Hilary A Smith, Honorary Research Fellow (Linguistics) at Massey University, writes for The Conversation:
From the beginning of the 2025 school year, all schools [in New Zealand] will be required to use structured literacy – also known as “phonics” or the “science of reading” – to teach children how to read. But the very nature of this approach to reading could cause bilingual children to lose their second language.
Structured literacy teaches children to decode the relationships between sounds and letters. Readers use decoding to “sound out” words they don’t recognise.
But teaching children decoding in English is different from teaching reading in other languages, which have different sound systems. Losing these second languages will be to the detriment of students, with research repeatedly highlighting the benefits of bilingualism.
According to the 2018 Census, the four most common languages after English were te reo Māori, Samoan, Northern Chinese including Mandarin, and Hindi. These all have different sound systems, and in the case of Chinese or Hindi, their writing scripts represent sounds in a completely different way from the English alphabet.
There’s more, of course, but you get the general idea. Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says “I’m frankly left scratching my head over it,” and I have a similar reaction — how could phonics cause children to lose their second language? But he and I may be missing something. Fire away!
I think it’s about how imposing English symbol-sound correspondences on innocent children will forever prevent them from acquiring the conventions of another language. But if phonics is teaching reading by making a connection between symbol and sound – and the simpler the connection, the more helpful is the technique – why shouldn’t it be used also when teaching Maori and Hindi? Surely you wouldn’t use English phonics for that?
And (traditional) Chinese is even weirder. Why would alphabetic conventions interfere at all?
I’d even expect that having a thorough grounding in the English conventions would be a help in acquiring another system and keeping the two apart.
[This is based on the fictional notion that there is an English system that can be successfully taught.]
Yes, I agree with all your points.
It’s not the same thing but L1 Anglophone me was definitely taught in school how to read foreign languages in … a phonics-like fashion, learning rules (with special attention to how they differed from English orthography!) for which letters (or kana) signaled which sound. Usually accompanied by claims that the language in question had a more phonemically straightforward orthography than English, although maybe I should note that I never really took French.
I’ve never paid much attention personally to these controversies, because reading came to me so easily* in my childhood (and this has been mostly true with my own kids thus far) that pedagogical approach seemed irrelevant and I mostly just wanted teachers to leave me alone so I could read whatever I wanted to, but my sense is that whatever you call the non-phonics-type approaches have been steadily losing ground to phonics-style approaches in the U.S. over the last several decades because the former invariably perform worse in any sort of evidence-based comparison for assessing efficacy and no one seems to be able to explain very satisfactorily what weird ideological fad** in the education schools gave rise to them in the first place.
*FWIW, I do understand that it doesn’t come so easily to everyone, so I’m in favor of schools using more effective rather than less effective pedagogical methods – I’m just explaining why I’ve largely tuned out the details of the arguments.
**Except for the rather cynical suggestion that the formerly-in-vogue methods are less effective for the students but also more subjectively enjoyable (and less boring) for the teachers to attempt to implement and that bureaucratic politics placed more weight on the latter factor.
reading came to me so easily in my childhood […] that pedagogical approach seemed irrelevant and I mostly just wanted teachers to leave me alone so I could read whatever I wanted to
This is true of me as well, and I suspect of many Hatters.
Seconded. And indeed I spent so much time reading there were quite a few words I’d never heard, so made up a ‘spelling pronunciation’ that caused my parents much merriment.
Nearly all of my brothers/sisters were quick readers, too. So it wasn’t ’til way too late my parents realised one sister was in fact dyslexic, because she was very smart at faking it. School had totally failed to detect what was going on.
The key issue seems to be that a focus on “structured literacy” in English will somehow detract from the maintenance of bilingualism:
But an increased focus on phonics and structured literacy in Aotearoa cannot adequately support bilingualism because the materials used here are mostly – if not all – based on English.
Research found the focus on English in schools means many bilingual children who enter schools speaking their heritage languages shift to English only and leave school monolingual.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Many teachers work to support the range of languages spoken by each of the children they teach, using differentiated and individualised approaches.
These teachers may not know the children’s languages themselves, so they use a variety of strategies in their teaching. This can include “translanguaging”, which explicitly encourages children to move between their two (or more) languages.
Such activities might include reading and reciting religious texts such as the Bible, or reading books or online newspapers in their heritage languages.
….
New Zealand should use some of the flexibility possible in the “science of reading” to support approaches such as translanguaging to encourage bilingual learning.
Some international approaches based on the “science of reading”, such as Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan’s work with bilingual Spanish and English children in the United States, are focusing on multiliteracy through structured literacy.
These approaches advocate a range of effective practices for teachers to respond to the multilingual needs of students, such as learning as much as possible about their languages so they can compare different sound and spelling systems.
The argument therefore appears to be that, instead of adopting “structured literacy” in English, New Zealand should be supporting “approaches such as translanguaging”.
In other words, the adoption of phonics monolingually represents a lost opportunity, not the destruction of an existing thriving bilingual educational environment.
I think the article is made more confusing by the title Bilingualism under threat. I would suggest that bilingualism has always been under threat from the monolingual school system, and that adopting “structured literacy” is nothing new in that regard.
AntC?
BILINGUALISM UNDER THREAT
Isn’t that how they used to teach Latin to 11-year-olds?
Well:
1. on the one hand: I don’t understand what exact mechanism is implied.
But I can’t disagree with the word “could”.
2. on the other hand: schooling DOES make people monolingual:)
So any given element of it can contribute.
Isn’t that how they used to teach Latin to 11-year-olds?
And now we have an entire generation of children no longer fluent in Latin.
(I started Latin when I was nine: it was actually the first foreign language I was ever taught in school. Later than that is probably too late …)
PS Bathrobe is making the same point (as my 2).
Seems the threat to bi- or multilingual students is less a function of phonics for English and more a matter of money and policy decisions. If phonics works for L A, why not hire staff competent to use the technique for L B, C, D, etc.?
The solution is to teach the five-year-olds IPA, and whatever language you’re using, include IPA guidance, so the cute little tikes can learn to speak English and Chinese with a proper American accent.
Dick works hard to get good grades and a good job.
dɪk wɜrks hɑrd tə ɡɛt ɡʊd ɡreɪdz ənd ə ɡʊd ʤɑb.
I think I was taught to read using a phonics-style approach (things like “a silent ‘e’ changes the pronunciation of the vowel in the preceding syllable”).
If my understanding is correct (and it could be completely off the mark), phonics then fell out of fashion in favour of some kind of “whole word” or “word recognition” approach. However, this was found to produce a generation of children who couldn’t spell — they had only a basic acquaintance with the art of relating specific features of the spelling to the pronunciation of words. So there has been an ongoing trend to move back to phonics.
The linked-to article Balanced vs Structured Literacy outlines the difference between the so-called ‘balanced literacy’ and ‘structured literacy’ approaches. It identifies the Balanced Literacy approach thus:
Balanced literacy has its roots in Whole Language (WL) instruction that emerged in the 1970s. This instructional approach aligned well with the educational zeitgeist of the 1970s, emphasizing child-led, discovery-based learning with minimal formal instruction provided by teachers.
Other important aspects of WL-based educational ideology were the positioning of the classroom teacher as the incontrovertible expert on reading instruction, together with a mistrust of research evidence derived from disciplines with positivist (traditional scientific) orientations, most notably relevant branches of psychology in favour of postmodern approaches which encourage multiple perspectives on meaning in research data (see Snow, 2016).
The (since discredited) belief at the center of WL pedagogy was that reading and by extension, writing and spelling, is a biologically innate skill (Goodman, 1987) which, like oral language is best acquired in the context of social interaction (Rushton, 2007). This led to a shift away from teacher-led instruction, that in turn, further (though possibly unintentionally) eroded the need for teachers to be content experts on the linguistic underpinnings of reading.
Personally, I think phonics is the better approach to learning to read, and being old-fashioned, I prefer a teacher-led approach rather than ‘kids finding things out for themselves’.
At any rate, the final paragraph in the Conversation article spells out clearly its conclusion: Rather than mandates for literacy programs which focus only on English, the government should instead consider supporting programs which will build and develop the literacy of all children in Aotearoa.
Totally agree. But how? What if a classroom has kids from diverse backgrounds (European, Asian of various flavours, indigenous…)? How is a bit of eclecticism going to help kids gain bilingual reading skills?
Well, you quote:
“Many teachers work to support the range of languages spoken by each of the children they teach, using differentiated and individualised approaches.
These teachers may not know the children’s languages themselves, so they use a variety of strategies in their teaching. This can include “translanguaging”, which explicitly encourages children to move between their two (or more) languages.”
I suppose these teachers do have some answer to this question.
The solution is to teach the five-year-olds IPA, and whatever language you’re using, include IPA guidance, so the cute little tikes can learn to speak English and Chinese with a proper American accent.
Some argue that ‘phoneme’ is a Western concept, based on English phonology. Chinese speakers don’t think in terms of phonemes. In fact, the traditional distinction between initials, medials, and finals might better explain the way that Chinese apprehend the phonology of their language.
Well, I was taught to read “by syllables” as it is called in Russian. That is, sy. lla. ble. by. sy. lla. ble.
As I could read very fast by then (having learned to read in 3 and become a bookworm immediately) I ignored all this…. which resulted in my first bad grade (for reading too fast*:)). Was… instructive.
