in its pacing.

One of Rosetta Stone's great virtues is that it shows up to the party, and in a pretty party dress, while Pimsleur sometimes doesn't show up at all.

What I mean is that for less popular languages, Pimsleur sometimes has minimal offerings. For Polish, for example, Rosetta Stone offers a full three levels of their language-learning approach, while Pimsleur has available only 30 half-hour Polish lessons--just their first level. For other, more popular languages, Pimsleur offers 90 to 100 lessons (three to four levels).

My key problem in my Polish studies was that there were not enough Pimsleur lessons to get me to my desired skill level. I tried replacing it with more Rosetta Stone work, but it just didn't help at anywhere close to the same rate that Pimsleur would have. I suspect that those 30 Pimsleur lessons got me more conversational skills than triple the Rosetta Stone time did.

Me Working Hard on Pimsleur

And that is why I am spending so much time on Pimsleur now. I hate to bash a language-learning product such as Rosetta Stone, because I think the idea that a company would have a focus such as theirs is amazing and exciting. I mean, how much better a corporate mission is that than making millions of Americans fat on cheeseburgers?

But I think it is time that more people took a hard look at whether Rosetta Stone really works the way it should, or whether its sexy public image has more to do with pretty packaging and ubiquitousness than hard-core skills. People feel excited when they buy something like Rosetta Stone. It is the cool girl at the prom. Pimsleur is more of a wallflower, kind of nerdy and unfashionable, but with substance and depth.

The people at Rosetta Stone have been very nice to me during this project, and I am grateful for that, but after many, many, many hours, and much careful thought, this is where I stand on these two language-learning giants.

Despite the silence on this blog, I have logged many Hebrew hours, studying every day. I have learned the Hebrew alphabet and am on the 45th of 90 half-hour Pimsleur lessons available for Hebrew.

Still Getting a Lot of Studying Done at Aroma: Many Thanks to All the Customers Who Have Answered Hebrew Questions!

To gain some historical perspective I have begun Edward Horowitz's book How the Hebrew Language Grew. In it I read, "Hebrew gradually ceased being a spoken language after 70 C.E., when the Jews were driven from the land of Israel by the Romans and were scattered throughout the world." He explains that it continued to be used as "the language of prayer, study, reading the Torah, and correspondence."

Then, he continues, around 1880, "a young man was inspired with a vision that Hebrew could once again live as a spoken language." The man was Eliezer ben Yehudah, who went to Israel to work.

"At first," writes Horowitz, "he was thought an idle dreamer, but slowly and surely, something of the fire that burned within him spread to his friends and neighbors, and to wider and wider circles, until in a few years almost all Jews in Israel were speaking Hebrew. One of the greatest miracles of all modern times had come to pass. This was the very first time in all human history that a language which ceased being spoken in ancient times came back to life on the lips of men and women and little children."

A Good Seat for Studying at the High Line (Hi, Usher!)

I haven't gotten very far with the book yet, but I love when writers are passionate about their topic and when they don't bury the allure of their subject in academic jargon.

Another thing that has been happening: in my studies, I have repeatedly benefited from the similarities between Arabic and Hebrew. They both read from right to left and both rely on a root system. That means for example that you will have a particular meaning associated with a trio of consonants, and then a host of words related to that concept are created out of those three consonants through an assortment of prefixes, suffixes, and I believe what are known as infixes (sounds like something you might buy at a plumbing store).

Hebrew and Arabic have many words in common, which also makes my life easier, in spite of the fact that the Arabic I learned more than two years ago is at present mostly sleeping in a dark corner of my brain.

I have learned that pronouncing certain Hebrew sounds is hard on my throat, so good hydration is essential.

In Union Square on a Warmish Day, Doing a Pimsleur Lesson (I Mean Me, Not That Guy)

As of late last week, I was liberated from the boot protecting my stress-fractured foot. I still have to take it easy, but things are improving, and Hebrew field trips are imminent. Recently I have been having running dreams, where I am fleet of foot and injury-free. I look down and can see the path beneath me, and I am moving swiftly along. When I wake up, I am a little sad.

The language dreams haven't gone quite as well. I had one about Hebrew not long ago. In it I dreamt I could not think of a single word in Hebrew, despite all my studying. In the dream Hebrew then turned into Greek, and suddenly I could not speak a word of Greek either (which at this moment is largely true; that's another one that has really gone to sleep).

What is funny, though, is that lately words I haven't thought of for many months in certain languages are suddenly are popping into my head on demand. In Arabic and Greek in particular. Very basic stuff, but still...it's been interesting. As though Hebrew is reinvigorating a particular part of my brain different from the one devoted to Western European languages.

Pimsleur Lessons Have Been Done on This JCC Exercise Bike

I asked the JCC on the Upper West Side if I could visit a Hebrew class and write about it for this blog, and they said no. It took me more than a month and multiple messages to extricate that answer from them. Very disappointing.

Although I am a wee bit annoyed, I have been going to the JCC regularly to work out, and have done a little Hebrew Pimsleur on the exercise bikes. However, I have mostly decided that exercise-and-language-learning multitasking is not a good approach for me. If you do Pimsleur while you are doing sit-ups (I guess what people do these days is actually called a "crunch," but that word bugs me for some reason), you tend to achieve fewer sit-ups and more grammatical errors.

I have something I want to say about Rosetta Stone, but I will save that for another day.

Fully Equipped at Aroma: Coffee, Alphabet Book, and Unsuspecting Israeli Tutors

But it is the most amazing language lab--probably the best local free resource I've found for any language I've studied so far during this project. So I was there twice today.

The first time, I did two Pimsleur lessons, slouched down as usual in my chair and covering my mouth so I didn't look like a crazy lady talking to herself. I am learning things like "Where is your wife?" and "My husband is not here." Also the rather hostile-sounding "My husband can drink water." In combination these seem like recipes for scandal. Those Pimsleur people are quite naughty.

When I got brain lock after two 30-minute Pimsleur lessons, I switched to one of my alphabet books, working on the letters tav, mem, and lamed. And when I got confused about why there were two different tav's, one with a dot and one without, all I had to do was look up and ask the customer sitting across from me, "Do you speak Hebrew?"

I felt sure the answer would be yes, and it was. He said he didn't know the historical reason for the two letters; in fact, he confessed, "I was traumatized by my language-learning experience."

I informed him that he seemed to have come out of it okay.

Despite this customer's past trauma, he was able to confirm that tav's both dotless and dotted were pronounced as t, and I continued merrily on my language-learning way. (I am realizing as I write this, though, that I am still confused about the twin ways of rendering the t sound, as well as the vowel sound a. It seems to me that there could be many written combinations that would produce the same outcome, though maybe there are constraints I don't yet know about that would limit the number of possibilities.)

These Don't Really ALL Say Tata, Do They?

The cool thing is, if he hadn't been able to help me, I could have gone to the people at the next table, who were engaged in a lively conversation in Hebrew, or bugged the man off to the side, once he stopped talking loudly into his phone in Hebrew.

While I was copying over letters, the aforementioned customer told me I should order a shakshuka--that that would help me. I thought he was referring to some kind of book, so I started to write the name down, but then he told me it was a dish--"the most Israeli thing Aroma serves," he said.

He was joking, of course, but people are always trying to feed me into a state of language competence, as if there were verb conjugations among the ingredients! 

Later in the afternoon I went back to Aroma seeking recaffeination. I did more Pimsleur, noticing as I was responding to the lesson's cues (to say things like "Is your wife with you?") that the customer sitting across from me was reading a French publication with multiple references in it to Jews. I figured he, too, probably spoke Hebrew, and I was correct.

Ceci ne pas un livre

He turned out to be a Belgian who had lived many years in Israel, and he explained to me the differences between the two Hebrew words ben and bar (which I had been taught by different sources both meant "son") and another pair confusing me, adon and mar (both meaning "Mr."). We spoke in French for a while; my Hebrew skills are not exactly in a state that supports sophisticated repartee. 

How awesome is it that there was help like this within two feet of my chair? At Aroma, I don't have to spend one second frustrated if I don't want. There's always someone around to answer questions. Not just employees, but also customers, which is ideal, because I can't always feel too great about bugging people who are behind a counter trying to make a living--in a very expensive city, by the way--for what are essentially free tutoring services.

You know, over the course of this project I have often been told, "You should just go to [insert country where whatever language I'm studying is spoken]." I'm not sure what these people think I am made of (diamond-encrusted gold bricks?), but I am not in a position where just going and living somewhere else, especially 15 somewhere elses over the course of three years, is a practical solution to my language-learning needs.

Anyway, a major point of this undertaking is that in New York City, it is possible to get way, way more than coffee in your local coffee shop! 

Learning the Basics in a New Language Is Like Reverting to Childhood

Before the procedure, I sat in a waiting area with a bunch of other people. One of them was a woman who had just finished her own procedure of some sort, and who apparently felt like total crap, which I did not find reassuring.

To relax, I studied Hebrew. As I have mentioned previously, studying languages has made doctors' visits a million times more pleasant. It is very relaxing and distracting. This doctor's office by coincidence happens to be right next door to the office of the podiatrist who is treating my foot injury. I considered popping my head in and saying hi, but decided the chances that no one would care were high.

So there I sat, waiting my turn, consulting a couple of Hebrew books and practicing my letters. Although my Hebrew focus has so far been almost entirely on Pimsleur lessons (meaning oral skills), I have started taking at least a preliminary look at the Hebrew alphabet. Above is an example of what I have been working on, from The Hebrew Primer (Behrman House).

I haven't checked my answers in the book yet, so there may be mistakes in what I wrote next to the Hebrew letters. But it is really such a cool feeling when you first start to penetrate a radically different writing system.

Hebrew, like Arabic, reads right to left. The Behrman book is paginated in the reverse of the English system (so their front cover is our back cover), and the other one I am currently using, Teach Yourself to Read Hebrew from Simon & Anderson, which covers similar material, is paginated according to the traditional English system. This makes it a little hard for me to open the books on the right end the first go-around.

My First Hebrew Letters

Anyway, back to the doctor's office. I am not super keen on medical things, but since I know there are far, far worse things than endoscopies, I tried to remain calm. I think I succeeded. To distract me (I assume), the anaesthesiologist asked me what I had done to my foot, so the last thing I remember before going under was talking about running.

I was knocked out completely for the full thing, and the first thing I recall afterwards was being ushered back to the doctor's desk. Two friendly young women attending to me seemed to be under the impression that I knew Italian. The reason for this perplexed me, since I had been chatting in English before the procedure and did not have any Italian books with me.

They explained that I had woken up from the procedure speaking Italian. Apparently I was talking about the marathon and how I hurt my foot.

I was floored. And ecstatic! To be comfortable enough in a language that I would come out of anaesthesia speaking it, when I could very well have spoken nonsense in my own native English? Maybe I was really getting somewhere!? (I have actually been worrying about my Italian, which is for my tastes still too primitive and fragile. Yesterday while running an errand, I practiced talking to myself in Italian--silently in my head, I mean--to make sure I hadn't forgotten certain words.)

One of the women said she had been studying Italian with Rosetta Stone, but that she hadn't found it useful. Still loopy from the propofol (yes, that's what they gave me), I gushed about the virtues of Pimsleur and wrote down the name for her on a piece of paper.

At least I think I wrote "Pimsleur." It's possible I wrote "Pommslar" or something delirious like that instead.

This endoscopy completely made my day.

The Jewish Community Center, aka the JCC

I have two main reasons for doing so:

1. They have a pool, which my regular local gym doesn't.
2. They have Hebrew stuff going on, which my regular local gym doesn't.

My regular gym does have a location with a pool about a mile and a half from me, but I still have to get on a subway to reach it, and the lanes are so narrow that if you have to share, which you inevitably do, you can get kicked in the head, which, depending on the force involved, could be bad for language learning.

Therefore, I have decided I am going to heal myself locally with Hebrew and swimming in a wide-laned pool. Swimming is stress-fracture-friendly exercise. A three-month membership is perfect. No running, just soft stuff involving water for now.

And so far Hebrew has been very relaxing! I was a little worried, but it is not as crazily bewildering to me as some other languages.

The JCC Pool Is Way Up There!

To take immediate advantage of my JCC membership, I went to use their gym and pool late last night. Initially I was stretching to a Pimsleur Hebrew lesson, but then I turned on my music instead. It is really hard to exercise properly when your brain is stalled on how to translate sentences such as, "Would you like to have dinner at my place tomorrow?" For exercise purposes, Nelly and Jessie J are better than Pimsleur, I have concluded.

In the gym there was a young woman, maybe late teens, who was running on a treadmill in a long black skirt. As someone who first began running in the age of Dolphin shorts, I am not terribly accustomed to such sights, and I think it will be interesting to have a little more exposure. She looked very athletic.

In terms of sheer Hebrew volume, though, I am pretty sure I will get more at Aroma, the coffee shop previously mentioned. The JCC has Hebrew lessons, but I can't even walk in to Aroma without hearing at least some Hebrew. The other day the owner (who, as I have mentioned, is Israeli) told me that he thought about 20 percent of his customers were Israeli, climbing to maybe 30 percent on weekends!

Today, for example, when I was there for my morning latte, I saw a family I had noticed there before: a father and two little boys, speaking Hebrew and with Hebrew books out. I sat down nearby and asked if they were Israeli. Indeed they were.

I told the father I was studying Hebrew. One of the little boys said something to me that included the word ivrit ("Hebrew" in Hebrew...well, in a transliterated version of it). The café is loud, so I couldn't quite hear him, but I decided to assume he had said something about studying or learning or speaking Hebrew, so I told him, "Ani mevinah kzat ivrit." (I understand a little Hebrew.)

That's (my own transliteration of) "I understand a little Hebrew." He appeared to understand me, and he had the cutest look on his face. 

Cool View from the Second Floor of Aroma

I told him, "To be honest, I didn't quite hear your question, but I have in my head right now only a small selection of sentences to choose from no matter what you ask."

The father said, "That's our situation in English."

Based on that one sentence alone, I can tell it is not his situation in English, but of course it is still nice when people try to encourage you in this way.

I am studying a ton of Pimsleur right now, cramming in as much as I can as quickly as I can. For the fifty billionth time, I really love this language-learning program. I think it's brilliant.

I asked a guy who works at Aroma today how to say "latte" in Hebrew, because I know how to say, "I want to drink wine, please," and also, "I want to drink beer, please," but I don't know how to say, "I want to drink a latte, please." I thought adding "latte" to my modest store of vocabulary would be good for ordering purposes.

The guy frowned and started in on a rather elaborate explanation of how there are two words for "latte," and one really isn't right, so I asked him, "Well, what is the right way?" But he said he needed to take the next person's order first, and then he never told me.

Which leaves me wondering: is the word for "latte" in Hebrew some really monstrous, scary thing? Or is it top secret and I am not allowed to know? I would like to be initiated into the mysteries of Hebrew latte. 

I promise I will study and learn how to say the Hebrew equivalent of "I would like" rather than 'I want," which will sound more polite and less greedy.

Aroma: Good for Coffee and Hebrew

According to its website, the company was founded in 1994 and is "the largest and most successful espresso bar chain in Israel, serving over 25 million loyal customers a year."

This particular Aroma is also a great place to hear Hebrew. I have been drinking way too many lattes over the past few days in order to justify hanging out there for extended periods of time.

I sit there and try to figure out how many people around me are speaking Hebrew, and I do my Pimsleur lessons, which means I am antisocially installed in a chair with a headset, muttering Hebrew words and phrases in response to the prompts in my audio lessons. 

I tend to slouch down and kind of hold my hands over my mouth so I less conspicuously appear to be talking to myself.

One observation: studying Pimsleur there works better in the morning, when the music is quieter and the crowds are smaller. This afternoon the Pimsleur prompts were competing with lots of loud conversations and Katrina and the Waves ("Walking on Sunshine") and Bobby Helms ("Jingle Bell Rock").

Doesn't It Look Cheerful? (Comfortable Chairs, Too.)

The owner, who used to be in the technology business, is often present, and I have talked to him a number of times. Last week I told him that I was soon going to be starting Hebrew, and that I hoped he would let me try it out on him.

Today when I came in, I asked him how he was in Hebrew, and he replied in Hebrew, and asked how I was, and I replied, also in Hebrew. I am doing pretty well with that line of questioning and have completed it successfully several times with different people.

It is not a terribly profound line of inquiry. Nonetheless, I find it satisfying.

He asked how I was learning Hebrew, and I showed him my Pimsleur lessons on my iPhone. He said, "So you don't want me to teach you anymore? I am insulted."

I laughed and said that no, I definitely did, but that I was trying to become a little more interesting first.

The Upper West Side Today, Late Afternoon

On Facebook yesterday, I posted a note asking people for ideas for Hebrew-related activities. I promptly got this list of suggestions from a high-school friend in California:

1. Buy the movie Giv'at Halfon, with subtitles and then learn all the lines. 
2. Rent or buy the taped sketches of "The Gashash Hakhiver" and get an Israeli to explain. 
3. Buy a Shlomo Artzi album and learn all the lines.

Then a writer friend, Marty Kihn, whose hilarious book House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time is being turned into a Showtime series with Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell, made this helpful observation: "I believe there is a Bible written in Hebrew."

A college friend offered, "Now you will commiserate with millions of Jewish girls and boys who had to learn Hebrew only to forget it all weeks after their Bar/t Mitzvah."

My New Hebrew Teachers

I am finding that a really significant percentage of people I know happen to know at least something about Hebrew. This is very helpful, but I am kind of wondering, where was I when all this language-learning was going on?

This afternoon in Aroma, I ran into a friend of mine and her two young sons, and sure enough, she speaks Hebrew, too, and even her boys know some as well.

Showing utter disregard for child-labor laws, I promptly solicited some language instruction from the kids. I learned beten (stomach) from the older one, while the younger one sang to me in Hebrew.

Both boys were gripping waffles at the time. I have never before been taught by someone holding a waffle.

I told them they know way more Hebrew than I do, so maybe when I see them next, they can quiz me to see whether I remember what they taught me. The older one seemed to consider this proposition rather seriously.

As a young child, I always found it interesting to realize I knew something a grownup didn't. For most kids the volume of such realizations increases quickly with age, perhaps helping to explain television programming such as Who's Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and also to illuminate how many teenagers come to learn that adults know absolutely nothing about anything.

J. Levine Books & Judaica

My first stop: J. Levine Books & Judaica, at 5 West 30th. Two different employees helped me there, and they were incredibly nice and helpful, but even though I left with a couple of books, I wasn't quite sure I had found the instructional resources of my dreams.

A search on my iPhone yielded another option, Sefer Israel, just a few blocks away on 27th Street. 

Sefer Israel, a publisher and importer of Israeli books, is a wholesaler, not a retailer on street level like J. Levine. To reach them, I had to take a freight elevator, because the regular elevator was broken. First I ended up on the wrong floor. Then I had to wait a while for the freight elevator to return. The elevator operator didn't really speak English, and I had no phone reception in the building to call the company to ask what floor they were on, so it was a little difficult to find them, but finally: success.

A Room Full of Books: Sefer Israel

It was worth the wait. I love going to businesses a random consumer would not normally see. Peeking inside New York buildings is fun.

As soon as I buzzed Sefer Israel's buzzer, out popped Orly Farhi-Haley, the company's president, a lively, friendly, attractive woman who made me feel completely at home. She ushered me into a room full of books in Hebrew, and then the phone promptly rang.

While she took the call, I couldn't resist the urge to park my behind on a desk near the door so I could take the weight off my foot. I felt a great conflict over this decision: rude to park behind? Or acceptable under the circumstances?

When she got off the phone, I apologized, and she waved off my concerns, immediately finding me a chair.

She told me she was not moving all that well herself because she had just done the New York City Marathon! She ran it in 3:57, which is a highly respectable time. I immediately liked her even more.

What was not to like, though? Even though I was a random drop-in off the street, she listened to me describe the project, and what I was looking for, and then promptly and cheerfully got me a bunch of books to look at. We talked running and business in the meantime.

Some Cool-Looking Books That I Can't Read

More Cool-Looking Books That I Can't Read

More than once when I was thumbing through the books, Orly had to come over and turn them the right way up, because apparently I don't know enough about Hebrew to realize when I am holding a book upside-down.

I said my few accumulated Pimsleur Hebrew phrases to her, and she said they sounded great. Pimsleur tends to generate that response, I find. You really get to hear the accent and work on it.

My strategy with Hebrew is: focus heavily on Pimsleur for a couple of weeks, in order to get as far as I can with my oral skills as quickly as possible, and then start worrying more about the grammar and writing.

As I told Orly, one thing that makes me a little nervous about Hebrew is that I am not at all religious, and so much of what I have seen in my life of Hebrew is connected to religion. In fact, I had rejected one of the language books I saw at the first store, even though an employee recommended it, because there was too much religion in the examples for my taste, though I did buy others there.

Orly and Me and the Book I Got

Orly said no worries, it is totally possible to separate the two if I want. I commented that this had been a problem for me with Arabic, but she said Hebrew is different.

By the way, she also told me that Americans' Hebrew tends to be very bad. By comparison, she said, South Americans who study Hebrew (in their respective home countries) have excellent Hebrew. 

I will need to work hard.

I left Sefer Israel with free flashcards Orly gave me, as well as a newspaper with simplified stories in Hebrew for language learners. And I am looking forward to trying out the book I got there, which is very basic and even has tracing paper for the Hebrew alphabet. Just like I used in first grade at Carlthorp Elementary School in Santa Monica, when I was practicing my five-year-old's writing skills! I LOVED practicing through tracing paper.

I would provide publishing information for the book I bought, but I can't read it. It's in Hebrew.

Runners Post-Race, at Cherry Hill in Central Park

Unfortunately, my stress fracture made me unable to work the finish line area, because standing and the more advanced skill of walking are pretty much prerequisites for being anywhere very central in Central Park on the big day. It's not that I can't do those things, but if I would like to get unfractured, I'm supposed to do very little of them.

So on marathon day, I instead ended up at Cherry Hill, a bit north of the finish line in Central Park, where I spent my time idling around a medical tent and some other tents set up for major volunteer organizations associated with the marathon. Runners connected with these organizations, about 2,000 in total I think, would make their way to this area when they were done.

But my language skills weren't really needed. The only thing I helped with was Italian, for one man of 50 who ran an impressive 3:04 time (he was disappointed not to break three hours). We chatted for quite a while in Italian while a volunteer tried to find his bag. 

My Volunteer Badge: Kind of a Lot of Pressure

While talking to him, I was sitting on the ground because all the chairs were being used by runners. (By the way, I hadn't remembered how hard it is for most people to walk right after they run a marathon; there was much limping everywhere.)

At one point, he stood, and told me to get up as well, holding out to me one of those foil blankets runners use to keep warm. I thought he had noticed I was shivering and was trying to make sure I did not get too chilled.

Very sweet of him, I thought. However, I was not sure where that blanket had been and so declined.

He insisted.

I politely declined again.

Finally I realized he wanted me to stand up and hold the blanket in front of him so he could change! This is a pretty common practice among runners, but normally when a woman, a relative stranger at that, is sitting on the ground with a big plastic boot on her leg, I would think a gentleman might actually figure out a way to find privacy on his own. Like in one of the numerous portable sanitation units (i.e., bathrooms) not many yards from where we were standing.

No matter. I was a good sport. I got up, I helped him out, and he was appreciative. As he changed, I reflected on the fact that his lower half was probably visible from a great many angles other than the 180 degrees obscured by the blanket I was holding.

Overall I kind of enjoyed my day, despite my being confronted with the reality that the medical professionals in the medical tent were about 3,000 times more valuable to the runners than I was.

Yes, I Actually Wore This Getup in Public

My enjoyment may have been dampened somewhat by the absolutely ridiculous headgear I was asked to wear, consisting of a bright yellow hat (yellow is a terrible color on me), with a piece of paper attached to the front showing my languages. 

Although it pains me, I have swallowed my pride to post a picture here. Yes, I wore this all day. In public.

To clarify: the yellow card on my hat is folded in half; there are more languages on the back, but all the ones that I needed were on the front.

Right below the first four, which I had circled in black ink to help out the runners, was Suomalainen. I had no idea what that was, and people kept asking me, which was amusing and also mildly embarrassing. Someone finally told me it means Finnish.

That someone was Toby Tanser, a former professional runner who is well-known around New York and a lot of other places globally, a guy who has so many different things going on at once it is kind of hard to figure out how to describe him. Among other things, he heads up a non-profit called Shoe4Africa and is also just a pretty hilarious and witty guy.

I am basing this latter conclusion on a single meeting (i.e., the one today), but I would say it is generally true that people who can be hilarious and witty after running 26.2 miles fast are also those things in their larger lives. With respect to Shoe4Africa, which I looked up later online, one thing I found interesting was the relevance of language for some of his organization's activities.

For example, on its website he writes, "I discovered there was no AIDS information written in the Kalenjin tongue in the Rift Valley (the center of our activities) and the people knew next to nothing about the disease, so I made brochures and distributed them at events..." Very cool.

Returning to the marathon: in the late afternoon a group of 20-somethings, three men and a woman, showed up by the medical tent. The woman had just run.

"Wow, you speak all those languages?" one of the men asked. "Spanish, French, Dutch, and Italian?"

More Hanging Out at Cherry Hill

I was confused. "Dutch?"

He pointed to the hat. I realized he was pointing to Deutsch. 

"No, that's 'German' in German," I said.

He looked confused. I tried again.

"Say something in Dutch," he said.

After some more back and forth, I succeeded in getting my point across. He started quizzing me.

"Say 'The ice is over there' in German," he demanded, pointing to a big pile of ice in front of the medical tent.

I obliged.

He then got distracted temporarily, but soon he was back.

"Tell me you love me in Italian," he said.

