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Tuesday, April 22 2008

Truly multilingual

By notafish on Tuesday, April 22 2008, 23:35 - the other words

Our neighbours are what one would call a really truly multilingual family. The mother is Swedish, the father is Italian. Together they speak English. The kids speak Swedish with their mother, Italian with their father. They lived the first years of their life in Switzerland, which means the children speak "Swiss German" (believe me, it's as far from German as Chinese from English) , They now live in Germany, so everyone is learning "High German" (Hochdeutsch, the "clean" German), and the kids are in an international school where English is the primary language, practicing the English they've picked up from their parents. In short, you have 3 kids aged 8, 6 and 3 who understand and speak 4 languages, 4 languages that their parents don't even all master.

Apart from the amazing-ness of it, I found it to be truly encouraging, to see that kids that young could simply pick up all those languages and feel at ease in any of them. We had coffee one afternoon and the kids indifferently spoke German or English with us, while conversing with their parents in Italian and Swedish.

I can't wait to ask my daughter questions about what it is like to learn more than one language at once. Although I now speak and understand four foreign languages myself, albeit at different levels, I learned them once my French was already there, meaning that gender, concepts and thought structure were already shaped in my mother tongue. I am especially interested in trying to understand what it feels like having different words for a same "thing" especially when those words convey different impressions or feelings, such as different genders for example. It'll be interesting, for sure.

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Thursday, March 27 2008

The language before the language

By notafish on Thursday, March 27 2008, 13:49 - communication(s)

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!

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Monday, November 19 2007

The bilingual challenge

By notafish on Monday, November 19 2007, 10:24 - communication(s)

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.

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