*I’m not terribly angry at the lady. 30 kids are 30 kids. I don’t know what pedagogical idea she was expressing by this 2 (1 …. 2. bad 3. satisfactory 4. good 5. excellent). Maybe she did not like thatI’m not listening to what’s going on in the classroom, or maybe she just thought that as I failed for this specific reason then she has a good technical reason to mark my failure this way, or she thought I was showing off. Anyway, since then I never cared about grades at all:)
Some argue that ‘phoneme’ is a Western concept, based on English phonology. Chinese speakers don’t think in terms of phonemes.
Oh for god’s sake. English speakers don’t think in terms of phonemes either; nobody does except linguists, for whom it is a universally applicable scientific concept. Next they’ll be saying gravitation is a Western concept.
Is the vowel in tán ‘discuss’, táng ‘hot’, and tián ‘sweet’ three separate phonemes, or a single phoneme whose realisation is influenced by the preceding vowel and following consonant? Or might it not simply be better to use the traditional system, which is how Chinese normally see it and colours their perceptions of phonology?
AntC?
I arrived in NZ in later life, so sorry I’ve never experienced the NZ school system — in any capacity.
Some context: late last year a new right-leaning government was elected (with necessary support from a very-right minor party — Proportional Rep be blamed). Plenty of rhetoric about cutting back on ‘wokeness’ — especially allegedly iniquitous (against the majority) support to Māori and Pacific Island communities; threats of rolling back Constitutional recognition for the special role of Māori as Tangata Whenua (first peoples).
Plus allegations the previous (Labour) government had been far too bleeding-heart in protecting us through the pandemic so now there’s nothing left in the kitty.
(That is February 2025, so the earliest opportunity the new government could bring it in.)
This is cover for cutting funding to Schools. In my expert opinion the alleged Educational improvements are bollox. (So no wonder you’re puzzling over this nonsense.) I think ‘Structured Literacy’ (if it’s actually any sort of a thing) is just a convenient smokescreen.
IOW stop any special funding for minorities/minority languages. There have been a few Māori immersion schools (Kōhanga Reo/mostly pre-schools), which have gotten special funding. That seems to be continuing at some level.
The fact of the matter is that in (rural) areas with a significant Māori community of speakers, kids will get to hear Te Reo spoken in context outside school. That also applies in a few Pacifica-dominated suburbs in the big city. Otherwise not: English is the only language that’ll get you understood throughout the country.
Languagehat, I disagree. A letter is a VERY close concept. I say so because my Arab friends (linguists included) sometimes say “letter” when they mean “phoneme” but seriosly, before the word “phoneme” was coined European linguists DID understand that the word means two distinct things (the shape and the sound).
And even of Latin alphabet may imperfectly represent phonology of a particular language, it does reflect it, just imperfectly. Similarly, Arabic script very neatly matches peculiarities of their language.
And the role of say, the syllable-initial consonant in Mandarin is markedly different form the role of any consonant in Latin – which again could have affected their graphical preferences.
So yes, some European speakers DO think IN phonemes even when they don’t know the word (and perhaps even when they are illiterate).
“…means two distinct things (the shape and the sound).”
Except that what a letter represents is not exactly the exact sound:)
reading and by extension, writing and spelling, is a biologically innate skill
galloping chomskyism, batman! (with a strong side dish of an “if english was good enough for jesus christ, it’s good enough for me!” relation to cultural history)
OK I’ve now read the article/document at @Hat’s links. I’m feeling confirmed in my assessment as ‘bollox’.
I see the article discusses “work with bilingual Spanish and English children” in U.S. Spanish there has a proportionally far larger speaker community than Te Reo in NZ; and (I would have thought) a ready supply of teaching materials because it’s an international language. So that’s a false parallel.
Well there’s your first problem: that’s an entirely unreliable strategy when it comes to the vagaries of English spelling. Furthermore, the same-looking letters have different sound values in Te Reo[**] vs in English. And different again for Pacifica languages. So doesn’t a learner first need to get clear in their head which language they’re looking at and what is its orthography? This is a tad tricky in NZ because it’s common to mix Te Reo words in with English. For example, the government document repeatedly uses the phrase
(Aside: how would you ‘sound out’ “Schools”?)
Te Reo has no consonant clusters, so sch- is problematic; it has some digraphs but not -ch- nor -sh- nor -th- nor -ph-; and the wh- which appears only word-initial is (should be [***]) a voiceless bilabial fricative more like Old English hw- or modern English f-. ‘u’s sound value is long or double-long (as in kūmara/sweet potato [****]), not as in English ‘cup’. Te Reo has no ‘l’; syllables must end in an open vowel. So ‘kura’ is not an original Te Reo word, it’s a transliteration of ‘school’. (Arguably that should be spelled ‘kūra’.) Te Reo forms plurals by reduplication; except kurakura (homophone) is a rude word.
Bollox with bells on.
[**] Te Reo’s modern orthography was as developed by the NZ Church Missionary Society (see at the link). I vaguely recollect their training/practice was more influenced by German linguistics of the time rather than English orthography. Can anyone confirm/deny that?
[***] In practice, English speakers can’t cope with the voiceless bilabial fricative idea, so they pronounce wh- as in modern English ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘where’, etc. And the proper Te Reo pronunciation was suppressed for so long, that’s how most Māori speakers pronounce it too. Cue stoush with small-town politicians who want to name/spell a colonial-era town as Wanganui, despite it sitting on the Whanganui River.
[****] So the macron in ‘Māori’ means that should be a three-syllable word with stress on the first. Of course macrons were in short supply before modern computers, so there’s much printed material that doesn’t show them, leading to ‘Maori’ getting pronounced as two syllables/with a diphthong if you’re lucky. There’s an older orthographical convention of doubling the vowel: ‘Maaori’, but that doesn’t give -oo- the same sound value as English doubled -oo- as in “school”.
@ rozele. Many good things (e.g., language teaching — the demonstrated success of the audiolingual method) were basically thrown out under Chomsky’s influence. In fact, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (1968) argued that English orthography is “close to optimal”. Lucky no one took them seriously on this one.
argued that English orthography is “close to optimal”
Rejected here. Page 46 of Chump & Halle (1968)
I daresay conventional orthography works for some words. But of course here and throughout, Ch&H are talking about ‘underlying representation’ cp ‘deep structure’; not the phonemics that ordinary mortals would understand. Extended discussion p49 ff. ‘underlying representations’ represent something consistent across “very different dialects” and “resistant to historical change”. “It is a widely confirmed historical fact” of course. So widely confirmed, it’s not necessary to cite any actual evidence beyond Chomsky acolytes.
The guy was a fraud even in 1968.
“audiovisual” – the article in WP says it was also called (the) Army Method – and based on its description this second name is much better/more informative.
The focus on its supposed connection to behaviourism (culminating with a reference someone’s attempt to propose “the generative principle” as the theoretical basis for a modified method) in the article is perplexing.
Surely you won’t care if the method practiced by your football team has a proper scientific motivation if your team wins?
But even formulating (ideally for yourself, but frequently for other) the goal of learning foreign languages (and teaching them in school) is essentially a genre of art. The criteria of your “success” simply can’t be clear. So I guess there are beliefs associated with language learning and the process might have certain esotheric qualities to it.
For example, poeple may want the process to be “natural” in hope that the result (the aquired half-learned Spanish language in your head – which can’t be observed directly!) will also be more “natural” (than someone else’s half-learned Spanish half-learned unnaturally). I guess that’s where scientific foundations come into the equation.
Then every method must have some limitations and testing them (approaching them and then testing) can’t be easy. When your team wins you don’t care about “the theoretical foundations”, when it merely wants to win, you do.
Having sat in on a course in Classical Tibetan that on old grad school friend of mine was teaching earlier this year, I have a ton of questions about phonics vs. whole-word approaches to teaching basic literacy. We spent most of the semester on Tibetan phonics, figuring how to account for a lot of extra consonants depending on where they occurred in relation to the vowel (sometimes unwritten) of each syllable. Doesn’t Devanagari script in Hindi suffer from some of the same (or worse) problems as archaic spellings in English or French? From what I gather, Sanskrit is even worse. Don’t you need “ordered rules” for Sanskrit phonics? Don’t many old Indic and SE Asian scripts suffer from similar issues?
Don’t Japanese students start with phonics to parse the kana, then jump pretty quickly into whole-word(s) mastery of kanji? Do students in China nowadays start with pinyin phonics (or bopomofo phonics in Taiwan), then graduate to whole-word approaches to hanzi.
Hawaiian Ka Leo has many of the same spelling issues as Maori Te Reo that AntC notes. A condo in our neighborhood near the University of Hawai’i is named Hale Kulanui (House Bigschool). I wonder if there are any “Daigaku Mansion” near Japanese universities.
> (Aside: how would you ‘sound out’ “Schools”?)
The first phonogram, s, makes its primary sound, /s/. The second phonogram, ch, makes it’s second most common sound, /k/. The third phonogram, oo, makes its primary sound (and here you’ll have to fill in the IPA yourself because I never can remember the vowels.) The fourth phonogram, l, makes its only sound. The last phonogram, s, makes its second most common sound, /z/.
This isn’t a difficult word to sound out. Why is it that people who are het up against phonics always pick super easy words and then say “I defy you to sound that out!”
Like, pick a hard word!
> Well there’s your first problem: that’s an entirely unreliable strategy when it comes to the vagaries of English spelling.
I think we all can agree that English spelling could stand to be a bit more transparent, however, people often vastly overstate how difficult it is both to encode and decode text. You’ll notice that everybody here is doing it, apparently effortlessly. We’re not all that smart.
