New! Plan! Also noodling about learning languages

[wildeabandon]

I have a new plan, which is exciting and only slightly ridiculous! I'm not going to reapply to Cambridge next year - I'm going to apply to KU Leuven instead. And yes, I know I said a couple of posts ago that places like Edinburgh and Glasgow were Too Far, but it turns out that it's actually slightly quicker to get to Belgium, and there are other significant advantages.

The course looks really really good, and very much aligned with the areas I'm more interested in. It's clearly heavily subsidized even for international students, so would save me a mid five figure sum compared to the Cambridge degree. And I've been saying for ages that at some point I'd like to go and spend a few months living in France so as to be able make the shift from conversational to actual fluency, and whilst Leuven is Dutch-speaking, it's only a short hop on the train from Brussels, which is offically biligual, but in practice mostly Francophone.

I do seem to have found myself with a thoroughly unexpected special interest in languages over the last few months. I picked up Robert's old New Testament Greek textbook over Christmas, and although I'd done so on a couple of occasions previously, this time I didn't put it down, and have now worked my way through the textbook. I managed a (halting, clumbsy) translation of 1 John, and am now several chapters into his Gospel. And then a few days ago, since reaching the conclusion that applying to KUL was what I actually wanted to do rather than just an absurd fantasy, I started learning very basic Dutch as well. And of course when I actually start the degree (or possibly a bit before, if I can get my Greek a bit more solid first) I'm going to be learning Hebrew as well.

And omigod you guys, I'm having so much fun! I have always had a perception of myself as not very good at languages, but now I'm starting to wonder if some of that was just bad teaching, or at least teaching that didn't suit my way of thinking. I mean, not all of it - I'm not good at auditory processing, and that's always going to make the listening and speaking bits difficult, and it has taken me a very long time to get my French to the mid-high intermediate level I'm at now.

But I'm still slightly astonished by how much easier it seems now that I've already got a bunch of meta-skills for language learning under my belt. It does help, of course, that for the Greek I don't need to worry about the audio processing stuff. And that Dutch grammar is simpler than French, and /much/ simpler than Greek. But I think that a lot of it is just about having developed the flexibility of thinking so that even whilst I'm still having to mentally translate individual words into English and then to actual meaning, I don't feel the need to translate into English shaped sentences.

Comments

[ewt]

I think that a lot of it is just about having developed the flexibility of thinking so that even whilst I'm still having to mentally translate individual words into English and then to actual meaning, I don't feel the need to translate into English shaped sentences.

I think this definitely helps a lot. My French (once fairly fluent, albeit with a very strange accent as a result of having a mixture of Quebecois and Parisien teachers) is incredibly rusty, but when I do pick it up again it's very much not a word-for-word translation into English, but rather understanding what meaning I can and then translating to fill in the bits that are missing because of words I don't know. My Hebrew is even more rusty than my French (despite being more recent) but it helped a lot that I learned at least some of it from services and Torah readings rather than from a textbook; I think that gave me a better feel for the language than any textbook could have. I haven't (yet) attempted Greek.

With regard to Hebrew, you might enjoy Bob MacDonald's work "Seeing the Psalter" -- I am not at all convinced about his interpretation of Anne Chaik-Vantoura's musical theories, but I do value it for the interlinear translation into English.

[wildeabandon]

Mmm - my Greek is still very much working with individual words and then figuring out mechanically what that particular form means in that sentence, because so much more of the nuance of the meaning is contained in the grammar than what I'm used to, but I am now making a point of doing this "decoding" on the actual text rather than contrived examples. Although of course that does have the drawback that much of it is already familiar to me in English translation, and it's hard not to be influenced by that. I'm not quite at the level yet where I feel confident to try and tackle things like the Didache, and Hermas, and the early church fathers, with which I have considerably less familiarity.

[shermarama]

Flemish isn't quite standard Dutch :D You'd be understood speaking standard Dutch, but would sound like you're from somewhere formal and foreign. Assuming the course will be in English, you'd only need Flemish for day-to-day living, but that's where people will be speaking something that sounds like a really accented and vernacular version. (I'm not sure how the Belgian version of French compares on this scale, either.)

I think as British kids, we were taught language in ways that never expected us to use them - a missing skill was being able to babble to yourself and try things out with other people. If you've got over that part, you should be fine, innit, especially if you've got other languages to triangulate with.

(And Leuven is a lovely place! But Belgian bureaucracy is famously awful, such that it can take a terribly long time to get essential stuff sorted out. A Dutch colleague went and worked there for a year, and you're technically required to register where you're living with the council within two weeks of moving in, but the first appointment they could offer her for doing this was seven months away... She'd really only just got all the official things sorted before moving out again.)

