Ceci n'est pas une endive - communication(s)

Empathy, Culture and the Words You Use

notafish — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:02:00 +0200

Je suis une empathique. De base, de tout coeur et jusqu'au bout de mes orteils. Pourtant, j'ai beaucoup de mal avec certaines personnes, notamment issues de la culture nord-américaine, qui abusent de mots teintés d'empathie et leur font perdre leur force. Je me suis trouvée dans plusieurs situations de communication où l'utilisation d'un discours empathique m'a fait me poser la question de savoir si la personne qui l'émettait n'était pas en train d'essayer de m'endormir à coup de positif et bons sentiments, une situation où l'utilisation de mots qui ont leur origine dans les sentiments n'étaient pas "ressentis" mais "pensés".

In the many scales that exist about characterizing one's personality, be it Myers Briggs or Process Com, i inevitably fall under the "empathic" or "feeling" type. I guess no matter how many of these tests I'd take, this will always be the main streak in my character. I feel first, thought and reason come second. I value too, but that's for another blogpost. It is both the bane of my existence, and a strength I've learned to use in communication with others.

I've lived in the United States for two years. And there is one thing that I really haven't managed to this day to understand, or rather, to come to terms with, it's what I would characterize as superficial empathy. I observed North Americans quite a bit, and in my observations, I often came across people who use and overuse a tone, or words, which want themselves to be empathic, but which simply don't touch me. The use, or rather overuse, of "I love", "I like", "you are great" and other positive sounding wording just does not sound right to my empathic ears.

I think there are two different occasions in which this bothers me.

First, with people I don't know. I came with the idea of this blogpost while reading a blog where the blogger answered most comments (which I think is good) by praising the person who commented, their thoughts and thanking them. The thanking I find great, I think we never thank enough. The praising however, after the first three comments, struck me as a fake calculated tactic to make people "feel good". Except just reading those answers made me feel uncomfortable. Too much love spoils the love, I would say. To some extent, reading these comments in a row made me feel as if the author was putting everyone on the same level. If I'm being great, somehow, in my mind's eye, it must be because I am to some extent "better" than others. Maybe I have the wrong scale here, but I want to feel special. Not part of a chain-letter type answer to my commentary which puts me on a par with everyone else. Praising is good too, don't get me wrong. I also find we don't praise enough. But I guess I have a limit. It's a bit like eating caviar everyday. After a while, you don't realize that it's a special thing anymore. North Americans, I find, do that a lot (again, this is a generalization and not all North Americans, but it is a trend I have noticed there and in no other country I have visited or lived in). And frankly there comes a time I don't believe this appreciation any more. To me, it end up being a fake varnish of appreciation, which might work for a while, but ends up losing all kind of reality. Mind you, I suppose if you read just the one comment addressed to you, you'd probably feel good. But reading all of them in a row made me pause. If I wrote a comment there, and the author praised it, I would not really feel as if their words were sincere. I sincerely believe this is a very cultural thing, maybe because the French are rather stingy with praise, I don't know.

Second, with people I know. I guess here the clash comes between what I have come to know of the person, and what their words are trying to say. Example: a colleague I worked with, whom I know for a fact has absolutely no empathy whatsoever in everyday life, or in their job, but who acts in public as if they were the most empathic people in the world, appealing in their external communication to understanding, loving each other and other empathic whatnots. I guess that's even worse than the first. Again, I've only experienced this with North Americans (or could-be North Americans), and in English. I find it extremely disturbing (and here I mean it in a very physical way) to read someone's words with the knowledge that they can't possibily be "feeling" any of those words. They might "think" those words, but they don't "feel" them. And "thinking" words of love and empathy just does not cut it. Empathy comes with the heart, not with the brain. It can't be a surface thing, like a heart milk on a coffee. For the overly feeling person I am, it ends up looking like a scary propaganda tactic designed to blind people as to what the real deal is all about. It's a bit like sugar coating the bitter cake to make it taste better. Again, it's fake. And often, unfortunately, makes me miss the point of their words and try and find the catch. Which definitely isn't a good way of taking in an attempt at communicating, I guess.