Foil People, at 72nd Street and Broadway

I looked up at him from the brick on which I was by then sitting, a brick that had thoroughly chilled my behind while also cutting off my circulation. "I don't think I know you well enough for that," I said.

"Come on," he begged. In my cold and weakened state, I relented.

At this point his runner friend had been tended to, and his other friends were trying to lead him away, but as he was leaving, he pleaded, "Now say it in German."

"You'll be sorry," I warned. But I said it anyway.

Ich liebe dich has always been very low on my list of romantic-sounding foreign phrases. But perhaps with a perfect stranger, that is all for the best.

Congratulations to the marathoners from around the world! Maybe next year I can again volunteer in Central Park, but while being mobile so I can get more into the thick of things.

Or who knows? Maybe, just maybe, and this is a very remote maybe, I will actually try to run it one more time myself.

Me Discharging My Runner ID Check Responsibilities

I take my responsibilities at ID check seriously, so I check IDs quite fast. At one point today, I found myself interacting with athletes, in quick succession, in German, Spanish, French, Italian, and English--all within a span of about 120 seconds.

I didn't get confused among languages. I am so excited about that! I just always wish my skills in each were better, is all.

So far at the expo, Italian has been the language where people seem to appreciate me the most. I believe I have read, and it has also been my experience, that Italy among European countries is relatively monolingual. So after crossing the Atlantic, making their way to their hotels, and slogging far west to the Javits Center, Italian athletes often seemed relieved not to have to speak English with me.

Runners Being Welcomed Multilingually

The NY Road Runners Club Has Good Signs

Now the Swiss, on the other hand, are another story. I am totally irrelevant for people from Switzerland, where multilingualism reigns.

Besides speaking various combinations of Italian, French, German, and English, several Swiss people I met today also speak Romansh, which is a language I know nothing about. Unfortunately, in the flurry of excitement generated by my nonstop examination of passports and driver's licenses, I did not think to ask them to say something to me in it! A lost opportunity, alas.

Sometimes after looking at the language stickers on my shirt, Americans would pass me by, assuming I didn't speak English. 

In a comment on yesterday's entry, a reader, Ron, asked what the funniest volunteer experience is that I've had to date. Here's the thing. A lot of this happens so fast, and the conversations are so quick, that not much funny stuff actually happens. People who have trained for 26.2 miles are in a relatively serious and often nervous frame of mind, so while there is good-natured teasing (from me, I mean), mostly they are just concerned about getting into the expo, getting their numbers, getting their goody bags, and eating a lot of pasta.

SPiN: A Ping-Pong Social Club! (In New York, They Think of Everything.)

While I was moving among languages today, I kept thinking of ping-pong. The experience reminds me of that. Light, fast banter, nothing too heavy, and constant movement, as more than 40,000 runners flow through Javits and get their stuff in just a few days.

Quite coincidentally, I did in fact end up playing ping-pong later tonight. I think it might have been only the second time in about 20 years. This was at an art opening held at SPiN, a ping-pong social club owned by Susan Sarandon.

It is amazing how ping-pong movements stay with you. Not quite like riding a bike, but close! I played a huge amount of ping-pong when I was a kid.

So it felt as though I was playing one form or another of ping-pong pretty much all day!

Welcome to the ING New York City Marathon!

Since October 1, I have been trying to revive the deceased Italian in my brain to prepare for my volunteer duties at the NYC Marathon Expo, where thousands of runners from around the world come to register for the pleasure of being allowed to run 26.2 miles on Sunday through the five boroughs that make up New York City: Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

I personally have run five marathons, four of them in New York, but it has been many years since the last one, and there is no marathon in my immediate future. To be honest, I find marathons a little...long.

But it is great fun to see so many happy, excited people, some of whom have traveled really, really far to run really, really far!

The marathon expo takes place over several days at the Javits Center, near the Hudson River in the 30s. My duty today was to check IDs as people entered the expo. This happens to be one of the few marathon volunteer tasks where you can actually sit (which I needed to be able to do for my injured foot), and I was there from about 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

They give you little stickers to put on your volunteer T-shirt indicating the languages you can help out with. Except for the Spanish sticker, which had the word "Español" on it, my stickers were national flags. I am extremely lame at remembering and recognizing flags. It is a glaring deficiency. Kind of embarrassing. 

Benefiting from some remedial flag help, I ended up with four stickers, for Spanish, German, Italian, and French. I stuck them to myself. Two of my flags then remained backwards until better-informed people came along and pointed out the mistake.

View Into the Expo from My Booth

Now, I am terribly sorry to disappoint people who are expecting that I will be adept in 11 languages by this point and should therefore have been wearing 11 stickers, but that is just not the case. The non-European, more unfamiliar languages I simply don't get as far in to begin with, and they largely go to sleep (some go completely to sleep, in fact) when I stop studying them. 

The Western European ones are the only ones in which I am currently conversational (and for Italian, that had ceased to be true until I did my review over the past month). I am no language savant, though if you want to read about some of those remarkable human beings, you should get Michael Erard's book Babel No More when it comes out in January. 

Back to the marathon: there are a number of ID check booths, all fed by a sometimes major river of arriving people. So, the deal is, the runners come at you thick and fast with their IDs and their registration sheets for the marathon. You check each person's ID and registration sheet, make sure those things correspond to each other and to the person standing before you, and you stamp the registration sheet. You tell the people where to go to get their race bibs. There is friendly small talk while this happens.

Today there was apparently a dearth of Italian speakers volunteering at the expo, and the Italian runners and accompanying friends and relatives seemed pretty happy to find someone who could communicate with them. I am so glad I studied up!

I'm not making any grand claims of sophistication in Italian, but what I had in my head was totally sufficient for small-talk, identification-check kinds of activities. And good enough to make jokes and tease in, which as I believe I have mentioned previously, is to me one of the most important signs that one has meaningful skills in a given language.

I even helped reunite an Italian man who didn't speak any English with his lost cell phone!

Marathon Volunteer Chic

Having people come at me all afternoon from countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain is absolutely 100 percent my idea of fun! I thought jumping around so much from one language to the next might hurt my head, or I might get hopelessly confused, but it was more like a caress to the brain. An energizing caress. It felt fantastic. People who didn't speak English well, or at all, were happy to get help in their languages, and I was ecstatic to practice on them.

I did this project for multiple reasons. One was to try some radically unfamiliar languages--and I have loved that piece of the experience, even when I have struggled. I wish I could learn faster and remember more, but even just being able to read Greek letters on a Greek passport today was rewarding.

Still, to actually use what you have learned with real live people, and to remember bucketloads of what you have forgotten from way back when you were in school, and to see these skills actually work with people who are standing in front of you excited about something and/or in need of help and/or just inclined to shoot the shit, well, that is an amazingly unbelievably fabulous feeling.

I have never done anything in my life like what I did today, and it is a most fantastic fantasy come true!

Going back for more tomorrow...

A Black-and-Blue Air Cast: The Latest in Language-Study Fashions

I am accumulating some Italian questions. Since Italian was not in the plan for this year, I don't know how many Italian-speaking readers are currently looking at this blog, but if anyone knows the answers to these questions, I would be much obliged.

1. I am curious to know how often in Italy people really, truly still use Loro, rather than voi, as the plural, formal "you."
2. In written Italian, which one of these is preferable: L'ho comprata or La ho comprata? (Meaning, "I bought it.") Does the choice depend on the level of formality? Or is the second one just plain wrong? Or even worse, weird?
3. I find it funny that grapes are considered a mass noun in Italian (l'uva) rather than a count noun. Grapes seem exceedingly countable to me. In fact, I ate, oh, about 80 of them just yesterday. Speaking of which, if l'uva is a mass noun, how would you say in Italian, "I ate 80 grapes"? Google Translate refuses to take that on. It offers, unhelpfully, Ho mangiato eighty uva.
4. In the expression ai tempi degli dei (in the times of the gods), why isn't degli just dei? To avoid getting stuck with dei dei? Google Translate rebels against the ai tempi degli dei construction, by the way, translating it as "at the time of the." Sic! That's it! No gods to be found.

According to one of my grammar books, Advanced Italian Grammar by Marcel Danesi, the process by which an adjective is turned into an adverb (e.g., lento, or "slow" -> lentamente, or "slowly") is called "adverbialization."

Cute! That sounds kind of like a manufacturing process. I am picturing a conveyor belt conveying adjectives (capable of modifying only two parts of speech) along until they roll into a piece of equipment that attaches a suffix, then spits them out the other side as larger adverbs, now capable of modifying three entirely different parts of speech.

In my imagination, the machinery is all very creaky and squeaky, which fits with how language works.

Time Warner Center This Week. Wow!

The main change affects Dutch, which has been reduced on my schedule from three months to one month.

My sincere apologies to the Dutch language and my Dutch friends, but as I recently noted, there is little Pimsleur available for that language, and I have developed quite a Pimsleur dependency. Also, even though I happen to know quite a few Dutch speakers here, the overall number of Dutch speakers in New York City doesn't compare to the numbers for the other 14 languages on the list.

Still, New York was once New Amsterdam! I will make it a good month, with visits to Dutch places and place names around the city.

Hebrew, Portuguese, and Chinese are all back on the calendar, and I will continue my current Italian review until the end of the month. The review is going pretty well, and I am enjoying it, although I have been hobbled in my relearning efforts by the fact that I lost my voice earlier this month and have had trouble finding it again. For a few weeks now, outside of the writing and grammar classes I have taught, I haven't been able to talk all that much.

I Keep Forgetting the Difference Between Fagiolini (Green Beans, I Guess) and Fagioli (Plain Old Beans?)

Being silent is incompatible with language learning. Also incompatible with my personality. 

I wrote the other day about my intention to get my European languages to as high a level as I can by this summer. I think I just need to chill out about that for now.

For one thing, I have already done a lot in recent weeks to revive my Italian, which has been great and fun and rewarding, and Portuguese is on the calendar for spring, and I think my German, French, and Spanish are all reasonably sturdy, even if the Italian review has been carving chunks out of my French. 

Oh, here's one more bummer: I just found out today that in the wake of some racing (in running shoes, not race cars), I managed to get a stress fracture in my foot. That will affect my mobility for city field trips for a while. I will probably take up swimming for at least part of my upcoming Hebrew months, but swimming from place to place in New York City is not exactly an option. (Just as an aside, unlike some of my triathlete friends, I have never been remotely attracted to the idea of swimming in the Hudson River.)

I am still signed up to volunteer early next month for the New York City Marathon, where I wanted to try talking in other languages to international runners and visitors...but the doctor's advice precludes standing around for hours, so that plan may have to be modified. Perhaps I can just ride around on the subway and talk to random people, now that my voice is coming back.

Anyway, I am going to start researching books and city resources relating to Hebrew. Advice is welcome! I know virtually nothing about Hebrew.

So, fantasy is being used to sell a car...but it is fantasy devoid of near-naked women.

And it is one of the sexiest ads I have ever seen.

By the way, no matter how absurd the men's almost instant language acquisition is, it still makes me jealous. 

As I post this entry, it is a little past midnight on the 17th. About an hour ago I came home from a small gathering of friends, a number of whom are multilingual and who have been helpful and interested advisors on this project. 

I got a look of horror when I said I was planning to drop Chinese and Hebrew. (The omission of Dutch didn't inspire the same concern, though it troubles me.) I am going to rethink this whole thing.

Maybe after a healthy fall/winter break for easier European languages, I will have energy for a couple of difficult ones...really, I'm just still a little worn out at the moment. But there is no question in my mind that omitting Chinese would be a big, big, big problem for the New York language story.

Hebrew should really be in there, too. It has a significant role in New York life. And at least a little Dutch, for the early history of the city and to help with place names throughout the boroughs.

I am mulling over a new schedule that would remove some of the German and Romance language rehearsal time and reinstate the temporarily abandoned other three languages. The schedule would be grueling...but rewarding. I will post more on this issue shortly.

My husband is humming the theme from Rocky in the background, and I am laughing.

Every time Vladimir sees me, he says cheerfully, "Ellen! Jak się masz?" (How are you?)

And each time, I say, "Bardzo dobrze, dziękuję. A pan?" (Very well, thank you. And you?)

And each time he proclaims with great enthusiasm, "No accent! No accent!"

During My Break, I Organized My Language Shelves! (There Are More.)

This is all very gratifying, of course, but I have a confession to make: I am not going to return to my Polish studies right now. I feel bad about that. I really do.

But I lost Polish momentum after a break that stretched much longer than I had initially expected (from August 10 through the end of September), and I have already devoted more than two months to Polish, which is longer than I've devoted to some other languages during this project.

In addition, by late this summer, this project seemed to be taking a physical toll on me. Starting in July, I occasionally began to feel just plain weird when I was studying. Kind of nauseated. And then my back also started killing me, making it hard to write and type. (For two years straight I have done a huge amount of typing, because of all the notes I maintain, and the blogging, not to mention all the old-fashioned writing I do by hand in grammar books with a pencil. And that's not even counting all the e-mailing and other typing I do for my business, Syntaxis.)

While on language vacation, I concluded that part of what was making me feel bad, besides the fact that I was starting to feel like a mole in a tunnel with all the studying, was that I was getting disturbed by all the forgetting.

Times Square in Fall, Full of International Tourists

I love starting a new language; each one is such a great adventure.

But each time I begin a new one--and this is especially true now, after more than two years of this undertaking--it accelerates the rate at which I forget what I have just learned of the previous one. There is a weird kind of grief involved in forgetting something that you care about and just spent a lot of time trying to learn.

I knew I would forget when I started this project. That didn't bother me. It was the pleasure of the adventure that attracted me. I mean, I love the actual process of studying a language and am not particularly affected by practical considerations in my choices here (or in other life adventures, for that matter).

But the project kept growing, to the point that there was a lot more to forget than I initially expected. A one-year project turned into two years, and then ultimately three years. That's a lot of grammar, vocabulary, etc., to be forgotten. And I kept adding languages.

One reason for the ever-expanding nature of this project is that I wanted to pay proper tribute to New York City and its language diversity. On my official schedule, in fact, I still have Hebrew, Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese left.

Passing Through Grand Central This Week, on My Way to Teach a Grammar Seminar

The problem is, I don't feel like doing four new languages right now. For one thing, there are only 30 Pimsleur lessons available for Dutch. Without Pimsleur, I tend not to do well (this was a big issue with Polish, which also had only 30 lessons). Studying on my own, I find that my progress in a language is highly correlated to the availability of Pimsleur lessons, even though those are just a part of my overall study program. 

As for Chinese and Hebrew, for which there is plenty of Pimsleur available, I currently feel just a little too tapped out in terms of my ability to deal with new writing systems and wildly different grammar. 

Now, Portuguese is another story. I am dying to study Portuguese. If it is anything like my Italian experience, it will be fantastic. Italian was far and away the most successful piece of the project from a language-acquisition point of view. In three months I went from knowing only a few words to being reasonably functional. (You can see my test results here.) And I am crazy about the sound of the language and the way it feels rolling off my tongue.

That's why it really bugged me when I started forgetting it.

At Grand Central You Can Buy Your Metro North Tickets in Other Languages

So, keeping all the above considerations in mind, I have settled on a new plan for what I expect to be the final stage of this project. I can't promise I won't change my mind, but at the moment my new goal is: to get as good as I can in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese, all at the same time I mean, by the the end of June 2012, which will be the three-year mark for this project, and probably, though not necessarily, its conclusion.

That means:

1. undertaking several months of intensive Portuguese study (I know only one Portuguese word now: obrigado/a), probably January through March 2012
2. studying however long it takes to revive my Italian (which, despite the blogging silence, I have actually been working on again daily since October 1)
3. refreshing and improving my Spanish, French, and German, which keep sagging to varying degrees when I am not supervising my skills in them properly
4. doing whatever it takes to keep the Romance languages from polluting one another, which I expect to be a huge--though I hope not insurmountable--challenge
5. coming to terms with dropping a few languages from the project, which is paining me greatly

I do feel bad that all the languages on my short list are Western languages, with many features in common with English. My apologies to speakers of languages from other language families. 

The reality--and this will hardly surprise anyone who knows anything about language learning--is that a language like Polish or Korean or Hindi requires a lot more study time of a native English speaker (such as me) than a more familiar language would. And they are much easier to forget. Now, I love studying really different languages...but right now I feel a powerful need to be able to communicate. And to stop forgetting. And maybe to work just a tiny bit less hard. 

On issue #4 above--the pollution--I don't know how I will do. Over the past two weeks I have spent a lot of time on Italian, which activity has promptly carved into my French and Spanish skills. And adding Portuguese this winter will only make that language pollution problem worse. 

German is relatively immune, since it is quite different from the others, but four Romance languages could be deadly. I don't know whether my brain can handle it. But I would like to see. I think it will be fun to try!

Now, even if I do manage to be competent in five non-English languages at once, I know these things require maintenance. If I don't maintain, I will forget again. Fortunately, as I have already pointed out, practical considerations like that don't really affect me. One can always relearn.

In a few weeks, I will be volunteering at the New York City Marathon, which has thousands of international registrants, and where I hope I will be able to use my German, Spanish, French, and Italian. We'll see how I do.

I don't have much time to prepare, and I imagine I will be confused and tired by the end of my six-hour volunteer shifts (by the way, I am pretty sure language learning burns extra calories, in case you are looking for a new diet). But I doubt the experience will cause permanent medical problems, and I think I have recovered sufficiently from the previous language-induced brain trauma to handle further assaults on my intelligibility.

So, after 771 consecutive days of this project, I have finally decided to take a mental holiday. 

The plan: to spend a few weeks thinking, eating, sleeping, etc., in my native language (English). Then return to Polish in early September.

During my mental vacation I will be enjoying multiple performances of my husband's new play, Just Sex, which opened yesterday at Theater for the New City in the East Village. There are no foreign languages in the play, but it does contain some colorful language. Brandt wrote it and is acting in it, and it is hilarious. 

If you live in the New York area, please consider yourself invited. You can even eat a nice Polish meal at Polonia restaurant down the block beforehand. 

Polonia on First Avenue, Near the Theater

Stuff You Can Eat There

Well, I haven't eaten there, so I can't vouch for it, but it looked cute when I popped my head in, and they have pierogis!

Pierogis for poor men, and pierogis for kings, and all for the same price. I don't know what that means; I am just reading off the menu. Maybe someone can explain?

Polish Newspapers: Ubiquitous in New York!

Last week I learned that one can buy a Polish newspaper mere steps from my front door, and on the next block, and probably on the next block after that. Amazing!

I spent hours on Rosetta Stone yesterday. Which unfortunately involves mouse-clicking, and did start to bother my arms. But I really wanted to do it, so I did it anyway.

Since my last entry here, I have made my way through most of the second level of Rosetta Stone, redone 25 Pimsleur lessons, almost finished Dana Bielec's Basic Polish Grammar, and made random small talk with Polish people.

There is a monumental gap between what I now understand about Polish grammar (which ain't all that great anyway), and the Polish I am able to conjure up at a moment's notice for conversation. The obstacle? Yes, the same cases that have been plaguing me. Although I have made my way through almost all the cases now--nominative, accusative, instrumental, locative, etc.--they are swimming around in my head like angry, confused sharks consuming vocabulary as quickly as I learn it.

The fact that words constantly change form depending on how they are used in a sentence definitely makes vocabulary acquisition more difficult. My ability to understand increasingly complex sentences improves, while my troubles conjuring up certain very basic sentences persist.

I think I am a major disappointment to the Polish women who work at my favorite coffee shop. It is kind of sad, but also pretty funny. I still have four weeks to redeem myself. Don't think I am depressed. I am stunned, but amused. 

I have finally succeeded at getting a Polish contractor I see a lot in our building to stop talking to me in English whenever I address him in Polish. Now he replies in Polish. This is an accomplishment. So I have been accumulating more small talk in my brain for the next time our paths cross.

My main goal right now is to finish my basic Polish grammar book so I can move on to the crisp new intermediate book waiting on my shelf. But the further I get in the basic book, the slower I go. My pace is now glacial.

I have considered the causes. One is that I am expected to know more grammar with each new chapter and grammar exercise, but I don't really know it know it. So a lot of exercises become major research projects, in which I troll chapters looking for the information I need to finish each translated Polish sentence, or even just fill in a tiny little blank.

Another thing is, checking your answers in Polish is time-consuming! I have to proofread words like wszystkie to make sure I spelled them right, and combing through all those consonants is no easy feat. No skimming possible, that's for sure.

Earlier today, I came across a cool resource, FlashcardExchange.com, the "world's largest flashcard library," according to the site. I went through some Polish cards, but am not up to more mouse-clicking at the moment. There are many languages there in case people are interested!

I Bought Gum Here, in Polish

I put a pack of the gum on the counter.

Czy pani ma wody? I asked quietly, trying not to interrupt her phone conversation. (Do you have water?)

Nie, she told me. (No.)

I felt very cool indeed to toss out a quick Polish sentence and be understood, all without interrupting the flow of her New York-paced day. I hope my sentence was grammatical. I think it was, but I find there are so many surprising ways to be tripped up in Polish that I am not at the point where I am confident about the grammaticality of even basic phrases.

Dzięnkuję, I said (thank you), and left with my gum.

For Cosmetics and Natural Remedies

I passed Ziółko on the way there. At least I think that's what the sign said. As I have mentioned previously, funky fonts in other languages are often hard to decipher if all you're used to is conventional typeface in grammar books. With some assistance from Google Translate, I have decided that at this shop they sell, in addition to cosmetics, natural remedies.

I enjoyed my class at the library. There were about seven people there besides me and the instructor, who clarified the differences between simple past (e.g., "I walked") and present perfect (e.g., "I have walked") in English. 

Present perfect does not exist in Polish, so such subtleties are hard to explain. There was some headshaking. 

There was also some confusion over why one would say, "I went to Central Park" and not "I went to the Central Park." There are no articles in Polish (i.e., no equivalents for "a," "an," and "the"). Explanations of articles in English as a Second Language books can go on forever. What native English speakers do instinctively with articles is very difficult to learn, and I sympathize with English learners who are native speakers of a non-articled language.

I really liked the group of students. When I first arrived, and they heard why I was there, one man told me I was wasting my time. "We speak simple English here," he said.

I told him I understood the situation completely and that it was not a waste of my time. Proving my point, two minutes later I had, from another student in the group, the name of a Polish school that she thought would be worth visiting. She was a friendly and talkative woman who was there with her considerably less talkative but also friendly husband.

Class was 90 minutes. Afterwards I wandered around on Manhattan Avenue a little, making my way into Sikorski Meat Market. 

Sikorski Meat Market

Meat Products for Sale

Bacon and More

They Had Piles of These Corn Puffs for Sale

At the Polish shops I have gone into in Greenpoint, employees have consistently addressed me in Polish. (At Sikorski, too!) This has surprised me.

Typically, throughout this project, people in stores where I am quite possibly the only natively English-speaking customer have tended to address me automatically in English. I do not look, say, Indian or Korean, but even when ethnically I am a possible match, they have still tended to opt for English first. Not in Greenpoint, though. Perhaps it is my partial Eastern European heritage.

I am enjoying the challenge of being addressed in Polish, though I confess, understanding a quick utterance across a store counter is not something I am good at at the moment.

Anyway, back to Sikorski: I am no vegetarian (sorry to the committed vegetarians; I could possibly be budged on this point), but I find such displays of meat kind of impressive. Where I buy my meat, there is considerable dilution from nearby vegetables and fruits. Meat isn't so conspicuously the point of the food stores I frequent. 

Second Polish Furniture Store I've Seen in Greenpoint

I Love This View up Manhattan Avenue

On Manhattan Avenue, right near the Nassau stop, I saw a furniture company. 

Seen on a Wall: I Think This Is an Announcement of a Bus Trip to Belmont Lake

That struck me because it was the second Polish furniture company I have seen so far on Manhattan Avenue.

I also saw a posting that, while more familiar to me than it would have been a month ago, was still full of words that needed translating.

Now that I am sitting at home with Google to help me (please don't think I regard Google as a reliable translator; mostly I use it as a supplementary tool), I have confirmed to a reasonable degree of certainty that this is a posting about a bus trip to Belmont Lake, which I have never been to. And that the trip sponsor is Liga Morska, which I think, now that I have googled it, is a longtime Polish social organization.

It is hard to imagine an equivalent posting in my Upper West Side neighborhood. It felt very...neighborhoody. And community-like.

If I'm being honest (that's how Simon Cowell always puts it), I would have to say, I have been feeling a bit defeated. My grammar studies usually translate more directly into actual speaking skills, but this time, I have stalled. Things go in my eyeballs and fall out my ears or the back of my head or something.

I decided I needed to get my nose out of my grammar books and get myself back to Greenpoint for more practice. So off I went to Brooklyn. 

A Beautiful Day in Greenpoint

Cafe Riviera, on Manhattan Avenue

My main destination was Cafe Riviera, which I had read about online. It has Polish employees and Polish desserts and Polish customers.

I went in and promptly heard a lot of Polish from both the patrons and the people behind the counter. I ordered a latte, sat down, and began studying.

Yep, I brought with me the grammar I was supposedly trying to escape. Some addictions are not worth fighting.

My usual approach, if I want to interact with people in a particular language, is to ask someone sitting near me for help with something.

This is not a ruse, by the way. I really do need help. 

Cafe Riviera, Where I Really Liked My Latte

I asked the woman next to me in Polish, "Do you speak Polish?" Tak, she said. (That means yes.)

Pointing to a word in my grammar book, I then asked her in Polish, "What does this word mean?" She told me. Frankly, I couldn't understand her. But I didn't really care, because the question got a cute little Polish conversation going.