[wildeabandon]

I suspect my accent is going to give me away as a foreigner no matter what, although I'm determined to get the hang of rrrrolling my rrrrs in the next 18 months. I'm currently using three different apps (Duolingo, Memrise, and Babbel) and of the three only Babbel has a Dutch course for French speakers, which I'm using a)because it means I get to practice my French at the same time, and b)because it makes it easier to just think in Dutch rather than mentally translating. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pronunciation there has more of the softer Flemish sounds, and once I get fluent enough to actually start listening to podcasts and watching videos and whatnot, I'll seek out Flemish accents as much as possible.

From what I can gather, whilst there are difference between Bruxelloise and Parisienne accents, they're not nearly as marked, and again, I will almost certainly sound more English than either ;)

The course is in English, and people tell me that I could probably get by without learning any Flemish, but I don't want to be one of those English people...

Thanks for the bureaucracy tip. I shall make a point of getting an early start on any admin that needs doing.

[shermarama]

It's not that you wouldn't sound Flemish so much as that some of the grammar and words are actually different, so you could be misunderstood because you've learnt the language of a different country. I don't know what resources there are out there about the differences, but it's not only accent.

(Wouldn't you also need a rolled r for French? Though the hardest thing I found in Dutch, which I think they do even more of in Flemish, is the throaty sound for 'sch' - for ages I could manage it at the start of a word but not in the middle :D )

[wildeabandon]

Googling brings up a few articles, but I suspect it's probably sensible to wait until I'm a bit beyond the "Dag! Ik heet Sebastian. Mijn favoriete kleur is paars." stage before trying to dig into the differences :)

The French r is in the back of the throat, rather than being rolled on the tongue, which is actually helpful for the 'sch's and 'g's, but not so much for the r.

[angelofthenorth]

That sounds really cool

[wildeabandon]

I know right :D :D

[liv]

Oh wow I love this plan! An awesome course in Belgium sounds like just the perfect solution. Gimme a shout if you need any help or advice with Hebrew?

[wildeabandon]

It is the best plan :D

I may very well ask to pick your brains about learning Hebrew when I get to it. I'm resisting the temptation to start now, because I think it would end up interfering with Greek acquisition if I try to get through the beginner phase of both at the same time, but with luck in a few months I'll get comfortable enough with the Greek that I can give it a go. (And also I'll have finished my A-levels and my spiritual direction course and stepped down as churchwarden, and quite possibly be taking a fairly long break from work over the summer, so will have loads of free time that I definitely won't have filled up three times over with whatever the latest thing is to catch my interest.)

[hairyears]

Good news!


Also, the Eurostar to Brussels is an amazingly useful thing!

Back in the day, we merry band of Akido students in Bethnal Green used the service - and the discounted connecting tickets - to descend en masse on courses and weekend seminars hosted by dojos in Amsterdam and Hilversum.

[atreic]

Yay! 😊

[highlyeccentric]

Re languages: it was my difficulties with a, starting german and b, progressing past B2 in French which REALLY highlighted my ADHD (and then, for diagnostic purposes, describing how I had Been So Good at langauges in HS / undergrad... very ADHD ways).

MORE languages is also very good for grammar - L3, for most people, will be easier than L2 (and in fact I remember reading, although stupidly didn't save the details, about studies proving that learning L3 THROUGH L2, eg, a mixed group of Europeans learning French, with explanations in English, is easier than learning L3 through L1) because your brain saves post-childhood languages on different bits of the hard drive to childhood ones. The studies divide sharply between "mother tongue" and "adult learner", for most purposes, but I think the L1:2:3 looked at langauges aquired in late childhood and early adulthood - i can't for the life of me remember if the study data was on English learners, or somewhere else - my brain is trying to suggest it might have been done in India or in eastern Europe (where Hindi or Russian would be the L2).

[wildeabandon]

Heh, good to know that there's academic backup for the approach that I'm taking :)

[khalinche]

Hurray for languages getting easier and more fun the more of them you learn! And what a great idea to go to Leuven. I wish you the very best with it.

[sfred]

That's very exciting - the plan and the languages.
I have a friend who lives in Leuven (I think!): say if you would like to be put in touch.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you! It might be a bit premature to put me in touch now, before I've even applied, let alone been accepted, but once I know that it's definitely going ahead I may well take you up on this.

[ludy]

Ooo exciting! That sounds (reads) like a really good new plan. And yay! for productive and useful language geeking

[emperor]

Cool :)

[kht]

This is a very exciting new plan!
Have you talked to pseudomonas (who recently started working for KUL)?