Let’s don’t foget us Arabic learners (and Arabic children as well) who insert fatḥas (/a/’s) everywhere untill we/they learn what to expect:)
The audiolingual method involves drills, often transformational, often done in language labs. The idea is to imprint sentence patterns and their variations in the memory, so that reactions become automatic. It was used to great effect in teaching in the Army, etc., where people learnt languages quickly and efficiently (the effects were felt to be amazing). Yes, it had behaviourist underpinnings, but to abandon an effective method because Chomsky had demolished its theoretical underpinnings is ridiculous. Of course there are other methods like “grammar-translation” (which was shown to be less than optimal at teaching people how to actually use languages) and “communicative (which encourages people to learn language by getting them to use it in communicative situations), but getting people to learn by imprinting grammatical habits is a productive and useful approach to foreign-language acquisition. If it works it should be used, not cast out because of Chomsky’s abstract theories.
From what I gather, Sanskrit is even worse. Don’t you need “ordered rules” for Sanskrit phonics?
What do you mean here? What I remember from my Sanscrit lessons is that the relationship between writing and pronunciation is basically 1:1; the difficulty are the sandhi rules that get you from what is said / written to the base forms of words and inflections that you can look up in the grammars and dictionaries. So it’s not a problem of the writing system, but of the spoken language that is encoded by the writing.
You’ll notice that everybody here is doing it, apparently effortlessly.
Emphatically I am not ‘sounding out’ anything in my head. I identify each word as a clump of letters, I mentally look up its meaning. (After all, figuring out the sound doesn’t tell anything of the meaning. Indeed in some cases, I need to know the meaning in order to arrive at the right sound. [**]) As we just saw on the ‘Large-scale Migration’ thread there’s plenty of technical vocab we might only have seen written, and have no idea what’s the correct pronunciation.
But then I’m not a school starter learning to read for the first time/having to get my head round the whole new idea that marks on a page might correspond to talking. Of course those merely need to grok Ch&H’s 240 pages of closely-argued phonemics and
prosodysupra-segments. Silly of me to think there’s any difficulty.And then there’s the problem of how to get from the sound to the spelling.
[**] Like, pick a hard word!
‘reed’ vs ‘read’ vs ‘read’ vs ‘red’. ‘leed’ vs ‘lead’ vs ‘lead’ vs ‘led’. If you think ‘schools’ is easy, please explain why ‘Scholes’ is sometimes like ‘shoals’ /ʃoʊlz/ vs sometimes per ‘skoles’ /skolz/.
Your blah-blah about most-likely pronunciations for segments relies first on correctly segmenting: have a go at explaining ‘mishap’ vs ‘mishanter’ — which are synonyms more-or-less. Or ‘cooperate’ vs ‘cooper’. Then you have the combinatorial explosion for (in ‘school’) five segments times (say) three possible pronunciations each. ‘ghoti’!
At least for Te Reo, the orthography was designed to fit the language/it didn’t evolve over centuries as the language’s pronunciation changed underneath it. But as I said earlier, the English sound-values for those letters are wildly mistle-ding.
Phonics is well-established to be essential for teaching kids how to read, but for some reason that I don’t fully understand, it’s been primarily a right-wing cause going all the way back to the fifties in America, and as such tends to trigger reflexive suspicion from teachers’ unions. Why Johnny Can’t Read seems to be the text that got the ball rolling there. More recently, prioritising phonics became a flagship policy of the Tories in the UK – one of their vanishingly few good moves, along with reintroducing grammar teaching. The idea that phonics somehow endangers L2 teaching makes no logical sense, but can be understood politically, insofar as Anglo right-wing governments generally dislike L2 teaching.
I think it is difficult for teachers to meet expectations from pupils and parents, i.e., there is no “one size fits all” approach, and expectations are not always realistic. In future, I suppose each pupil will have an AI assistant tuned over time (or adjusted by the teacher) to support the pupil in achieving optimal results.
Looking back at the phrase “the educational zeitgeist of the 1970s, emphasizing child-led, discovery-based learning with minimal formal instruction provided by teachers” vaguely reminds me of the case of my nephew, who did an entire assignment on the causes of WWI at high school without actually knowing where or what the continent of Europe was. (He admitted, some ten years afterwards, that he still didn’t know.) I suggested that writing about the causes of WWI without knowing where Europe was might be a bit difficult. He admitted that it was a confusing assignment.
Sometimes children need to be taught the basics, not by emphasising “child-led, discovery-based learning” but by providing formal instruction. This should equally apply to spelling.
When things become politically loaded, it turns into a discussion of which side of the tub the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. This isn’t an either-or, but about different valid approaches to language learning that strengthen eachother if done properly.
(This isn’t the knee-jerk centrist position. Sometimes the baby needs to go, and one side of the tub is better.)
an entire assignment on the causes of WWI at high school without actually knowing where or what the continent of Europe was
I managed to go through the whole of a 1970’s Grammar school without finding out there were _two_ revolutions in C17th England. The school absolutely did not encourage “child-led, discovery-based learning”.
wrt Languages, I got ‘O’ Level Latin with grammar rammed down my throat. Turned out quite useful in later life, but left me incapable of carrying out a conversation in Latin. I got ‘O’ Level French taught by the ‘situational’ method — that is, no grammatical insights at all. Also left me incapable of carrying out a conversation in French — as I discovered when I got to actual France. Did leave me with the overwhelming question: why do French families have pet monkeys? I guess I observed a language with orthography as devilish as English.
without finding out there were _two_ revolutions in C17th England
Only from the 19C on.
#
The English Revolution is a term that describes two separate events in English history. Prior to the 20th century, it was generally applied to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, when James II was deposed and a constitutional monarchy established under William III and Mary II.[1]
However, Marxist historians began using it for the period covering the 1639–1651 Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum that followed the Execution of Charles I in 1649, before the 1660 Stuart Restoration had returned Charles II to the throne.[2] Writing in 1892, Friedrich Engels described this period as “the Great Rebellion” and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as “comparatively puny”, although he claimed that both were part of the same revolutionary movement.[3]
#
As said above, many who come here acquired literacy skills in their native tongue without problems, irrespective of the latest trend imposed by educationalists, and could then get on with other things: a second language for instance. And, certainly in English, and I think in many other languages/writing systems, that applies to the majority of the population.
The problem is : on the left the mantra is equality of outcome and having kids of very different abilities and motivation in the same group, with tacit acceptance that many of them will be held back from developing as quickly as they could.
AntC : ‘O’ Level French – incapable of carrying out a conversation in French. Second language acquisition to real conversational level in school before the age 16 is probably not realistic for the majority of pupils, unless they’re in an environment where the language is active. Once again, unless the kids who can and want to progress quickly are given the chance it’s not going to work.
The new policy in NZ could perhaps better serve bilingualism if it frees up curriculum time for those who want to move on.
@Bathrobe, yes, I’ve read the article in WP and something else too. And I think I once read an account of (or talked to?) someone who was taught this way (when he was a soldier).
Yes, my point too is that you only care about theory – and I mean an actual scientific theory and not speculations (and occasionaly worse: fashions and preferences) whiches are all we have now – when you need to predict performance of something.
When you already have it and it is working, you know that it is working.* If it is good enough for the military then it is good enough for the military.
And the attempt to present it as a method based on generatist approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-lingual_method#In_recent_years) is a really good joke.
No, honestly I fail to even recognise anything behaviourist about it (other than in the sense in which everythign has a behavbiourist component). But I don’t know the behaviourist language theory.
*In reality of course we need to exactly predict many things about language education, like “does this poorly implemented method have the potential for improvement?” “what will happen if we try to reproduce its success in the ‘experimental’ classroom when implemented by its (enthusiastic) author at the scale of our whole (not very enthusiastic) school system? … and if what will happen is exactly collapse, as it happens with most good ideas can it then be fixed by proper training of specialist teachers?” but that does not change the fact that we don’t have a theory, only speculations.
In light of the questions above, the strong side of this method is apparently “no collapse when quickly and forcibly scaled up”. it’s a crop that grows fast and cheap. What is its nutritional value is a different matter.
Emphatically I am not ‘sounding out’ anything in my head. I identify each word as a clump of letters, I mentally look up its meaning. (After all, figuring out the sound doesn’t tell anything of the meaning. Indeed in some cases, I need to know the meaning in order to arrive at the right sound. [**]) As we just saw on the ‘Large-scale Migration’ thread there’s plenty of technical vocab we might only have seen written, and have no idea what’s the correct pronunciation.
If you’ve ever seen a word you hadn’t seen before and figured out that it was a word you’d heard pronounced, you sounded it out.
No one is so foolish as to claim that English orthography always allows you to determine the pronunciation from the spelling or vice-versa. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Chomsky and Halle meant by “close to optimal”. On the other hand, though like many here I learned to read before I went to school, and like you I naturally use the “whole-word” method, I still remember being glad to learn phonics in school. (Two senses of “still”.). It helps remember spellings and figure out unfamiliar words, even if it’s not 100% effective.
For arguing with people who exaggerate how effective phonics is, my favorite common words are “one” and “choir”. My favorite short rare word is “asty”. Is it like “hasty”, “nasty”, or “awry”? (TRAP-BATH splitters may have yet another question.) Does it help to know that it means a colony of bryozoa or other sessile aquatic animals? But I’m annoyed with myself because I actually found out the correct pronunciation—I saw a license plate that read BRYOZOA in a parking lot and naturally asked the driver—and now I’ve forgotten!