I wonder if I'm the only one reading those people and feeling the same way. So I ask you, have you come across people whose words of love and empathy you could just not relate to? Do you feel/think it might have to do with culture and/or language?

Lara604, Latte Heart 2 , March 24, 2009, on Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Of intended puns and other language barriers

notafish — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:27:00 +0100

L'humour est la chose la plus difficile à traduire dans un contexte interculturel. Souvent celui-ci s'inscrit dans un contexte hautement culturel et fait référence à des choses qu'une personne ayant grandi/vécu dans un autre pays ne peut comprendre. Le plus difficile à faire dans une langue qui n'est pas la sienne sont les jeux de mots, qui souvent sont pris comme des fautes de grammaire plutôt que de l'humour.

I've just read a very true blogpost about how humour just does not cross borders very well. Borders of language, but mostly, intercultural boders. I guess we're all shaped by whatever environment we evolve in, and humour usually resides in that environment. Humour appeals to things we have experienced, TV shows, books, movies, pop culture in its greater acceptance, family history, you name it. As such, it takes quite a bit of knowing the other to make sure that the joke you're about to make will come across as such. Humour is difficult to translate and difficult to understand when you're living in another country or speaking another language.

What I find hardest however, is how difficult it is to make puns in a language that is not your native language. Not so much because you cannot (as in "you're not able to"), but because the pun presupposes a mastery of the language that people aren't ready to grant you. After all, I'm a French speaking English, or German, so people know that English or German aren't my first language, and they'll be somewhat hermetic to my trying to play with the language that is theirs.

Of course, there are unintended puns. One of the most embarassing moment of my learning-languages life was while trying to make a quiche in the USA (yes, quiche is the one thing I export everywhere I live ;)). I was at the very beginning of my living there, and was looking for grated cheese (Gruyère, to be exact). Which, for the record, simply did not exist in New Mexico. So here I am, talking with my English teacher, and telling her I need eggs, bacon bits and... raped cheese. Yeah. Raped. The thing is, the word for grated in French is "rapé". And since so many English words come from French, I took a stab at it. Wrong stab, it seems. Raped has somewhat of a different meaning than the one I was expecting. That's how you learn, mind you, I'll never forget my English teacher's look, and never ever forget how to say "grated" in English.

But here is another story. There is a phrase in English that goes "I don't give a flying fu*k". Pardon my French. I've always found it funny. And one day I "punned" it, and said "I don't give a fu**ing fly". The first time I said it, I can't remember who it was, but the English speaker that was there said, just a bit embarassed to be correcting me: "Hmm, the proper way to say this is actually "I don't give a flying fu**". Crap. I was trying to be funny here, but because I am not a native speaker, they thought I had not gotten that right and was making a mistake. That episode taught me two things:

- No matter how well you master a language, people do remember that you're not a native speaker. This would probably have been considered funny if uttered by a native speaker.
- A language that you learn is hard to use in a way that isn't conventional.

A bit sad actually, I probably could be quite funny in English, if they'd let me ;). And I realize that my confidence in how well I speak a language can be measured with how funny I try to be. I'm even starting to make jokes in German now! (and they don't come across :P).

Time is Relative

notafish — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:28:00 +0200

Où j'explique combien la perception du temps varie selon le cadre de référence. Par exemple, sur internet, un site qui a dix ans est un site vieux, alors qu'un hôtel ou un café qui a 10 ans et le montre est plutôt ridicule.

Among the cultural dimensions laid out by Geert Hofstede, there is one that is based on time and our relationship to it. He calles it "Long term orientation". The idea behind this is that culture shapes the way we relate to time, or rather, that our behaviour inscribes itself in a frame that also has a relationship to time.