I got to tell her, in Polish, that I had been studying the language for six weeks, and that I found it hard. She nodded in agreement and started listing the more challenging consonant combinations. She was curious about why I was doing it (meaning Polish). I have found that curiosity a lot among Polish speakers, who apparently do not encounter that many Americans trying to learn their language.

It is not the consonants that are doing me in. I don't find them that bad, and I keep getting more and more used to them. It really is the grammar.

It is things like the fact that even proper nouns like "Polish" or "Martha," which have only one version apiece in English, change form constantly depending on how they are used in sentences. Proper nouns!!! Those seemed inviolable to me before this project.

It is things like, if you take the negative of a sentence, the case of the direct object changes. Say, like, "I see the boy," versus "I don't see the boy." The boy is (I think) in accusative case in the former, and genitive in the latter. In non-grammatical terms, that means the form of "boy" changes.

As I try to talk, Polish creates in me a kind of linguistic hypervigilance, a grammatical self-consciousness, that translates into a need for numerous naps and extra caffeine.

A Trilingual Pharmacy: English, Polish, Spanish

Polish and Spanish on Its Doors

After leaving Riviera, I was relieved to discover in walking around that more of the Polish signs were understandable to me than the last time I was here.

I'm not sure, but I think the sign above right from the pharmacy translates along the lines of, "Buy your medications cheap. Generics only $6!" Being able to get the gist of a sign that only a month earlier would have been impenetrable is an unbelievable thrill. It gives me the same rush as great literature!

I also liked that it was right above an Hablamos Español sign.

A Greenpoint Grocery Store

A Polish Diner

Residential Block, Greenpoint

Greenpoint Branch, Brooklyn Public Library

I ultimately made my way to Greenpoint's public library. There I spoke at some length to librarian Izabela J. Barry, who is originally from Poland and who has been at the library for nine years.

Lots of Polish Books There!

She has worked to increase the Polish-language section, which I can report was substantial.

Izabela told me that in Brooklyn, demand for Polish reading materials is significant. Only English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian (not sure of the order) exceed Polish in terms of book needs.

I am going to return to the library next week for a conversation class there. It is English conversation, but attendees are often native speakers of Polish.

I do enjoy bartering language skills; it's a cool kind of currency.

At least that is true for some grammatical cases. I don’t know about all, and I have a long way to go.

Bananas May Be Masculine in Polish, But They Are Grammatically Unlike Men

But just for example, if you wanted to say, “I eat them,” with “them” referring to bananas (“banana” is a masculine noun in Polish), I gather that for "them," you would use the accusative pronoun je, pronounced roughly yay.

If you wanted to say, “I visited them,” with “them” referring to women, you would also use je to mean "them."

If you wanted to say, “Jack greets them,” with “them” referring to men, you would--if I am not confused, which I can't guarantee--use the word ich.

I keep encountering this issue with different grammatical concepts in Polish—i.e., that there is a difference between how you treat men grammatically in comparison with (1) masculine nouns that are alive but not men (such as animals), (2) masculine nouns that are inanimate, and—naturally—(3) female and neuter nouns. There are special units and sections and subsections devoted to all the special forms I need to know based on how, um, manly something is. Or isn’t.

The amount of time I have spent reading about man-specific noun and pronoun and adjective forms makes me feel a little bit as though I am bringing a guy who is lounging in an easy chair a newspaper, a cognac, and a pair of pre-heated slippers. It seems like an awful lot of grammatical attention to give just to men!

It is funny because the number of forms is so dizzying, and mystifying because I have to categorize things in ways I am still not used to. I saw this type of thing in Russian (another Slavic language), but I honestly do not recall its being quite this complicated.

In terms of materials, I am almost done with the 30 Pimsleur lessons available to me, and I am now on the second level of the three levels Rosetta Stone offers. I am sad to be running out of Pimsleur, and glad Rosetta Stone has plenty of additional content for me. I need it!

When I try to search for Polish things on the web, I run into trouble because the word “Polish” keeps bringing up nail and beauty salons. Like the Polish Parlor, where you can get lash extensions.

Polish

Also Polish, in Internet Searches

In addition, whenever I see the word “polish” in printed materials now—say, in a phrase such as “polish your skills”—I mistakenly read it as “Polish” the first go-through. 

Brands in Polish are not written with initial capitals—only lower-case letters. So: ford, cheerios, kraft, etc.

I feel very powerful to have just written a (sort of) sentence with all of those in lower-case letters.

That brand-lower-casing custom would eliminate some of the arguments that have plagued English speakers over the years. Do you capitalize Kleenex, Jell-O, and Google? There is much debate and sometimes much legal activity over brand capitalization in English.

Eventually some brand names cross over at least part of the time into common nounhood, where the little letters reside. (Please pass me a kleenex.) The lucky versatile few even get to be verbs. You can google it.

I guess the arguments on this issue would be much shorter, and cheaper, in Polish?

In English there is potentially a big difference between asking for a pack of Camels and asking for a pack of camels.

Oops, a quick Google search just undermined that point, since I gather that a group of camels is not a pack, but rather a train, caravan, or flock. But seriously, how many people would actually know that?

In the grammar book I am using (Dana Bielec's Basic Polish), as in all grammar books I have encountered, sometimes the sample sentences strike me as particularly esoteric. For example, I was just told how to say, “The piglet’s straw is wet”!

First, in consonants. I am most definitely not used to consonants with accents. They are especially audacious in the Polish word for "song": pieśń.

Accent Marks Congregating

An accent mark makes me want to stress the syllable in which it appears. I am used to them on vowels. I am used to them in Spanish.

Yeah, I know in French they are used to indicate pronunciation--e is pronounced differently from è and é--but for some reason that fact never dislodged my original association of accent mark with syllable stress.

With respect to the Polish for "song": an s with an accent on it is pronounced roughly sh in Polish. The n with the accent I am still kind of figuring out, but it seems to give you a little lift, almost like a ni sound but without the i being thoroughly pronounced/noticeable? So "song" would be roughly PYESH-ni?

Polish speakers, please feel free to correct me. I have found some of the instructions I have received on that accented n a bit mysterious.

Although they look more familiar than accented consonants, accented Polish vowels sometimes throw me more.

Take the word samochód, which means "car." When I look at that word, it makes me want to stress the last syllable. As in sah-mo-HODE.

But in fact, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, and what the accent does is change the pronunciation to an oo sound--so the word is roughly sah-MO-hood.

When I write it, I keep trying to put the accent mark on the first o. I have to restrain myself.

The History Book I Am Reading: I Like the Cover

In 2005, writes Bukowczyk, there were nearly 10 million people of Polish ancestry in the United States.Also from the book: although the city with the largest number of people of Polish descent is Chicago, New York City and Newark are high on the list, too, with (these numbers are from 2000) 268,228 and 120,193 people, respectively.

In the book’s introduction, written in 2007, he notes, “Polishness has lost much of its stigma...has become more ordinary, neutral, and normal in American society and culture, while things Polish have begun to enter American mass culture, in symbolic and commodified forms, just as elements from other ethnic cultures have done."

Among other developments, Mattel’s introduction in 1998 of Polish Barbie: “the polar opposite of derogatory anti-Slavic female stereotypes.”

He also discusses Martha Stewart and John Paul II. I admit, I was surprised to see their names together in the same paragraph. I did not remember that she was of Polish descent.

“Certainly, both Stewart (née Kostyra) and Pope John Paul II have been sources of pride for Polish Americans," he notes, "and while her humiliation caused Polish Americans shame and his death, deep grief, both produced in Polish America a profound sense of loss.”

I Am Using This a Lot

An aside: as I proceed through my grammar studies, I have quickly become enamored of the Oxford Essential Polish Dictionary.

I am very picky about dictionaries. I like the aesthetics of this one, the readability of the print, the weight of the book (light), and its dimensions (small-purse size).

Most important, when I look up words, they are almost always in there.

A final note: one thing I am really enjoying about studying Polish is that I can finally figure out how to pronounce Polish surnames when I see them! That is worth a lot!

Times Square Has Been Hopping This Summer

According to the Modern Language Association Data Center, in 2000 in New York City, there were 1,832,365 million Spanish speakers versus 60,770 Polish speakers.

But, as I have mentioned previously, I encounter Polish people close to daily at my favorite café. In addition, as I have not mentioned previously, a number of Polish contractors do regular work in my building. 

I am friendly with a couple of them who I think will speak with me in Polish when I become more interesting and conversational, and can go beyond spouting random and therefore socially inappropriate things such as Rower jest stary (the bicycle is old) or Kot jest pod stołem (the cat is under the table). Currently they tend to revert to English with me.

There is also a Polish employee at the physical therapy office I have been going to. (Physical therapy is my latest, and most successful, effort to date to restore my running ability, such as it is. It’s actually working, I think. I hope.) His name is Michael, and besides being Polish and a taskmaster (good for physical therapy; you don’t want a pushover), he happens to be a natural-born language teacher.

Today when he stretched me after my assigned strength-building exercises, he quizzed me on what I had been learning. He asked me about the vocabulary I knew and then made little forays off of that. I left feeling as though maybe I knew a little more than I had thought I knew. (Which is good; all the declensions have been giving me a confidence crisis.)

And there’s more!

At this local shop I go to maybe once every few weeks, there is a new Polish-speaking employee. She moved here when she was five, but her parents sent her to Polish school on the weekends and she grew up speaking to them in Polish, so she is fluent. 

I Like This Dictionary

This morning when I was in there, I told her a couple of the sentences I had learned recently, including Drabina jest zepsuta. That means, “The ladder is broken.” She laughed.

In a final coincidence, this afternoon a New York friend skyped my husband and me from his travels abroad, and he just happened to have a Polish friend with him.

Drabina jest zepsuta, I told her, as an illustration of my Polish prowess. She laughed.

Yes, indeed, I am quite the conversationalist.

Tea, Source of Pronunciation Challenges (This Came from One of My Lovely Japanese Conversation Partners, By the Way!)

In Rosetta Stone, when it is at the end of a word--such as herbatę, which is the accusative form of “tea,” such as you would use in the Polish equivalent of “I am drinking tea”--the letter is rather complicated and sounds kind of like ay-oh, and quite nasal. So "tea" as a direct object comes out something like hair-BAH-tay-oh.

In my Pimsleur lessons, the same word sounds like hair-BAH-tay. So no ay-oh fanciness at the end.

Fortunately, most of the women who work at the café I favor speak Polish, so when I have questions, I sometimes ask them. Their assessment in this case: although the Rosetta Stone version is technically correct, people don’t pronounce it that way in everyday speech. Rather, you would hear the Pimsleur version with the simpler vowel sound.

I would welcome any other thoughts on this point.

Anyway, while I was consulting with the café employees, a customer overheard my question. "Why are you studying Polish?" she asked me.

I told her. It turned out she was also Polish. Although she now lives in Boston, she lived in New York for many years. She is in her forties, and she had a Polish friend with her, a man somewhat older. 

The woman said that Greenpoint, the heavily Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn I have written a bit about previously, had gentrified greatly since she left New York in the 1990s. I don't remember ever going there during that time, so I have no basis for comparison.

Greenpoint Today

She said it used to be quite smelly, that you would notice it as soon as you exited the subway. I said that is not the case now and showed them pictures off my blog on my iPhone.

In 1980, at the start of the Solidarity movement, she was still living in Poland. The period of martial law that ensued was very difficult for her. She was 16 at the time, and one needed coupons for everything, and you couldn’t get sanitary napkins or shampoo and I think she also said acne cream! For a teenager with pimples and insecurities, she explained, that was traumatic.

It became easier after a couple of years, but then she moved to the U.S. in her twenties and has lived in the States ever since.

I think she and her friend and I were about the only customers in the café at the time of this discussion, meaning I was for a brief time the only non-Polish person in the room (there were the two Polish employees as well) in a French café in New York City! 

I need all the help I can get with noun forms. Three genders, and seven cases, and lots of different endings...I am spending a shocking amount of time on nouns, not to mention their accompanying adjectives, and I haven't even made it past the accusative case yet.

Here’s one noun-related thing I found rather amazing. The nouns listed below, which are singular in English--and generally other languages as far as I have noticed--exist in Polish only in the plural.

Basic Polish by Dana Bielec! I Like It!

Nouns That in Polish Are, Weirdly, Always Plural

There are more where those came from. For their strange status, I was offered this explanation: “These are items usually consisting of two or more parts.” That caused me to start considering doorknobs, doorknob screws, those plate thingies that attach doors to a wall (I am not handy and have no handy vocabulary in any language), etc.

Okay, I can buy that there are multiple pieces to a door, but a birthday? Cake, candles, presents, concerns about aging, etc.? Are those what make it plural?  

Polish doesn’t remind me a whole lot of other languages I have crossed paths with. Of course I find some things that remind me of Russian, what I remember of it anyway, but then sometimes random Polish words look and/or sound surprisingly familiar from other languages.

For example, the word "are" in Polish is są. It is pronounced a lot like “are” in French: sont. I don’t know whether the similarity is accidental or not. 

Other words seem pretty unmistakably connected to their equivalents in other languages. The Polish word fryzjer, which means “hairdresser,” looks and sounds like Friseur in German. The pronunciation is roughly FRIZZ-yair in Polish, and fri-ZOOR in German.

The Polish word malarz, or “painter,” looks and sounds somewhat like the German word Maler. MAH-lazh in Polish, MAH-lur in German.

It would be very interesting to be able to go back in time hundreds of years and trail after people interacting, and hunting, and maybe sitting around fires, and not taking a lot of showers by modern standards, and watch language change as they take it with them from one part of Europe to another.

Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

A Presumably Polish Restaurant

I enjoyed a lovely walk down Manhattan Avenue, starting at the Nassau subway stop and finishing at the Greenpoint stop, where I got back on the subway for my return to Manhattan. It’s really a very charming stretch!

Robin Cook and Tom Clancy in Polish

The first place I went was Polam Bookstore, at 648 Manhattan Avenue.

When I arrived, a store employee was speaking to a man in Polish at the register. She was nice and helpful in response to my questions, but unfortunately, she didn’t have grammar books at the moment. She said she was reordering them, but this is an urgent language-learning need!

They had other books, for people who already speak Polish. I find it interesting how many languages writers such as Robin Cook are translated into.

When I left, I thanked her in Polish, and they both smiled. I find that even slight efforts in Polish seem to yield rather significant rewards. Surprise, appreciation, etc. It is moving.

From there I walked into random stores. There was Polish everywhere on the street.

Electronics in Polish

Legal Services in Polish

Banking in Polish

Cucumbers in Brine, in Polish

I was able to understand some of the words on signs, on labels, and in passing conversations, and got irrationally excited about that.

Lots of Polish Food at Biedronka!

The food store Biedronka seemed to have a strongly Polish clientele.

As I walked up and down the aisles, I heard and saw a ton of Polish. I took a few pictures.

Sometimes taking pictures at food stores can be tricky, because if you start photographing pickle jars and juice bottles, people tend to think you're an inspector from some New York agency. So I am pretty surreptitious these days.

After all, I'm not trying to expose anyone; I just have a thing for foreign-language food labels!

Hydrate in Polish!

Polish Juice

I really liked the second Polish bookstore I visited, Polonia Bookstore. They had a number of grammar books, but I decided they weren’t for me.

The problems: one book was entirely in Polish, which is not going to work at this point. I am not currently capable of understanding grammatical explanations about Polish in Polish.

Another book had some explanations in English—but no answer key! No answer key, no purchase.

The store also had phrasebooks. I personally find phrasebooks useless. 

I feel as though the main purpose of phrasebooks is to make the people buying them believe that they have done something useful by handing over a credit card, without actually teaching something meaningful. I find it frustrating and unhelpful to try to learn a few random questions and sentences about bathroom locations and tourist attractions without having any sense of the language architecture behind them. Syllables without meaning, in my opinion. 

Finally, they had CDs, but I already have Rosetta Stone.

My failed grammar expedition was by no means the fault of Polonia, however; in fact, the woman I spoke to there was great, and it was a very nice store. 

Polonia Bookstore, 882 Manhattan Avenue

Polish Cuisine

Cards, with Babies and a Pope

Lots of Polish Magazines at Polonia

My grievances are just common ones when one is looking for books about a not heavily studied language. Demand and competition are definitely good for the language-learning market. 

Anyway, if you speak Polish, I recommend this bookstore!

Even without success on the Polish grammar front, my field trip was totally worth it.

And afterwards I found a good grammar online, and it arrived today, Monday, and so far I like it: Basic Polish, by Dana Bielec.

One thing I love about modern life is barnesandnoble.com! You want a Polish grammar one afternoon, and the very next day, without your even leaving your building, it is in your hands.

It read, "Gdyby wybory prezydenckie w USA odbyły się teraz, to hipotetyczny kandydat Partii Republikańskiej (GOP) pokonałby Baracka Obamę--wynika z ogłoszonego w piątek sondażu Instytutu Gallupa. Za czołowego kandydata GOP uchodzi na razie Mitt Romney."

(Readers, if you have trouble seeing the Polish characters in your browsers, I would be very grateful if you let me know!)

I include this quotation here not for the content (which I am not equipped to translate anyway), but rather because I have an aesthetic comment: don't there seem to be an awful lot of consonants?!

Everything, in Polish

To my eye, Polish words often look like consonant traffic jams. And a number of characters are pronounced differently from their English counterparts, so you have to proceed with caution.

At left is a word I find visually stunning. It means "everything."

Although y is (as far as I know) exclusively a vowel in Polish, in English it flips back and forth between vowel (as in “syntax”) and consonant (“days of yore”). But when I see a y in an unfamiliar foreign word, I tend to instinctively read (often misread) it as a consonant. When I first saw wszystko, it looked as though there was no vowel until the o, by which point I would have already choked on consonants.

But it's really not that bad. In Polish, the w is pronounced v, and the sz combination is pronounced sh. So this word is pronounced VSHIST-ko. There are two vowels, which is totally reasonable.

Not that bad at all!

Hi in Polish

Now here's the word for “hi." Cz is pronounced as a ch sound, as is the c with the accent over it. The s with the accent over it is pronounced sh. So "hi" is pronounced cheshch.

It is a little tongue-twisting at first, and maybe the kind of word it is good to practice alone at home first so you don’t spit on people when you greet them.

Fortunately, there are easy words in Polish, too. Rosetta Stone recently taught me that “laptop” in Polish is: laptop!

I forgot to mention that last week I got back my French writing test results from ALTA Language Services, the testing company I have used for some of the languages. I got a 10 this time (out of a possible 12), which is defined as “advanced.”

As a reminder, this is a language I studied in college in the 1980s, but then pretty much stopped using. So in the end, after three months of study and review, I raised my oral score two points, to 9, and my written score three points. I was hoping for two 11’s, but I am moderately happy with that.

Eleven days into my Polish studies, that basic starting knowledge is still coming in handy—way out of proportion to what I would have expected.

Rosetta Stone, Numbers Practice

For one thing, I didn’t realize how much time was normally devoted to teaching basic numbers! They come up in Rosetta Stone repeatedly.

And it’s interesting psychologically, too, because those few Polish words—which have not come up very often in my life—connect me across a significant expanse of time to another age. Another age for me, and another age for Poland, too.

I don’t know why I remembered the 15 words I learned back in the 1970s, but every time Rosetta Stone starts an exercise on numbers, I get happy.

However, there are clouds on my language-learning horizon: Oscar E. Swan, writer of the grammar book I am reading, cautions, “The Polish numeral system strikes most people as complex. Indeed, it has probably never been exhaustively described, and usage can vary from speaker to speaker.”

“Never been exhaustively described”? Really?!

Swan goes on to give what he calls a “basic outline.” His basic outline lasts pages. Many features of Polish numbers sound similar to Russian, which was the first language I studied as part of this project (back in July and August of 2009) and whose numbers amazed me.

The most important thing is, numbers change form—a lot! Which version of a number you use depends on case (i.e., is the number connected to the subject or the direct object or the indirect object or something else altogether?), gender of the thing being counted, whether the thing is a person or not, and probably other considerations I am not yet aware of.

(I intentionally ended that sentence with a preposition, by the way. I believe in it. It’s an old wives’ tale that you can’t do that.)

These are all forms of “two,” for instance: dwa, dwóch, dwu, dwom, dwóm, dwoma, dwie, dwiema, dwaj. I am not kidding.

Probabilities apparently factor into the number choices as well. If you are referring to two students (this point applies to nominative case), and you know one is male and one is female, you would use dwoje. If you are not sure of the gender breakdown, but there might be one male and one female, you use dwóch.

As a language learner, this kind of thing inspires some dread, I confess. But I also find it fascinating.

There’s plenty more where that came from. “With compound numerals,” Swan explains, “the counted noun has the case indicated by the final numeral. Numerals ending in 2, 3, or 4 are followed by the nominative plural, while numerals ending in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 0 are followed by the genitive plural.”

Translation: if you refer to 23 notebooks in Polish, the form of the noun “notebooks” is different from the form of "notebooks" you would use if there were 25 of them.

Another thing that takes some getting used to: in ordinals (e.g., “first,” “second,” “third”), both pieces of compound numbers change to ordinal form.

For example, you don’t say “twenty-first” in Polish. You say the equivalent of “twentieth-first.”

That may not sound like a big deal, but it actually requires a significant amount of brainpower (for me, anyway) to recall two ordinal forms at once and then stick them together without forgetting entirely what else I was trying to say. 

And finally: there are apparently special numbers for special circumstances. It cracks me up to read sentences like this (from Swan's book): “A set of collective numerals is used with mixed male-female groups, with the young of animals, and with plural-only nouns. In poetic use, collective numerals may be used with paired body parts, such as eyes or hands.”

I am suddenly picturing incongruous collections that could require counting in this special way: awkward pre-teens at their first boy-girl dance, wide-eyed baby animals at Central Park Zoo, and disembodied eyeballs.

Trying to sort through stuff like this sometimes feels like the linguistic equivalent of bungee jumping.

Disclaimer: If I have made mistakes in anything above, I sincerely apologize. I am trying to highlight grammatical features I find interesting, but since I am brand new to this language, it is entirely possible I misunderstood something or got something wrong.

Mr. Oscar E. Swan is the expert. I, on the other hand, am still learning how to say things such as “husband,” “wife,” “plate,” and “I would like to drink a beer with you.”

I have no experience with those three languages, but I am definitely finding at least some similarities with Russian, which has six cases (versus seven in Polish) and, like Polish, piles of declensions.

Not to belabor this point, but I continue to be stunned by the challenge of the declensions for foreign-language learners.

Dobry (Good), with Declensions

I was complaining about nouns last time, but just as in Russian, the adjectives change form, too. (True for German as well, but there just aren’t as many cases.)

At left, for example, are the many different forms of dobry, or "good," in Polish. 

Scandalous!

Besides reading my Oscar E. Swan grammar book, which I like so far but which contains no grammar exercises (I need to go shopping), I have been doing Pimsleur lessons, which are the audio-only, highly portable lessons to which I have been seriously addicted for nearly two years.

In addition, today I set up and started Rosetta Stone for Polish. 

Rosetta Stone: Cute, Right?

I actually liked it quite a lot. 

This is, I am realizing, the first time I have used Rosetta Stone to study a language that is based on the Roman alphabet.

Rosetta Stone Hindi and Japanese were far more challenging; having a reasonably familiar writing system makes things easier for sure.

Sometimes easier is more fun, because there is less frustration. But crazy hard has its advantages, too.

New York As Seen from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel

The purpose of the event was to announce their new TOTALe Companion HD application, which allows you to run their course content on an iPad. I don’t currently have an iPad, but I can appreciate how this development would add to the language-learning experience by making it more flexible and mobile.

I will aspire to an iPad in the near future.

I think that after inviting me to two events, the Rosetta Stone people might possibly be getting tired of my tendency to derail new-release-related discussions in favor of my own agenda, which tends to involve listing in excruciating detail the pros and cons of my Rosetta Stone experience--or, alternatively, trying to talk broader language-learning philosophy that has nothing to do with whatever new release we are there to discuss.

I don't meant to derail the discussions. I am excitable and can't help myself. It's not every day that you get to be around so many language-learning nerds at once. (That's a compliment, Rosetta Stone people!) But they are very nice to me anyway.

Today I got the results for my oral French test, taken two days ago. I got a 9. That’s out of a maximum possible 12. My 9 is described as “advanced,” and it is two points higher than the 7 I scored back at the beginning of March, but still, I was hoping for at least a 10. I am a little sad, to be honest.

Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar, by Oscar E. Swan, with Latte

But I have to move it along! My attention is now on Polish. I have been doing Pimsleur Polish lessons—sadly, they offer only 30 lessons for this language--and reading my new Polish grammar book.

I will also be using Rosetta Stone as soon as I set it up.

One great resource is the women who work at my favorite local café. Most of them are Polish, and they are, generously, happy to help.

At least the Polish alphabet is familiar. It is after all the Roman alphabet, with some extra letters with diacritical marks. 

I was going to type them here, but I see they are not among my symbols in Microsoft Word. Grrr. I will write them instead.

Some Fancy Polish Letters

Letters like these always make foreign languages look so, well, foreign! And mysterious! And exciting!

That the other letters are familiar is a good thing, because I can already see that the declensions in Polish are crazy. There are three noun genders (masculine, neuter, and feminine) and seven cases.

You know how in English there is only one form of the noun “store” no matter how you use it?

For example:

• The store was open.
• I ran into the store.
• I robbed the store.

Well, that’s not true in Polish. Depending on how you use a noun in a sentence, the forms change. A lot. Shown here are the possibilities for "store," whose basic form is apparently sklep.

One Noun (Store), Many Forms

Please don't think for one second that because I'm writing these forms down, I already know them. I do not have the slightest clue at this point. I haven't even memorized the basic word sklep, much less all its permutations.

