I'd take the sentiment as "if you're going to quit, at least do it in style," or "do it with flair."

What 80% comprehension feels like

I know I should be on my hiatus but this is something I really need to share with you all; those who are intermediate can relate. Some guy called Marco Benevides visually demonstrated what it’s like to only understand 80% of a text

Here is 98% comprehension

You live and work in Tokyo. Tokyo is a big city. More than 13 million people live around you. You are never borgle, but you are always lonely. Every morning, you get up and take the train to work. Every night, you take the train again to go home. The train is always crowded. When people ask about your work, you tell them, “I move papers around.” It’s a joke, but it’s also true. You don’t like your work. Tonight you are returning home. It’s late at night. No one is shnooling. Sometimes you don’t see a shnool all day. You are tired. You are so tired…

bold = uncomprehended 2%

Here is 95% comprehension

In the morning, you start again. You shower, get dressed, and walk pocklent. You move slowly, half- awake. Then, suddenly, you stop. Something is different. The streets are fossit. Really fossit. There are no people. No cars. Nothing. “Where is dowargle?” you ask yourself. Suddenly, there is a loud quapen—a police car. It speeds by and almost hits you. It crashes into a store across the street! Then, another police car farfoofles. The police officer sees you. “Off the street!” he shouts. “Go home, lock your door!” “What? Why?” you shout back. But it’s too late. He is gone.

bold = uncomprehended 5%

Here is 80% comprehension

“Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…

And this really sums up how ***** annoying it can be to be an intermediate speaker. To be able to get the basic of gist of what’s happening, but never be able to get any kind of finer detail. I don’t think I’ve seen such a good illustration of intermediacy in a long time.

Source: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like

This Polish commercial is the purest thing I ever seen in my entire life.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

My eyes are leaking!!!!! I blame @peekaboochelsie! 💙💙

Lucian's speech progress

Oh my goodness. Lucian’s speech is FINALLY picking up speed!!! Until this week he’s been making attempts to copy individual words with the occasional high frequency two-word phrase, e.g. “Bye Li, hi Papa.” He’s 2y8mo.

But this week, he finally said “up.” That word-final /p/ has been a long time coming. “Help” has finally become “hep” instead of “wuak” (which was a morph from the earlier “wah”).

He has started saying “thank you.” It comes out as “atch you.” It began when I would thank Lionel profusely on Lucian’s behalf when Lionel would give Lucian the toy in his hand or do a trade. Two days ago, he started saying it after I would thank him spontaneously (e.g., for bringing me something or putting something in the garbage). And now he says it during every appropriate exchange, regardless of whether he’s the one who should be doing the thanking. Sometimes he thanks himself, or says thank you after Lionel did something for me.

“Video” is no longer “zhee-zhee” (/zh/ as in the s in “measure”). It’s “zhee-jee-oh.”

Today, he spontaneously says “yo” and “mio” (I/mine) while pointing to himself. He’s been using “me” (pronounced “nee”) for awhile appropriately.

The other day he was “counting” in a book, saying “vahn… vahn… vahn…” (one… one… one…). Another time, I said he needed to listen to my directions or I would get upset. He then said “vahn… doo…” which is copying me when I count to three as his warning. He also counts “uno, dohf” in Spanish. I should also note that he grasps the concepts of one and two, it’s not just mimicry. When he has two toys, slices of mandarin, etc, he exclaims “dos/two!” (interchangeable) and holds up two fingers.

Something cool for the bilingual piece, if I ask him to say “good” he says “ben” (bien). I suspected this for awhile but today when I served him some sweet potato I asked, “Is that good or is it too much?” And he said “Ben.”

For the longest time, he hasn’t said any version of his name. He gets embarrassed and refuses to try usually. The first time he did spontaneously, he called out “Nahn!” (Lu-ciAHN) as he went down the stairs, wanting me to follow (as though saying what I would say as I called after him). He’s using it with more frequency now.

I realized he tried to say “another one” this morning, but can’t remember what the pronunciation was like.

Most exciting for me is his use of two word phrases. They’ve cropped up in the last 48 hours. Yesterday he said “nee wake” for “me awake” after his nap. After lunch today, he said “Li done,” then “Na-nahn all done” (Lucian all done). I don’t count that as a three-word because “all done” tends to be a “chunk” for kids, learned as one word, but the two-syllable name was huge. And all of it together is just delightful.

The funniest bit: he was playing with trains this morning and started using the engine to push a block. Then began repeating, “no pow,” which is… snow plow! During our walk later, when he got to a pile of leaves with his push toy, he kept repeating “no pow, no pow.” He has a snowplow Hot Wheels whose function I explained in detail once, so I know where the concept came from, but having him extend it spontaneously and imaginatively to other activities is a FANTASTIC sign of development.

þ!

A feature of English which I think is stupid,

If we’re carrying on with this game,

Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,

With two letters that meant the same.

The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,

Perfect in every respect,

Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,

The one thing it didn’t expect;

One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,

And then, thanks to the printing press,

Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,

Which is pointless, I must confess.

Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,

Þreatened as the language evolved,

Þankful for þose who knew of old English,

A topic where it was involved.

It only survived in Modern Icelandic,

In English it’s treated with scorn,

And as barely anyone knows it exists,

Please try to remember the thorn.

ð!

Saving the thorn from obscurity is surely a laudable aim but if this letter deserves our praise the eth should receive the same.

The scribes of the Anglo-Saxons interchanged the eth and thorn until the first one fell from use and the second was left forlorn,

But for the modern Icelander their roles are more defined and could improve our English texts if we were so inclined.

The thorn (Þ, þ) denotes a voiceless dental fricative as in the English ‘think’ or ‘thresh’ but not the ‘th’ in ‘hither,’ whereas the eth (Ð, ð) is a voiced dental fricative perfect for ‘this’ and ‘that’ and most especially for ‘thither.’

So I propose ðey boþ be used  in the Icelandic manner; ðen students won’t be loaþ to learn our spelling and our grammar.

To þink we’ve never fixed ðis mess is really quite astounding. One letter cluster for two sounds? Ðat’s damnably confounding!

Linguistics, my old friend.

An interesting thread about the discursive function of “waslike”.

Technically speaking, I wouldn’t say that this construction is really a compound verb “waslike”, because it still conjugates like you’d normally conjugate the verb “to be”. (I’m like, you’re like, s/he’s like; I was like, you were like, s/he was like - not I waslike, you waslike, s/he waslikes.)

The linguistic term for it is quotative “like” and there have been several academic papers about it, including this early one from 1990 and this extensive survey of functions of “like” by Alexandra D’Arcy.

A classic table of accidental lexical gaps in English, from Language Log.

Lucian just said his FIRST EVER two-word phrase! He said “Buh-bye Li!” I got so excited, I tried to get him to say Bye Papa and Bye Mama too, and he DID IT! This is a typical milestone for an 18mo, which would have been last October…. so we’re a year late, but better late than never!

Too real. (via Merman_Melville)

//russian cursive

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.