7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 94
Crucial habits, self-talk, work hours in Spain and Sweden, and the K'iche' language!
Hey language lovers
I hope you all had a lovely week!
Updates
Mine was a mixed bag.
It was probably my busiest week in 2022 so far. Because of this, it flew by in an instant without ever finding the time to actually get an active study session.
It wasn’t all bad though, since part of the reason I got busy (during the weekend at least) was that I celebrated my birthday! 🎁
In language news, I kept some exposure to Korean in my life through a few episodes of dramas divided throughout each day. But everything else got thrown out the window.
As you may have seen also, the deep-dive into the history, culture, and structure of Sranan Tongo is out! It’s a fascinating creole language!
Alright, let’s dive into what you came for now!
7 Bullet Points
Each week, I share 7 things about languages.
I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
A quick reminder first: I’m not affiliated with any resource so far. Every recommendation you find below comes from my own research and experiences.
🎥 One video
Why language classes don't work - do THIS instead! — By Multilingual Mastery
I’m already convinced that classes don’t work but I’m always curious about what’s said. In this video, Jamie gives a bunch of reasons that make sense.
My favorite was the mention of objective versus subjective perspective. Indeed, in classes, it’s always black or white. It’s correct or it’s not. That’s not what happens in real life. You can make mistakes and still be understood. And isn’t it the goal?
One other bit I enjoyed was the mention of “word mincing,” something I knew about but didn’t know how to express.1 As a French speaker, I’ve seen many learners struggle to understand French because we said “jsais ap” instead of the standard “je ne sais pas.” (I don’t know)
📚 One article I read
Do Polyglots Have Language Superpowers? — By Veronica Llorca-Smith 💎
I started skimming this piece and then the part about “what a polyglot won’t tell you” hooked me. It felt so raw, so real, so relatable.
My experience with language learning was never as “difficult,” but I did have my own set of tears and effort. Every polyglot does. Hell, every long-term language learner does too.
I highly invite you to read, at the very least, that part of her piece.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
3 Crucial Habits to Become a Great Language Learner and Improve Faster
The best language learners aren’t those with a great memory. In fact, I’m willing to bet those with a good memory don’t learn that well because they’ve never looked into learning better.
Great language learners, on the contrary, have made constant efforts to improve their learning habits and they now rely heavily on these three habits.
If only everybody had them!
🎧 One podcast episode
87: Self-Talk — By Time and Attention
This episode, like all the others by Chris Bailey and his wife Ardyn Nordstrom, was a pleasure to listen to for both the content and their energy.
While not related to language learning directly, I feel all language learners will also have a lot of self-talk (particularly negative) on their journey. I know I do.
As Chris mentioned, when the mind generates some self-talk, it creates what is called talk-unrelated thoughts but when the thoughts do correlate with actions, the self-talk becomes more positive.
The better we’re able to focus, the less negative our self-talk is shown to be, therefore creating a virtuous circle once you start.
Finally, another piece of advice they gave was to keep a daily accomplishment list. That’s also why I like to write about what I’m grateful for in language learning regularly.
How’s your self-talk when it comes to language learning?
🌎 One cultural aspect to discover
Work hours in Spain and Sweden
Last week we talked about the work hours of my home country of France and Japan, where I lived and worked for over 5 years. This week we’re spreading our wings a bit to four other countries.
First, let’s talk about what might be the greatest misconception about Spain. The famous “siesta” break in the middle of the day for people to take a nap doesn’t exist.
Well, it did and was indeed an important part of the day for a long time but it’s not the case anymore. Over half the population doesn’t ever have a siesta today. After all, it was a common habit for the farmers to avoid the hottest part of the day. It made sense for farmers but farming clearly follows a different work rhythm compared to most of today’s jobs.
In fact, the so-called “lazy Spaniards” work more hours (1,641 in 2021) than the so-called “serious Germans” (1,349 in 2021) according to the OECD data!
On the other side of Europe, the Swedish (who also work fewer hours than the Spanish, at 1,444 in 2021) have a custom called Fika. Literally translating to “coffee and cake break,” this custom is about taking the time for a small social gathering during the day to chat with others around coffee and break.
This custom reminded me of the French custom of having a coffee with colleagues before starting work in the morning, although the timing and style are different.