There is a pretty standard exercise you can do when trying to help people get the grip on cultural differences, which consists of asking them to give a value to fuzzy propositions and see how they come up with different answers. For time, it could be something like this:

He came late to the meeting

People then have to say whether "late" means 5 minutes, 15 minutes or an hour, or whatever length of time "late" means to them. In a German/French crowd, you'll probably have much longer delays among the French than among the Germans (a stigmata of the legendary German punctuality). A French may answer (well, at least I would) at least 20 minutes, while for a German, 5 minutes is already very late. Just to show,

I keep noticing how companies, great or small, tend to tell how long they've been around. How many times have you crossed a truck that said proudly "Company & Sons, Established 1985". I must say that every time I see this, and the date is a date which I have memories from (I would say my first "public" memory is 1981, when Mitterrand was elected president of France), I feel that boasting about it is a bit over the top. "I mean, seriously, you make pipes and electrical ware since 1985, who cares?" But then I actually make the calculation and realize that well, that's about 30 years. Pretty good, actually.

Of course, you have the "really old" ones. Our very own baker in Königstein "Haus der Qualität seit 1750" (House of quality since 1750) displays an experience dating back 260 years, quite an achievement indeed. In Europe in general, you'll see lots of businesses displaying proudly their ancient experience. Hotels, Cafés and restaurants are specialists of the genre.

While surfing a few days back, however, it came to me that internet has introduced a very interesting and new relationship to time. The internet (or the web, if we want to be precise) has existed for the general public for no more than 15 years. Which makes the whole frame of reference rather awkward. I stumbled upon a few blogs in the past few days which made a case of how long they had been around. 2003, 1999, 2000. In relative time, ie. in my lifespan's frame, this is rather young, not to say it's almost just yesterday. And yet, in the web's lifespan, this is like... ancient.

What I find interesting, is how my own relationship to time changes depending on the context. I'd be impressed with a website that's been around for 10 years and is still successful, but not so with a Café that can only boast of a 10 year long experience. Not to mention that I feel very young, so any business boasting "Around since 1971" would be construed as bragging in my mind's eye (yeah, you, Starbucks!). Come on, I'm not "that" old, that you'd want to tell the world you've been around for that long!

What about you? Do you also feel this stretch in time depending on what you're looking at?

Image sources:

Heaphys Quality Menswear - Established in the reign of William IV - © Elliott Brown - CC-BY
Established 1971 - © Kim Navarre - CC-BY-SA
Image with blog exerpts from: Stephanie Booth's website, Steve Ivy's website Monkinetic, Robert Basic's blog.

How Intercultural Is Social Media?

notafish — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:17:00 +0200

Les médias sociaux, contrairement à ce que j'ai lu dans un billet de blog, permettent à mon avis de transcender les cultures, notamment nationales. Parce que les gens peuvent échanger sur des sujets précis, basés sur leurs intérêts communs, ils trouvent un point d'entrée qui permet une conversation autrement impossible et ce, quel que soit leur bagage culturel.

Via Twitter, I stumbled across this blogpost, talking about Social Media and Intercultural Communication. Interesting, I thought, as I believe "culture" is an essential component of Social Media to start with. I was left with a sense of non-achieved to some extent, as I think this blogpost does not really reflect how cultural boundaries are pushed away thanks to online communication.

For one, I am missing hard facts. The blogpost starts with a bunch of statements that don't seem to be backed by any kind of research. I'd love to see numbers, or proofs. Only one example is given later in the post about how the same people follow the same people. And frankly, it does not really convince me in drawing conclusions that:

When it comes to communicating with others online, most of us tend to stick to people within our own cultural group. For those of us in Western societies, it’s easier to communicate and connect with others who experience the same culture and language.

Mind you, I don't really have hard facts either, just my experience.

Let's start with language. It makes sense that the use of one language over another does limit the scope of online communication. I mean, I follow people who tweet in Chinese and well, although it happens to me to click on their links, I just don't understand what they are talking about. This said, I am amazed at the number of allegedly-non-English-speakers who react to my Facebook statuses. Most of them French, and from whom I would never have expected that they even read my statuses in English. In that regard, I find that the use of one language is not as limiting as I thought it would be. Then comes culture. And there, I just can't agree that social media is all about the same-same. Social Media is a way to broadly share thoughts, ideas and information. And I think that this sharing occurs, to a certain extent, regardless of culture. For the sake of clarity, we'll assume that culture here is taken in its broadest sense, ie. something like 'Western culture", shaped mainly by loose national borders and linguistic boundaries.

