jeudi 28 février 2013

One global language. Not yeeeet please!!!

Now technology and the tools we can have at our finger-tips make it even easier to learn a new language or "avoid to learn" for the least adventurous and curious of us... "Google translation" is still annoyingly inaccurate but that will change. People will then have the choice to learn more languages and vocabulary or on the contrary to learn less or not at all. I'm trying here to address the people willing to learn "more". My interest of the other group is as tremendous as their interest for foreign languages and culture, not very indeed. Some days in any case translation and language-learning will disappear since there won't be anything else than "one global language" that, i'm almost 100% sure, won't be english. But for a while still we'll use perfectly efficient Artificially Intelligent translators which will highly simplify global communication and reduce even more people's interest in learning any kind of languages other than the one which will still have an undoubted supremacy for at least another quarter of century and at most another half. Yes, it's not (at all, haha) because I am French but I think that english will be a dead language by long already in 2063, left alone all the other 5000 languages still spoken nowadays. This doesn't make any sense at all you probably think? and if it even happened to be right what would then be the point in bothering oneself to learn something doomed to die anyway as this seems the normal process of the development of intelligence on an intelligent planet? Well, my own interest are "curiosity" and a love for these different ways to communicate among thousands of different cultures since it is still time. When the whole world will be unified in one arithmetic and algorithmic language with an impressive number of words/datas/numeral/figure/pattern we'll be able to communicate more accurately, faster and better for sure but the price to pay is a loss of these cultures that won't be ours anymore. That will just belong to museums, virtual for the most. We can't change that or even fight it. We can always pretend it will never ever happen, that this is just insane science-fiction but it would just be some form of denial that won't change a thing anyway. What we do actually is simply enjoy them while they are still their and travel and speak foreign languages as much as we can because our children won't be able to have the same chance at some point!                                                                                                                 

Tonal or not to nal, that is the question...

Thai is a "tonal language" as most of south-east asian languages for that matter and about half of the world languages if I'm correct. This means that you'll have 5 different ways in Thai to pronounce the sound "Mai" for example. There is a middle tone, a low tone, a falling one, a high one and a rising one. The falling for example would sound like a complaint (as if you said: whyyyy… is that happening to meeee!!) and the rising tone sounds like a more proper question mark (why?). The Tones in Thai are not exactly easy but they are also far to be hard! Actually what makes Thai such an easy language beside its super-easy grammar (or lack of it) is its tonal form. Why? Because thanks to that most of highly used thai words are monosyllabic. Thus for each new word you'd have to learn there is only one sound and syllable instead of several ones as in Indonesian, for example, supposedly one of the easiest language out there (not tonal). Also The pronunciation is fairly simple and straightforward so as you try to say simple words most people will understand you and repeat them also in a comprehensive way what is much harder with vietnamese which is also a very easy language with, on the contrary, one of the hardest tones and pronunciation you could imagine!! After one month of daily study of the vietnamese language last january I could not get close to what I achieved within only 2 weeks and with much less effort in Thailand. Why? Because of 2 main reasons I suppose. Because my Vietnamese language method wasn't straightforward enough with its tedious 63 lessons and also because speaking to people was more challenging. Even when they could understand me and expected me to have a fairly good knowledge of the language I just couldn't understand much of what they answered back. Therefore I had very little practise and just spoke a couple of minutes a day hoping for a break-through in my understanding. I studied hard but hardly got any reward out of it. Obviously something was going quite wrong even though I thought at the time that everything was fine since I could definitely not expect to be able to communicate myself after one month, left alone 2 weeks. Well, as good I thought my method (Assimil, le vietnamien sans peine) was actually it wasn't. It could have been on the long run but most people have very little patience and if they don't get what they want quite instantly they won't stick around. A method has to be efficient right at the beginning or people won't use it! Now, of course, the tones and pronunciation made it harder too but my intuition tells me that with the right method even the hardest languages with the most incomprehensible/reproducible accents, sounds and tones can be pretty easily handled! It's all a question of organisation, on the paper/LCD screen and into the brain but we'll get back to that later...