And the thing about this kind of stuff is that it adds so much time to the learning process. I mean, if I want to learn how to say “store” in English, someone tells me “store,” and I am done with it.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I also have to know that “stores” is the plural. And then, much more significantly, I have to learn how to use articles (“a,” “an,” and “the”), which is an automatic thing for a native English speaker and extremely tough for someone whose native language does not even have articles.

Still, I think I'd take articles over this. If I had a choice. Which I don't. So I will need to suck it up.

I’m afraid I didn’t know/remember this characteristic of Greenpoint until last month, when Brandt and I went there for a friend’s book reading. As soon as we popped out of the Greenpoint subway station, we were surrounded by Polish. I was ecstatic. It seemed like a good omen for this upcoming segment.

Polonaise Terrace, Greenpoint

Polish (I Think) Meat Market

Polish Paper, Seen in a Greenpoint Bakery

Polish Memory Cards, Sold at Word Bookstore

I was in Poland once, I believe when I was about seven, with my family. This was in the 1970s—so a very different time for Poland.

During our trip, my sister Diana and I learned to count to ten in Polish, and also to say “thank you” and the all-critical “I don’t speak Polish.”

These things have stuck in my head all these years, despite the fact that I have never gone back. I’m not sure why. I remember that trying to say things in a language I knew absolutely nothing about was unbelievable fun.

Polish Sign on a Greenpoint Window

One of my strongest memories from this trip is that we didn’t know how to say 12, and my stepmother--who I believe taught us the numbers as she learned them herself--wanted to buy a dozen eggs, so she tried saying six twice.

It didn’t work, and we ended up short on eggs. By half, I believe.

My sister and I found that hilarious. I think we subsequently brought up this incident about 3,000 times during the remainder of our respective childhoods.

But in any case, I am actually starting out with way more vocabulary in Polish than I’ve had in a number of the other languages I’ve studied for this project. 

Now, off to augment my seven-year-old self's Polish vocabulary!

As I read along, I found it helpful to write down in the back of the book, more or less alphabetically, unfamiliar vocabulary that seemed important or likely to recur.

My Homemade Mini-Dictionary

Some words recurred with surprising frequency. L'essor, meaning "the rapid expansion," showed up often (rapid expansion apparently being an important characteristic of New York City history).

Writing down key vocabulary helped reinforce it in my head so that I didn't have to look up the same word 10 times. (That kind of thing happens to me a lot, and it drives me crazy.) And, if a word disappeared from my brain--as the words for "stevedore" and "slaughterhouse" tended to do--it was easy and convenient to consult my customized mini-dictionary. 

By the way, I am pretty sure this is the first history book I have ever read in a foreign language. My foreign-language reading in school was, as far as I can remember, limited to fiction and essays.

That's pretty standard in university foreign-language departments, and I regret to say I did not continue to read in languages other than English once I was out of school and no longer had syllabi to follow.

Union Square This Week

Following are some random observations and details from the book that I found interesting.

In 1643, a priest named Father Jogues was apparently stunned to discover that there were 18 sortes de langues (not sure whether this should be understood literally as “kinds of languages,” or just plain old “languages”) among the 400-500 people (!) he encountered on and around the island of Manhattan.

If he could have imagined what was to come! According to Sam Roberts in his article "Listening to (and Saving) the World's Languages," (New York Times, April 28, 2010), "While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages--far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms."

Times Square This Weekend

Back to the book. It is funny to read Mark Twain quotes in French. Also funny: seeing The Great Gatsby rendered in French: Gatsby le Magnifique.

On another kind of cultural note, Saturday Night Fever showed up in the book as well, as La Fièvre du samedi soir. The French in this case doesn’t seem to have quite the rhythm of the English original!

The author mentioned that there were floating baths on the Hudson and East River in the 1870s. This was news to me. A quick search online yielded this page, with a picture and descriptions. Amazing!

I read that during World War I, anti-German sentiment led Coney Island hamburgers to be renamed sandwiches de la liberté (well, "liberty sandwiches" in English). That reminded me of the french fries-liberty fries hullabaloo back in 2003. I had forgotten that we had such a long tradition here of xenophobic food-naming.

Seen May 26 from the A Train to JFK: Can Someone Please Tell Me What Cemetery This Is?

I found it funny to read in French about the 1955 World Series, which pitted the Yankees against the Dodgers. I mean the Brooklyn Dodgers, of course, though when I was growing up in Los Angeles, and before I moved to New York, I had no idea that that team had ever had anything to do with New York. My apologies to any longtime baseball fans.

I finished my Histoire at about 1 a.m. this morning. I am really, really happy that I was able to get through it in a relatively short amount of time. Plus, it was a lot of fun, and the experience makes non-English texts, even long ones, feel more within reach.

On to Polish! Good luck to me. From what I hear, I’ll need it.

It's been going fabulously. Books are highly portable and can go anywhere.

I Took a French Book to Times Square...

...and Over Manhattan Bridge

First I read Catherine Cusset's New York journal d'un cycle. As I mentioned previously, this book details, among other things, her adventures riding through New York City on her bike, sometimes accompanied by her husband on roller skates.

As a runner who constantly competes with roller-bladers and cyclists in Central Park--roller-bladers and cyclists who do not understand their proper lanes, though through no fault of their own, since the markings on the park drives are totally confusing--I found it amusing to see New York from the (French) point of view of a cyclist.

Cusset appreciates the therapeutic benefits of exercise and of simply being outdoors. She writes, "Je suis convaincue que c'est en prenant l'air chaque jour qu'on garde le contrôle de sa vie." A rough translation: "I am convinced that it is in getting some air every day that one maintains control of one's life."

Cusset Traveled Around Town With Me This Week

I can relate.

In addition, one of the things I like about reading real books rather than just grammar books is that you tend to get a broader range of vocabulary (though I do seriously love grammar books). For example, in Cusset's narrative I came across the term gadgets érotiques. For good reason, I figured that was probably "sex toys."

Since such a thing is presumably not in my dictionaries, I checked the term in Google Translate. Google Translate translated it as "erotic gadgets." 

Skeptical, I then tried translating "sex toys" from English to French. Google Translate offered jouets sexuels. 

Now I am perplexed. And distrustful, because erotic terminology tends to be an area where your standard dictionaries and translators are not the best sources of information.

As I have mentioned previously, one of the reasons I have a hard time reading books in a foreign language is that I have a tendency to look up every single word I don't know or am not sure about, until I lose track of what the writer is saying. Constant interruptions are not good for reading comprehension; it is better to rely a little more on context and to let certain murky words go.

Preventing me from looking up too many words is the fact that some weeks ago, a piece of gum, of a psychedelically blue color, fell onto my favorite dictionary. 

Reluctantly I will concede that the place that it fell from was in fact my mouth.

Normally I chew gum with my mouth closed, but I guess I suffered a lapse.

Anyway, I picked most of the gum off of and out of the dictionary, but the remainder is still making things sticky, and also it looks kind of gross. I don't like it.

The gum affects the c's, d's, and e's in particular, but it is also a general deterrent to dictionary use. Which is, in the end, better for me.

American History in French

After reading Cusset's bike book, I moved on to François Weil's Histoire de New York. I am loving it. I read quite a few histories of New York City when I first moved here, but I have forgotten a lot of what I read.

It is amusing to read in French about things like the birth of Columbia University, Shearman & Sterling, Fraunces Tavern, and Macy's.

A minor point that I find strange visually: French spacing around colons is different from English. They actually put a space not only after but also before their colons. It is a bit jarring to look at, but after all, punctuation is neither universal nor a science. Semicolons, quotation marks, and punctuation around quotation marks are also handled differently.

By the way, I stopped by Strand Bookstore Saturday night to check out their French section. There were quite a few French books, though the selection was a little obscure when I was there. I asked an employee where they get their books.

Strand Bookstore Was Hopping on Saturday Night

An Eclectic Selection, French and Other Languages

He said they stock new (meaning new to them) books all the time, buying them from people who bring in their libraries, but that customers snap up the good French stuff fast. He told me, for example, that a Senegalese man comes in twice a week and buys the best literature and political writing. 

So, if you want to shop French at Strand, you may get lucky, but you should be prepared for some New York-style competition. 

Yes, you can check them out of Haskell Library at the French Institute Alliance Française--but what if you want to buy them?

I want to buy books. And I want to buy them in French. I found some options at Idlewild Books in Chelsea last week, but I want more.

McNally Jackson Books, Prince Street Independent

Two days ago, therefore, I went to an independent bookstore in SoHo that I have been to a few times and really like: McNally Jackson Books, on Prince Street. I had heard they have French books.

Here’s the thing. I have confessed this before, but I will confess it again: although I studied three languages in school (Spanish, German, and French), I had not--until this project--bought books in Spanish, German, or French since graduate school, or shortly thereafter.

It is hard work to read a whole book in a language you aren't fluent in, and I have a very hard time getting over not being absolutely certain I am understanding everything the writer says. And I am kind of compulsive; I don't like guessing. 

Doesn't It Look Seductive From the Sidewalk?

Regret about my lack of foreign-language reading was definitely a factor in my undertaking this project.

Only 3 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations from books in other languages. Three Percent, a website devoted to remedying this sad fact, explains: "It is a historical truism and will always remain the case that some of the best books ever written were written in a language other than English."

Depending on that paltry percentage for our international reading is rather limiting. Americans need to read books from other parts of the world, or we will not understand other parts of the world. We will read and reinforce our own ideas over and over, in English.

Anyway, back to McNally Jackson. It is a very appealing store, with a charming café, and I recommend it to book shoppers. 

En Français at McNally Jackson

Unfortunately for my purposes, though, the French books were minimal, and many were translations from English or other languages. 

Apparently most of the customers seeking French in this store are tourists or in any case native French speakers looking for something to read in their native tongue. It makes sense that translations would dominate for that market--but I do not want to read books such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections in French when I can and should read them in English.

Foiled in French. But not in English. To launch my renewed commitment to independent bookstorehood, I bought a book about New York City's ethnic communities, The World in a City by Joseph Berger.

This week's attempt #2 to find French books for sale took place at Rizzoli Bookstore, at 31 West 57th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. I went there yesterday, a foggy day, when buildings were disappearing into clouds.

French Retail on Fifth Avenue

Midtown Fog, Eating Building Tops

I used to shop at Rizzoli. Not a lot, but with some regularity. Then the appearance of bigger, more convenient bookstores near me (Barnes & Noble in particular) cut into my Rizzoli visits dramatically, until--I hate to admit it--they stopped altogether.   

So, before yesterday, I can't actually remember the last time I had been to Rizzoli. It is the most beautiful store: the architecture, the windows, the book displays.

Rizzoli Bookstore, East 57th Street Independent

Browsing Amid Beauty

The French department is on the third floor, where I found the French buyer, with whom I talked French books. 

The French department is relatively new, reinstated in 2009, I was told, after many years of absence from the store. The Spanish department was also reinstated at that time. There is a longstanding Italian department, meaning you can now buy books at Rizzoli in four languages (I'm including English here).

How cool is that?!

Promoting Its New French Department

Lots of French Books to Choose From

There are enough French books here that you can browse for hours.

Many are French translations, from English as well as other languages, which makes sense since about three-quarters of the store's French-book customers are native speakers of the language. Native English speakers make up a minority of their customers in this department. But there are also many books by French authors.

Children's Books Are So Cute

Egoïste Magazine Has a Cult Following

By the way, the store's manager told me the magazine above, Egoïste, comes out only every few years. It has a fanatical following, I have read online.

I was excited to find a relatively new history of this city in French: Histoire de New York by François Weil. I am going to try to read it by the end of my French unit, which comes May 31. The book was not cheap: $55 with tax.

To complement my purchases, I went to Haskell Library and checked out some New York-themed books. As I write this, I am a few pages into a book called New York journal d'un cycle, by Catherine Cusset, which appears to be about (among other things) the inherent drama of riding around the streets  of Manhattan on a bicycle, something I myself have never dared to do.

La Parisienne Diner, Not So Parisian

The book has already introduced me to an impolite word, couillon, not found in my dictionary, which apparently means something like "idiot."

I think perhaps it could be shouted at a taxi driver who cuts you off when you are riding around on your bike, though it's probably more helpful in Paris than in New York.

On my way home from Rizzoli and Haskell Library, I passed La Parisienne Restaurant/Diner. It is on Seventh Avenue near Central Park, but the menu didn't look as though it had much to do with Paris.

Except even a (misleadingly named) diner can look romantic in the rain.

Then go to the John & Francine Haskell Library, at the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF). Members can check out music, learning tools, movies...and yes, books! Lots and lots of books.

In French, about French, about France, about other French-speaking parts of the world. You can read a French novel. Or learn to cook chicken in 10 different French ways. Or whatever! 

En Route to FIAF

Fifth Avenue, Tail End of Rush Hour

Plus another nice thing is that the people who work in the library know a lot.

And they all speak French--it's a requirement for employment there--so you can ask your research questions in French and check out your books in French and maybe even be shushed in French if you make too much noise!

For Your Reading Pleasure

I visited the library last night around dinnertime to meet Ronda Murdock, the library services manager.

Ronda began working there in 1991 and has a great affection for the French language. She took me on a library tour (I am almost unreasonably fond of library tours).

One of our stops was the periodicals section. I love piles of magazines on lots of different topics. They make me feel as though there's so much good stuff in the world to read.

And as though I am way, way behind, though over the years I have learned to coexist rather cheerfully with that nagging sense of inadequacy.

The Latest Magazines

Keep Up on French Fashion!

There is a room dedicated to the French needs of children. Very cheerful!

And also a room housing various media: Pimsleur (oral language lessons often mentioned in my blog, and which I love), French in Action (a popular language-learning approach that recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a gathering at Yale), several computers, and French TV!

Someone was watching TV while I was there, in fact, seeming very engrossed, and I fear my talking may have bothered him a bit. 

Where Kids Can Have Fun, in French

Watching French Television (TV5MONDE)

The room also houses music CDs from French-speaking performers from around the world (including the famous wives of Johnny Depp and Nicolas Sarkozy). 

"Music's a great way to get into a language," said Ronda, pointing out the library's collection of rap CDs. Since I often can't understand the words of rap songs in English, I don't think this approach would work for me, but I find that many people can grasp lyrics with less careful enunciation than my brain seems to require.

My tour concluded with a visit to the history collection, on the second floor, where there are some old and very beautiful books. But a warning: you have to be at least 16 to go to the second floor.

Hmm, what's in those history books anyway?

Some Beautiful Old History Books

The library sponsors numerous events as complements to its resources. There is Scrabble, for example--in French, which means lots and lots of e's. There is also a current events discussion group, led en français by Yann Carmona, an engaging native of France I met yesterday, who also runs various French book groups (Cercles de lecture).

And finally, I would like to point out--after a morning of foiled, failed efforts to obtain a particular French title from local bookstores (it would take weeks)--there is at the library the ability to look for a particular French title, find a particular French title, and check out a particular French title immediately.

This fits well with a key element of New York City culture, namely, instant gratification. Many of us who live here are not too good at waiting for things.

I know I'm not. So I'll be heading back to the library tomorrow to get a book.

P.S. You do have to be a member of FIAF to use the library, but the rates are not onerous compared to the many other things for which one must hemorrhage money in order to live in this city.

P.P.S. In light of a scary link a journalism friend recently sent me about Federal Trade Commission requirements affecting bloggers, I would like to underscore that I am not currently paying for my various FIAF activities. Yet I will swear on a pile of French grammar books that my effusiveness here is objective library effusiveness and not the grateful product of a waived fee.

I need to get out more.

Chelsea: No Shortage of Cabs to Take You Places

Located in Chelsea, Idlewild is about three years old, the creation of owner David Del Vecchio, who (I read online) previously worked at the United Nations.

To get there, I took the number 1 subway to 18th Street at the tail end of rush hour, exiting to find a sea of cabs still floating down Seventh Avenue. Chelsea is an exciting, varied neighborhood, the first place I lived when I moved to the city.

From its 19th Street location, Idlewild offers not only books but also language classes, in French, Spanish, and Italian.

When I arrived, there was a Spanish class going on in the back room. I eavesdropped, just a tiny bit. And soon was dying to join in.

Idlewild, for Your Book and Language-Class Needs

But French. I reminded myself I was there for French. I am currently living in a state of Romance language confusion, with my Spanish under assault. Today when I spoke to one of my neighbors in Spanish, I translated "with" as avec instead of con.

I find that weird. That is such a basic thing to mess up, and my Spanish is usually so much sturdier than my French. I expect this to be a temporary problem, but it is embarrassing when I am actually talking to someone. 

Although I haven't tested it, I like to think that if I spoke Spanish for, say, five minutes or more, the walls between languages would become impermeable again, and I would stop dropping French into the middle of my Spanish sentences. 

Okay, back to Idlewild. I like when you can get help at bookstores. And knowledgeable help is even better. Paige, an employee at Idlewild who showed me around, was clearly a book lover herself.

An Impressive French Selection

Street View from Idlewild

There were numerous French titles; I believe Paige said they have more than a thousand. Many options for children as well as adults. Overall, way more French than I had expected, considering I had just had a disheartening time locating businesses that still sold French titles in actual retail stores.

Of the various phone numbers I found online this morning for French-book-selling New York stores, four were dead ends.

The Librairie de France store had closed, I already knew (in 2009, after 74 years in Rockefeller Center). Two other numbers I called yielded a "This number is no longer in service" message. For a fourth store I tried, a woman picked up and said wearily, "I'm sorry, honey, you have the wrong number." 

Charm Being Radiated

At Idlewild, they answered. So I went. I must say, hardwood floors and good books are a winning combination. Very seductive.

Although I went to Idlewild primarily to browse, I was also half-shopping for myself.

Specifically, I want to buy a book in French, one that was originally written in French (i.e., not a translation), about New York or set in New York. It can be fiction or non-fiction, but my preference is that it be set in the present, or in the fairly recent past.

Also, it doesn't have to be super-easy, but it would be good if it weren't 1,000 pages. 

If anyone has suggestions, I would be grateful.

At Idlewild, French for the Wee Ones!

The difficulties I had today finding French-book-selling stores surprised me. I don't mean to suggest that Idlewild is the only place in New York one can buy books in French, but considering the number of French speakers here, I was surprised there weren't more options.

In college I spent a lot of time in a Harvard Square bookstore called Schoenhof's, which had shelves and shelves, and then more shelves, of foreign-language books. I just checked online to make sure the store still exists; it does. I guess places like that are not typical, however, since its website says it offers "the biggest selection of foreign books in North America."

When I left Idlewild at 7:30, a new Spanish class was starting. The students looked happy.

Walking around these days, I am constantly on the lookout for signs with French words. They are so easy to find on the streets of this city.

Just a couple of blocks from the bookstore, for instance, I came across Le Singe Vert (The Green Monkey), on Seventh Avenue. It is a cute French bistro I have never noticed before.

Le Singe Vert (The Green Monkey)

French Bistro Fare at Le Singe Vert

Above is a piece of its menu. I get a kick out of les burgers. Somehow the article les just seems a bit too elegant to accompany hamburgers. 

Multilingual Rabies Alert Seen Earlier This Week, Central Park

I loved my program, but it had come to my attention that I was not meant to be an academic. Instead, I picked up and moved from Los Angeles to New York City, with my boyfriend at the time, and without a job or apartment. I had been to New York a few times and knew I liked it, but within three days of my move, fondness became a full-fledged love that has never since abated. 

The Modern Language Association (MLA) was to me, as a graduate student, like God. Every year they had a huge conference at which there were numerous talks of interest to scholars of language and literature, and at which scores of aspiring academics desperately tried to secure jobs at colleges and universities around the country.

I had never been to an MLA conference, but I had heard it spoken of in reverent tones, and when I moved to New York, where the MLA is based, I recall responding to a job ad for some kind of position there. God declined to pursue my application, but I have periodically been a dues-paying member of the MLA since then, and the organization remains an object of reverence for me.

When I was first trying to decide what languages to include in this project, I turned to the MLA Language Map and the accompanying Data Center.

More recently, David Goldberg, associate director of the MLA's Office of Programs and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (phew!), generously agreed to give me a tour of the language map's current features and functions. David is a friendly and helpful scholar of Yiddish, which is not currently one of my languages, though perhaps it should be.

26 Broadway, Where the MLA Lives

MLA Reception Area

The MLA is housed at 26 Broadway, also known as the Standard Oil Building. According to the building's Wikipedia entry, "The structure is currently the 197th tallest building in New York City and the 572nd tallest building in the United States." I find it amusing that someone bothered to point these things out.

Earlier this week, David showed me around the MLA's offices and updated me on language-map capabilities. Here, for example, are some nifty things you can do on the MLA's website:

• determine the number of people who speak, say, Tagalog in your zip code 
• look up all the languages spoken in your state or county, with numbers of speakers and age breakdown (there are, for example, 34, 535 French speakers in Brooklyn)
• get a map of the colleges and universities where French (or another language) is being taught around the country and determine the number of registered students at the various institutions (in 2009, for instance, there were 53 French students at Wagner College on Staten Island)

Leaving the Lobby, 26 Broadway

Besides satisfying curiosity, this type of data has many useful applications. David said that teachers use the map in class to show the language composition of local communities. The map is also used by disaster-preparedness types to determine what kinds of translations and interpreters might be needed, and in what quantities, in case of an emergency. 

Then there are marketing applications. Publishers can use the data to determine how many books to publish and in what language, and what school districts to market to. An architectural firm apparently relied on the MLA mapping tools to help make decisions about design preferences for housing, predicting aesthetic tastes based on linguistic backgrounds (which correlated with particular cultural backgrounds). 

The map has even been helpful to petroleum pipeline companies! Legally such companies are obligated to inform the communities through which their pipelines pass about safety issues--which requires an awareness of the language and communication needs of those communities. 

These are just a small sampling of the ways one can deploy the MLA's linguistic mapping and data tools. I confess, I have occasionally found it a little challenging to figure out the inner workings of the data map, so if you have trouble and feel like posting a question below, I will find the answer and follow up here with a response.

Heading to French Class Monday Night

Although I have kept up religiously with the French grammar exercises, blogging has been a bit much, since it requires the use of a keyboard. Hence the unusually long delays between reports.

So, I am turning to the experts. On Wednesday I start physical therapy, which I hate, and I am also getting an MRI of my lower back. I seriously doubt it will show anything, but I am following my doctor's recommendation.

Besides, I have to make sure I stay functional to withstand the rigors of French grammar. And after that, of Polish.

Fortunately, walking is much less painful than writing, so I made sure not to miss this week’s French conversation class at the French Institute Alliance Française.

Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, Passed Friday on My Way to Doctor's Office

The discussion was wide-ranging and included topics such as:

• sports we like and why
• the invasion of Normandy
• how the women in the class would rate the attractiveness of certain male soccer players and Ultimate Fighting champions on a scale from 1 to 10 (as an example, Cristiano Ronaldo’s scores ranged from 8 to 10, with some students abstaining)

Yep, we do manage to make our way through a lot of subjects in 90 minutes.

Outside of class, as I continue to study on my own, I am struck by how many words in French are identical, at least in writing, to their English translations.

“Indulgent” is indulgent(e), “strict” is strict(e), “competent” is competent(e). I could go on for days on this point.

Sometimes it’s almost as though one is not even studying.

For Movies in French, and Other Languages, Too

French Gigolo is about a successful middle-aged businesswoman who turns to male escorts for sex, then unexpectedly develops a relationship with one of them. Despite some flaws, we both liked the movie. By the way, it had English subtitles; it was not dubbed. I can’t stand dubbing.

I found it in the Sundance section. 1006 has quite a few free French movies—free if you are already paying for cable, that is. If you are a subscriber, I recommend checking it out.

Okay, now some French comments and questions.

Recently I came across this as an equivalent for “Sincerely (yours)” at the end of a business letter: Veuillez agréer, Madame/Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués.

Seriously? Do people really put all that? It sounds so formal for 2011.

Midtown Manhattan Tonight

Here is “Please leave a message after the beep”: Veuillez laisser un message après le bip. 

Bip is so cute. It cracks me up.

In one exercise I just did, I had to say whether this sentence was true or false: Le jour de son mariage une femme est radieuse. That translates as, “On her wedding day a woman is radiant.” Barf. I refused to mark it vrai or faux and instead wrote, “Mon dieu.” Plus something I won’t repeat.

And now, a technical grammar/translation question. In another book, I was told these sentences are equivalents, both translating as, “They watch their kids playing.”

• Ils regardent leurs enfants jouer.
• Ils regardent leurs enfants qui jouent.

Are they really equivalent? I would have guessed the second meant, “They watch their children who are playing.”

And actually, I would also have thrown in a comma before the “who” in my English version (thereby changing "who are playing" from what is known as a restrictive relative clause into a non-restrictive relative clause), and then I would have done the same to the French, with a comma before the qui. 

But French remains a mystery to me, in thousands of ways large and small. So perhaps this is just how it is, and I am viewing French through English-colored glasses?

MegaVerbs!

My focus: verbs. Specifically, a software application called MegaVerbs. This application consists of hard-core drills, where your mission is to type in the correct verb forms for a series of questions. You get four tries; when you get something right, you are politely told “oui” and given a new verb.

I like this kind of intensive training. It’s like verb boot camp. You can’t fudge it. You can’t cheat. You can’t slur your words and hope you are understood anyway.

There is a MegaVocab application, too, that I would like to try. Plus much, much more that I haven’t yet investigated. The reason I went straight to the verbs is that I am just really, really into verbs. If you don't know verbs, you are seriously out of luck when you try to communicate!

Although there were a couple of usability issues with the MegaVerbs application, which director Jason Oxenham, also one of the company's founding members, tells me they are working to address in the next two to three months, I did love the content. I adore rapid-fire, bare-bones drills. They really work for me. I did subjunctive, conditional, future, past tense—all good stuff.

