Pattern Slurping

One of my favorite aspects of learning languages is learning their history. I'm a history and anthropology nerd, I was a couple classes away from my anthro minor in college and if the history department had had anyone focusing on areas that I was actually interested in I would have easily attempted a double-major. (This would have gotten tricky. English and history both qualify under the 'humanities' section at my alma mater, and we were sledgehammered into taking a wide breadth of social sciences and hard sciences by the credit requirements. But I would have done it, dammit.) So it was an absolute revelation in my ability to learn new languages when one of my English profs told me about the Great Vowel Shift. The wiki article on it's not bad, though frankly the academic debates of it don't much matter for the purposes of this post.

What does matter is that I learned consciously in my early 20s something that I'd known subconsciously, through years of French as well as training as a singer. English had a vowel shift over the course of some several centuries, and that vowel shift only got more pronounced (pun semi-intended) as American English and British English drifted apart. By contrast, the Romance languages retained quite a lot of the a = ah, e = ay, i = ee, o = oh, and u = oo sounds. Not always with perfect consistency, but it gave me a hell of a template to map new Romance languages onto. I like templates, so long as I know they're only templates!

...this plus learning French first is, however, probably why my Spanish sounds Italian-accented. Oops. At least my consonants are, through deliberate practice, not European. Latin American Spanish is far, far more useful, practical, and frankly? A lot easier than the nuances of Iberian Spanish. Just like whenever I get around to Portuguese I plan to learn Brazilian as opposed to Continental.

On the downside, this means I had to toss out the template when I got around to German, and I have no template whatsoever when it comes to non-Indo-European languages. These languages, I have to form my own templates as I go. And I suppose I should explain; I don't mean a literal template either on my hard drive or in my gdocs or anything else, I mean the mental mapping I do in order to organize my brain. I tend to think in metaphor a lot, and it shows in the language choices I make as well as the ways in which I process learning new skills.

(We don't talk about the metaphorical workshop wherein I store my musical knowledge. That way lies madness, or at best confusion.)

Humans are a pattern-seeking species as a whole, so it's not surprising that this lives at the top of my toolkit. If you speak multiple languages, what patterns and templates do you use to keep your communication skills fresh?

Being an introduction of sorts

I suppose the first and most sensible place to begin is an introduction and some explanation of how I got to this point. What a quaint and shocking notion, etc. Some of you reading this will likely know me from my work over on Unspooling Fiction; others of you may know me more professionally or not at all. Regardless, I needed a place to drop all my linguistics and editing geek babbling, and since that's nominally what I do for a living (when I have the clients), this blog was born.

At the moment, I speak about three and a half languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. I learned bits and pieces of Spanish in some summer program when I was very small, and retained a few odds and ends until I came back to study it independently as an adult. (This made for a great deal of swearing when I discovered the alphabet had changed meantime. Give me back ch and rr! Hmph.) French I picked up from the end of middle school straight through high school, and was one of only two students in my class to complete French 5. I think I was the only one to try taking the AP exam, for all the good that did me since I lacked motivation as well as opportunity for lots of different conversational partners with varying accents. My primary teacher had a strong Parisian accent, somewhat distilled from years of dealing with high school students, and I had maybe a semester of time around a Quebecoise student teacher. Since that time I've gotten better about seeking out a variety of French media, but it's still not easy.

German I've been working on for about a year now, and it's both easier and more difficult than the Romance languages, depending on what aspect of them I'm dealing with. The list of languages to learn is as long as my arm and ever-growing, but imminent projects include Arabic, Russian, the rest of the Romance languages (though probably only a drive-by attempt at Romanian), Japanese, and Mandarin. Assuming I can find good classes on some of those, of course, since I may be stubborn and driven, but I'm not going to set myself up to fail at learning a language by not finding a native speaker (ideally) to learn from.

Things in my toolkit include Memrise, for vocab and alphabets; Project Gutenberg for various texts in their original language (Dumas père and fils are both on my to-read list); and an assortment of hard-copy textbooks, dictionaries, and verb dictionaries. On top of that, I have the kind of ridiculous English vocabulary that stems from a lifelong liberal arts education and a brain that is pattern-seeking in the extreme. This often results in hilarity as I either try to jam things in patterns that don't work, find a pattern that makes sense to my brain that nobody else understands, or look at a word and recognize its Latin roots and the ending being used and never need to look it up again.

I never said it wasn't a usefully skewed brain.

Since I get reminded that I'm skewed in this direction on a regular basis, though, I figure other people might be amused to watch the process of learning a new language (or three) and the ultimate results. Plus, I get a way to organize my thoughts on any given aspect and maybe have some no-shit-Sherlock moments. I like those moments.

I also edit. I edit a lot. Sometimes I have this urge to talk about common mistakes people make, sometimes I feel like banging the drum about the ways the English language is changing as a result of the internet (and whether or not I approve of all those ways it's going to keep changing), and sometimes I just need to fling up my hands and go WRITERS HOW DO THEY WORK.
I'm told the answer is to give them chocolate, but I have my doubts.