My followers, and the people i follow on identi.ca and Twitter, for example, can roughly be put into two categories. The first one would be my friends (in the real life sense of the term, not in the Facebook sense of the term), who follow me or whom I follow just because I am me and they are them. They don't really care what I share, as long as it comes from me, and I don't really care what they share, as long as it comes from them. We have a predisposition to being interested in the same things. The second category are the people I don't know, but who share the same interests as me. May it be all-things-wikipedia, or parenting, or the love of words, or geeky things such as Linux and KDE. These can be anyone. They could be indians, or Chinese, French or Americans, Kenyans or South Americans. We speak the same language(s) or we don't, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we have at least one thing, one interest, in common. Our national cultures are different, our social cultures (social backgrounds) are different, we may vote right, left, or center, love cheese or hate it. As a matter of fact, we could meet in real life and find nothing to talk about at all, nothing that binds us except that one interest, and even then, find each other boring, uninteresting or even plain annoying. In that regard, I believe social media actually brings people together who can be culturally extremely far away from each other.

Of course one could argue that these "interests" are a culture in and of themselves, but that's the reason I restricted the definition of culture above, because that's how I understood it was defined in the blogpost I quoted. What I find is that social media, because it brings some kind of focus, actually allows people with very different cultural sensitivities to find a connection, and allows for conversations between people which would, without this one entry point, not take place at all.

Pourquoi les français ne parlent pas de langues étrangères

notafish — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:54:00 +0200

A few months after writing my blog post Why The French Don't Speak Any Other Language, I read Jean-Benoît's Nadeau Les Français aussi ont un accent. Jean-Benoît Nadeau is French Canadian and lived two years in France to study the French. And he seemed to come to a conclusion similar to mine concerning why the French don't speak any other language, ie. that the mastery of the language is a very important thing for the French and unless they speak a foreign language perfectly, they just won't speak.

Il y a de cela quelques mois, j'ai commis un billet tentant d'expliquer pourquoi les français ne parlent pas de langues étrangères. Ma théorie est que le français est une langue qui supporte difficilement d'être mal parlée, parce qu'elle en devient difficile à comprendre.

Les français ont une réputation qui les précède de gens ne sachant pas parler les langues étrangères et surtout pas l'anglais. Et ce malgré un système scolaire qui met l'accent sur les langues étrangères dès la sixième (que l'on atteint à environ 11-12 ans) et pendant au moins cinq années si l'on passe son bac. Il y a quelques semaines, j'ai lu l'ouvrage de Jean-Benoît Nadeau Les Français aussi ont un accent, qui relate ses deux années en France. Il y aborde rapidement la question du blinguisme et le fait en ces termes :

J'ai ma petite théorie pour expliquer pourquoi on dit que les Français sont moins bilingues que les autres Européens. D'abord, je crois que c'est faux : je suis même convaincu que les Français ont toujours été aussi bilingues que les autres. Problème : le niveau de bilinguisme d'un peuple ne se mesure pas, objectivement. Toutes les études ne peuvent mesurer que ce que les gens pensent d'eux-mêmes. À la question : "Parlez-vous une autre langue ?" un Français aura tendance à répondre non, sauf s'il la parle bien, tout simplement parce que la maîtrise parfaite de la langue est fondamentale pour lui.^[1]

Je suis évidemment d'accord avec cette analyse. Je pense que les Français ont tout simplement un complexe d'infériorité lorsqu'il s'agit de parler une langue étrangère, notamment parce que dans la société française, la maîtrise de la langue (française) est un signe de distinction sociale et d'éucation. Du coup, le Français parlant mal une langue étrangère (ou pensant qu'il la parle mal), aura tendance à ne pas s'aventurer hors de la langue qu'il maîtrise.

En tant que Française parlant tous les jours une langue étrangère, c'est un état d'esprit que je connais bien. Bien que ma maîtrise de l'allemand soit bonne, elle est loin d'être parfaite et cela donne lieu à de nombreuses frustrations, probablement exacerbées par le fait que je suis française.

Notes

[1] Les Français aussi ont un accent, Jean-Benoît Nadeau, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, p. 243

Why the French Don't Speak Any Other Language

notafish — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:42:00 +0200

Now here is a commonplace. I believe I have heard this a million times.