@Bathrobe, I think the most popular method (apart of practice with speakers) among Internet polyglotgs is things like the (idiotically expensive) Pimsleur method – I once read someone’s transcript of their Russian tape, but of course I was not going to pay $1200 for having an opportunity to compare yet another method to others (I think now it is mere* $350, not 1200) and cheaper Glossika.
As far as I can tell from transcripts it is a sequence of lines in target languages to which you can listen while walkign or driving.
You’re expected to repeat them and occasionaly to translate something in the target language.
It is similar in some ways to the army method. That is, it can be practiced when you are walking.
To quote WP:
This.
But the other component of the army method is a priory more dubious.
* I remember some guy wrote “I have invested $6000 in my Chinese. Good knowlege can’t be cheap!” – so maybe 1200 is a reasonable price.
> Then you have the combinatorial explosion for (in ‘school’) five segments times (say) three possible pronunciations each. ‘ghoti’!
This is a myth. Those letter combinations do not ever represent those sounds in those positions. Which is why nobody ever would actually come up with that spelling naturally. (For an explanation, gh only represents the sound /f/ at the end of a syllable, and generally at the end of a morpheme, you won’t see it with that meaning at the start of a word, o only represents that vowel in the word women… and not in all dialects, by the way, and ti only represents the sound… um, okay, let’s say sh because I can’t type the IPA here, in the middle of a syllable, as in nation or ratio, never at the end of a word or syllable. And I believe you really do know all that.)
> Emphatically I am not ‘sounding out’ anything in my head. I identify each word as a clump of letters, I mentally look up its meaning.
Have you ever looked up the science of reading? Because I submit to you that your intuition about what is going on in your mind is… well, wrong. This is something that I think I know a lot about for an interested amateur, due to my own interest in the subject and also the fact that my niblings are dyslexic. All the evidence suggests that people do sound words out – fluent readers just do it really really fast, so fast they don’t necessarily know they’re doing it.
> If you think ‘schools’ is easy, please explain why ‘Scholes’ is sometimes like ‘shoals’ /ʃoʊlz/ vs sometimes per ‘skoles’ /skolz/.
Because it’s a German name?
> relies first on correctly segmenting: have a go at explaining ‘mishap’ vs ‘mishanter’ — which are synonyms more-or-less.
Of course. There is definitely an element of straight memorization involved. But the thing is, “co oper” isn’t a word, and neither is “coop er ate”. So if you sound out the word and you come up with something that makes no sense, you go back and sound it out again. Obviously this isn’t perfect when it comes to new and unfamiliar words, but it works well enough.
> For arguing with people who exaggerate how effective phonics is, my favorite common words are “one” and “choir”.
Indeed, there are plenty of English words – mostly very common words – that have spellings that are unintuitive and for more reasons than simply “Okay, so that vowel letter represents a schwa”. “One” isn’t a bad example, though my go-to that I’d like to see people say, ever, other than simple words like “school” is “two”.
The writing system certainly isn’t perfect. There never would be a perfect writing system, but absolutely, it could be better.
However, again, it’s not *impossible* to sound out *most* words, and to make an honest stab at the majority remaining and come up with something plausible. Literacy in the Anglosphere is pretty high.
_two_ revolutions in C17th England
With the Newtonian Revolution, that makes three.
the other component of the army method :
Teacher: There’s a cup on the table … repeat
Students: There’s a cup on the table
Teacher: Spoon
Students: There’s a spoon on the table
This is a kind of activity included in every method. Just simplified and worked out to authomatism. I think one of accounts of this method that I read (I’m not sure if it was one or more) compared it to assembling and disassembling a rifle.
Is this going to be efficient? For soldiers (especially in absence of good teachers) – yes. But
– the limitations are clear
– its efficience for what it is efficient for is debatable because this component is present as a component in other methods. If we indeed are going to focus on this component and neglect others (which is usually not the goal) – perhaps something better can be devised. “Debatable” means, one should try this and then compare the result before speaking of relative efficacy.
And the third component is as I understand absence of instruction in your native langauge (and pictures).
On unintuitively spelled words: “One” isn’t a bad example, though my go-to that I’d like to see people say, ever, other than simple words like “school” is “two”.
Has anyone ever suggested to six-year-olds that the /w/ in “two” got moved to “one”?
Yin, twa, three, fower …
Like the /h/ in Amherst getting moved to Northampton (which is pronounced North-hampton).
“Sometimes children need to be taught the basics, not by emphasising “child-led, discovery-based learning” but by providing formal instruction. ”
I honeslty don’t understand why.
I know, we all were formally taught this or that. Some of it remains on our heads. That is all I know.
One of the main drivers (or the main driver now, but not when most people were illiterate) behind school education is our desire to make our children experience same things that shaped ourselves.
I’m not ready to say that children ‘need’ it even ‘sometimes’ without a good (and specific) reason for saying so.
I am familiar with efficient and well implemented “discovery-based learning” in math education** (if what I described can be called so), I know some of its weaknesses (I don’t know for example, what problems I will enocunter when applying the same to children who don’t love math as dearly as my own classmates and students) and its strong sides.
Grumbling at it because it sounds as “one of those fashionable ideas” makes no sense for me because for me it is simply the best part of MY own experience (that ‘experience’ which everyone wants to make her children experience as well). It is hardly inefficient: out of 16 kids in the class 12 are scientists now*, others work in Google etc. and one who does not love mathematics trades stocks and is rich. (I’m the loser among them:)))))
* but I must add that there also was usual formal instruction in math.
** also discovery-based learning is what PhD students and working researchers do:)))))))
I managed to go through the whole of a 1970’s Grammar school without finding out there were _two_ revolutions in C17th England. The school absolutely did not encourage “child-led, discovery-based learning”.
What it looks to me like it encouraged was a very, um, smoothed-out knowledge of national history. Revolutions are things that happen in other countries. We English have Common Sense and Fair Play instead.
All countries do this, of course. The actual on-the-ground realities of American genocide and slavery always shock Americans who learned in school only the bare fact of their existence.
I say the town name Amherst that way, but reading the comment made me realize that when confronted with namesake Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, I pronounce the aitch. And then run away to avoid getting smallpox.
By the way, why does Hilary Smith refer to “te Reo Màori” but “Samoan” and “Mandarin”, not (*checks Wikipedia*) “Gagana Sāmoa” and “Guānhuà”? Is that usual in New Zealand?
I guess only the society can benefit from shared knowlege of “what’s Europe” and “what are the causes of WWI”.
And this shared knowlege is going to be very sketchy.
I don’t see how this knowlege can be useful to an individual.
So the society… Can it benefit?
The cause of Hitler’s invasion in Russia (rather than “of WWII”) from the Russian perspective is mostly that Hitler is an asshole and Nazis are perfectly dehumanised evil.
Not even human beings.
The causes of Hitler’s popularity are discussed in school, but… this did not really help me to recognise that we are in the very same situation described in school until the annexation of Crimea.
The contribution of what Germans (in general) felt at the time or what specific people around Hitler felt at the time (but there were not any people, only Nazis, see above) in Hitler’s ambitions is not discussed.
Then if you compare the annexation of Crimea to that of Sudetes Russians will take offence because for them it would mean that Putin is like Hitler (he is not) or worse that we are not human beings but perfectly dehumanised evil which is impossible (only Ukrainians can be so).
I’m not sure it is different for Westerners, i mean, I’m not sure that they will analyse the similarity of the two situations in terms of “what people feel” (sentiments and group dynamics) and “what is the situation” or analyse anything rather than merely concluding “it is similar to what Hitler did and that’s why it is wrong”.
In other words: this history is taught inadequately but would it help if it were taught adequately?
@JF, I would guess that it’s because the Māori care, and the Sāmoans and the Mandarin speakers in NZ don’t.
I see the Army method (as drasvi insists on calling it — I wonder why) as a sophisticated form of rote learning. I don’t see it as anything more than that. Of course you can achieve a similar result with the grammar-translation method (applying grammar rules in your head as you try to put sentences together). Maybe you could achieve the same with generative grammar, who knows? But rote learning can be useful and shouldn’t be banished merely because Chomsky theorises that we all innately have grammar in our heads and don’t need to be trained like Pavlov’s dogs. (Multiplication tables are another form of rote learning. You will never become a famous mathematician by learning them but they are still taught because they are useful.)
(Incidentally, the “Army method” was not used to teach common soldiers; it was used to teach people who needed to reach proficiency in a short period of time — for intelligence work, etc.,etc. It was developed by linguists and adopted because it yielded results fast, not because it was innately militaristic or required a high level of “discipline”.)
I do not think iaudio-lingual methods are the be-sll and end-all of language learning, but there were times when I was sitting in classrooms learning Mongolian from conventional old-style language teachers that a bit of “Army-style” rote learning would have been helpful. Just as I found that textbooks written by linguistics-oriented teachers were, if well done, were more helpful than textbooks by people who mindlessly relied on conventional grammar (and I do have one specific textbook in mind.)
In other words: this history is taught inadequately but would it help if it were taught adequately?
Sure: to take an example far from your country and mine, to avoid parti pris, the loathsome Ron Desantis is keen to corrupt American history teaching by stressing the benefits of chattel slavery for the chattels. Opposing this sort of perversion strikes me as eminently likely to “help.”
US army methods for teaching exotic languages during WW2 were largely developed by academic linguists (some of them very eminent.)
One feels that Chomsky might have been rather less useful in this role than his distinguished Structuralist predecessors were.