📜 One quote to ponder
“One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” — Frank Herbert
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language (LKL)
K’iche’ - The Most Spoken Mayan Language in Guatemala
I grew up thinking “Mayan” was a single language and only discovered this wasn’t true when I heard of Nahuatl during the 2019 Polyglot Conference. I was shocked. And curious.
Fast forward to earlier this year when I began looking for lesser-known languages to research. I fell upon K’iche’ and the apostrophes caught my attention. 30 minutes later I knew I needed to write about it.
K’iche’ is a Mesoamerican language in the Mayan language family. It’s spoken by about 9% of the (7+ years old) Guatemalan population, according to the last census (2018), which adds up to a total of 1.1 million speakers. It’s also spoken in neighboring countries, although to a lesser extent.
The country of Guatemala actually takes its name from the Nahuatl translation of the word K’iche’ (which means “many trees”): Cuauhtēmallān.
The K’iche’ people had the most powerful kingdom in the region before the European conquest: The Kʼicheʼ kingdom of Qʼumarkaj (1225-1524). One of the last rulers of this Tecun Uman, a figure whose life was not well-documented, is now considered a hero and celebrated on February 20 each year by the indigenous people of Guatemala.
The K’iche’ language, also known as Qatzijobʼal (literally: “our language” among its speakers) is believed to have originated over 4,000 years ago from an ancestral Proto-Mayan language spoken by the inhabitants of the area.
It is a Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), but other word orders are possible, depending on the focus of the sentence. It’s an agglutinative language, which means that particles attach to words to determine their meaning.
When it comes to the sounds of the language, the intonation is always kept on the last syllable and on every other syllable before the final. There are five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) but some dialects make a difference between long vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and short ones. This difference comes from some dialects keeping retaining the original system.
There are 6 pronouns (in, uj, at, ix, are’, iyare’) and no gender system for them. There are also formal versions of the “you” pronoun: lal (sing.) and alaq (pl.). This being said, pronouns are often omitted as the subject and object need to be marked on the verb.
Talking about verbs, this is the most complicated part of K’iche’.
Verbs use prefixes to be conjugated. For example, the word kimb’e means “I go.” Here’s how to dissect it:
k- → Marks the tense (incompletive aspect). The action is ongoing.
-im- → Marks the 1st person singular for a subject (can also be -in-)
b’e → Verb root of the verb “to go”
This system only works for intransitive verbs (ie. verbs that don’t need an object). For transitive verbs (the opposite), the verb is not only marked by the subject but also by the subject.
Let’s take the following sentence: Kinusik’ij le nunan. (My mother calls me.)
k- → Marks the incompletive aspect. The action is ongoing.
-in- → Marks the 1st person singular for the object (“me”)
-u- → Marks the 3rd person singular for the subject (“she”)
sik’ij → Verb root of the verb “to call”
As for the remaining part, le is the definite article in K’iche’ and nunan is a combination of nan (mother) with the first-person possessive marker nu (my).
Talking about possessive markers, there are two types of possession:
Standard possession: Uses prefixes (which differ based on whether the word begins with a vowel or not) → nub’aq = my bone (as in, the one I hold in my hand for example)
Inherent possession: Uses the prefixes of standard possession and add an additional suffix. → nub’aqil = my bone (as part of my body).
If you wish to learn the K’iche’ language, this online course will probably be your best bet. It includes videos, audio recordings of all examples sentences, complete texts to get some context, and a very well-explained grammar section for each lesson.
Utz maltyox! Jeb’a’! (Well, thank you! Goodbye!)
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
A thought that now makes me laugh.
Geography was never my forte.
Context can make the sentence be understood as being in the present tense though.
Still learning English as we go! 😁
As someone who is currently teaching a language class, I just had to click on the "Why languages classes don't work" video 😂 Although I fundamentally disagree with her conclusion, it was very interesting to listen to her rationale. And I personally think that a good language class (methodologically principled, utilizes assessments meaningfully, attentive to pragmatics, rooted in interaction, etc.) will not demonstrate a lot of the problems she listed, but I am quick to acknowledge that there are a LOT of bad language classes out there in the world. So what I'm saying is... adult English learners in New York, come to my class! It's much better than the ones she's talking about! Haha.