The French are terrible, they won't ever speak to you in English or any other language and if you address them in English, they'll be very unpolite and unfriendly.

I have been thinking about this a lot, and I thought I'd share with you the fruit of my thinking. Trying to un-common the commonplace.

Any French person who's studied as far as the baccalaureate has had at least 7^[1] years of classes in a foreign language and possibly 2 to 5 years in another. Now make that studied until they were 15 (not as far as high school), that's still 3 years in a language. The statistics are amazing. In 2006 ^[2], 99% of French students in the secondary education are learning a language,

The French educational system introduces the first foreign language (première langue vivante) at the beginning of the secondary cycle (classe de sixième - around 11/12 years old). The first language learned is English 92%, followed by German, 7.5%. A second language is then introduced two years later (classe de quatrième - 13/14 years old). Spanish mostly (70%), then German (14%).

So how come the French won't ever speak to you in another language?

Well here is my theory.

French is a language which, if you don't speak it properly, is difficult to understand. Structure being so important and all. So French speakers are afraid, when they don't master a foreign language, that they won't be understood. That's the first reason, I think.

Then comes the "proud" factor. The French educational system, while not being the worst, is definitely not the best when it comes to languages. French students are usually really good at grammar, but can't say a word, because they are rarely taught in a conversational way. And the French are convinced that they are really bad at languages (a stereotype that sticks). So when you go to a French person in the street and ask, in English:

Hi, do you speak English?

You're bound to get the answer:

Non.

And that's it. So try this. Next time you're wandering French streets and are lost, find someone and tell them, in the worst French you can master:

Bonjour, je suis désolé(e) je ne parle pas français, est-ce que vous parlez anglais ? (Hi, I'm sorry, I don't speak French, do you speak English?)

I bet you that the French will then answer, in a broken, accent-ridden, but totally bearable English

Yes, a little bit.

The thing is, if you put yourself at the level of knowledge the French think they're at when it comes to speaking a foreign language (ie. me no speak), you're showing them that you are as bad as they (think they) are in a foreign language. Doing this, you break the barrier and show them that you are willing to admit that you're the one who does not speak their language in the first place and that if they speak to you in English, however wrong their grammar or accent is, they won't be utterly ridiculous.

It's all about putting yourself on the same level, to avoid any kind of hierarchy that would hinder the communication channel.

Notes

[1] [edit 22 May 2009], it's 7, not 8, as was written here previously

[2] See the file: Etude des langues vivantes dans le second degré

I don't spreche Deutsch, merci beaucoup

notafish — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:16:00 +0200

Well, actually, I do speak German, but I hate it (If I dared, I'd write the hate bold in font size 40 and with four exclamation marks) when a website speaks to me in German. I mean, my language preferences are clear in Firefox, there's even only French and English so why a website should speak to me in German is beyond me.

Well, I know why. I live in Germany. But as Stephanie Booth explains very well in her "Waiting for the Babel Fish" presentation, which I attended in Reboot a long time ago, there are some things that are very wrong in how the internet brings about multinlingualism.

And that starts (or ends?) with websites speaking to me in German. It is, for example, the case for MySpace.com, which bases the site's interface language on the IP address (ie. the geographical location of the user). But there is nothing worse than to go from a French blog or a French email to a page which speaks German without real reason. Not to mention that having Hano's page all in German when their music is a tribute to the French language is kind of... a heresy.

I can understand, and I can even accept, that ads altogether speak to me in German. Well, it's not like I'm gonna click on them or anything, but basing ads on the IP address is mostly a good call. Mostly, because many of these ads are for online stuff, which I would be much more receptive to in a language I am willing to read at the top of my head. German is too much work.

This said, it is actually quite interesting to note when it bothers me and when it doesn't. I hate it that sites give me a default German interface, but for some of the sites I use, my user preferences are set to give me a German interface (Xing for example). So what I really hate is not so much the German in itself, but the lack of rhyme or reason for a specific linguistic environment. And the rupture which comes with switching from a language I am not in the mood for (read: my brain is not ready for).