I guess only the society can benefit from shared knowlege of “what’s Europe” and “what are the causes of WWI”.”
“Europe” is, of course, a conventional geographical concept. It’s also Eurocentric. But if someone says “I’m going on a trip to Europe” (which many Australians do) and you don’t have the faintest idea what countries they might be visiting (Venezuela? Mozambique?), then there is a rather glaring gap in your “general knowledge”. I don’t know how he got to his 20s without knowing where Europe is, but there you are. As for “the causes of World War One”, that is a standard sort of history question. It’s not fundamental to “general knowledge “, although some knowledge of which countries were involved would be. And, of course, if your country was involved in the war, which was immensely destructive and wasteful of human life, your motives for dissecting the question might not be completely dispassionate. But as I said, it was a school assignment. I was curious how you could seriously tackle a complex historical issue without any basic geographical knowledge, and more importantly, without any intellectual curiosity about where this mysterious place called “Europe” might be.
But even if we all have “grammar” innately in our heads to facilitate learning oral/aural fluency in whatever natural language we may happen to be exposed to as toddlers, it does not at all follow that we all have reading, writing, or a general ability to convert the L1 spoken language we have learned “naturally” as toddlers into or out of glyphs following some particular society’s orthographic conventions. This was mentioned upthread I know, but I encourage resisting the temptation to bash aspects of Chomsky that are irrelevant to the specific Bad Idea to be bashed in this thread.
Separately, the original article being criticized suggests that the author has expertise on account of being an “Honorary Research Fellow (Linguistics) at Massey University.” I’m not familiar with “honorary research fellow” being a thing in the context of U.S. universities. Can someone familiar with N.Z. (or perhaps general-Commonwealthish?) university practice tell us what that title does or does not actually imply about the holder’s role, if any, in linguistics research conducted by or at that university? Wikipedia informs me FWIW that the settler-colonialist Massey University is more properly known by its indigenous name Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa.
@JF why does Hilary Smith refer to “te Reo Màori” but “Samoan” and “Mandarin”, not (*checks Wikipedia*) “Gagana Sāmoa” and “Guānhuà”? Is that usual in New Zealand?
Yes. And the first is usually abbreviated to ‘Te Reo’, as I did above. (“Mandarin’ is a lot more rare than ‘Chinese’, because NZers outside of the Chinese communities can’t/don’t distinguish the much older waves of Cantonese and Southern Min speakers vs more recent Mandarin.)
@JWB Wikipedia informs me FWIW that the settler-colonialist Massey University is more properly known by its indigenous name Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa.
Emm, then wp is misleading you. It’s known and recognised as ‘Massey University’ throughout the country and internationally. ‘wokeness’ (in the eyes of the new right-leaning government) has given its Te Reo name equal billing, but that’s no more “proper” of a name. Is it so weird in a bilingual country that everything would have two names?
Massey is (or at least was, when it was based purely in Palmerston North) a leader in distance education. Because much of NZ is remote from any centre of learning, and PN itself is remote from anywhere — it was promoted as a kind of new town, think Milton Keynes. wp says “the only university in New Zealand offering degrees in … veterinary medicine.” — so it’s absolutely crucial to livestock farming.
I believe ‘Honorary Research Fellow’ would be a semi-retired role, probably without significant teaching load. Something like ‘Emeritus Professor’? The link’s to a whole wp article on ‘Honorary’ whatever. Claims they _are_ a thing in American Universities. Perhaps you’re going to dishonourable establishments?
I see the Army method (as drasvi insists on calling it — I wonder why)
@Bathrobe, I find it a better name. More informative. Not only it is suits specific army needs (teaching a large crowd of soldiers – presumably inexperienced as students – to communicate with locals ASAP in absence of good teachers) it does recemble army drills.
But there is a serious problem with this label: it can be misleading if soldiers are not taught this way anymore.
My attitude to ANY method is: “language is a forest which you can enter from different directions using differnt paths [and find yourself at CEFR B1, that is lower intermedaite level]” – All work, all have limitations.
Perhaps there is a method that is “better” because for example it more closely reproduces a baby’s experience and [at the same proficiency level B] provides a better foundation for your further advance (if your goal is to understand the language on par with native speakers), but our science of applied linguistics is hardly capable of identifying such a method among many.
I am not ready to call this one “good” because it is hardly enjoyable – but it must be efficient. I’m not hostile to it. A label “army” can sound as a negative characteristic… Because of drills etc. Yet this methods suits your needs army needs, those very needs that create some (not all) “negative” connonations of the word “army”.
“as a sophisticated form of rote learning. ”
I’m definitely not against rote learning. drasvi method is “memorise 70 songs” (which does imply analysing the lyrics! I usually memorise songs by 1. listening to them anyway 2. having analysed the lyrics. After this I simply remember most of the song) and
– you’ll know 70 songs (I guarrantee that!)
– you’ll perhpas have enjoyed some of the process
– you will have a sufficiently large vocabulary and know sufficiently many constructions to understand some of what you read and hear in the language. Then there many trajectories from there – inluding “attractive trajectories” and “easy trajectories” – which were not open to you at first.
-you will WANT to consult the grammar (if you’re not a drasvi who enjoys reading them anyway) and able to benefit from it (if you are a drasvi).
Sadly, i never tried my method. A dozen of long songs can happen to me on its own – just because I’m in the habit of analysing lyrics of songs I like and because after having analysed one I remember it.
One per an evening.
Means hundreds (can be more than a thousand if songs are long…) of words and can indeed be enough to understand some of what I read and hear. I just think 70 must be better than 10 or 20:))))))
I’d gladly have sold it to anyone here for mere $1200 (or better 8400…. or…) if you kindly come here – or to any interesting country like Georgia or Mali – to hand the sum to me in cash.
But please, don’t capitalise it. It is a method. Not “Method”.
I will NOT return the money even if after having memorised 70 songs you won’t know 70 songs:(
I’ll have them spent already:( (women and alcohol… Rather the first of these)
“…it does not at all follow that we all have reading, writing, or a general ability to convert the L1 spoken language we have learned “naturally” as toddlers into or out of glyphs following some particular society’s orthographic conventions. ”
@JWB, deaf people learn to sign and read as well.*
It does seem plausible at least that the language machinery of our brains that processes speech can also work with visual input in the very same fashion.
I’m not sure what it says about “learning to read” when you already can speak it (is not learning logograms like learning a similarly structured second langauge?), but there is at least the possibility that relationship of the postulated Chomskian grammar-in-heads which (to quote you) “facilitates learning oral/aural fluency” to the text is pretty much same as to the aural input/oral output.
The input is structured very differently though: you don’t teach toddlers to read by texting them (or your spouse in their presence). Maybe some parents of deaf children do. I don’t know.
___
One internet polyglot (the mezzofanti guild) loves to repeat that learning a language without actually speaking/listening is like learning to play a musical instrument from books, without practicing it. The site has a forum, not very popular.
And one thread is some deaf guy’s request for recomendations for deaf learners.
@Bathrobe, you reminded me of a sad story I once told here.
A girl from … Indonesia? Malaysia? asked on a forum if Europe is safe. Her sister was goint to travel there, alone. She technically could forbid her to do so.
And she worried, because you know all those terrible things that happen to young Malay ladies in Europe (she was having in mind the stories of local girls receiving – back home in Malaysia or Indonesia – job proposals onl;y to find themselves in a borthel and based on these stories was afraid of Europe)..
I wrote something there which she found intellegent apparently so she PMed me. I did not know what to do, so I found some stats, and these stats of course made her fear much more than before.
I still don’t know what to do in such cases. I would not be afraid to send my own daugter (I don’t have one) to “Europe”, but safety depends on knowlege of where and when to go and not to go, usually aquired from local peers/freinds if you have any (others often follow boring and safe tourist routes) and I know nothing about the pair “Malay girl and Europe”. Sex slavery does exist, normally I think it is Hungarian girls receiving those job offers from some richier country, not Malay tourists (and yet I can’t be sure).
Because of my intervention some curious young lady 1. did not go to Europe 2. has complicated relationship with her sister and I 3. knew it is going to happen but 4. I normally answer questions addressed to me the best I can and as honestly as I can. Simply telling “Europe is all right” would be manipulative.
teaching a large crowd of soldiers – presumably inexperienced as students
As I tried to point out to you, it was not a method of teaching a large crowd of soldiers, nor was it designed to facilitate communication with locals as quickly as possible. If this is your reason for persisting in the use of “Army method”, this so-called “informative” name mainly appears to be designed to prop up your own preconceptions.
The Audiolingual approach was developed on the basis of Structuralist linguistics, which (in its purest Skinnerian form) viewed language-learning by the infant as “behaviour” instilled by contact with its environment (parents, etc.). Chomsky famously demolished Skinnerian behaviourism in linguistics, substituting his own concept of an innate language ability (as expressed in his ideas of “Universal Grammar”). Since a child already has a “Universal Grammar” in his head, all that is required to learn a language is exposure to actual language, which then actuates innate switches for left-headedness, right-headedness, etc, etc. So no need at all for drills of the Audiolingual type.
I would not rule out the possibility that teachers found the Audiolingual method not totally satisfactory in teaching foreign languages — and I have read articles saying as much. However, at the time (WWII and post-war) it was apparently found to be remarkably successful in teaching people foreign languages quickly, so I am sceptical. It seems to me that it basically “fell out of fashion”.
@Bathrobe, I did not say it is “a method of” teaching a crowd of soldiers.