Thai, the easiest language I ever started to learn

Now i have the feeling that I am starting a new journey. One of the purpose of this journey is to make people understand and accept (what's even harder) that not only any language can be learned but also that any language can be learned a lot faster and more efficiently that one could ever imagine, at least for every-day communication. Fluency takes a lot more effort and time (still much less than what you think) but being a fairly good beginner able to communicate easily with a Chinese (speaking and not writing) or Thai person isn't far-fetched at all and doesn't require years of studies, practise and training. Actually I am going to sound as door-to-door or supermarket salesman but it doesn't even require months buuuuut: simply weeks, awwww! Not more than a couple if you are determined enough!
     All you need is a high dose of motivation and a few hours a day of intense, magnetic and magic cerebral activity. I have begun to learn Thai a little more than two weeks ago. I will start the 9th lesson of my 10 lessons book today learning 1 lesson every 2 days. Actually it took me about 3 weeks to start learning the language and go from lesson 1 to 2 to 3 and so on and my relationship and way to be perceived with and by the locals have changed quite a bit even if everybody here speaks english since Koh Tao island hosts more "farang" at the time than Thai people. I spent 3 weeks in Thailand (plus twice 2 weeks the first 2 times I was here) just knowing "thank you" (koopkun Krap) and "hello" (Sawatdii Krap). Then, 2 weeks ago I surprised myself being strangely able to make short but full simple sentences right after my second lesson. As I daily go back on all the previous lessons listening and reading them one more time, even with my flawed memory I started to use the extremely simple "kun cheu arai?" (what's your name?) seen in the first lesson and at the same time use words and sentences from the second lesson as (to answer the question "where are you from") "Pom bpen kon Faranset" (I'am person France/French). I could also use demonstratives such as "this" (ni) and "that" (nan) and vital interrogative adverbs such as "Where" (ti-nai) and "how-much" (tao-rai). By lesson 3, I was communicating most of the time in english with the locals but kept trying to include a couple of sentences or if even only words here and there. All together I wouldn't speak more than 5 minutes a day in total as my vocabulary and proper and efficient knowledge of it was and is still pretty limited but nevertheless, it felt wonderful to express myself in this easy but drastically different language!

Two choices

Sadly more i listen some people speaking and less i want to listen to them. I have always had little interest in discussing about the anything too trivial as i am realising now. The difference is that I have come to a point where talking about "the weather" makes me absolutely annoyed and out of place, at least in languages I understand fluently as french, english or spanish. From there two choices unfold: Either looking for interesting and life improving (if not changing) conversations to share with fascinating people often depreciably called geeks or at best, nerds. The kind of people that you don't find at every street's corner even if by no means all geeks/nerds are fascinating I imagine. Another option would be to speak in a very basic manner to anyone with a brain and two legs (I don't actually need the legs) for the sole purpose of learning their language and getting to understand their weird and alien culture (for us). In this case you don't need noble price winners, scientists or even language teachers. A kind and curious soul willing to help is more than enough. At this stage any deep conversation or even slightly philosophical would be not only unthinkable but unwanted and counterproductive as impossible to understand. The only way to learn a language is obviously to start by the beginning and to use the "most spoken words" of this very language. a first set of around 1000 of this words are enough for simple "weather like" conversations. These are the "key" opening you the door of any language and culture. One can even do with as little as 500 words probably but they will have to keep asking the rest of the most common words along their trivial conversations and a word that you only hear and not read is harder to remember especially when you ignore how to write it. (in this case a smartphone can help). So learning about 1000 words is a very good starting point for simple daily converastions even if there will still be some blank sometimes. I will just finish by saying that one doesn't have to actually wait to know by heart 1000 or even 500 words before to start practising and speaking a few words of a language here and there. Actually a mere set of not more than a 100 words is enough to get started with ulta-simple conversations and i am not talking here about saying "yes, thank you and hello" since a conversation is obviously a set of sentences which usually include at least a subject, a verb and a complement...