For the record, on the contrary to what Stephanie says in her presentation, it seems Google speaks to me in French, with a very nice "Google Suisse" logo, which changes to "Google Switzerland" when I change my browser's preferences. Google's got it right.

Bottom line is, thereis still much work to be done to make sure that the internet really speaks to all.

Lack of Words Sinked Ship

notafish — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:49:00 +0200

I came across a Reuters story about Henry the VIII's ship the Mary Rose while browsing Intercultural Communication and Translation News.

The idea that a ship could sink because the crew could not understand the orders that would have saved their life is quite an interesting metaphor for the world we live in. Looking back on the failures I have experienced in the companies or organisations I have worked with and for, I realize that many of them were induced or sometimes even deepened by a failure in communication.

Whether it was because the protagonists had different values, spoke different languages or came from different cultures, I realize that misundertanding has sometimes a great impact on our ability to survive a crisis. And often is it just that, something about survival.

Addressing an International Audience

notafish — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:52:00 +0200

Last Friday, I attended the Going Solo conference in Lausanne, a one-day conference for freelancers. I was very impressed with the quality of the speakers and of course, I tried and observed the cultural bias/questions/issues that came up. Here is a little rundown of the things I noticed.

I consider myself a pretty good measure of the level of English. As a non-native English speaker having learned English in the US, but in an international setting, I tend to understand many accents and idiomatic expressions. However, when I don't understand, I have found that there is a good chance that other non-native speakers won't understand either. The audience was a very international audience, among which many French speakers. I would say that overall the English in the talks was of a very acceptable level for us foreigners, easy and clear, with maybe just a few lines that you can't pick up. That's for the language. But the interesting part is not so much the level of the language itself, but rather the illustrations used by the speakers, their metaphors and their examples.

The first talk of the day was given by Laura Fitton, and I found it a very inspiring talk ^[1]. Up to the conclusion, which was supported a slide reading "Surrender Dorothy". Laura used it to illustrate the fact that we should "give up control". However, if slides are a visual support to a presentation, this one failed to talk to some of us. "Surrender Dorothy" comes from The Wizard of Oz, a movie probably all Americans have seen (along with It's a Wonderful Life, I suppose). A movie too few non-Americans or non-English speakers have grown up with for them to understand the image. I asked Laura what the reference was. Which she explained. Thanks.

Later in the questions session, Laura gave another culturally bound example, explaining how she got her father to care about blogs by getting him to read his favorite baseball player's blog. She quickly realized that the example did not carry the weight she had intended at first, as the audience, very mainly European, was trying to get a clue as to who the Redsox were (I personally get confused with American Football and Baseball teams!) and had to walk us through her example again, with explaining who the Redsox were, who the basebal player was, much more than she would have had to do with an American audience. The interesting part being that where in the heat of the presentation Laura did not pick up on people not getting the Wizard of Oz connection, she picked up very quickly on the baseball stuff. Attentive to her audience indeed, I appreciated that.

What I find confirmed by these examples is that as soon as we address an international audience, we probaby should test (as far as it is possible, of course) our illustrations for anything people might simply overlook, or worse, plainly not understand. As soon as we're using references that are strongly tainted culturally, to reinforce a point we're trying to make, it becomes much harder to be sure that they are universal enough for the audience to pick up on them. Laura illustrated that issue with the example of the talk she gave in India, and discovering before her talk that she had to refocus her presentation because her audience in reality was very different from what it was on paper. Too often we forget that things that are very obvious to us might not come across borders and oceans.

Notes

[1] read the excellent notes taken by Suw Charman-Anderson

The language before the language

notafish — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:49:00 +0100

I am still reading the book about bilingualism and before I write a more detailled review about it, I wanted to share my last experiences in terms of communication and languages. As you may know, or not, we had a baby. Emma was born a few weeks ago and I must say that the greatest challenge her father and I have been facing since she was born is not so much the short nights (although those are real), as it is understanding her.