I said that
(a) teaching a crowd of soldiers is “army needs”
(b) it suits.
Now, when I prefer the name I do of course imply that it works especially well in this situation. And more over, it have been famously used in this situation.
But I do not imply that it won’t work for others.
Moreover, my preference is based on what it tells of the essence of the method (the drills). Why on earth the name must hide the fact that
???
If you want to say that there is nothing wrong with “drills” – what is the problem with the label which makes people think of… drills?
Every method is “-lingual” and every student today uses “audio-“. “Audiolingual” is simply very uninformative.
And no I don’t see such a basis. I mean, maybe you’re right and it was developed on such a basis. But it is as behaviourist as anything we do.
And well, I DO understand what is the problem with the label. Indeed, many people will object to introduction of something called “Army method” in schools. No, I don’t intend to promote this name. For my (!!!) purposes the name is better than “audiolingual” so when WP offered two names I chose the one I personally found much more informative. But perhaps it needs some other name.
____
It can work ‘better’ than other methods in army but it technically can’t work “better” in school for a simple reason: it has limitations and the GOALS of school lanhuage education are poorly defined.
It simply won’t teach you some things. Other methods won’t teach you some other things.
True, you only said that it is suits specific army needs (teaching a large crowd of soldiers – presumably inexperienced as students – to communicate with locals ASAP in absence of good teachers.
So you are admitting that you find it a suitable name since it fits your impressions. Have you ever used the method yourself? I have, back in its heyday. I understood the grammar and had lots of practice in it (conversation classes, reading Japanese short stories, also linguistics lectures), and maybe I would have learnt Japanese without such drills. But they certainly helped reinforce fluency because the structure you want pops out automatically, without juggling grammar in your head. I missed that in Mongolian because, as I got older, memorising and using patterns got harder. Of course I could understand the grammar intellectually (I have a background in linguistics, after all) but being able to produce structures semi-automatically would have helped a lot in increasing fluency and in retaining structures in memory.
And more over, it have been famously used in this situation
Could you please provide some kind of reference. I’ve never head of it being “famously” used in this situation.
my point too is that you only care about theory…. When you already have it and it is working, you know that it is working.
On the contrary, I do not care only about theory; I was arguing that the method does work (within its limitations, of course), and that it is objectionable that it has (arguably) been rejected due to new fads in linguistic theory.
I wrote: you only care about theory when you need to predict something.
Otherwise there is simply no point in discussing the theory. My point is that “theory” is not how you measure (current) efficience of (current implementations) of methods and when WP speaks of people who argue for and agains this method based on some speculative reasoning that they mistakenly call “theory” – i’m perplexed.
@ drasvi
My apologies for misunderstanding. We finally agree on something.
It’s called Audiolingual because 1. it is based on the spoken language (not written passages) and 2. it involves drills involving listening to and repeating/modifying sentences and structures.
No, I did not use the method. But it is a combination of familiar elements.
Everyone does similar things and I think we can have some reasonable expectations as to what it is going to give to learners. I coudn’t predict that you’ll “miss it in Mongolian” but its effect on fluency is fairly obvious. Because we all do somewhat similar things.
And what’s the problem?
Do you disagree that it suits army needs and have been famously used for this?
Do you disagree that in school it technically can be “the best available” method because it does not teach you some things?
Nowhere I said that is should not be used in school.
Do you disagree that it suits army needs and have been famously used for this?
Yes. I disagree with this. Firstly, I disagree that it is suited to “Army needs” in the sense that you understand it, and secondly, I have yet to hear examples of it being used to train large numbers of combat soldiers for communicating with the local populace. I repeat, I would like a reference for this “famous” use of the method. You mentioned “I think I once read an account of (or talked to?) someone who was taught this way (when he was a soldier)” but with the vagueness of your memory, I’m wondering if this was even the method involved.
Much of your commentary has been devoted to the military connotations of the method (“assembling and disassembling a rifle”, “suits specific army needs”, “teaching a large crowd of soldiers”….), which appears to be due to your fixation on the term “Army method”.
You also assert that “it is a combination of familiar elements”. Only familiar if you are acquainted with its various spinoffs or variations. Would it have been familiar to 19th century language students steeped in “grammar-translation”? Maybe some teachers came up some kind of variation in their classrooms. But the method was developed in a specific way on a specific linguistic basis (spoken language, repetition, syntactic drills of various types, conversational drills of various types), not as an amalgam of existing theories.
When I learned Breton (and as result learned instead some French because books about Breton are in French) I did something arguably bad.
I did my homework on my way to the lesson. And I memorised vocabulary in the train (11 minutes).
11 minutes were enough, but I merely read the list (Breton, transcription, translation) out loud (the train was noicy so no one heard) several times (the first column as if it were Latin), then hid columns 2 and 3 behind a sheet of paper (sliding down line by line) and read it out loud again a few times (fields from columns 2 and 3 from memory) until I was sure I remember all translations and then hid columns 1 and 2 and repeated until I was sure I remember all spellings and pronunciations.
It is NOT the same. Of course vocabulary learned this way is torn away from evertying (from networks of associations and context), it facilites reading/listening but it won’t make you fluent, while the audiolinguial method is about constructions.
But I still occasionaly remember some word from those lists and can hear my voice reading all the three corresponding entires one after the other.
This is to say: yes, I know that rote memorisation can be powerful.
AntC: Thanks for answering my question. And Y: Thanks for the suggestion about the underlying reason.
“a reference” – WP?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-lingual_method#Historical_roots
“…which appears to be due to your fixation on the term “Army method”.” – “Fixation” on this term in a comment fully dedicated to explaining WHY I prefer it is natural.
You wrote “as drasvi insists on calling it — I wonder why”. I explained. Now it is my “fixation”. Thanks:)
Othterwise no, I just used “audiolingual” in the comment above. Because I’m talking to you and you prefer this name.
@ drasvi
Thank you for the reference hiding in plain sight.
Since we are quoting Wikipedia, please also note what WP says: “Because of the influence of the military, early versions of the audio-lingualism came to be known as the “army method.””
@JF/@Y suggestion about the underlying reason.
Māori culture and language has explicit formal recognition in NZ’s constitution. Pacifica languages do not; but in practice for Auckland as NZ’s largest city/the largest city in Polynesia/with larger communities of Sāmoans, Tongans, Fijians [**] than back in each island group, government/community services have to be able to operate in those languages.
The position of Chinese languages are different: there’s (or at least until recently there was) frequent interchange for them with mainland China. The Chinese communities are generally wealthy/don’t interact so much with community services; but do facilitate NZ’s international trade — which is alarmingly reliant on Chinese manufactured imports and for processing our raw material exports. In terms of language teaching, the alphabetisation/’sounding out’ approach doesn’t apply. As far as Chinese parents are concerned, the kids are here to learn English as the international language. Mandarin they can manage for themselves, thank you very much.
[**] I see The Conversation’s article makes specific mention of Hindi: this is Fijian Indians kicked out of the country by a whole succession of nationalist governments; mainland India Hindi speakers not so much.
this is Fijian Indians kicked out of the country by a whole succession of nationalist governments
Ah! I was wondering about that.
Bathrobe, I don’t insist on it.
I thought that given (a) WP speaks of its military use (b) I heard about it and (c) (if WP is accurate here and the name “Army method” is a widely used name) people called it so, its military use is at least a prominent episode in its history.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Note that when you’re interested in teaching or learning Arabic dialects you may come across materials produced by DLI. They also rank languages by difficulty and produce more esotheric stuff like language aptitude test (“defence language aptitude battery”). War is one of very few fields where people need langauges (as opposed to a lingua franca). For me “army” does not mean “stupid”, it means: clearly defined.
I did not mean for example, that the method is useless for students like you or when you have good teachers.
But when you don’t have good teachers and need to teach a crowd of soldiers something like this becomes your natural choice. And they do not need BAD methods (people who wasted months and still can’t talk to locals). You say “fluency” – but army drills too are about fluency (with rifles etc). Doing things without having to think for a second or two.
Ah! I was wondering about that.
Yeah, bloody Brits again. Although Fiji was never exactly a colony in the same way as NZ (because the Chieftain system was allowed to persist, so native Fijians retained independence of a sort/it was beneath their dignity to be (wage-)slaves), the Brits brought indentured labour from India to work the sugar cane. The two communities never integrated, and as the leases on the plantations expired, the Indians essentially lost any right of residence. The first and only Fijian Indian majority government 1999 got ousted in a coup. Bloody stupid of the Fijians IMO because it’s only the Indians who keep the tourism industry going.
Part of the deal with UK handing independence back to Fiji was rights of residence in NZ. And that is a Good Thing because I get to eat decent curry. (And good for the Indians because Fiji economically is now a basket-case.)
Colonialism: it’s complicated.
When I learnt using the Audiolingual method, the teachers in the ordinary classes were excellent, and they were also the ones who produced the language-lab materials. We also had specific language-lab classes. Not everyone felt the need to use the language lab outside of class, but I did because I was a good, dutiful little 17 year-old. I possibly didn’t need to at all, but I know that when I went to Japan after three years of studying in a classroom (and language lab) situation, I hit the ground running. Pretty much fully functional within a week or two. As I said, when I studied Mongolian at a much older age I missed the mindless voiced-out-loud drills because they would have helped me a lot. But Audiolingual materials require a great deal of time and effort to prepare, so I can understand why no one in Mongolia felt the need to produce any. (Mongolian-for-foreigners in Mongolia is still relatively recent, post 1990 at any rate, and well past the glory days of the Audiolingual method.)