Unfortunately, a natural disaster recently struck Rocket. The company’s Christchurch offices were destroyed on February 22 of this year, in a major earthquake. This amateur footage, which shows the quake, by coincidence starts right outside Rocket's offices.  

I like earnest companies that do good things, like make language-learning products. Best wishes to Rocket for a speedy rebuilding!

An Actor From Paris, Seeking Work, Not Timidly

I find myself leaving accents off words I know need them, just by accident. I am curious to know whether educated native speakers, when they’re tired or absent-minded, leave off needed accents like on, say, à? I am guessing not often.

Though wait—I have read that people do not use diacritical marks when they text in French. Does that increase the likelihood they will leave them out in more formal writing? I am guessing yes. If so, do people frequently bemoan the state of diacritical marks in French-speaking countries?

I would like to say that I find these constructions crazily tongue-twisting:

• qui que ce soit qui – whoever it may be who
• qui que ce soit que – who(m)ever it may be who(m)
• quoi que ce soit que – whatever it may be which/that

I am at present very, very unlikely to be able to pop these into conversations while speaking to people in French. I hope I will be able to get by without them for now.

Today I began a new book, Advanced French Grammar, by Véronique Mazet. It is yet another McGraw-Hill book, probably still a little advanced for me, but I am close to finishing some of the other books and need fresh material.

In it I read that 90 percent of verbs in French end in -er. I had no idea; I thought verbs were more evenly distributed than that among the classes of -er, -re, and -ir verbs. One misses random things like this when studying on one's own.

The problems I have been having with my back went away long enough for me to have a transcendent seven-mile run tonight in Central Park. It was my best run in two months, and while out there I ran into my running team doing interval training on Cat Hill on the east side of the park. The hill is called Cat Hill because at the top of it, there is a sculpture of a crouching cougar that has scared the hell out of many unsuspecting passers-by on Circle Drive.

It is a lovely sculpture. However, when running, I refer to it undiplomatically as “that stupid fucking cat,” because I am usually out of breath by the time I reach it and it feels as though it’s taunting me. Despite the stupid fucking cat, I was sad not to be able to work out with my team; my speed training stopped with my running injury nearly a year ago, a situation I really, really hope changes soon.

Especially since it is now officially spring in Central Park, and it is beautiful.

I Just Noticed Our Hand Soap Is Bilingual

At the beginning, French from college was pouring back into my brain, but now that I am past the mere memory-refreshing stage, it takes considerably longer to absorb things.

Also, my back has been hurting a lot, which in turn hurts my French-at-home policy. If I feel crappy, I am not patient with trying to communicate in a language I don’t speak very well. Therefore, more English than French has been uttered around our residence lately.

Fortunately, the French Institute Alliance Française, also known as FIAF, has come to the rescue: they are allowing me to sit in on a French conversation class. I am pleased to report that it is an advanced class. (The fact that they put me in a class at that level made me ridiculously, embarrassingly happy.)

To School!

The instructor, whom I'll call N. for now in case he minds my writing about him, is a funny, energetic, wiry young guy with long hair and a special knack for getting people to talk. Such a knack is really useful when one is teaching a French conversation class. I would go so far as to call him eccentric, which I hope will not offend him should he read this, since I mean it to be a compliment. I happen to like eccentric.

I had missed the first two classes, so when I arrived last night, N. plopped down next to me and asked me to introduce myself to the group. I hesitated and requested guidance on the type of information he would like to know. (In French, naturally.)

He prompted me with questions. What did I do for a living? Had I been in another French class previously? If so, had I switched because I heard that he was musclé (muscular)? And so on. He cracks me up. 

By the way, if you are a cool Francophile guy looking for a cool Francophile girlfriend, I definitely recommend taking a French class at FIAF. The women outnumber the men. I am pretty sure by a lot.

After class, despite my aching back, I felt happy and rejuvenated, and Brandt and I returned to speaking French with each other.

Spring Has Arrived at Columbus Circle

In case such a French sentence might come in handy for you in the future, here it is: “Dès qu’il était parti, elle ouvrait les fenêtres.” 

On another subject: are réussirons and réussiront really pronounced the same way? They both mean “will succeed,” but the first is the conjugation for nous (we), and the second is the conjugation for ils (they). So many French verbs are like that: spelled differently, and matching different subjects, but pronounced the same. 

French is frustrating that way. You spend all this time learning to spell, and then when you speak, no one can even tell the difference.

In my French Verb Tenses book by Trudie Maria Booth, I read something that really surprised me: the e before the r is silent in future-tense verbs such as j’oublierai, il continuera, tu créeras, nous jouerons, vous jetterez, etc. In other words, the first verb in this list is more like oo-blee-ray than oo-blee-uh-ray, the second more like con-tee-nu-ra than con-tee-nu-e-ra, and so on.

So, according to what she says, in all of these verbs I have been wrongly adding an extra syllable for the e when I pronounce them. Wow. Did I ever know this? I don’t remember ever saying these the right way. I bet English speakers of French mispronounce them a lot.

Or rather, I guess I hope I am not the only one.

If I had been studying Hebrew, I would have been very happy with this situation, but because I am studying French, I kept willing the Hebrew-speaking woman, who was on her cell phone, to leave so I could scoot over and talk to the French-speaking people. Totally unfairly, I became irritable when she persisted in sitting there and drinking her coffee, as was her absolute right.

Entering Columbia University

Last night I went to an event at Columbia University’s Maison Française (French House). The topic was: “Why French Matters.” And it was free!

This was the public description of the event: “Does French still matter? If so, why? This roundtable discussion is a response to recent concerns about the status of the study of French and other foreign languages and cultures in U.S. higher and secondary education at a time of increasing globalization. Five leading voices in different fields bring a variety of perspectives to bear in a lively discussion about why French matters today.”

Those five leading voices were the writer Adam Gopnik; Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development in D.C.; Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, based here in New York City; Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor of French and philosophy at Columbia; and Antonin Baudry, cultural counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S.

The Stately Columbia Campus

Maison Française

Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that the presentations favored the notion that French still mattered, and for a wide variety of reasons: political, cultural, social, linguistic, etc. What did surprise, and please, me was that the room was packed with people who clearly cared about the fate of French, and of foreign languages generally.

It was so packed, in fact, that latecomers were forced to stand, and that the room became rather unpleasantly hot.  In case you’re really curious (I myself am generally a fan of going to events rather than watching recordings of them), here’s a recording of the event in its entirety.

P.S. The back of the head on the left is me, so if you do watch any of it, I sincerely hope I didn’t do anything embarrassing.

P.P.S. I know this is going up well after the 14th of April, and I apologize for that, and for backdating the entry, which is kind of a violation of the spirit of a blog, but my back has been killing me, which has seriously slowed down my editing and posting process, and I have several entries to post, and I don't want to post them all on the same date, because that would be an intolerably long entry.

116th Street Subway Station Art

Heading East on 118th Street

Headed by Katrine Watkins, it is located on 120th Street, between Eighth and Manhattan avenues. The school mission, according to its website, is to "develop global citizens who are well-prepared to assume leadership in a multicultural society."

The text continues, "Preparing students for the International Baccalaureate (IB) as well as the Regents High School Diploma, the school blends the rigorous standards of learning that are characteristic of the French educational system with American approaches that value individuality and critical thinking."

The children's families come from many different parts of the world, including numerous African countries, France, Haiti, and more. The majority of the parents are French-speaking.

The majority of their children are not.

The School Entrance

Across the Street: Église Adventiste du 7ème Jour

It is the goal of Ms. Watkins, who previously started two other French-American schools, and her staff to change that. The school opened last fall and currently has students from kindergarten through second grade, for whom 75 to 80 percent of the instruction is in French. Next year they will be adding a third grade, at which level the instruction in English and French will be evenly divided.

The idea is to create an immersion experience in the early grades when the children are still quite young and can acquire language easily. Ms. Watkins said she would start even earlier, at three, if she could. At that age, she explained,  "They don't even know you're speaking another language."

As part of my visit, I sat in on a kindergarten class. There were four adults in a room of about 23 children, which struck me as a rather encouraging adult-to-student ratio. One of the instructors was from Senegal, another from Haiti, and all were friendly.

I had hardly sat down when all the children began clustering around a fish tank on one end of the room.

Something was wrong.

Where Bubbly Lived, and Died

The teachers investigated. Tragically, it seemed a fish had died. I did not run over to look myself, feeling that decorum would be best preserved by my remaining in my seat and allowing the teachers to attend to the fish and the children. 

The teacher from Senegal (whose name I'm afraid I didn't write down) went to retrieve a little blue fishing net, which she used to fish out the fish. She put it on a paper towel and held it out for the inspection of the children, who were understandably all very interested in the fish equivalent of lying in state.

I thought tears were imminent, but I never saw any; in fact, most of the children seemed surprisingly cheerful. I believe I heard the teacher say, "On doit l'enterrer" (we must bury him), before disappearing for a minute. Later I learned that he had been laid to rest in a porcelain bowl of a variety that has served as burial ground for many a goldfish globally.

When she returned, all the children went to their respective seats around several tables, from which they participated in a thorough and wide-ranging discussion of the possible reasons for the demise of Bubbly. (That was the poor fish's name.)

"Bubbly" was pronounced by all the children as a three-syllable word, and often with a bit of a French accent. Bub-bull-ee.

Seen on the Wall: French Body Parts

Vegetables: Good for You in Any Language

The majority of the children had opinions about the cause of Bubbly's untimely death, along with a powerful desire to express them. The teacher called on them one at a time to elaborate, encouraging them to offer their explanations in French. If they started in English, she stopped them and prompted, "Je pense que..." (I think that...).

Among the explanations offered:

• He had a fever.
• He ate too much.
• He ate too little.
• He was electrocuted.
• There was too much water.
• He tried to leave the water.
• He hit his head on the wall of the aquarium.
• His eyeball got stung.
• He got a wound on some other part of his body.
• He tried to eat a piece of plastic from the top of the aquarium.
• And so on.

But far and away, the favorite explanation was: He swam into the light at the top of the tank, and it made him too hot.

If that is what befell Bubbly, well, apparently the remaining fish hadn't learned their lesson, because loitering around the light seemed to be their favorite pastime. 

Bubbly's Pal, Living Dangerously

After the discussion ended, I visited another class, where the kids were older and less shy and kept charming me by walking up to me and saying, in lovely French accents, "Bonjour."

They were working on French phonics, and I actually found myself at a disadvantage in this discussion, as my ability to distinguish between certain similar French sounds is compromised by my age.

A young child's ear for language is remarkable. It would be fabulous to keep that as we grow older. But we can't, and we have to make do with the many ways we can still learn and appreciate language, albeit through less malleable brains.

The woman half of the couple came over to the table next to me and laid her stuff down. I rejoiced. I listened for more French. I heard the man, who was still over by the counter, call out to her something about a sandwich, with what sounded like a French pronunciation of the word sandwich.

As an aside, I just noticed that "couple" and "copulate" have similar etymologies (involving the Latin verb copulare). I don't know whether I had ever realized that before.

Another French Restaurant, Downtown, Seen Yesterday

Anyway, back to the actual couple. I made sure the cover of my dictionary was facing upwards with the word "French" conspicuously available to adjacent customers. They sat. I waited.

I kept trying to hear French, but strangely, I couldn't really pick up on what they were saying. They were much quieter than many New Yorkers.

Then I realized that they were in fact speaking German. I thought, hopefully, maybe it's a temporary thing and they will soon switch back to French.

Nope, they were German. (I asked.) 

This encounter continued my streak from last night, when I went to a movie at the Museum of Arts and Design, co-sponsored with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF).

Columbus Circle Last Night

Time Warner Center, En Route to Movie

The fact that FIAF was involved, and the fact that I learned about the event from a posting for the Williamsburg French Language Meetup group, and the fact that I read somewhere that the star, Isaach De Bankolé, had been born in the Ivory Coast, whose official language is French, and that I also read that he was "discovered" (as an actor, I mean) in Paris, led me to believe that the film would be in French.

Museum of Arts and Design, Where the Movie Was Shown

The film was called Otomo. As soon as the characters started speaking, I thought, Scheiße. That means "shit" in German. I thought it in German because the actors were speaking in German.

I thought, hopefully, maybe this is one of those movies where they will just switch from one European language to the next, and soon we will be on to the French piece. 

Nope.

German all the way.

It was a powerful and disturbing movie, based on the true story of an African immigrant killed in Stuttgart. The lead actor was impressive, and I am glad to have seen it. I was also glad to see that a lot of my German review from some months back was still with me.

It's just that, when you expect you are about to drink orange juice and it turns out to be grapefruit juice instead, it is at first always a little shocking.

I had a particular destination in mind, one that I thought would produce some opportunities to talk about and speak French as it is used in one or more African countries, but I won’t write about that destination at this point, because the employees—who were extremely charming, by the way—wanted me to wait for the owner to come back from Senegal and okay their participation.

Harlem Near 112th and St. Nicholas

Near 115th Street, I Think

And I don't want to get anyone in trouble.

I did, however, roam up and down 116th a bit, and could see snippets of French on signs and product names here and there. I exchanged a few French words with a couple of people. I learned—I didn’t know this in advance—that 116th Street and neighboring blocks in Central Harlem make up a community known as le Petit Sénégal, or Little Senegal.

French, Though I Don't Understand Intended Meaning

A Senegalese Community Center, Avec Français

At one store I entered, I asked a man if he spoke French. He said of course.

I asked him if I could speak to him in French. He said absolutely not.

I asked why, though I had a pretty good idea already. He told me he was from Senegal, where French was, he said, the language of their oppressors. He speaks Wolof and English. I said, well, since I don’t speak Wolof, I guess we’re stuck with English.

He smiled. He was very friendly, despite his having just come off a night shift, and despite my having attempted to speak to him in a language he apparently shuns. (By the way, I can't tell you the name of his store; apparently the sight of me walking up and down the street taking pictures made a few people uncomfortable, so I need to be more farsighted and get advance permission from places next time.)

He said other people in the neighborhood would not necessarily share his point of view about French, but added that that was because they weren’t educated and didn’t realize the history of what the French had done to their country. 

He also told me that young people in Senegal want to learn English, and that you see and hear more and more English in his native country. It is funny to keep trying to learn foreign languages when I keep hearing, and seeing, how people around the world are moving more and more towards English. 

In the afternoon, I paid a visit to the French Institute Alliance Française or FIAF, which I have mentioned previously in this blog, to talk about French classes. They are allowing me to sample some FIAF offerings, which include--besides a wide variety of events--dozens of French courses, at all levels.

Central Park, Near FIAF

East Side Rush Hour

FIAF happens to be located in a very ritzy neighborhood, on 60th Street between Madison and Park. As was the case earlier in the day, I saw French in the names of various organizations and businesses I passed.

Approaching FIAF

For French: Tirez!

The context was very, very different, however, and just three miles away.

French Classes Have Just Begun!

The Restaurant Rouge Tomate (Red Tomato)

Café Saint Honoré Today, Upper West Side

DVR capabilities are a great thing. 

The ad, for Burlington Coat Factory, goes like this. Two women, strangers to each other, are standing at the condiments area of someplace where they have apparently just purchased coffee or tea. One of them, a supercilious white woman, reaches across the other, a light-skinned black woman, for something for her drink, and says, "Merci."

The other woman, who is down to earth and spunky, looks at her and says, "Cute accent."

The supercilious woman then says, in weirdly accented English, “My native tongue is French, but I actually speak four languages fluently.”

The spunky woman says, “Really? I got my girls four dresses for fifty bucks at Burlington. Parlez-vous good deal?”

Next you leave this scene and hear from a disembodied voice: “Impressive brands and styles for your whole family, all at up to 60 percent off department store prices every day. Now that’s really something to brag about. Burlington. Brag about it.”

More Upper West Side French (Name Means Cotton Counter)

I absolutely hate this ad. It is goofy, but overall it plays the themes straight and, I think, is meant to be understood pretty literally; there is no campiness or irony. It makes the multilingual person a white, snotty bitch, which is irksome, and the other woman--the nice one, the one you could perhaps imagine yourself hanging out with--the representative of self-righteous monolingualism.

I'm not saying it's bad to be monolingual, but do we really have to stoop to disparaging people who are not? The commercial seems so shockingly typical of the worst stereotypes of American culture, in which knowledge-bashing and shopping are favorite sports.

I admire people who know things. I admire people who are nice. Many people who know things are nice, and I hate the too-easy equation of knowledge and snobbishness. 

Why couldn't this company have pitted something that is actually crappy, like crass materialism, or perhaps meanness without the multilingualism, against the good deal? Why link multilingualism and snobbery and bad behavior? I would like to see the ad redone with a multilingual person who gets a good deal for her daughters while also being nice to monolingual strangers at coffee bars.

Oh, yeah, and also: it is so trite to bash French people (this includes non-French actors playing French people).

I don't like your ad, Burlington Coat Factory. I don't like it at all.

Night Falls on the Upper West Side

Les quatre langues non-romanes qui se parlent en France sont le basque, l’alsacien, le breton et le flamand.

Translation: "The four non-Romance languages that are spoken in France are Basque, Alsatian, Breton, and Flemish." I had to laugh when I saw that one.

In another of the grammar books I am using, I encountered the sentence “Ils se rencontrent en mars.” Upon first reading, I interpreted that to mean “They meet on Mars.” It is in fact, “They meet in March.”

And this was just something goofy that happened to one person sitting alone with a grammar book. It boggles the mind to consider all the misunderstandings that might arise when there are lots of people, let's say world leaders, speaking lots of languages, with lots of international crises to handle.

Water Towers at Dusk

On a subject of much less global significance: rendez-vous is French for “appointment.” As in, “Elle a un rendez-vous avec son dentiste.”

All this means is that she has a dentist’s appointment, but because of the way "rendezvous" is often used in English, reading that makes me think of something far more salacious than a cleaning. Words with similar or even identical etymologies often set sail separately on their own voyages, sometimes with surprisingly different destinations. 

In conclusion today: a confession. Over the past weekend, Brandt and I fell off the wagon a bit in terms of our French-only commitment. We had various social engagements, and most socializing took place in English, and then we tended not to be as careful to switch back once we returned home.

But we have now renewed our vows to French and will carry on dutifully from here.

House of Chocolate! Upper East Side, Manhattan

At a party last night I spoke some German with a tall Austrian basketball player (a woman) and a tiny bit of French with a couple of friends. The latter experience reminded me that party French needs to be much better than quiet-café French or you will be (a) incompetent and (b) a huge bore.

French continues to be spoken by Brandt and me chez nous. Today a French-Canadian violinist materialized in our living room. Not unannounced, which would have been really weird, but rather, accompanied by our pianist friend Julian. Since everyone there was perfectly happy to speak French, a conversation in said language ensued.

I, unfortunately, had to leave for a run and abandon the French chat. This broke my heart. Such opportunities do not fall into a French learner’s lap every day. I mourned a bit as I ran around Central Park.

A non sequitur: I have wondered for a long time why you don't say septante for seventy. It has always struck me as particularly unwieldy to have to say soixante-dix (literally “sixty-ten”). Why not just do the math for me? Same thing for quatre-vingts ("eighty," but literally "four twenties") and various other French numbers.

I answered this question through Google. Years of confusion were dispelled in the seconds it took me to read this explanation.

Having read it, though, I would still love it if “seventy” were septante. And yet, sentiments such as this about language are completely useless.

A final note: I have resolved over the past couple of days: there will be no leaving of French at the end of April. I simply can't do it. I am actually getting somewhere, and I don't want to stop getting there.

The experience inspired me to search for more French speakers from Haiti. New York, especially Brooklyn, has many Haitian residents.

Offices of the Haitian Times

I decided to go to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, where I got off at the Prospect Park subway stop and walked over to Flatbush Avenue.

My first destination: the offices of the Haitian Times, a weekly distributed here and in Haiti. The publisher wasn't there, but I had a nice albeit brief conversation in French with an employee there. She said that the paper has some French content, though most of the articles are in English, and gave me the publisher's contact information.

According to the publication's website, "In the last two decades the number of Haitian immigrants in the New York metropolitan area has grown from 100,000 to close to 500,000 people."

A Slice of Flatbush Avenue

Heading Towards Church Avenue

Haitian Creole and French are Haiti's two official languages. Official recognition came late to Haitian Creole, despite the fact that it is spoken by virtually everyone in Haiti, while French is spoken by a much smaller percentage of the population. Although French has a powerful hold on business, government, and literature there, only 10 to 20 percent of Haitians speak it.

Compere & Compere, for Tax Services

I did not know that the number of French speakers in Haiti was so small until I ended up in Flatbush looking for people to talk to, but I have spoken French to quite a few Haitians in New York over the years since I moved here and never had any trouble (well, aside from the fact that my French kept degrading).

Wandering off the street into Compere & Compere, which offers tax and accounting services, I struck up a conversation in French with an employee who told me that they generally use Creole and English with their clients, not French. The only non-English text on her business card was in Creole: a sentence announcing that she spoke that language. 

After I left this establishment, I continued south down Flatbush Avenue, where I was told by one of various men hanging out on the sidewalk, "You look like Pink! I like you!" This in spite of the fact that I had my headphones on, with the sound turned off, in an effort to deter the commendable efforts of men such as this one to pay charming tribute to passing women. Some men are just too committed to language to be so easily deterred; their love of the art of communication is admirable.

As I walked, I couldn't help noticing that French was thematically relevant to the names of numerous dry cleaners in the neighborhood. 

French Cleaners!

Cleaning Services at Maison Charles

And Yet More French Cleanliness!

Heading South on Flatbush Avenue

Is that how it always is with dry cleaning businesses, or did this have something to do with the Haitian presence in this neighborhood? My own Upper West Side dry cleaner speaks Tagalog, and there is no French anything in the store name.

When I hit Church Avenue, I made a right and passed some French on storefronts. Not a lot, but some. 

This Store Sells Articles Divers (Sundries)

Belle Fourchette (Nice Fork?) Offers Catering

A final observation: the percentage of non-French four-letter words I heard while walking around this neighborhood was somewhat higher than I encounter on my average day in New York. All such words came from men. "Fucking," used in the adjectival sense, was in fact the first or second word I heard when I got off the subway.

This experience made me think about the use of the expression "pardon my French" to excuse expletives. A quick Google search has yielded multiple explanations of this phrase, with the most likely one from my point of view (and this is not an informed point of view, I admit) being that it grew out of anti-French sentiment and a desire to blame bad behavior on another country. 

In addition, last night I came home to discover that Brandt had downloaded a new Google Translate app—a free one—onto my iPhone for me.

It is fabulous. You speak the English word into your phone and it provides you with the foreign-language equivalent in writing. Which you can then play as well if you need help with pronunciation. The voice recognition is pretty impressive. 

Talk to the Phone in English...

...and Out Pops French, for Free!

Brandt and I are still speaking French to each other. We have had lapses, but the majority of the time we are living in a non-English household. Even though we sometimes get lazy about pronunciation and vocabulary, I think our efforts are making a huge difference.

Turn Sideways If You Like Your French Supersized

This afternoon I went to the Haitian consulate, near Grand Central, to see if I could set up an appointment to talk with someone there about Haitians in New York. There are speakers of French from all over the world in this city.

Everyone I spoke to in the office was extremely nice to me, and my conversations were in French. I felt pretty proficient compared to 28 days ago, and pretty proud of myself—until a woman tried to spell out for me the e-mail address of the person I needed to write to for an appointment, and things fell apart. I went from confident constructor of sentences to pre-nursery-school analphabet!

Oui, c'est vrai, I barely know my alphabet in French. I have mentioned this as an issue before, with at least one other language. You have to be able to recite the alphabet in a language or you can't follow spellings and you look like a moron. I know the sounds pretty well, but I have forgotten the names of some of the sounds.

En Route to the Haitian Consulate

When I was studying Italian, my seven-year-old niece taught me to say the alphabet. I will ask Brandt to teach me the French.

Anyway, as usual, I am still going nuts with the grammar exercises. I have now finished Annie Heminway’s book Complete French Grammar and am focusing on a new one I bought, French Pronouns and Prepositions, also by Heminway, as well as a couple of others I already had.

One is called French Verb Tenses (by Trudie Maria Booth), and though I like it, there are little spacing things about it that are sometimes annoying. For example, the blank spaces aren't always big enough to accommodate my answers. So I have to squish things in and then I can't read them when I am checking what I wrote against the answer key.

In one case in this same book, I was asked to translate a paragraph from English to French, but the lines for the translation were on the back side of the page where the English was. You can't flip back and forth every three words to see what you're translating; it just isn't manageable. So I wrote the translation in the margins next to the English and made a big mess.

Grammar Book Designers: Consider Spacing!

I Needed These Lines a Page Earlier

It may not sound like a big deal, but little things like this can add up and dent the pleasure of studying.

A question about grammar, something that has puzzled me for a while. An adjective in French has to match up in gender and number with its noun, but in rapid speech, especially when the relevant noun is not mentioned in the utterance, do French speakers bother?

For example, let’s say you are eating some food, and it is delicious, and you want to say so. Would you actually consider the food’s gender and say delicieuse if it’s female (e.g., viande, or “meat”) and delicieux if it’s male (porc, for “pork”)?

Or do you just default to male?

It seems too complicated to consider what you’re eating, get the gender, and match your adjective. By then your food will be cold and no one will give a damn.

A final observation for the day: I feel sorry for French teachers who have to teach their high school students the word for "shower." It is douche. How much giggling does that provoke every year in French classes?

It is impossible to imagine.

Mexican Raspberries with French Subtext?

French even showed up in my food. For breakfast, I ate raspberries with yoghurt. I was amazed to see that, although the raspberries were identified on the package as a product of Mexico, the text was in English and French. Framboises? Produit du Mexique? Mais pourquoi?

