Nag, nag, nag!

When my daughter was first taking music lessons (piano) her first teacher wisely told me that she had never seen a student progress well without a parent who kept on them. Since I vacillate between being a drill sergeant and a pushover, I never quite got my nagging program in gear. As might be expected, piano progress was so-so.

However, when she began harp lessons, I was convinced that I might as well throw $55 out the window, and my nag switch opened full throttle. Besides the fact that harp turned out to be “her” instrument (see my post on harps), she readily admits that without the...er...motivation I supplied she never would have made the progress she has.

It strikes me that as teachers and learners, we really should just admit something to ourselves and our students: some things just aren’t fun to learn. Fields that require memorization or significant practice to master are going to have a huge quantity of things you have to beat yourself into doing: the foundations of music, math and foreign languages are, let’s say it, dull and repetitious. No amount of cute computer animation or music enhanced audio flashcards, or any of the other tricks we try really make a difference. Expecting a child to have the discipline needed is unrealistic. Someone else, someone who can visualize the long term benefits, needs to supply the superego.

As I used to pound into my daughter, memorizing the 2500 or 3000 words needed to read a French newspaper is no fun, but being able to pick up a French language fashion magazine or make yourself understood while travelling is a lot of fun indeed. Getting to the fun part, at least in some fields, requires a significant amount of grinding away. For me, and for her, the study of literature or history has been intrinsically pleasurable, because it exercises the brain, but requires no particular skill building exercises once you’ve learned to read. But not so with math, languages, music and advanced art: it’s practice, review and memorize for a long time before you can think big thoughts or work with anything interesting.

“Child-led learning” sounds great and is certainly a popular concept in both traditional and homeschool settings. I wish I believed in it. I wish my child had known what she wanted to do and pursued it wholeheartedly at an early age. I wish I could fly. While I recognize that there are kids like that somewhere on the planet, I think it’s a disservice to expect all of them to be that way, or to wait until they are. How could a child discover a passion for Javanese gamelan (or harp) if she was never exposed to that possibility? So, until I’m confident that she can drive herself, I still direct the tour.

Portuguese? Sim! Easy? Não!

If you want to learn French or German, Italian or Japanese, you’ll have an exhausting array of choices. (I put learning Spanish, at least in the U.S., in a category of its own. It’s so prevalent it’s hard to avoid picking up at least a little.) You can choose among immersion style conversation (Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone), intuitive computer game style workouts (Auralog), and shelves and shelves of workbooks, listen in your car, and book/cd combinations. But venture off the path beaten in the aisles of your local Megabooks or library, and you will truly be in another world—following a narrow path with little signage.

I’m on a quest to learn Portuguese, and not the Brazilian kind. I have an idea for a novel set in medieval Portugal and I know from long-ago travel in Portugal that finding translated resource material, even the glossy coffee table books sold at cathedrals, is a quest not for the faint-hearted. All of my favorite language programs are either produced in Brazilian Portuguese or not at all. Think you can find everything you could possibly want by googling it? Take a spin with European or Continental Portuguese. I did run through the 10 lessons of Continental Pimsleur in ten days, and now I can introduce myself, but I don’t think that’s going to be very relevant to reading scholarly works on the 14th century. I’m working through the only other program I’ve so far been able to find, Portuguese in 3 Months (Hugo), but it’s not going to give me anywhere near enough expertise.

Among other ideas I’ve explored are finding a group on Meetup.org (only a Brazilian one in my area); local university courses (all in the area assume that you already speak Spanish), and Live Mocha (not bad, but I need to move faster with heavier grammar). Apparently there’s no market for teaching Portuguese.

It saddens me that learning can be so market driven. Portugal has no strategic political importance like Arabic or Chinese; no cool factor like Japanese (anyone remember when THAT was considered a strategic language); no perceived daily utility like Spanish, and no place in glamorous travel or graduate studies, like French, Italian or German. Still, isn’t it worth learning something for the joy of it, to pursue an interest not shared by everyone, to travel in another culture through the window of their language?

The positive effect of this quest is that I am ever more determined to speak it, and I’m filled with daydreaming about how surprised natives will be if I actually manage to communicate when there. It’s really a beautiful language, filled with soft and wispy sounds, like the beautiful and heartbreaking sounds of the national music of fado. I just with it wasn’t going to be such a solitary pleasure.

Bag the Sudoku

I will never understand how people can waste their time doing Sudoku or the myriad of other puzzle books I saw displayed at several airports last weekend. Maybe I’ll make an exception for crosswords, as you actually might learn something and build your vocabulary. But so often these are touted as ways to keep your brain alive, stave off the effects of aging, and sharpen your reactions, blah, blah, blah. So, I make a modest proposal: let’s all learn at least one other language!

Americans are simply woeful about this. There are plenty of reasons why: Europeans have access to all sorts of media in other languages, speakers of other languages who wish to do business in our world use English as the lingua franca (a term that should give ample warning in itself of how languages can diminish in importance), and Americans are pretty much isolated from daily opportunity to use other languages. But of course, all these excuses fall apart if we ask one simple question: why aren’t most of us English speakers at least conversant in Spanish? Although Spanish is ubiquitous in nearly every major city of the U.S., the knowledge of it by non-native speakers certainly is far from routine.

So, this is a pitch for considering learning a language—really learning, reading newspapers, novels, listening to newscasts from other parts of the world, with their often very different take on world events and policies. Not only will it keep your brain alive, but it will give you increased social opportunities to interact with people outside your own small community. And maybe, just maybe, it can make a small strike for world peace. I’ve never met anyone who could thoroughly study a language, and the cultures it represents, and still maintain prejudice or loathing for the people who speak it. The complexities of understanding bring respect.