I am under no illusions as to the wartime origins of the method; it’s just that insisting on a particular name (which is not so widely used) despite having no real experience with it, apart from what you’ve read on Wikipedia, and suggesting that it might be useful “if you don’t have good teachers”, seems misguided to me. The method can be (and has been) extensively used outside a military context, which you seem to be playing down through your persistent focus on its military use.
Another plus of Audiolingual learning in language labs is that you record your own voice and can hear it played back if you wish. This helps a lot in improving your pronunciation and intonation.
“and suggesting that it might be useful “if you don’t have good teachers”” – No. It must be more useful than many other methods when you don’t have good teachers. This does not mean it is not useful when you have a good teacher.
“it’s just that insisting on a particular name (which is not so widely used) despite having no real experience with it” I don’t insist. I prefer it. I am what I am. Being mylsef I find this name more informative.
People who use it do not need the name to be “informative” at all:)
“Another plus of Audiolingual learning in language labs is that you record your own voice and can hear it played back if you wish. This helps a lot in improving your pronunciation and intonation.”
@Bathrobe, try Glossika. It has Mongolian from the very beginning of its history as a puiblisher of learning materials (initially it was a youtube channel), even before it added Korean. The overlap is significant, it even has “transformation drills” which I imagine are similar to drills in the method over whose good name we’re fighting:) But the main idea is i think what is called “spaced repetition”.
I do not use any method and have never used any (other than by browsing a textbook implementing a method). But I am curious about materials for teaching Russian and as I have Arab freinds who teach Arabic I also explored various stuff about Arabic (and Berber but there is not much for Berber) even when I’m not going to use it
Also I have been hanging on a site full of polyglots (in the sense of a subculture), language teachers and their likes. I was reading and enjoying Russian essays, but I read what they were discussing in English too. Idiotic expensive Pimsleur is what polyglots praise, Glossika is its cheaper (a bit different) alternative which most of them use because only a few can afford Pimsleur (Russians would just download it from soemwhere for free…) and because what are Pimsleur’s 40 languages for a self-respecting polyglot:)
To the extent it is a version of the method you’re speaking about, it is still extremely popular among language learners.
I believe the site has some free materials.
One of the first links in google is this: their three mongolian textbooks – or thier first version if they evolved (by the method’s author and someone Gungaadash Oyunsuren, so “no one in Mongolia felt the need to produce any.” was not true in 2015*). I think usual online libraries also have them. Wihtout audio, but can give some idea of how it is structured.
(I understand that at the moment you’re presumably fluent enough and don’t need such stuff anymore)
PS ‘*Or it was.
I remembered what was the problem with Glossika. People told that contents are same for all languages! If ture (if I remembered that correctly) it is a significant drawback. In that case the Mongolian author can be a translator and not an author.
Oh, wow. Its Wu, Welsh, Hokkien, Manx, Sorani Kurdish, Sixin Hakka, Hailu Hakka and “Gaelic” (not “Irish”) courses are said to be free.
But no Kusaal (and no langauges of China other than Sinitic and no Africa other than Swahili and Egyptian and Moroccan Arabics)
Thanks for the footwork. The Glossika sample page I saw was not very impressive. Like:
Тэр сурч байсан юм.
Ter surch baisan yum.
1. Pronunciation: Mongolians in ordinary conversation are more likely to say Тэр сурчайсийн. Ter surchaisiin (=ng).
2. Naturalness: Adding ‘ter’ for ‘she’ is ok, except my feeling is that it’s just as likely to be omitted.
Or
Тэр өглөөний цайгаа ууж байхад шуудан ирсэн.
1. Pronunciation: Тэр өглөөний цайгаа уужайхад шуудан ирсэн. Ter öglöönii tsaigaa uujaihad shuudan (=ng) irsen (=ng)
2. Naturalness: Why is the word шуудан (mail) repeated when the English sees fit to reduce it to ‘it’. If you’re answering the preceding question, just leave it out. And тэр is also possibly superfluous.
As you suggested, it sounds like someone has just translated the sentences into standard written Mongolian.
I might be missing something but substitution, expansion, and transformation drills are nowhere to be seen. This is not ‘audiolingual’, except in the sense that you can hear it spoken as opposed to reading off the page.
Funnily, here a user complains that Japanese “originals” (translations) don’t match English “translations” (originals) and the representative of glossika explains that Japanese culture is high-context:)
Yes, they translate from English:(
Transformation drills can be found in the textbook, but I think mostly it is just listen – repeat – listen to your voice, listen in English – translate etc. It recembles the audiolingual method in that it is repetition > automatism > fluency. I mentioned it because you emphasised the part about working in the language lab.
Of course they aim at functional equivalents: literal translations would have turned the course in complete garbage. With less literal tranlsations one can hope that their Welsh course mostly is not garbage.
Translations from English explain why they are willing to expand to Kurdish and Wu etc. But I am not sure I’m willing to try these even for free.
Oh, and I even understand mae hi’n braf heddiw.
Unsurprisingly, for the Russian Breton course makes the same subtle observation about the weather:))))
“The weather’s nice today” is given as the translation, but more literally it is “it is fine today” in Welsh (though I can’t understand their forms of to be – this language is extremely rich with them). Textbook Breton an amzer (a) zo brav hiziv would be understood as “the time is fine” in Welsh.
I wonder how braf (“Borrowed from Middle French brave, from Italian bravo, from Medieval Latin *bravus, from a conflation of Latin pravus with barbarus. Cognate with Breton brav.“) reached Welsh.
If it is from pravus, it is funny. Bad>bold>good.
Russian хороший “good” from хоробрый “brave” is a similar semantical development (can it be a calque?).
Russian хороший “good” from хоробрый “brave”
Well, that’s one suggestion, but it doesn’t seem that compelling to me (even though Vasmer puts it first in his list). Wiktionary has a different one.
@LH, agreed.
But the entry in ESSJa for *xorostь? (with a question mark in ESSJa) is unimressive.
Attested in a Russian dialect (Kostroma region) in senses “convenience, beauty, pleasantness”. Dahl notes its plural form in the adjacent uyezd of Nizhni Novgorod region in the sense “beauty” – these two can be counted as one, I suppose.
And in some dialet of the very west of Belarus хороство in the same sense “beauty”.
Хороший DID mean “beautiful” (the only meaning attested in Dahl by the way), though in modern Russian it became just good (only its diminutive хорошенький means “pretty”).
And what it is derived from?
*xorъjь? – dialectal Czech chory “dark, black” (the two examples given are “dark/black flour” and “dark/black bread”, Polich chory “black (about flour, bread)”.
(the text is in Russian and “black bread” is how we call rye bread in Russian so one can’t even be sure – based on this entry – that the Czech/Polish word is understood in the colour sense:(((().
And he offers to compare it to
*xarъjь – a somewhat better attested word.
Bulgarian харый “spoiled”
Slovene harè gen haréta “old horse”
Czech charý “gloomy, delapidated” and in dialects “worn-out, скверный” (скверный 1.bad 2 nasty)
Russian Karelian dialectal харо “strongly/powerfully”
“Possibly” Czech dialectal and Russian Karelian dialectal charuzna “old house” and харзина “bad house”.
____
What? I mean, well, yes, IF there was xor- in PS, there could be xor-stь “xor-ness” too. Why not add -ness.
Now, how does he relate this -ness word from a root whose only modern reflex is a West Slavic word for dark/rye bread, but which has a better attested but unflattering -a- variant to хороший?
From a lake name Xoрошно (xorošno) “the name of a lake in the mouth of Lovat” (Lovat’s mouth opens to the lake Ilmen, so it must be some smaller lake in or around the delta) he reconstructs an adjective *xoročšьnъ (no question marks) by adding a č…
Is the whole point of adding this č to connect it to the previous imaginary entry?
And then he forgets about the lake and lists хороший “beatiful” words.
Including Belarussian verbs for peeling (some western, others unspecified region, one is glossed чистить “1 to clean, scour 2. to peel”, others are “чистить (about vegentables, fish etc.)”)..
Then a beautiful explanation (for *xoročšьnъ):
:/
*skrestí “to scrape, to scrub, to scratch”, čístitʹ “1. to clean, scour, 2. to peel”.
Yes, I’m afraid none of the suggestions are all that convincing.
Well, I get the idea. ESSJa thinks that all those forms radiated of the former *sker- Cf. the ideas regarding deriving of храм from a *scr-something and ESSJa derivation of *xrьbьtъ ( > хребет) from *screb-[ti]. He frequently tries x-<sc- or at least xr- <scr- etymologies.
So the logic is:
“we can’t explain this x- word. Let’s check if anything will come out from replacing it with a sk-.”.
Once he has connected it to *sker-/*skor- all he needs is explaining the ш in хороший (which you have to explan somehow anyway).
And here he introduces the suffixed form.
@AntC: Thanks for the additional information. I still find it odd that New Zealanders use “te reo Māori” in English, since in other bilingual or multilingual countries I know about, people refer to the other languages with exonyms. But there are lots of things in the world that I find odd.
Drasvi’s «Army method » seems to just be the Berlitz method, except Berlitz used (still uses?) live teachers. It is an economically appealing model for a language school because the teachers don’t require a lot of training- just plug and play with the repetitive materials.