A friend of ours, Julian, came over for a while this morning and added his rusty French to the mix. He joked that this (i.e., speaking French to each other) was a great idea, as long as it didn't cause us to split up by the end of the week.

I am realizing that one of the reasons Brandt and I understand each other so well, despite the current not-too-hot state of our French skills, is that when we don’t know a word, we make it up, and when we make it up, it tends to come from English, and, therefore, we both tend to understand it.

Would You Speak French to This Man?

For example, here are two sentences that were spoken today, and that one could possibly consider cheating:

• Il faut stretcher, for “I need to stretch.”
• Je devrais flosser, for “I should floss.”

I’m looking up a lot of stuff, but there isn’t always time or opportunity mid-conversation to check a dictionary.

I confess, at one point late tonight I begged Brandt to switch to English, but he denied me. He is tough.

A Famous French Restaurant Whose Name Means "The Frog," and Which Brandt and I Passed on the Way to a Meeting This Morning

I celebrated by going on a French outing. The fact that I was able to find the French outing I found is one of the reasons I love New York.

At 4:15 p.m. today I did a Google search. At 4:16 p.m., I found something of interest. At 5:55 p.m., I found myself sitting at a table on the other side of town in the offices of a group I had never heard of before: Association des Francophones Fonctionnaires des Organisations Internationales (AFFOI). I believe this translates as Association of Francophone Officials of International Organizations. And a Francophone is someone who speaks French, usually natively.

There were about 15 people there for a 6:00 p.m. lecture on this topic: "Comment rendre aux Organisations Internationales leur diversité linguistique et professionnelle?" Which I understood to mean "how to restore linguistic and professional diversity to international organizations." The speaker was Dominique Hoppe, AFFOI's president.

Every word was in French, and Monsieur Hoppe does not have what I would call a languid speaking style. Even taking into account that all foreign languages sound fast when you can't understand them well, I think it would be accurate to say that he speaks très vite. 

Still, I am pretty sure I got the general gist of it: English is taking over at international organizations despite their complex and diverse linguistic traditions. It may be more convenient from an administrative and operational point of view to rely on a single language, but monolingualism encourages short-term thinking and simplification--and gets in the way of linguistic and cultural diversity, more thorough reflection, and a long-term vision reflecting truly global perspectives. All very interesting and important stuff.

At one point towards the end, a woman on the other side of the room said something that sounded suspiciously like a suggestion that we all introduce ourselves and say why we were there. Oops.

The thing was, unlike me, everyone there was fluent in French. Unlike me, everyone had been capable of understanding all that had preceded this suggestion. And this, like everything else that evening, was clearly going to go down in French.

We went around the room. A number of people who introduced themselves before I did spoke long and earnestly about their background and their concerns about the topic. I stuck with short. I said I was a writer, mentioned this project, and added, "Il faut peut-être avouer que je n'ai pas compris beaucoup que vous avez dit ce soir." Approximately: "I should perhaps admit that I have not understood a lot of what you said tonight."

At Grand Central, Heading Home From the French Lecture; I Find This Place Beautiful

I think there's at least one mistake in there (for example, I am pretty sure I should have included the words de ce after beaucoup), but people laughed. Which I will take to mean that they understood.

Besides my French outing, the other big thing that happened today was that as I was sitting talking with my husband in our kitchen this morning, he said out of the blue, "We should speak to each other only in French until the end of April." (April 30th is when my French unit ends.)

I was amazed by the suggestion. And promptly agreed! And we promptly began!

As I have mentioned previously, he achieved near fluency in French before he met me, when he dated a French-speaking woman. He is now rusty. I am rusty. But much can be achieved when two rusty people speak to each other. It is in fact amazingly helpful.

Now, I wouldn't have suggested this. I wouldn't have thought it could be done. We have an English-language relationship. My thinking would have been that in French we wouldn't be able to manage the nuances of our lives together. If you still can't remember the words for simple things like "floor" and "wheat" and "stamp," can you manage to express complex ideas and feelings without causing serious misunderstandings?

Plus, I would have assumed it would feel too weird.

But really, it didn't feel weird at all. We understood each other quite well all day, and we probably got in a good three hours of French before midnight (we both talk a lot). And each of the few times one of us forgot and lapsed into English for a sentence or two, the other was there with a stern "En français!"

If we actually do this, there is a chance I could get further in French than anything else, even German or Spanish, in which I started out a lot more advanced than I did in French three weeks ago.

I am crossing my fingers. The question is, CAN WE DO IT???

Lots of Languages Could Be Heard This Weekend...

...at the Architectural Digest Home Design Show

Questions keep arising. For example, I have been informed that one says la hauteur (height) and not l’hauter. Is that true, and if so, why? You don’t actually pronounce the h, do you?

I learned that la musculation is “weightlifting.” That is one cool word.

Some of the vocabulary I have been coming across in my books is not very relevant to my daily life. I’m not blaming the books; the experience is just kind of underscoring that I have a pretty urban lifestyle.

For example, maybe this will be shocking to some people, but I can’t come up with the word for female horse (“mare”) in English without doing a Google search, so I am unlikely to need the French word (jument) either. And, although most of the time I can remember that a female pig is called a “sow,” I never, ever say it. So I probably won’t be using la truie, the French equivalent, a whole lot.

A nightmare (cauchemar): learning genders of 50 American states so that you can pick the right preposition when you want to say you are in one of them. For example, I believe it is Je suis en Pennsylvanie (a feminine state), but Je suis au Delaware (a masculine state). At least there are only two genders in French, and most states are male, but still! There are benefits to genderlessness.

I am just realizing I have a little bit of a phobia that I will unintentionally be rude, or crude, in asking for a bathroom in a foreign language. Think of how many words for bathroom there are in English, each with different associations and applications! We have:

• bathroom
• restroom
• washroom
• toilet
• women’s room
• ladies’ room
• men’s room
• powder room
• john

Bathroom vocabulary seems to be pretty complex in most languages. I just read that in French, les toilettes is equivalent to “restroom,” while a salle de bains is a full bathroom, complete with shower or tub. But at a restaurant, am I really supposed to ask, “Où sont les toilettes?”

To my English-speaking ear, that sounds very, um, specific. We are big on bathroom euphemisms in English. I have also seen a third bathroom option, cabinet, so I am filled with uncertainty. Help.

I have now finished Level III of Pimsleur. There are just 10 lessons left. I really wish there were more.

Green People Near Macy's

A lot of people in New York (and elsewhere) hate St. Patrick’s Day, I guess because some other people get very drunk. I myself have never had any problems with St. Patrick’s Day.

I never even know it is happening until I encounter a bunch of people in green, as I did today, and my experience of it has generally been a purely chromatic one.

Back to language. Something I have been considering: in my opinion, the most romantic Romance language is not French. Too much phlegm.

Starting with maximum romance and going in descending order, my romantic-language list is as follows:

1. Italian
2. Spanish
3. French

Having had no meaningful experience with Portuguese (yet), I can’t comment on where it would fall, but based on the contact I have had to date, I think it is likely it will round out my personal list at number 4. Don’t get me wrong: I find them all romantic. I’m just saying Italian wins. Je suis désolée.

My Pimsleur lessons have been pushing the word sympa on me. It is a shortened form of sympathique (nice), and I have never, ever come across it before. I gather this is an example of what is known as “apocope,” where stuff gets lopped off the end of a word.

Sympa (pronounced roughly sampa) appears to be a cool and casual way of saying “nice” in French. (If this is wrong, I hope someone will alert me.) It does not seem to fit well with my tradition of formal college French.

Is there an age limit for using sympa? I feel kind of ridiculous saying it.

I read today that “ballot” in French is le scrutin. Is that what they actually call the thing you stick in the box? (In the olden days anyway.) 

Le scrutin is funny. It sounds like “scrutiny” and brought to mind the year of the hanging chads.

Pimsleur is helping; I just wish it would help faster. To speed things along, I made sure to take my Pimsleur lessons with me today while doing some errands, one of which took me through Central Park, where I crossed paths with a hawk.

Mid-Pimsleur, I Saw This Red-Tailed Hawk

A Closer Look

Ever since I read the other day, “French vowel sounds are much tenser than the English ones,” I have become kind of obsessed with my French vowels. That one sentence made me realize I have been doing even more things wrong than I realized.

For example, I wasn’t saying une right at all. I was saying it more like oon than, well, like the tenser sound I guess it really is. I have a very hard time saying un homme ou une femme (a man or a woman). The ou and une kind of battle it out in my mouth.

Still, the more I practice, the better my r’s and my vowels are getting. This afternoon, around Pimsleur lesson 15 (Level III), I had a bit of a breakthrough, after which it became less painful to hear my accent, because it started to suck less.

That’s good, because so far French has been the only language where hearing myself speak has repeatedly made me cringe. 

In the past few days I have done 13 more Pimsleur lessons. Some of them I did while running in Central Park (I would be able to run faster if not for those French r’s, which require considerable physical energy).

Some of them I did running errands.

Some of them I did lying in bed.

Some of them I did lying on the floor stretching.

Some of them I “did” while sleeping, so I then had to redo them.

They are going well; I have only 24 left.

Me in Cab with Flashcards: Too Bumpy to Study

Last night en route (see that French?) to a party, Brandt and I did French flashcards together on the subway. People were looking at us funny. Partway there we switched from subway to cab, which was unfortunately too bumpy to continue with the flashcards (or to get an in-focus photo).

Later we took a cab home, too. The driver initially struck me as pretty gruff and uncommunicative. I soon realized he was French-speaking by the radio program he was listening to; it sounded like an African French to me, though I am by no means able to identify accents with reliability.

When we reached home (I don’t like to talk to cab drivers when they are actually driving), I had a little conversation with him in French. To recap: I said, you speak French, right? And he said yes. And I asked where he was from. He said Senegal. I said I was studying French right now, and he said I was doing very well, that he could understand me perfectly. His face lit up as soon as I began speaking to him in French, and he was utterly charming.

This conversation would not be terribly exciting to the objective observer, I suppose. But it was thrilling to me. Like a new world opening up. And also plain old fun! Just in that little exchange I felt so much more confident in my pronunciation and constructions than I did two weeks ago. 

Following are several observations from today’s grammar and vocabulary lessons.

First, the French word for “lawyer” (l’avocat) is the same as the French word for “avocado.”

Second, I find it funny that “grape” in French is raisin. As a consumer of both grapes and raisins, I also find it confusing, but I will work it out.

Third, I am perplexed about the differences between j’aimerais versus j’aimerais bien versus je voudrais. For “I would like,” I have always said, “Je voudrais,” as in “Je voudrais manger ton gâteau.” (I would like to eat your cake.)

According to what I am hearing from Pimsleur, I have now formed the impression I can also use either j’aimerais bien or even j’aimerais, but I always thought j’aimerais meant “I would love” rather than “I would like.” Such issues matter; you don’t want to overstate your prospective affection for something.

Fourth, it is interesting to study a foreign language years after you first studied it, because the experience makes it obvious how language changes. I am now learning technical vocabulary that simply didn’t exist when I studied French in college. Page d’accueil, for example, is what I just learned for “home page.”

Surfer sur le net translates itself, I think. 

I have been doing flashcards for the past couple of days. I love flashcards. There are 1,000 study cards in this SparkNotes box, and I just keep going through the cards I don’t know over and over until I get them right. The first time through the box I knew/remembered only about 40%, but the number keeps going up.

Flashcards: You Can Use These on the Subway (Métro)

It is impossible to speak a language well with a minuscule vocabulary. I realized earlier this week that I could not remember “knife,” “fork,” or “spoon”—all critical to basic functioning in society. In fact, I still can’t remember "knife" and "spoon," but at least I can now ask for a fork (fourchette).

As of tonight, I am several lessons into Level III of Pimsleur, so I have finished 30-something lessons so far and have about 45 lessons left. My French strategy is to get through my grammar books, flashcards, and Pimsleur lessons as quickly as possible, then roam New York with some reanimated French skills.

I am at my best with sentences with very few r’s. Trying to pronounce words like pour and arbre is doing me in.

One thing that has been fun is that I can enjoy Pimsleur lessons and flashcards with Brandt. Before we met, he had a romantic relationship in French, and although he is rusty, he is definitely more advanced than I am. But just you wait, husband, is what I say.

Large numbers in French have always confused me. Although “million” in English translates into million in French, “billion” is milliard and “trillion” is billion. How did that happen?

I forgot to say previously how I did on my French tests, administered through a company called Alta. I took an oral test (via telephone) on March 1 and a written test on March 2, and I received 7’s on both. This is considered an “intermediate plus”; the maximum one can get is a 12. As I expected, the score was noticeably lower than my initial Spanish and German scores.

On my writing test, accompanying my score was the following (maybe not perfectly written) explanation:

• Comprehension: The candidate is able to understand all of the questions prompts and render most forms and styles of writing.
• Mechanics: 5 - 10% of the written texts contain errors in grammar and spelling.
• Expression: The candidate's vocabulary is good in areas of frequent usage but cannot use language structures to effectively express his/her ideas.
• Overall: The candidate writes using basic language structures to convey meaning but almost no advanced or formal structures used correctly. Understands basic grammar, spelling, and vocabulary but mistakes are present in advanced areas.

Harsh! On the oral exam, my scores were explained in this way:

• Comprehension: The candidate understands the main ideas and some details of common subjects; repeating and rephrasing are often needed.
• Communication: The candidate can participate in social conversations and express general ideas; hesitates often.
• Grammar: The candidate uses the language's basic structures with control, but demonstrates weaknesses with common structures, word order, and subject-verb agreement.
• Vocabulary: The candidate's vocabulary is strong in areas of frequent usage, but limited in more advanced areas.

I am in a competition with myself to see how much better I can do on April 30 when I retest. I am shooting for at least 9's, though secretly I have more ambitious dreams.

My time was not good, but considering I haven’t been able to train properly since my injury last summer, I am pretty happy with it. And I am definitely getting better.

I just got these new shoe inserts, called orthotics, to help me improve my biomechanics, reducing the strain that led to my foot troubles. The orthotics were suggested to me last year, but I was highly skeptical of their efficacy, and to be honest, I think the word “orthotics” itself—which made me think of orthopedics and orthodontics—turned me off. I feel optimistic about my prospects now, though. 

Besides running, today and yesterday have involved grammar studying and also marathon Pimsleur sessions. My head is ready to fall off. I did Pimsleur lessons 14-20 (this is still Level II) yesterday, and 20 through 27 today. Since each of these lessons is half an hour, that is a lot of Pimsleur time.

Good for Pimsleur Marathons

Fortunately, I have finally solved my longstanding headset problems. For several months now, I have been using these things called yurbuds. They are soft and comfortable, so my ears and head never start to hurt, and the sound quality is high, and they stay in while running, and they do not blast whatever you are listening to so that everyone around you, on the subway or wherever, has to listen to it, too.

They lend themselves well to endurance Pimsleur sessions. The one bummer is that they do not block out subway noise quite as well as the huge Martian-ear headsets that I used to wear around everywhere when I started this project.

From one of my books I just learned that un crapaud is a toad. I like that word. It sounds as though it should be a curse word, but I guess running around saying “toad” when you spill coffee on your blouse or bang your shin on a cabinet wouldn’t be very cathartic.

I did some work today on conditional. I adore conditional. Until I get a handle on conditional, I don’t feel comfortable in a language. I wonder if there is a psychological profile for people who adore conditional. 

Studying French is simultaneously knocking Spanish and Italian—but especially Italian, whose hold on my brain was already precarious—out of my head.

My Seatmates on the Flight Home Last Night

People care about grammar, I think, much more than the popular perception of indifference would suggest.

From one of my McGraw-Hill books, French Verb Tenses by Trudie Maria Booth, I just learned that you use tu when praying to God and talking to a pet. Good to know.

This same book discussed how one can use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the 36 sounds that exist in French. Thirty-six sounds doesn't sound so bad. If only I could pronounce some of them better, without choking on my own throat. And if only I actually knew the International Phonetic Alphabet. 

Now that I think about it, not knowing it has plagued me for decades, dating back to many dictionary encounters in my past. It is frustrating to look up a word to figure out how to pronounce it and then have to run around looking up how to pronounce the various phonetic symbols used to represent its pronunciation on the printed page. The IPA is supposed to help you, by showing you in a standardized way how to pronounce things across languages that have different alphabets and that contain sounds not used in your own language. But it doesn't help you if you don't know it.

And the thing is, I do not seem to be motivated to try to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is one of those things. I started to read the Wikipedia entry on it and got a headache, so I abandoned it.

Also in my same verb-tense book I read, “French vowel sounds are much tenser than the English ones.” This sentence I found amusing. I do sometimes feel tense when I try to speak French, but I think for different reasons.

Fellow FIAF Moviegoers

I did a bunch of Pimsleur today. In the evening, I also went to a major French cultural institution, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) on the East Side, to see a 1992 French film called La crise (The Crisis). It was subtitled, but I resolved to cheat as little as possible.

The promotional copy on FIAF’s website read: “High-powered businessman Victor loses both his wife and his job on the same day!” Without the exclamation point, that might have sounded pretty depressing, but the punctuation cheered me right up. Coline Serreau, the director, was going to be present and do a Q&A afterwards.

I actually did better than I expected understanding the film's dialogue. I didn’t love the movie--found it exaggerated in a way that didn’t quite work for me--but I enjoyed it nonetheless and felt glad to be testing out my French comprehension in this way.

After the movie, because I have had mostly bad experiences with Q&As, I considered sneaking out early, but since everyone else stayed put, and since I was sitting front center like the geek that I am, I stayed put as well.

And I was glad I did.

Serreau was cool, witty, authoritative, and impressive. I hadn’t realized she did the film Trois hommes et un couffin (1986), which was remade in the U.S. as Three Men and a Baby, and which I naturally saw in French, because in the year it came out I was a leather-jacket-wearing, cigarette-smoking college student who shunned American films in favor of foreign-language offerings whenever possible.

Walking to the subway from FIAF was romantic. I passed CBS, the Apple Store, the Plaza Hotel, and dark clusters of large trees at the southeastern corner of Central Park. I love New York.

Romantic Urban Sights...

...to Cap a Night of French Culture

Tiny iPod Nano Holds Large Quantity of Pimsleur Lessons; Raisin for Scale

Today after a Pimsleur run I flew via Detroit to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I will be teaching a grammar class (English grammar, that is) for a corporate client. This is through the communication skills training company, Syntaxis, that I run with my husband.

Studying languages has made air travel a lot more fun than it was for a while after 9/11. In fact, these days air travel is kind of heavenly, because without office-related distractions it is very easy to spend the entire flight and airport time on my language books and sometimes my Pimsleur lessons. Irksome things such as flight delays become almost irrelevant, since I always have something I like to do while I wait.

I do find that airplanes aren’t great for Pimsleur, because trying to hear a lesson against the sounds of the plane engines gives me ear strain. Also, if you are sitting next to someone on the plane, you will quickly become annoying as you say your responses to the Pimsleur prompts, especially since it is hard for people to tell how loudly they are speaking when they have a headset on.

Even airports aren’t always ideal for Pimsleur, because of all the TVs they have blaring these days throughout the waiting areas, and all the boarding announcements, which seem much louder than usual when you are in the middle of concentrating on the pronunciation of a critical foreign-language phrase.

Detroit Airport's Moving Walkways: Pimsleur-Friendly

However, I have done Pimsleur lessons strolling through airport terminals, up and down escalators, and along moving walkways. It is fun.

Here are some things I need to figure out about French.

First, why there are three words and not just two (since there are two genders, masculine and feminine, in French) for “pretty” (beau, bel, belle) and “new” (nouveau, nouvel, nouvelle).

Second, am I correct in thinking that you pronounce the l sound in ville (city), but that in similarly constructed words such as famille (family), fille (daughter), and gentille (nice) you do not? Why is that?

Third, mignon is “cute.” So does filet mignon translate essentially as “cute filet”?

Fourth, I remain perplexed by a sentence in one of my exercises, reading, “Le père de Maman et de Papa, c’est notre grand-père.” (The father of Mom and Dad is our grandfather.) You aren't really allowed to do that in French, are you? It sounds like the beginning of an unfortunate Appalachia joke.

Japanese at the Detroit Airport

Finally, I need a major accent mark/diacritics review. I got off on the wrong foot in my understanding of French accent marks back in 1984, when I somehow missed the part where the teacher explained the difference between an accent aigu—as in é—and an accent grave, as in è. I think I was well into second-year French before my instructor pointed out that I was incorrectly pronouncing them the same way. 

Despite the questions spiraling out of control, studying French is so exciting at this point because it is just pouring back into my brain. Each sentence I encounter in a grammar book trains me for and reminds me of many more.

A lot of people tell me they don’t have time to study a new language. In such cases, an alternative could be to study an old one, one you learned in school.

Often in the U.S. that means Spanish or French. It is less mentally demanding to re-study a familiar language than to start a brand new one, and there is a nostalgia about it that I think has some fascinating emotional and psychological components. It feels to me as though it turns back time.

I am really loving it. And one thing that's funny, too--following Japanese, French feels almost like the same language as English!

One way it is clearly not the same language is the way certain words of what look like common etymology take on different meanings and associations in French versus English. I was amused by some of the vocabulary I encountered in the McGraw-Hill book French Vocabulary by Eliane Kurbegov, which I began in the Detroit airport while waiting for my Kalamazoo flight. (The book made a mechanical problem on my flight, one with an initially indeterminate delay, completely tolerable.)

Here are some examples I found interesting:

• “Cohabitation” translates as le concubinage.
• “Pregnancy” is grossesse.
• “Bachelor” is célibataire.

One phrase that really amazed me appeared in this sentence: “Une fille peut être un garçon manqué,” which translates as, “A girl can be a tomboy.” Doesn't the part that means "tomboy" translate more literally into something like "a boy with something missing"?! Or am I mistaken?

This vocabulary book (which is part of a series McGraw-Hill has for other languages as well) cracks me up sometimes. The choice of examples is kind of random. For example, one was: “C’est l’urticaire qui me donne une démangeaison.”

Translation: “It is this rash that gives me an itch.”

By 8 a.m. I was already drinking a latte at Café Margot--which has a thematically appropriate French name as well as a nice French-speaking owner--and was making my way through a book called Complete French Grammar by Annie Heminway. At least to start out, I am using books from the same McGraw-Hill series that I have used for other European languages to date. I am fond of them, in part because they include many, many exercises, and I just love grammar drills.

Because I have some background in French, I decided to skip the first 30 lessons of the 100 that are available from Pimsleur for this language and begin with Level II instead. I studied French in college for a few years and did a small amount of work in it in graduate school when I was studying comparative literature. While I never was as good in French as in Spanish or German, I was reasonably proficient at one point.

Comfortably conversational, I would say. But having begun French later in life, and studied it over a shorter period of time, I forgot a lot more than I did of those other two languages.

My Bad-Ass Proctor

Pimsleur Level II is a little basic, but there are so many basic things I don’t remember, and also, pronunciation has always been an issue for me in French, so I could use the practice. French really tangles my tongue. The main problem is those darn r’s. 

I decided to get myself tested in French, by my usual testing service Alta. I want to get retested after the two months I will be devoting to this language, to see how much I am able to improve in a short period of time. My prediction is that the improvement will be more pronounced than it was in Spanish or German.

I took Alta's one-hour writing test before I went to bed, proctored by my usual proctor (my husband, Brandt), and scheduled an oral exam for tomorrow.

The last time French and I had regular contact was 20-something years ago. I am curious to see whether my sense that my French has decayed disproportionately is confirmed by my scores!

In recent days I enjoyed a number of conversation sessions with native Japanese speakers. Unfortunately, I don’t think I was quite ready for so many intensive conversation sessions.

It is fun to try to speak Japanese, and that is the idea, but I got frustrated and my ego was dented. When the person you are doing the conversation exchange with can say sophisticated things in English about art and culture, and your response is repeatedly, “Huh?” and “It’s nice weather today, isn’t it?” and "Where does your older sister live?" then the conversation is a bit lopsided.

Sayonara (Goodbye)

I think I should have focused heavily on the Pimsleur from the start, rushed to finish it earlier, and been further along in my basic oral skills before starting the conversation practice, so that I could be more expressive.

As someone who has made a living as a writer, expressing whatever I wanted to express, being so limited in what I can say is monumentally frustrating. 

Japanese was definitely harder than I expected before I began. Grammatically and in many other ways. There is a different word for “older sister” versus “my older sister,” and “younger sister” versus “my younger sister,” with the same thing happening for brother relationships. Meaning that instead of just combining “sister” and “brother” with age-related terms, as you do in English, you have all these new words to learn.

That is just one small thing, though, and not a formidable obstacle in the end. There are other, more formidable obstacles. Though with time and dedication, nothing that couldn't be overcome.

My three months did give me a flavor of Japanese, but a systematic basic grasp of the grammar of Japanese eluded me in the short time I had. I would like to go back to it and do it more justice in the future. But now—on to French!

As my goodbye to Japanese, I went back to something I have enjoyed a lot, which is kana practice. Finally, at 12:40 in the morning, I closed my books and said sayonara.

Japanese went out with kind of a whimper, but there is no reason a whimper needs to be the final word. Who knows what will happen down the road?

I found this rather depressing.

I am trying to finish all the Pimsleur Japanese lessons by two days from now, but I am not going to make it, I’m afraid. I did lessons 20 through 24 (Level III) today. I rushed so much I started making significant mistakes. I will have to go back.

Running in Central Park today, I saw a red-tailed hawk, a woodpecker, and—near 102nd Street on the West Side—a pack of people standing around waiting for an owl to emerge from a hollow tree. I never actually see owls. I only see other people seeing owls.

I know it is early to say this, but I feel spring coming.