At first, a baby's language is binary. Either she cries, or she doesn't. After a few weeks, there are some notions in between, but it is really not that different. The challenge thus resides in understanding the cries. Why on earth is she crying? Is it hunger? Pain? A way to communicate? Fear? Trying to practice her singing? Well, it can be all of those and more. Her cries can mean a number of things, all different. How many times in the course of the past weeks have we looked at her right in the eye and asked What exactly are you trying to tell us here?. A million times already, I believe. And she does not answer. At least not in so many words.

So we have been forced to develop a finer understanding of her language. Mind you, it is interesting to note that babies don't "cry", as in they don't really go with the tears and such. They cry, as in 'shout' or yell, or "express themselves loudly.".The actual tear part comes up seldomly and it's rather the result of intense crying than a part of the crying altogether. This is the first clue as to why the baby is crying. If she sheds tears, it is usually pretty serious. As such, it comes with stomach aches for example, or terrible hunger.

With time, here are the clues we've been able to gather, the signs we're looking for to decode her language.

The length of the cries: is it a steady cry? then she's probably hungry. A more intermittent cry? Then she's probably uncomfortable (gas, diapers need to be changed...)
The intensity of the cries. Is it really loud? Then she means business. Rather a puppy-like yapping? Then she's warning you that this might get more serious.
The color of her skin and her breathing. Is she getting really red as she cries, and holds her breath? Then she's frustrated and unhappy. Keeping her milk-like complexion? Then she's rather asking for some conversation (I swear, babies sometimes ask you to talk with them).
Observe body language. If she folds and unfolds her legs, she might be experiencing digestion problems. If she's sucking her thumb like crazy, she's probably hungry.

All in all, with a little practice, I would say one learns to decipher most of the baby's needs by observing and listening closely. It is, if nothing else, a great exercise in observation and taking into account other things than just words, something we probably should be doing in our everyday life more often, so as to make sure we understand not only the words, but also the environment surrounding them. Looking at people's body language, analyzing the tone of their voice, understanding whether they are anxious, angry or happy probably goes a long way to help us understand what they are really saying. A lesson in communication. And she's 2 months old!

The bilingual challenge

notafish — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:24:00 +0100

I have written about the interesting differences in cultural perception of the same objects, or rather of the same words. I have always been fascinated by the easiness with which I navigate from one language to another, namely French and English. And I am equally fascinated by the difficulty I have to do the same thing with German, which could probably be tagged as my third language.

Here I am for example, sitting in the waiting room of a German doctor, writing in English, while understanding the radio in the background in German, and recalling to write this note the words I have just read in French. I am reading a book about bilingualism "Le défi des enfants bilingues", to try and understand what Tuinkel will have to go through with a French mother and a German father. I am just at the beginning, but there is one image the author recalled which really lit my understanding of what bilingualism could be all about.

The first part of the book tries and defines bilingualism, to come to the conclusion that there are probably as many bilingiulisms as there are bilingual people. In short, it is very difficult to pinpoint when exactly someone can be considered "bilingual". It is also very difficult to actually compare the degrees to which one person masters two languages. Mainly because this measure can only realistically be taken against that of monolingualism, ie. a state where the person who learns a language uses it at every single opportunity; whereas a bilingual person probably makes use of their two languages in different circumstances (at home for one, at school for the other, on holidays for one, at work for the other etc.).

Abdelilah-Bauer recalls an example given by François Grosjean in his book Bilinguisme et biculturalisme, essai de définition. I am paraphrasing:

It would probably never come to the athlete's mind to compare the performances of a hurdles runner to those of a 100m sprinter or those of a high jump athlete. In short, although the hurdles performance actually takes from both sprinter and high jumper, noone would say that a hurdle runner is a bad sprinter, or a bad high jumper. Bilingualism can thus be measured as a different set of skills which, if it fishes in different pools, constitutes a discipline of its own, independant of monolingualism.

I found the image very interesting, because it somehow broke one of the ideas I've always had at the back of my mind, while finding it really weird, ie. that languages coexist as separate pools from which I fish from. In short, thinking that my brain has some kind of switch that goes from one language to the other and that switching on one language, I switch off the other(s). At the same time, the situation I described above and the difficulty I have had to translate the illustration of the hurdle guy definitely proves that all the languages I speak are always there for the taking.

I'll share more of my thoughts about this book which I find extremely interesting as I get along.