The Boy has had a hard time motivating to learn English. His opinion is that we just need to move to New York, and he'll just magically pick it up. I don't think he's totally wrong about that, given his sharp mind, his general fearlessness and his genuine interest in talking with people, no matter what language barriers may be present. However, I don't think having the basics down could really in any way hinder that process. He just doesn't seem to want to work on it.
But still, once every four or five months, he'll become extremely motivated and announce semi-barbarically: "Ok. In this house, we speak only English. No French in my house. No French!"
This is always funny to me because:
1. This is not his house and
2. I'll answer back by saying something really average like, "Ok, that's totally fine with me. I was just wondering, though, did you manage to pay the phone bill we got last week?" in English, and he'll respond with a simple, "Shit."
That's how our attempts have gone over the years. I've also put together lesson plans for him, sat down with him with books, tapes, whatever... but really, we can't help it. I'm not his teacher, and we're used to speaking in French together. Old habits die hard.
Plus, I think it's frustrating for him. He has a really hard time with verbs, mainly with problems of when to use which tenses and forgetting proper endings, so he often says things like, "I going." or "I'm say you" (for, "I'm telling you") and so on.
Which is why, yesterday, our breakthrough was so extraordinary. He was listening to yet another African singer (Koffi Olimode), and he insisted on yet again going through the 8-minute-long song in Lingala, translating line by line so that I could appreciate the beauty of Koffi's words (I think some of that beauty must be getting lost in translation). I noticed some arbitrary pattern in the verbs, and, fascinated, I started asking him questions about Lingala. After a lot of talking and translating and laughing and comparing, we were surprised to see how many verb structure similarities there are between his language and mine.
Note: to say "his language" is a little deceptive, mainly because he has four mother tongues. There are two national languages in the Congo (French and Lingala) and then he speaks two regional languages as well, Lari and Kitouba. And he seems like he's most comfortable in Lari (his mother's native tongue, and the language that all of his childhood friends in Paris speak with him) and French, but he argues that Lingala is the most worthwhile. It's spoken in both Congos (the DRC and Congo-Brazzaville) and apparently even spreads to certain parts of Angola.
So, given the newly-discovered resemblance between our two languages, and my general obsession for all things language-oriented, we ended up sitting down and putting our heads together for a few hours to figure out the overall structure of verb tenses. That's when you know you've got somebody really special: when you spend three or four hours talking verbs. It was an enlightening experience for him, as he has never sat down and thought much about the language; he's just simply spoken it all his life. Much like most Americans do with English.
It was a helluva lot of fun. And, via his exploration and my discovery of the language, we both learned something new. He managed to clarify some of the fuzzier parts of English verbs (like the difference between "I eat." and "I am eating" - something that trips up anyone that tries to compare English to French), as well as the purpose of certain endings ("ing" and so forth). I, on the other hand, now know how to say, in Lingala, the following:
- I sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm about to go to sleep. I am sleeping. I was sleeping. I slept (variations on all of these sentences for he/she, it, you, we, and they)
- The above sentences with I eat. I leave. I go. I speak. I can. I want. I shit.
Notice, of course, that I have no understanding of any nouns, and that I have instead just gone straight to the verbs. The nouns'll come. I'm excited. I don't think I'll be fluent or anything, but it's a REALLY easy language to learn. Very straightforward with unbelieveably simple phonetics. Just the way I like 'em.
Mainly, though, I think it's just fun for the two of us to discover the others' language via his/her own. It's really groovy. And makes for Good Quality Together Time, too.
Of course, The Boy got really excited at the idea of teaching me as well, and we've decided that he'll teach me Lingala and I'll teach him more English, and we'll see where it takes us. He really hates learning foreign languages, but I think that teaching me about his language is a whole different ball game. And also, he had never learned English via Lingala, he had always learned it while trying to make the not-quite-right connections between French and English. We've both agreed that he should drop that technique, and instead use either Lingala or Lari (which apparently follows the same verb structure, roughly) to get a better grasp on English. In The Boy's case, he has the words, he just doesn't know how to use them. Hopefully Lingala will help him get them organized in his head. And hopefully I'll get to learn a lot, too, in the process.
We're both very excited about it. Me especially, because I can never seem to get him as interested or fascinated by languages as I am. I can blab on and on about morphemes and phonemes or Prodrop vs nonprodrop languages, and I inwardly know that he doesn't give two shits. But with Lingala, he's actually interested and wants me to learn, and enjoys figuring out the "code" behind a language he has spoken his entire life.
The proof: we just bought a Lingala grammar guide.
Along the same lines, in my linguistics class, we're learning how to analyze languages structurally. That is, if given a page of quotes from one language, and translated into French, are we able to come up with a few grammatical certainties about the language? For example, how does one know if a word is in its plural form or not? How many different plural forms are there? What are some different verb endings? Can you identify any prepositions?
This sounds easy but it isn't, necessarily. In our latest example, we were given these two sentences and had to figure some things out:
Ibibiindi byiiza byaa Peetero biri he?
(Where are Peter's pretty vases?)
and
Ikibiidndi kinini cyaa Peetero kiri hariiya?
(Peter's big vase is over there."
Do you see how fun that can be? It's like a huge logic puzzle. I've got a whole bunch of 'em. I get really excited for this class every week because it's just so interesting to me. But you know what? It's even more fun to do it with a live example at home.
I'm a nerd. But maybe I'll just one day be a quintilingual nerd, and then you'll all be jealous.
And on that note, I'm already thinking ahead for my master's thesis (not due for another year and a half, mind you). Why not work on Lingala? I've seen how much literature there is about it out there. Judging by the looks of amazon.com, there ain't much.
Na kei!
You're a nerd! I'm jealous!
I know the quintilingual wish myself... but I wisely chose Korean as language #3 (I was once passably functional in language #2). You know, Korean grammar's not so bad... not for the first while anyway... but the vocabulary is infuriating, even if you can catch and follow some roots from Chinese. Pronunciation's relatively easy, though.
We once did something like that in a linguistics class I took. We hired a native Urdu speaker to just tell us how to say things.
"How would you say 'My book is over there'?"
"How would you say 'There is a book on the table'?"
"How would you say 'The book is on the table'?"
"How would you say 'Put the book on the table'?"
"How would you say.,.."
on and on and on. And from it we were trying to derive the syntactic rules (that may or may not jibe with the grammar rules). It was AWESOME.
Kari - Man, we're a nerdy family. Not that I didn't know that already. But I can just hear you saying, "It was AWESOME" with the same inflection I would use. And we're using that tone to talk about analyzing a foreign language's syntax. Most people reserve it for, I don't know, a really killer goal in a soccer game or something.
Gord- what was language #2?
So what DO other families say is AWESOME?
I dunno, but I bet it's not finally solving the Sunday NYTimes crossword (without peeking) or working on your geometry problem all day.
Sports, maybe? God, that seems so boring, doesn't it?
i, myself, call english my 5th language. i'm currently learning my 7th alphabet, sanskrit. languages are an amazing and most functional practice, the more you can learn the better you can communicate with those around you and with your own soul.
www.rosettaproject.org
check it out