Where I Went to School Today

It was tremendous fun. I loved it. The teacher (sensei) was Reiko Akai, a delightful, attractive, energetic woman with a great sense of humor. I love energetic teachers with a great sense of humor, especially for language classes, where you the student are often making a fool of yourself.

I think I recall a junior high school Spanish teacher of mine, someone well into middle age, getting down on her hands and knees and meowing to try to convey to a perplexed student what a gato was. I find it very hard to believe that she would have done this, so I have at times questioned the reliability of my memory, but that's how I remember it, and I have always been impressed by the pedagogical commitment and lack of self-consciousness implied by such an act.

Anyway, back to Japanese class. When I first arrived, the sensei gave me a folded piece of paper (serving as a makeshift tent card) and told me I could write my name on it in Roman letters. I thought she was saying that only because she didn't think I would be up to writing in katakana, so I decided to go for it and wrote my name in Japanese instead. Then, once class started, I looked around at the other name cards and realized no one's name was in katakana. I felt like a dork. I turned around my name card and wrote "Ellen" instead.

As a warmup, the teacher put words of foreign origin (such as the Japanese for "Internet" and "iPod") on the board in katakana, and we, the students, were supposed to figure out what they said. I have been doing quite a bit of work on this kind of thing, and it was very hard for me to hold still and not call out the answers as soon as I figured them out. As a non-paying guest, I didn't want to be greedy, or a Goody Two-Shoes--but I may have been a little of both.

Although I think the class level was pretty good for me and most of the time I knew what was going on, to continue in it I would have needed to do some studying on my own to fill in the gaps. I have monster holes in my understanding of Japanese verb-related grammar, as well as in my verb vocabulary. The instructor kept talking about different categories of verbs, with different conjugation patterns, that I was barely aware of. Also, there are many basic verbs I don’t know by heart--for example, "sing," "run" (I keep forgetting that one), "clean," etc.

There were a number of interactive activities where we were divided up into pairs, which I thought worked well. Since my presence made for an odd number of students in the room, the two guys next to me got stuck with me as a third wheel--a third wheel that was squeaky and asked a lot of questions, but they were nice about it.

At one point there was a vocabulary-building charades-like activity. Some of us selected little folded slips of paper from the instructor and then had to act out the verbs written on them so that the other students could guess the words. Embarrassingly, I was first and my word was “to shower” (in Japanese, I mean). To break the ice, there is nothing like pretending to shower in front of a group of strangers.

Even though I enjoyed myself immensely, I do not on the whole think classes are ideal for me. They tend not to go as fast as I am trying to go at the moment, and they require too much of a time commitment at hours that are not necessarily convenient for me. And yeah, I admit it, I am a bit of a control freak. 

An Education in Japanese Toilets

However, it is fun to drop in and visit. In addition, because it is very hard to do unfamiliar languages such as Japanese (or Korean, or Hindi, or any number of other languages) on one's own, I think classes are a good idea. Preferable, in fact. Just maybe not for me, most of the time, though I would have loved to continue this particular class for a few more sessions.

A cultural note: as was true at the Japanese tea place I went to the other day, the toilets at Japan Society are advanced. These were Toto washlets, Japanese toilets that offer "rear cleansing," both gentle and standard, "front cleansing," and dryer functions. I didn't test them out, but I was impressed.

Having lived most of my life in the U.S. with U.S. toilets, I find the Japanese toilet situation--and implied bathroom philosophy--rather sophisticated. 

Me on Day 600, with Morning Coffee at Local Café

How the hell did this happen?

In the first moments I thought of this project, I was thinking ten months. It almost immediately became a year, then pretty soon two years, then not long ago three years. And honestly, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to expand it.

I had no idea I was capable of waking up every morning and continuing to want to do more of this.

But I do. So I keep going. 

Someone said to me the other day, "What you are doing would be torture for me." One man's torture is another's pleasure, I suppose. 

Some ways I would not want to spend my days: karaoke, video games,  watching football on TV. And a whole bunch of other things.

I can say with 100 percent certainty, however, that this project is the opposite of suffering for me. Yeah, I get crabby when I can't remember a word after twenty tries--but that is a trivial and evanescent sensation.

Learning new vocabulary, and conjugations, and declensions just happens to be my idea of a good time. I cannot help it.

I found him to be quite a good teacher. He was strict. He made me speak Japanese by asking me questions I could handle, about the weather and similarly simple topics. And responded to my primitive Japanese questions in Japanese. Which is good, because my listening skills are bad.

He also showed me some kanji. Again, kanji is the Japanese writing system based on symbols of Chinese origin, which I don’t know at all, having been deterred by the need to learn several thousand symbols versus the mere dozens required to grasp the kana syllabaries.

He wrote “tree” for me in Japanese. (Are you allowed to use the word “draw” for the act of writing kanji? It is like art.) Anyway, the kanji for “tree” looks like a little tree. And all the different tree types (birch, oak, etc.), Koji explained, include the tree symbol in their written names. You can see how this works here. 

He next showed me “forest,” which is three of those tree symbols in a little pyramid arrangement. Then he showed me something in between, a pair of the “tree” kanji side by side, and told me that the pair represents something between a tree and a forest. I tried to come up with a word in English that consists of more than one tree but not as many as would be in a forest.

I couldn’t. Because as soon as we started talking trees and forests, the saying “I can’t see the forest for the trees” started rolling repeatedly through my head and blocking out all my other tree vocabulary. I am pretty hopeless on greenery anyway.

With the benefit of a Google search later, I found “grove.” And here you can see Japanese for grove (two tree symbols) and forest (three).

Me As an Actual Kindergartener (Yeah, I Was Short on Artwork Today)

During our meeting I told Koji that a few Japanese people have looked at me like I’m a small child when I've tried to write things in kana.

Japanese texts consist of a mixture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana, with the overwhelming majority being kanji, I believe. Little kids learn hiragana and katakana first, and then kanji. Since I am writing only in kana, I come across as infantile, apparently.

“I am like a kindergartner,” I told Koji.

Later in the conversation he said no, more like an elementary school student.

Ha!

Koji told me Korean movie stars are popular with Japanese housewives. He said some housewives will actually travel to Korea to try to meet them. 

Details such as these would be tough to find in my Japanese books. 

Japanese Beer Truck, Upper West Side Today

For February it was a freakishly warm day, so all I wore for a coat was a denim jacket. This clothing decision was an unjustifiably optimistic one; I shivered the entire trip.

My first stop, Katagiri, is, according to its website, the oldest Japanese grocery store in the U.S. The space itself, on 59th Street between Second and Third avenues, is not all that big, but an employee told me people call in orders from around the country, so its activities extend beyond the constraints of its retail location.

He corrected my primitive Japanese. I loved that.

Today was the first time I have ever seen a carton of eggs with Japanese writing on it.

Katagiri Storefront

Numerous Food Options

Mushy Mayonnaise Bottles

Sea Urchin on the Right (I Love That Stuff)

Foods I Couldn't Immediately Identify

Eggs in Japanese

My main destination was Japan Society (a "the"-free name), 333 East 47th Street, which is an amazing cultural institution I have visited in the past but not in a long time.

Today I ended up in its Toyota Language Center, where I met Reiko Sassa, an energetic, attractive, and charming Japanese woman who first came to the organization in 1977 and has been director of the language center for 25 years now.

Japan Society, East 47th Street

We talked for quite a while, about their many language programs, my project, and some differences between Japan and America. This was a confidence-building conversation for me, because she spoke some Japanese with me and I understood way more than I expected. Of course, she is the director of a language program, so she knows plenty about how to speak to beginners and what they are capable of understanding when.

She let me sit in for a few minutes on a lunchtime class, which I loved, even though it was way too advanced for me, as indicated by the fact that their vocabulary lesson included terms such as "lightheartedly," "uncork," and "single parent." I realized while sitting there that I have hardly ever seen a white person speak Japanese. Except maybe in movies. That realization was kind of a shocker.

Not a word of English was spoken in the class, except the few that I resorted to when I was leaving and surreptitiously asked the teacher if she needed her handouts back. 

She answered me in Japanese, so I really hope she said I could keep the handouts, because I absconded with them.

I am going to visit another class next week, one more appropriate to my, um, language circumstances.

By the time I got home it was 66 degrees. Which meant I couldn’t possibly work inside.

Riverside Park, on a Spring Day in February

I gleefully took my Pimsleur lessons with me to Riverside Park but soon realized, 66 degrees is not really 66 degrees when it is crazily windy and you are sitting by a big cold river. But I stubbornly persisted, huddling along the Hudson and doing my Pimsleur as joggers and cyclists went by looking much warmer than I was.

It was the principle of the thing.

In the evening I met my conversation partner Akiko for the third time.

There are definite advantages to the conversation-exchange thing. You learn things about the language and culture that you just can’t learn on your own. However, if you don’t speak much of the target language, the conversations tend to tilt in the direction of the language that both people speak better. 

I noticed this same phenomenon when I tried conversation exchange with an Italian man over a year ago. He was frustrated with his English, and my Italian was improving rapidly, so we kept speaking Italian. Which was great for me and less great for him.

This Is a New York Japanese Newspaper, Which I Can't Claim to Have Read

If you are the person with the weaker skills (which I most definitely am in this case, many times over), you have to be very disciplined: you have to make yourself talk in the target language no matter how boring you are. Unfortunately, my general inclination is to make an effort to be interesting--which is a much more likely outcome when I am speaking English (how likely is not for me to say) than when I am trying to speak Japanese.

If you value conversational subtlety and wit, it is rough to be limited to discussions of weather conditions, what number train to take, whether you’re hungry, and how many brothers, sisters, and children you have.

To willingly sound dimwitted: that is the task of the early-stage language learner.

The Snow Is Conceding Defeat

Today was 63 degrees. I went running in shorts! In February! I know this, uh, heat spell will be short-lived, but it really is a lot more fun to roam around New York when it is 60 degrees than when it is 20.

I am desperately trying to get through the last level of Pimsleur lessons: level III. As I have mentioned, these are half-hour lessons focusing on oral skills that I listen to on my iPod. With Italian, I could do a bunch of them in a row in, say, a single afternoon, with great pleasure and few mistakes.

With Japanese, it is much slower going, and I sometimes get frustrated. Today I had to redo lesson 11 (there are 30 lessons per level) a second and third time before I thought I did well enough to pronounce it "done." And even then, I did not cover myself with glory.

Still, I love the feeling of a race. Competition, even if it is just with myself, is fun! I have 11 days after today to learn as much Japanese as I can, practice with my new conversation partner, and visit some more Japanese sites and try out my skills there.

The reason I am so bent on finishing Pimsleur is that I have found it pretty key to my ability to carry on basic conversations. For languages where only one or two Pimsleur levels were available, I had a lot more trouble, and I think I can say pretty conclusively that I did not retain as much. This was true for Hindi (which had only one level, meaning 30 lessons), Greek (60 lessons), and Korean (60 lessons). 

I don't mean to say Pimsleur is sufficient; I always supplement significantly with other sources. But the interactivity of Pimsleur--which requires you to respond quickly to prompts and questions in the target language--is intense and pushes your brain. I haven't yet found anything else of a self-help nature that works as well. (Though I am open to recommendations!) I desperately need more resources, because there are only 30 Pimsleur lessons each for Dutch and Polish.

Help!

Anyway, back to the competition idea. Every time I start a new language, it is like another little race against time. I love it. If I didn't have a structure like this, with time limits and clear deadlines, I think I would have gotten way less studying done. In fact, I probably would have stopped studying.

Another area of my life where competition is important is in running. If I can’t race—which I have barely been able to do because of this persistent injury from last spring—I have a hard time continuing to train. I like to compete against myself: see if I can better my old times, or better my times from this year, or better my time from my last race. Or, in the case of this project, better what I did with the previous language.

In general, it is hard to stick with language-learning efforts, but establishing a clear and appealing goal helps. If I wanted to learn a single language such as Spanish, I would probably focus my efforts on, for example, a planned trip to South America where I would use my language skills. Not just a vague intention of a trip, but a specific, tickets-are-purchased kind of trip, that would motivate me to learn as much as I could by a particular date.

But there are other, less expensive options, too. Here in New York, unless you never leave your apartment, it is hard to avoid Spanish. Maybe you are friendly with a neighbor who speaks Spanish, or maybe you like the Spanish-speaking woman you buy your coffee from in the morning. You could study with the specific goal of being able to have a conversation with that person. 

By the way, in the course of this project, I have heard more than a couple of complaints from people whose native language is not English, but who are married to native English speakers. They have expressed annoyance, or disappointment, or regret, that their significant others have not made a greater effort to learn something of their respective native tongues.

It is not an easy thing to do when you live in a country where English dominates. I know that. But I will point out--slyly, the week of Valentine's Day--that if you want to woo someone whose native language is not your own, making an effort to learn something of theirs is probably one of the biggest and most impressive romantic gestures you can make.

Think big!

With each language, I go in with great renewed and usually unrealistic optimism, which tends to be challenged by the time constraints placed on each language. And of course there are things like work, colds, social obligations, my desire to watch American Idol instead of studying one more minute, general exhaustion, indolence, etc., that at times slow my progress. But thinking big, even if it isn't always realistic, is part of what makes me try harder and what makes the effort fun.

Fortunately, the snow is melting, my injury is healing, and Japanese is being learned, with pleasure, even if not at the pace I would like.

East 9th Street, Home to a Japanese Tea House

Such websites serve as reminders that language skills have value in the open market! It's like a special kind of currency that you can use to purchase other skills. (Warning: I've been told that some of the sites are more focused on dating and hookups than on language-learning, so if you're looking exclusively for the latter, beware.)

Besides actually being a native of Japan and a native Japanese speaker, Akiko has been a helpful provider of information on local Japanese resources. 

For example, she suggested I go to a Japanese tea house called Cha-An, on East 9th Street between Second and Third avenues. Now, this kind of thing happens to be right up my alley.

As I have mentioned previously, I am determined not to eat my way through this project. A tea house, however, sounded very healthy and simple.

So off I went to East 9th Street. On the way, I saw vestiges of our neverending snowstorms, a romantic sample of which is shown here.

Enough Is Enough: Fallout from Previous Snowfalls

When I got to the tea house block, I was thrilled, because this is a street I have passed before and often wondered about. It is cute. Any bleakness in the photo above should be blamed on winter and my own limitations as a photographer.

As I began walking down the block, I saw the tea house sign some meters ahead of me (all this foreign-language study has me thinking metrically) and signs for a number of other Japanese establishments as well. Right across the street, for example, were two Japanese restaurants. They looked nice. I decided to check them out after tea.

To reach the tea house, I climbed a flight of stairs, at the top of which was an inviting, stylish, clean space full of customers. The place had a warm wood aesthetic.

As a low-value non-lunch-eating customer, I volunteered to sit at the counter, which gave me a great view of the kitchen and rows and rows of tidy tea offerings. 

Cha-An Exterior

Behind the Counter at Cha-An

If I was hoping someone working at Cha-An would have time to talk to me (I was), I picked a really stupid time to arrive: 1 p.m. The place was packed, and the wait staff, while extremely polite, were all extremely busy. 

Cha-An's Binder-Menu

The menu came in an attractive binder, with laminated pages, color photos, and descriptions of teas from around the world. I stared longingly at a picture of a dessert, then turned the page.

I would have liked to have Japanese tea, but my caffeine intake has been creeping up lately, so I went herbal, which options came from other, non-Japanese parts of the world. My choice: Crimson Chai from South Africa.

Sitting there drinking tea was very relaxing. I practiced converting transliterated sentences into Japanese kana while I  enjoyed my beverage and occasionally made out Japanese words spoken by the employees working behind the counter.

Before I left, I went to use the restroom. As I entered, the toilet cover rose automatically to greet me. I found this enchanting--what hospitality! I took a photo of the toilet, but I feel it would be tacky to post a picture of a restaurant's toilet, so I will refrain. 

Even the Bill Was Packaged Appealingly

T.I.C. Restaurant Map: Seriously?

Cha-An is owned by T.I.C. Group, I learned from a brochure available at the tea house entrance. The map showed a number of other T.I.C.-owned Japanese restaurants around town, including, to my amazement, six on the very block I was already on. Plus three more just one block away!

This I had to see. Nine Japanese restaurants, same owner, practically next door to one another?! 

When I went outside after paying my bill, I realized that the two restaurants I had seen right across the street were in fact part of the T.I.C. family. 

First I went into Sobaya. It was packed, with a heavily Japanese clientele. Sobaya specializes in soba, a type of Japanese noodle. There was a soothing fountain at the entrance.

Sobaya Entrance

A Relaxing Sobaya Fountain

Next door was Robataya NY, where it was a little calmer and a waitress showed me around a bit.

She told me Robataya specializes in grilled foods. The front room has a large grilling area that I think the waitress said would be operational at dinner, but was quiet, at least today, for lunch. She pointed out long wooden paddles used to serve the food to customers who would be seated around the grilling area. The paddles looked big enough to move boats. 

Robataya Exterior

Robataya's Bilingual Offerings

Bottles as Art

Free Eggs and Pickled Vegetables

I was fascinated by the free eggs and pickled vegetables that were sitting out in the main lunch room. I love eggs. They get a bad rap, but eggs are definitely one of nature's perfect foods.

While we were talking, I told her, "Nihongo o benkyou shitte imasu." (I am studying Japanese.) She smiled politely.

A side observation: in general, I feel that my announcement that I am studying Japanese has not generated the same interest in chatting with me that my similar announcements in some previous languages generated. I know I'm boring in Japanese, I know my vocabulary is impoverished, but really, I do want to speak! 

After Robataya, I headed to the east end of the same block, where I found another T.I.C. restaurant, Otafuku, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place that offers takoyaki (octopus balls) and okonomiyaki (savory pancakes).  

At Otafuku: A Contemplative Customer?

Inside Otafuku

I did finally get to test my language skills there with the staff; unfortunately, they were my Spanish skills, not my Japanese.

Next I dropped by Decibel, my fifth T.I.C. establishment of the afternoon. (Yes, seriously, I was still on the same block.)

Decibel, for Your Sake Needs 

Decibel is a sake bar with some food options as well, and it was closed. It is more of a night-time kind of spot, I gather, and apparently has been around for a while.

According to its website, "With almost 100 of Japan's finest sake available Decibel is the closest to Japan you can get without stepping on a plane."

Finally, walking to the west end of the same block, I arrived at a sixth T.I.C. restaurant, Hasaki, whose outdoor signage proclaimed its presence there since 1984.

I entered.

I observed sushi.

I talked briefly to a harried waiter, who was unable to answer my questions about the restaurant's history.

I exited.

Hasaki Exterior

Around Since 1984

One thing that boggled my mind is that these six Japanese restaurants, all on the same block, were not the only Japanese restaurants on the block. 

Sharaku Job Ad

Right by Hasaki, for example, is Sharaku, a competing establishment. In the window I saw an ad for wait staff, posted in both Japanese and English. The Japanese came first, then the translation.

I was able to sound out the kana for "waiter" and "waitress" and was happy about that.

Next I went to 10th Street between First and Second avenues, to see the remaining three T.I.C. restaurants in the immediate area.

The restaurant Curry-Ya is relatively new and specializes, not too surprisingly, in curry cuisine. The space smelled delicious. 

But wait! There's more!

Curry-Ya Interior

Rai Rai Ken

After that was Rai Rai Ken, which specializes in ramen and gyoza (dumplings). It was cheerful, but did not look like my kind of food (not sure it would qualify as health food). However, it appeared to be many other people's kind of food; there were quite a few patrons. 

Closed! Foiled!

Next door to Rai Rai Ken was Shabu-Tatsu, which specializes in shabu shabu and Japanese barbecue. It was closed for lunch, so I was limited to trying to peer in the window.

After typing "shabu shabu" in the preceding paragraph, I had to go Google the term. Actually, I had to Google most Japanese food terms above that were not the word "sushi." My shabu shabu research (not extensive) told me it is thinly sliced meat and vegetables cooked in boiling water and served with dipping sauces.

I found it astonishing that nine Japanese restaurants from one company, plus other Japanese restaurants not owned by said company, could all make a go of it on the same two practically adjacent blocks. 

I also found the cross-promoting interesting. The T.I.C. businesses all advertised that they were part of the same restaurant group. They were not hiding that fact at all.

Whizzing Home Through the Tunnels

Conceptually I myself would prefer that the restaurants I go to have different owners--I like the variety--but I loved the idea that so many people wanted Japanese food that these places could happily coexist. And they did all seem quite different in any case.

Japanese food is my personal favorite of all cuisines, though as someone who is obsessed with sushi and sashimi above all other Japanese eating options, I am not really eligible to judge the cuisine as a whole.

I can say that I would much rather see a dozen Japanese restaurants dotting the gastronomical landscape than a bunch of greasy, obesity-abetting diners and fast-food joints.

• “Can I buy stamps at the station kiosk?”
• “No, but you can buy them at the post office.”

I am also practicing writing American names in Japanese. I find it very entertaining.

American Names in Japanese

Me, Translated

Basically how it works (in the samples I have encountered so far, anyway) is that the name, if not coinciding with Japanese sounds, mutates slightly to fit Japanese pronunciation better.

Then those sounds are rendered in katakana, the syllabary used for words of foreign origin.

It is amazing how totally unrecognizable the names look in Japanese. My personal identity is kind of bound up in both the sound and the sight of my name in English. Or at least in Western languages; I am totally comfortable with my name in French and Spanish, for example.

But it is kind of mindbending to see oneself rendered in a radically different set of symbols. Makes you think!

I hope there are no mistakes in the Japanese writing shown above, but if there are, the deficiencies are my fault and responsibility.

And I continue my writing practice. As I move from one workbook to the next, I keep noticing that the way certain kana are rendered is often significantly different from the way I learned them in my main source of lessons on Japanese writing, the Easy Kana Workbook (by Rita L. Lampkin and Osamu Hoshino). 

This is an issue that has recurred frequently throughout this project: when you are learning a new alphabet or writing system, the difference between a handwritten sample as opposed to a machine-generated sample, or from one font to the next, causes certain letters or symbols to become unrecognizable to the neophyte.

Me at Multilingual MOMA

In English, Don't These A's Look Pretty Different?

The katakana look consistent enough to me across the different books I have encountered; my problems so far lie entirely with the hiragana. I first really noticed this issue at the Museum of Modern Art a couple of weeks ago, when I couldn’t recognize certain characters on their customer-friendly multilingual signs.

Please Help

The hiragana characters shown here are the biggest troublemakers.

I am wondering if the six in the left-hand column, which are what I learned from my Easy Kana Workbook, are not the standard or ideal, and if I should reform my writing to look more like the versions on the right, which are what I see frequently in other sources. Help!

Today I wrote my first sentences in Japanese. Well, kind of. I looked at transliterations and rendered them in kana. That was exciting.

I love seeing how different cultures punctuate. There is much more global variety than I ever realized.

In Japanese, periods are cute little circles. And the Japanese comma slants from upper left to lower right. It looks like an English comma taking a nap.

This afternoon I read food packages in Japanese. And I loved it. Besides carrying on a long tradition of reading packaging, I was reading Japanese!

The location: Midoriya, a newly opened Japanese mini-mart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They sell all kinds of Japanese foodstuffs, kitchen items, and other miscellaneous useful things.

Williamsburg: Yep, Another Grim Winter Day

Midoriya, Beckoning

It is an amazingly clean, orderly, tidy place. I happen to love amazingly clean, orderly, tidy places, but I myself am kind of messy, so it is a good thing I am married to someone who is not. I find it satisfying to stand in the middle of organized, aesthetically pleasing rows of things.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Hello Kitty Even Has Biscuits

Michi, the general manager of this store and its sister store (located in Queens), was my tour guide. He was extremely polite and friendly, and indulged my requests to test my language skills during the tour. I read the sides of cans and packages and asked him if I was reading them correctly, which he said each time I was. Though he didn’t seem all that impressed. 

I also said informative things like, “My name is Ellen,” and coughed up a few basic courtesy phrases, in Japanese, and understood basic courtesy phrases in return. That was fun. But I confess the tour was conducted almost entirely in English, as I am unable to have a conversation in Japanese about lotus root or quail eggs or rice ladles and still come away understanding what has been said.

Tidy Shelves

Michi, General Manager

High-Volume Rice Offerings

Cute Candy

Quail Eggs (I Read From These Cans!)

Ramen: Kind of High in Sodium

Current Japanese TV Shows, to Buy or to Rent

You Can Even Buy Lotus Root Here

Michi said 20 percent of the store's customers are Japanese, in contrast with the Queens store, where only 20 percent are not Japanese. The difference in patrons, he said, meant they had to stock the stores differently. Japanese customers don't like to buy things with English-language packaging, and American customers generally want at least some English text!

As someone who appreciates the literary merits of food packages, I guess I can understand those inclinations.

Mr. Erard writes a great deal about language and in fact has a book coming out in 2012 entitled Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. Should be very interesting! Now that is my kind of book.

It is about the superhuman feats of hyperpolyglots, the Steve Austins and Jaime Sommerses of language learners. I am by comparison a mere bumbler-alonger; fortunately for me, I enjoy bumbling.

Me Working Hard

Today, though, I did six Pimsleur lessons (well, technically seven, since I did one in the middle of the night, at four in the morning, before going back to sleep).  I am still doing each lesson at least twice, so I don't mean to say that I mastered seven lessons in one day and am moving on.

Rather, I redid one previously completed lesson once, redid another lesson twice, and then did four new ones. Those four new ones I plan to redo tomorrow.

I think one thing that has improved my Pimsleur performance is reminding myself how important it is not to multitask too much with difficult languages (Japanese qualifies). I am going back to my Russian-style studying from July 2009, when I first discovered Pimsleur and used to do Russian lessons while lying completely still on the office floor with the lights off.