Shame to be tired

 When I was around 13 my mother had to take me to the hospital all the way to Marseille to make some tests as it occurred to me, by some rare moments though, that everything around me was going much slower (or was it faster, I can't even say now). I remember my heart beating faster and my tech teacher speaking much faster (or slower) and everything around me changing its pace in a total weird way just as if time had gone totally mad. My mum got pissed off at me for making her coming all the way there after the doc couldn't find anything logical about it. As if it was my fault! He prescribed me some anti-anxiety meds that my sister sarcastically urged me to take every time I got mad at her after that and soon after I never got this spacio-temporal problem anymore...When i was 17 my skin got highly irritated after showers so I started to take baths more and more seldom. After timidly mentioning the issue to my parents as I didn't want to bother them with my problems they didn't seem to be concerned anyway so I had to live on with this problem until it went away by itself about one year or two later. I am not blaming them. They probably under-estimated the implications. When I was around 14 or 15 and already didn't deserve any favour from them i saw this advertisement about spending a schooling year abroad, in the states. I would have loved it so badly. Since I had become a teenager I had developed a passion for America as probably TV had contaminated my young vulnerable mind. I knew that it was a shame for me to mention it. That even asking them to send me there would have been a ridiculous and pointless option. I also knew that not going there and not going anywhere else (abroad) to study for the matter would have been the beginning of the end. I like (or dislike) to think that if a miracle had happened, a very simple one, my life might have been much different now. Learning english and discovering a new country might have motivated me to keep studying instead of quitting school soon after. But why did I really quit school? Maybe because I was tired to fall asleep during long hours of nonsense teaching but I wasn't just bored and was mostly already physically exhausted and hardly able to focus. But, at the time i didn't really know that this problem was just at its very beginning and was going to last until now. At the time i wouldn't have described me as "constantly-tired" even if now that I try to recall it it seemed to be already the case. And what would have been a huge shame in my teenage years keep being one now. The suspicion that most people would consider you lazy, weak and hypochondriac when trying to explain that you "feel tired all the time" and that you have no idea why. The fear that everybody would misinterpret your explanations as being the one of some looser fond of complaining instead of the one of some lost mind willing "to understand" and mostly "act on" or even "recover" from an expending gangrene. I have to take my 10 min nap and my headache will be gone after that. Then I will start talking about what I am here for. The science of communication. For an asocial freak as I am it seems a little paradoxical but most of my inabilities to verbally express myself even in my mother tongue also come from an unmatchable desire to talk about what really matters instead of what "really seems to matter"but that doesn't, at least not for me...

3 days from now

3 days from now and I will turn 32. My biologic mum was 31 when she passed away. She wasn't exactly sane all the way but still more lucid than another delusional person that keep fooling one third of humanity almost two millennium after his death at 33 years old. Most of people either a little curious or totally disinterested about my life could believe that I am either hiding a secret of self-acomplishment by being able to be and travel so freely apparently without any specific life goals or that my existence is an absolute failure. None of them would be exactly wrong or right. My life hasn't exactly been the success I envisaged but as long as I'll be able to breath I will refuse to assume it is an actual failure. Rending me and accepting what seems the truth would make it even more so and I have been auto-sabotaging me for far too long. I am a 32 years old child that has learned too little from his experiences. Your memories make up your experience that create your wisdom. My forgetful brain has become weaker these last decade and especially couple of years. Most of my imagination is gone but thanks god the little I have left is more than enough to spend several lifetimes developing the crazy ideas I keep coming up with. Also, my ability to think, concentrate and remember seem to be leaving me at an exponential pace and I have a little less hope for that. If I keep not doing anything about it I'll be a total vegetable by 40, if I am still alive, and pretty magically, without taking any drugs or anything of the kind. What is it that makes me so tired either I sleep 12 hours or 6? What is it that prevents me to focus properly no matter what i do? That forces me to drink various coffees and energy drinks a day that don't really help at all? That make me sleepy with a need to lie down for a few minutes every couple of hours or less? Is it because I over-think and blow my vital energy wastefully into the air? But then why is it getting worse now that I have actually stopped thinking and day-dreaming? Is it because of my nervousness and "non-biologically inherited anger" that kills me slowly? But then would it be enough to feel the way I do and why does the one I inherited this pathological anger problem from is still in good shape at almost twice my age? Is it something physical but then why the couple of doctors I have seen haven't found anything wrong with me even though I had a heart operation when I was two that has never seemed to affect my health since then anyway? Nobody knows, nobody cares. my parents didn't. Neither i do enough now...