Over the past few days I have done Pimsleur lying on the floor, lying on sofas, lying on the bed, with my eyes closed and concentrating like hell. And I am doing much better.

I am getting things right in spite of myself, and in spite of this crazy grammar! No offense meant to the Japanese language, but wow! Those particles, and the different verb forms for the different levels of formality, are killing me!

Word-Writing Practice

I even made great progress on the writing front today, moving from characters to words. I practiced by looking at transliterations of common words like "mother" and "nose" and then converting them to kana. I am amazed at how reliably phonetic Japanese is. The writing is definitely hard--but once you master the kana, you can make great progress, it seems to me.

This past day was probably the first time I felt an intuitive connection to the spoken language. It is starting to make more sense. And the parts that don't make sense, I'm able to relax through and feel less frustrated about and try to grasp through intuition rather than reason and grammar.

What I really want is to add a fourth month for Japanese and get an internship at a Japanese company here in New York. Japan Society or Nippon Life, do you need an intern? I promise to sit up while at work.

Kinokuniya, As Seen From the Street

Although it is in a very central location in the middle of town ("town" is a funny word to use for New York City), I don't think I have ever noticed it before.

Kinokuniya's wares are not confined to books. The store also sells magazines. It sells comics (lots). It sells stationery items. It sells gift items. 

There are things about Japan in English. There are things about Japan in Japanese. There are things about the U.S. in Japanese. And many more books and materials whose content I couldn't grasp quickly enough to record for this blog entry.

I started out wandering around the basement, which was well-stocked with language-learning books and CDs, then toured the ground floor, and concluded on the second floor, where a cheerful little café overlooks Bryant Park. 

Bryant Park, As Seen From Kinokuniya's Café

This trip was a delight for me because, finally, in a public place, I confirmed that I am now more or less able to sound out Japanese words, as long as they are in kana without any kanji (Chinese characters) involved. I wandered from book cover to book cover reading words out loud like a first-grader. 

The reading was pretty slow, because I have to sound out the syllables one at a time and still have trouble remembering some of them right away--but I was quite delighted with myself. 

In fact, I would say I was considerably more delighted with myself than were most of the five different employees I pestered to tell me whether I was reading and speaking correctly. 

New York, in Japanese

A very big thrill came when I sounded out a sign in katakana only to realize it spelled...New York! That's the great thing about kana. I've never actually studied how to write "New York" in Japanese, but once you memorize the Japanese characters, you can--unlike in English--work things out phonetically. At left is how "New York" is written in Japanese. Looks a bit different, no?

 To recognize something that looks so unfamiliar as something...familiar is an amazing feeling.

I tried out two improvised sentences on employees. Meaning, yes, I actually spoke out loud, in Japanese, to other human beings. (It has taken me a while; Japanese has been rather shockingly hard.)

The first sentence was (and this is my own probably imperfect transliteration), Omisewa hontoni kireina to omoshiroi des. I was trying to say, "The store is very beautiful and interesting." I made a mistake in my choice of conjunction (the word to), according to a nice young man behind a counter on the basement level. I'm not sure that means the rest was okay, but he said he understood me, so I hope that's a good sign. 

Things to Help You Learn Japanese

Some Magazines With Cool Guys on Them

So Much Stuff It Looks Like a Library!

Many Books and Gifts Here for Kids

On my way out I told another employee, Omisewa totemo ski des. Meaning, I hope, "I like the store a lot." She beamed and thanked me in Japanese, and I was happy.

This language project sometimes makes me think of the Blob, even though it is entirely benign. It's just that it keeps expanding! First I was going to finish after one year--so in the summer of 2010. Then I added a second year. That wouldn't do either, so now I have added a third, thus committing me and my poor addled brain through July 31, 2012.

Expanding to three years allowed me to include two more languages, Polish and Dutch, which I felt were critical. I hear Polish here almost every day! And New York used to be New Amsterdam!

Adding a third year also allowed me to stretch out the time per language from two months to three (except for French, which I have studied previously and which I am therefore limiting to two). I am really happy about these changes.

For one thing, I did not want to leave Japanese after two months! That would have meant just a few more days after today--painful!

In Japanese you can write horizontally left to right, as in English—but you can also write vertically, moving top to bottom, right to left! Crazy, right? 

My First Vertical Word

My Second Vertical Word

Writing vertically was for me a life-altering event. I’m not sure why. After all, I wrote right to left during my Arabic unit, and in small blocks of letters when I did Korean, and those were pretty radical experiences.

For some reason, though, writing vertically feels even more radical—like exporting the fun and play of a crossword puzzle or a round of Boggle and infusing it right into your own real life.

Very fundamentally I experience language as horizontal. I picture words leaving my mouth horizontally. I have never experienced anything but horizontal writing. And now all that has been turned, well, not upside down, but at least on its side!

There are 92 basic kana characters, and I have been writing them over and over, but I have still been having trouble remembering a number of them. Most days when I wake up I practice first thing, but some just refuse to stick in my head.

Memory Aid: Salt Is Bad for You

So today, instead of simply running through the entire set of kana repeatedly, I briefly worked on some memory aids for the more troublesome characters. A few minutes made all the difference.

Within just 45 minutes, I was able to write out all 92 characters, in order, without error, and without peeking.

Personal memory aids can range from silly to, well, obscene. For the syllable na, which looks like a cross, I thought: NaCl, so salt, overconsumption of which can put you in an early grave.

For the syllable mu, which looks like a nose, I thought “mucus,” then “drippy nose,” which then reminded me to draw a regular non-drippy nose.

For the syllable so, which looks like a deformed smiley face, I thought of the face saying, “Yeah, I have just one eye—so?!” In my head this was delivered by Amber, Amy Poehler’s promiscuous, farting one-legged character from Saturday Night Live.

Mucus Is Gross, But It Helps Me Remember

Yeah, So, I Have One Eye. What of It?

Why was this necessary? Well, the order of sounds in Japanese does not correspond at all to the order of sounds in English. There is no a-b-c-d-e-f-g thing going on. 

Instead, here is the order of sounds--syllables, actually--in the Japanese "alphabet" (which is how you need to memorize them if you ever want to be able to function properly in the language):

• vowels: a i u e o
• k syllables: ka ki ku ke ko
• s (and s-like) syllables: sa shi su se so
• t (and t-like) syllables: ta chi tsu te to
• n syllables: na ni nu ne no
• h (and h-like) syllables: ha hi fu he ho
• m syllables: ma mi mu me mo 
• y syllables: ya yu yo
• r syllables: ra ri ru re ro
• w syllables: wa (w)o
• a last lonely syllable-ish thing: n

The first challenge: the vowels (see the first bullet above) are "out of order" if you are used to English. I figured out some days back that the pattern is the first English vowel (a), third English vowel (i), fifth English vowel (u), second English vowel (e), and fourth English vowel (o). 1-3-5-2-4.

Realizing this was phenomenally helpful to me, because it is a pattern that repeats itself. In other words, if you look at the second bulleted line above, the same order of vowel sounds is preserved for the k syllables: ka-ki-ku-ke-ko. 1-3-5-2-4. And for the s syllables on the third line. And for the t syllables on the fourth line. And so on.

But how to remember the order of consonants? I needed a mnemonic device, and here is what I came up with:

• "kissed," for k-s-t in lines 2, 3, and 4 above
• "NoHo," for n-h in lines 5-6, with NoHo being the affectionate shorthand for North House, the residential college where I lived as a Harvard undergraduate
• "Mayer," for m-y-r in lines 7-9 above, as in Oscar Mayer wiener

The last three syllables--wa, (w)o, and n--I was able to remember without tricks. 

Anyway, now every time I write the alphabet, I think, "1-3-5-2-4" and "kissed NoHo Mayer." It sounds stupid and nonsensical and is definitely not broadly marketable as a mnemonic device. A marketable mnemonic device is one like "fanboys," which helps people remember the seven coordinating conjunctions in English: "for," "and," "nor," "but," "or," "yet," and "so." I love that one, which I guess makes me a "fanboys" fan. I regret that I could not come up with something similarly elegant in this Japanese-alphabet-memorizing case.

But stupid or not, my "kissed NoHo Mayer" mnemonic device works for me, and my point is, you can invent your own highly personal and stupid mnemonic to work for you!

1. It won't stop snowing here.
2. When it's not snowing, it's been really, really cold.
3. I can't make myself stop practicing kana.

But today I decided to get off my lazy, cold-averse ass and get myself to something Japanese. For starters, I settled on the Japan Society. I've been there before, but not for quite a few years.

I got on the subway heading downtown, then took the shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central. I love Grand Central. I noticed a Rosetta Stone booth there that I don't remember seeing before.

Grand Central: Many People, Many Languages

Rosetta Stone Kiosk, Grand Central

From Grand Central I began heading east towards the Japan Society--and promptly stumbled across the Japanese Culinary Center, 711 Third Avenue, a big, beautiful showroom for lovers of Japanese cuisine. Of which I am one.

So I'm afraid I never made it to the Japan Society (I'll try again another day), because I was enthralled instead by this gastronomically seductive space, there courtesy of a Moonachie, N.J.-based company called New York Mutual Trading.

They have everything: serving dishes, soy sauce, sake, chopsticks, appliances, miscellaneous cooking tools, tea, cookbooks, and much more. And the people who work there are charming and helpful.

The Showroom, Which I Found by Chance!

Light, Air, and Lots of Cool Stuff

Soy Sauce

More Soy Sauce

My favorite thing was the electronics section, which included sushi "robots" to abet the sushi-making process. I am thinking these are probably not popular with highly trained sushi chefs. 

This Sushi Robot Will Make Your Sushi!

They Have Kits, Too!

This Is a Cool Place to Buy a Gift (So I Did)

Vinegar, Sauces, and Other Good Things

The Beverages Are Beautiful

I Couldn't Always Identify the Products

I spoke at some length to a Japanese woman who worked there. Was this in Japanese?

No, I'm afraid it was not. My conversational skills are still too primitive to have conversations that veer from Pimsleur topics such as the current location of my husband, or my desire to eat lunch, or the state of the weather. She was kind enough, however, to allow me to test my reading ability off a package I found with some kana on it. I sounded out the syllables under her supervision.

The verdict: I was initially off on a couple of vowels, but solid on the consonants, and she said I did well. I don't actually know what was in the package, but just being able to read a package at all was a huge thrill! You have to start somewhere!

In case you are into sake: they are having a sake tasting on February 3 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. (information available right on their home page).

I can see myself sitting on the floor at the edge of a sunny living room, I think with wall-to-wall carpeting and glass doors, and I am writing letters not in order in neat rows, but in random positions all over a piece of white paper. An A in one corner, a B in another, and so on. Each pointing in a different direction, and therefore collectively messy (even though I was very careful to form the individual letters correctly).

Something about placing the letters randomly around the page was exciting, I remember. It was...fun! And a little rebellious, perhaps? As an adult, I often take notes that way: in chaotic swirls rather than rows.

Practice Makes...Better Than Totally Lame

I have been spending a lot of time practicing my Japanese writing skills, and it gives me feelings similar to the ones I associate with that early memory: profound joy, resulting from the placement of representations of sound on paper.

I am in fact writing the Japanese kana in tidy rows, but I find many of the symbols inherently messy in appearance. Some of the kana are sort of random-looking.

One of the two katakana symbols for the syllable ji, for example, is almost ugly to me. Like a deformed smiley face with an extra pair of eyes!

It is, by the way, only one of four ways I have encountered to write the syllable ji in Japanese!

A Deformed Smiley Face?

In any case, I am now like a woman obsessed.

Must.

Learn.

These.

Amid the obsession, I am still getting other non-writing-focused language-learning tasks accomplished. Today I advanced to the second of three Pimsleur levels, and I have continued with Rosetta Stone. Still, my focus on learning to write the Japanese kana is definitely encroaching on the time I would normally spend developing my oral skills through Pimsleur.

I have therefore decided I need to come up with mnemonic devices that will help me remember some of the characters I have not been able to get into my head. It is harder work to come up with mnemonic devices than to copy things over and over, and I am sometimes lazy, so I will have to make myself.

Okay, here is a mnemonic device I just came up with for the hiragana symbol for yu. Although I have been able to remember that the syllable starts with a y, I keep mistakenly thinking it is yo, not yu, so I need something to help me fix the vowel portion in my head.

How You Write "Yu"

How You Write "Yo"

Since yu looks kind of like a fish, I came up with, “Ooooooooo, a fish!” (“Oooooooo” being read here as a long u sound, not as an “oh.”)

Silly, I know, but it will probably work!

Site of Today's Language Encounters

One emerged from the mouth of a maybe 30-something woman who parked herself long-term at a table without offering any evidence of food, or coffee, or coffee companions.

What she did have, however, was a cell phone. And a loud voice. She talked on and on in a language that was not English.

Fortunately, when you are forced to listen to other people’s high-volume phone conversations that you don’t want to hear, it is much less distracting when you can’t understand what is being said than when you can. I never did figure out what language she was speaking, but she annoyed me only a medium amount.

The other language I heard was spoken by an elderly man at the table immediately to my left. He was talking to himself while reading the New York Times in a way I would characterize as highly interactive. As he read along, he groaned, fidgeted, held his head, pressed hard on his temples, and alternately popped up and then slumped down in his seat, punctuating all these activities with passionate utterances. As in: “those fucking bastards.” Or, “I want to kill those guys.” And other words and phrases in that vein.

No one paid him the slightest bit of attention.

While I do not have formal training in it, I believe he was speaking a version of New Yorkese. If you are delicate in linguistic temperament, the subways--and I guess maybe cafés!--of this city are not for you. 

From a Pimsleur lesson today, I learned that you stick yo on the end of a Japanese sentence when you want to show emphasis in the vein of “I’m sure.” For example, “John will show up soon yo.” Or, "The economy is improving fast yo." Since acquiring this new bit of knowledge, I have been walking around sticking yo's on the ends of things.

I find it very empowering. I sound like a tough New Yorker!

Or not. But it's fun.

If You Keep Writing This in Your Head, It Is Time to Get Out of Bed

Today much Rosetta Stone was accomplished, and I moved on to Level 2! There are three Rosetta Stone levels available for Japanese. I hate being in Level 1 of things, so I am happy.

An observation: simple words can be so loooooooooooong in Japanese. “I” is watashi. “We” is watashtachi. “Boy” is otokonoko. I don’t usually think of English as easy, but I can’t help appreciating the relative shortness, at least for certain words—although there is something entertaining, pleasantly percussive even, about some of the Japanese equivalents.

A recommendation: when you are learning to write a new alphabet or writing system, use a book that shows you how people actually handwrite symbols. While I think the Kana de Manga book I have been using is cute, the symbols are machine-generated. In other words, tidy and perfect.

Learning to write by copying them is a little like learning to write letters in English by copying the typeface in the New York Times. In the Easy Kana Workbook by Rita L. Lampkin and Osamu Hoshino, on the other hand, the writing models are actually images of handwritten Japanese.

So they look like what you might reasonably produce with your own hand—which is a more realistic model, and much easier to emulate, and therefore much more encouraging to the neophyte writer of Japanese.

Snow

More Snow

Nonetheless, I decided to brave the elements to achieve a higher goal: errand running.

There I was, trudging down Columbus Avenue, listening to a Pimsleur lesson--which was prompting me to translate things like, "There are a lot of American cars in Japan," "The child is not small," and "Where does your family live?"--when I glanced to the right.

And saw a bunch of different languages in a store window.

The languages were on baby clothes, and the store was Älskling, which, I soon learned, means "darling" in Swedish. The owner happened to be there. Her name is Vivianne, and she is from Sweden.

Vivianne gave me a tour of rows of tiny white onesies, each emblazoned with the word "darling" in a different language. I think she said she had been doing this language line for about seven years. In total, 30 languages were represented. 

So, baby shower coming up? For a smart, cute gift: 228 Columbus Avenue. (No, I have not been compensated for this blog entry.)

Onesies in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese...

...And in Other Languages, Too, for All Your Baby-Clothes Needs!

Rosetta Stone, Danger! See That Girl's Really Big Piece of Cake on Right? That Made Me Eat a Whole Pint of Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream.

In recent days I have been doing a ton of Rosetta Stone, in combination with writing drills in my Easy Kana Workbook. (I get a kick out of these hopelessly optimistic book titles.)

Rosetta Stone is growing on me. I am a little perplexed by how much. Honestly, I didn’t love it before. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. But I am really enjoying it a lot at the moment.

One reason is that it is very helpful for learning to write in unfamiliar alphabets--and read, too. I find it less helpful for speaking, but even that is going better than speaking did with, say, Rosetta Stone Hindi. 

Part of it is that I am getting used to the Rosetta Stone system. It was not always intuitive to me. I understand it better now and am less often frustrated.

Look-Alike Japanese Symbols Representing Totally Unalike Sounds

Back to writing: it is interesting, when you don’t know a foreign alphabet or writing system, how hard it is to tell the difference between similar-looking symbols. The symbols for so and n, respectively, may be conspicuously different to Japanese readers, but they sure aren't conspicuously different to me. I find it very hard to tell them apart. Although I can see that there are subtle differences, they both basically look like cheerful Cyclopes to me.

While loitering at a café this afternoon with one of my books, I had a breakthrough: I wrote some words in Japanese!

It was super-exciting to me, but I wouldn't want to overstate the accomplishment. Here’s what it entailed:

1. I looked at some Japanese words in romaji (i.e., words rendered in the Roman alphabet).
2. I did not actually know what the romaji words meant. The book I was using said don’t worry about that for now. So I didn't.
3. I rendered at least some of the words into kana (sample below) without having to look anything up and without peeking at the answers.

One of the First Words I Wrote in Japanese

I found this to be unbelievable fun. In all seriousness, this is one of the most exciting types of experiences in this entire project. It is like unveiling a secret. Cracking code. Solving a mystery. 

I could cut some of the time I spend on writing practice with these languages and spend more time on my oral skills. Oral skills are the ones, after all, that actually impress people—no one tests your writing skills during casual conversations—but I really, really care about the writing piece, too, and would be very unhappy not to learn something of that.

Rosetta Stone Pronunciation Lesson

I am enjoying Japanese more now that I am not quite as clueless. Rosetta Stone has been a lot of fun. Pimsleur remains difficult, as it tends to be for languages that are wholly unfamiliar, so I sometimes have to gear up for those lessons, but whenever I successfully complete one, I always feel I have advanced my skills in a meaningful way. I am also enjoying all my Japanese books.

Especially with non-Western languages, the multimedia approach is really beneficial for me, I find. By that I mean a combination of oral Pimsleur lessons, Rosetta Stone (which is both audio and visual), and books, where I get more in-depth explanations of grammar than I do with either Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone. Without having different instructional sources, I get frustrated easily and often.

As an example of why: today I did a pronunciation unit in Rosetta Stone (screen shot above) in which katakana symbols were shown and I had to pronounce the corresponding syllables correctly. I believe this was the first time I had been asked to read and pronounce katakana, the Japanese syllabary used primarily for words of foreign origin. Up until now, the Rosetta Stone pronunciation and writing lessons have focused entirely on hiragana.

The thing is, the two syllabaries represent the same set of sounds, just with different symbols. So there are--for example--two different symbols in Japanese for the syllable yo, one in hiragana and one in katakana.

Two Ways to Write the Same Sound (Yo) in Japanese

As I made my way through this Rosetta Stone pronunciation lesson, if I hadn’t already learned elsewhere that there are two competing systems in Japanese, I would have had no idea why I was suddenly seeing totally new symbols for sounds I had already learned to associate with other symbols. A little explanation would have gone a long way; fortunately, I didn’t need it this time.

From my point of view, this lack of occasional English-language explanation is a weakness of Rosetta Stone, but I have come to the conclusion that one self-teaching tool cannot reasonably be all things to all people. People who learn on their own, I have decided, have to be aggressive about seeking out different sources of information or they will lose their language-learning minds.

The advantage of a class is that you can always ask your instructor questions. When you are studying on your own, you don’t have that option, but if you have different materials and tools around you, it is kind of like being surrounded by a small population of not terribly responsive instructors. Maybe three of them will ignore your burning question, but then the fourth will answer it, and you will get satisfaction and be able to move on.

Post-Blizzard Piles of Snow and Trucks

This Is a Kuruma (Japanese for Car)

Griping aside, though, and onto another subject: one of the things I find so amazing about language learning is that things repeatedly seem impossible, and then they aren’t. Even with the experience of multiple languages behind me, I basically couldn’t have imagined a month ago that I would be understanding by now what I am understanding and reading of Japanese.

It ain’t much, don’t get me wrong, but more symbols are starting to look familiar, and more sounds are starting to be understandable. I love feeling a language mystery become slowly less mysterious.

A New York language-learning experience: tonight when I went to fetch my Rosetta Stone headset, the little black foam piece from the microphone fell off without my noticing and began rolling around the floor. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and freaked out because I thought it was a roach.

Fortunately, we don’t have an issue with those in our current apartment, but I’ve been in this city—U.S. capital of languages and roaches—long enough that a wiggly piece of Rosetta Stone foam looks more like a bug than a microphone part. 

While practicing the Japanese syllabaries at Café Margot, I met a Japanese man who is here on a short-term rotation with his employer, a large financial firm. I am finding that I suddenly cross paths with Japanese people all the time. Meaning I must have been crossing paths with them all the time before, too, but just didn’t recognize what language they were speaking.

Some of the Japanese hiragana and katakana symbols are really very cute. If they were familiar to me, they might actually look like syllables. Since they are not familiar to me, they often look like little pictures, kind of in the way I perceive faces of animals and people in the random patterns of our bathroom tile.

For example, the hiragana symbol for re makes me think of an elephant. There is another hiragana symbol, for me, that resembles a bunny. 

Hiragana Re, an Elephant Trunk

Hiragana Me, a Bunny

The hiragana symbol for fu looks to me like a small explosion. And the katakana symbol for tsu is a happy face peering mischievously out from the words in which it appears.

Hiragana Fu, Exploding Symbol

Katakana Tsu, Smiling

Snow started falling harder during the afternoon. I studied.

One thing I learned is that in Japan, requesting a hanbaagaa will get you a hamburger with a bun, but say hanbaagu by mistake and your order will show up bunless. So don’t mess up that final vowel if you are inflexible on questions of hamburger design.

The Blizzard of 2010, Underway

Snow Piles Growing

Japanese Books Work Better With Coffee

Today in my Kana de Manga book by Glenn Kardy, I read, “Children in Japan learn to read and write hiragana and katakana (collectively known as kana) long before they are introduced to Chinese characters, or kanji.” As I proceed, it has become clear to me that of course I am not going to bother with kanji for this project. Learning thousands of Chinese symbols is not exactly a realistic goal at the moment.

It is, however, realistic to think I could at least try to learn all the hiragana and katakana. What’s another 92+ symbols to shovel into my brain?!

Seriously, though, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this project is studying new writing systems. It is calming, like art therapy, or like I would imagine art therapy would be had I ever done it, or seen it, or had anything whatsoever to do with it.

The abovementioned book relies on manga cartoon images (whatever those are; I am not up on my cartoon images) to help teach the language. I don’t really get what manga is, but this is a very cute book with amusingly smart-alecky text, and I have been finding it quite helpful.

For one thing, the book explains a couple of issues that have been confusing to me. I read in it that “the l sound…is almost nonexistent in Japanese, with a Japanese approximation falling somewhere between a d and an r to English-trained ears, and usually romanized with an r.”

What a relief. I have found that so bewildering in my Pimsleur lessons. A word will sound one way in one lesson and then another way in the next. To my ear d and r and l are radically different, so hearing those sounds used almost interchangeably is kind of bizarre.

From My Rosetta Stone Lessons: Why No Spaces Between Japanese Words?

In addition, the manga book has informed me, “All Japanese words end either in a vowel, or a consonant that can sound like either an m or an n, depending on the word....There are no other consonant endings in Japanese.” This is totally unlike English, where words end in all kinds of crazy ways.

A question, so far unresolved: why are there no spaces between Japanese words? Everything runs together.

I thought I would get an answer to this from one of my sources, but so far, nothing. There was a time, many centuries ago, when Latin had no spaces between words either, but I didn't realize--I guess I should have--that this was a feature of some modern languages, too.

This Workbook...

...Reminds Me of First Grade and Tracing Paper

As I mentioned previously, the Japanese writing system consists of three different types of symbols:

• hiragana, a syllabary for words of Japanese origin
• katakana, a syllabary for words of foreign origin
• kanji, symbols borrowed from Chinese

Each of the two syllabaries has 46 characters, plus various permutations, meaning over 100 symbols between them to get to know—but the kanji are what could do a lowly language learner in. I have read that an educated Japanese person would know upwards of 2,000 kanji, and that number may be low (I am having a hard time getting consistent information on this point). 

All things considered, there is little hope for me to advance my writing skills significantly in the three months I plan to spend on this language.

Nonetheless, I am going to do my best in the time I have. This afternoon I did some studying in one of my new writing books, Easy Kana Workbook by Rita L. Lampkin and Osamu Hoshino. So far I love this one.

As I am feeling vulnerable about the challenges of Japanese writing, I was interested to read in it the following:

Over the last century several systems of romanization have been developed to represent the Japanese sound system. There have even been attempts at a permanent substitution of romaji for the much more difficult kanji system, although there has never been enough popular support to bring the idea to reality. One of the major problems in making such a substitution is the fact that the Japanese sound system is extremely limited, making homonyms—words that sound alike but have different meanings—the rule, rather than the exception. Since kanji characters illustrate the meaning of the words they represent, they help to clarify what is being written.

Still many Japanese conversation texts use one or another of the various romaji systems, since learning Japanese as a second language by way of kana and kanji exclusively is a slow, difficult process.

Pictured above right are my remedial early writing efforts. It really is like being back in first grade!