@JF: That’s a trend in many places, with the idea of showing respect to minorities by accepting their ethnonyms or their preferred spellings. I see Diné a lot where in the past you’d see only Navajo, and in B.C. people write down Hul̓q̓umin̓um̓ for Halkomelem and St̓at̓imcets for Lillooet, even if they can pronounce them.
(That said, I can’t make myself get used to the all-caps orthography of SENĆOŦEN, a.k.a. Saanich.)
The English seem to be in no hurry to call us “Cymry.” Though, to be fair, many people perfectly entitled to call themselves “Cymry” are in no hurry to do so either. But I suspect the proportion of our ethnic group who are competent in the traditional tongue is no lower than in many of these other cases.
proportion of our ethnic group who are competent in the traditional tongue is no lower than in many of these other cases.
“Māori” is the exonym — it means merely ‘ordinary, usual’. The indigenes didn’t need to distinguish themselves before the Europeans turned up.
There’s plenty of Māori words in common use in NZ (albeit with tortured pronunciation), and plenty of placenames, so using ‘Te Reo’ doesn’t seem a big stretch. I take DE’s point, though, that there’s far fewer competent in the tongue, even amongst those who identify as Māori.
“Māori” is the exonym — it means merely ‘ordinary, usual’. The indigenes didn’t need to distinguish themselves before the Europeans turned up.
Maybe. If it meant ‘authentic, genuine’ and therefore ‘local’, it could conceivably be an early term used for strangers from other parts of NZ.
I’d be curious to know if the use of mā’ohi as a self-designation in Tahiti was independent, or if it was due to post–European contact cultural exchange.
(POLLEX lists mā’ohi and māori as cognates, albeit with an unexplained irregular correspondence. There are also reflexes of *mā’oni. Go figure.)
an early term used for strangers from other parts of NZ.
There were specific tribal areas (and regular periods of war over territory). But all tribes travelled in principle throughout the islands. (Particularly to the largely uninhabited South of the South in Summer to collect food and greenstone/pounamu — to bring in another word in common use) There’s great traditions of hospitality.
So I don’t think travelers from other parts of NZ would count as ‘strangers’.
Possibly if Māori had gotten more settled/for centuries before Europeans arrived, there’d be a notion of ‘stranger’.
Possibly if Māori had gotten more settled/for centuries before Europeans arrived, there’d be a notion of ‘stranger’.
Didn’t they outright slaughter the Moriori, who aren’t Maori but who are related to them, in a genocidal war until the Europeans arrived and gave them something else to worry about?
The Europeans took them to the Chathams. There hadn’t been any contact between the two populations perhaps for centuries (for nautical reasons; AntC can explain them better than me.)
“with the idea of showing respect to minorities by accepting their ethnonyms or their preferred spellings”
The idea is I think mostly that the mere fact of use of exonyms is disrespectiful.
People are better at sticks than carrots: Orthodox preachers are more willing to speak about sin than love, and with name change the main driver is fear to be disrespectful.
Instead of telling about how the new name is beautiful, people say that the older one is ugly.
I can’t say that I feel particularly affronted at being called Welsh, exonym though it be. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who was. Maybe we’re all just too downtrodden.
Perhaps it would help if we made up a derogatory original meaning for it, like with “Eskimo.” (As far as I can make out, it’s just what barbarous Germans called civilised Latin speakers, which is fine by me. But I can affect to believe that it really means “baby-killer”, and work up some resentment if I must.)
I was just reminded (looking at Kropp Dakubu’s nice Gurenne grammar) that the Gurunse (apparently) object to being called “Frafra” (as everyone actually does) but are fine with being called by the equally exonymous “Farefare.” Given that virtually all Western Oti-Volta languages call the Ashanti something like Kambunsi, and will happily folk-etymologise the name as “Akan donkeys”, the Gurunse should probably count themselves lucky.
See the discussion of “Gypsy”. I think the main reason why everyone here prefers Roma is that they’re afraid something might by possibly wrong with “Gypsy”.
Wiktionary says “sometimes offensive”.
My point here is that negative motivations are more common than positive (like “Roma sounds cool!”).
Accordingly if one wants to convince people that “Gypsy” is all right, the most powerful argument is going to be that some Gypsies DISlike “Roma” – and indeed someone noted that this is the case in the thread.
(But I don’t think the Wiktionary entry for Roma is going to have this “sometimes offensive” addition).
I don’t know what was the motivation given for “Roma” by those who first began promoting it. As far as I understand the effort is connected to the idea of a Roma nation (as a political entity).
But I think once Roma(ni) becomes more and Gypsy less common (it’s still common) the claims that it only exists to emphasise various flaws of Roma/Gypsy people will become much more frequent than today.
POLLEX calls *mā’oni Proto-Oceanic, following the Lexicon of Proto Oceanic (V:553), which shows supposed reflexes in Proto-Polynesian — and in one other language, Sinaugoro (Balawaia dialect), spoken at the Papuan tip region of SE PNG. The reflex (if that’s what it is) is moɣoni ‘true’ (hence).
Either the discipline of historical linguistics is nuts, or the Austronesian language family is nuts. Either way, I’m not criticizing.
Didn’t they [the Māori] outright slaughter the Moriori, who aren’t Maori but who are related to them, in a genocidal war until the Europeans arrived …
(Without blaming C.B., this is rather common mythology put about with what I can only describe as ‘racist’ agenda wishing to whitewash some unsavoury history.) Europeans generally had good relations with Moriori before …
Y is correct, and thank you for the opportunity to counter this myth. The slaughter of the so-called ‘Moriori’ [**] (which is just a variation of ‘Māori’) happened 1835, some 40 years after European contact with the Chathams. A group of Māori (displaced by European settlement) hijacked a European ship to get there. As I mentioned, intermittent territorial warfare amongst Māori tribes was ‘business as usual’. Taking European muskets against known pacifists was not.
@Y for nautical reasons
Yes, not just loss of contact with Chathams and on to the Pitcairns, but loss of contact NZ with Rarotonga/Cook Islands, Easter Island, with central Polynesia, up to Hawaii. It seems to have been climate change: less reliable trade winds and patterns of currents, meaning that the usual exploratory strategy became unreliable of voyaging outwards during intermittent periods of counter-winds then getting blown back home safely when the winds reverted.
[**] Not a “distinct Moriori language” as wikip claims (that is, not by any criteria we’d use round here — just look how seldom the vocab differs on Pollex: it’s a different dialect, as much as say South Island Te Reo is different vs N.I East Coast; the tupuna/ancestry of native Chatham/Rēkohu Islanders wish to assert they’d evolved a pacifist culture after settling away from NZ ~1500CE, and part of that is to claim a different language. But it’s easily mutually intelligible.)
AntC: I was thinking in particular of one of the early navigation computer simulation studies, which found that the return voyage from the Chathams (I think? Or the forward one?) to be one of the most difficult ones in all of East Polynesia.
Didn’t they [the Māori] outright slaughter the Moriori, who aren’t Maori but who are related to them, in a genocidal war until the Europeans arrived
Yes, I’d heard this story, too, and also criticisms of its lack of veracity. The whole point of the story is that Europeans moved in, killed lots of Maoris, and took their land, but so what? The Maoris did the same to the people before them, didn’t they? A very handy myth.
@Y [to/from Chathams] one of the most difficult ones [journeys] in all of East Polynesia.
Hmm, I hadn’t heard that specifically. The difficultest would be to Easter Island? There’s evidence Polynesians stopped off in the Pitcairn group, but it wasn’t inhabited by the time of European exploration.
Also Polynesians reached Norfolk Island but not mainland Australia (because there’s no even mildly helpful winds/currents). And the Auckland Islands well south of NZ, which are too cold to be habitable in Winter/won’t support growing crops. There’s mythology that might be interpreted as icebergs that far South, plus some European romanticising/fanciful translation that claims they got within sight of Antarctica.
They were prudent and skilled navigators. Journeys/navigational aides memoires were mythologised, so as to be repeatable. Which is why I just don’t see they’d get to mainland South/mid-Americas.
You may be thinking of this, the context of which is specifically exploration voyaging from NZ [Michael King’s magisterial ‘Penguin History of NZ’, Ch 4 ‘Landfall’]
“…but so what?”
Colonised people quite frequently are not “better” than colonisers, so anti-colonialist criticism must be based on something else than moral inferiority of Europeans.
@drasvi, [quoting] “…but so what?”
Bathrobe is putting those words in the mouth of a putative racist; not voicing them for himself.
I really hope your words don’t mean what they appear to mean. I’ll put it down to your poor English. I suggest you ask @Hat to remove that comment.
IIRC from earlier threads you seem to be proud of not studying history. Go study some history of colonisation.
Colonised people quite frequently are not “better” than colonisers, so anti-colonialist criticism must be based on something else than moral inferiority of Europeans.
True enough: however, even if I am a bad person, it is still wrong to steal my land and kill me if I resist. If crimes only counted as such when committed against saints, it would lead to great savings in police budgets and ease prison overcrowding enormously.
I don’t think that this is a particularly abstruse ethical point.
I’ll put it down to your poor English.
But no mercy is extended to wealthy English ? That’s pretty rich.
AntC: What DE said. drasvi’s point is unexceptionable (you surely don’t believe colonized people are in fact somehow “better” than colonizers?), and you are way too quick to decide others are both morally inferior and less educated than you. Physician, heal thyself.
AntC, you said you (a) don’t like me personally and mny comments and (b) it is not a problem because you just skip them.
You perfectly know that (unless I DO mean it), I have no slightest idea what my comment “appears to mean”.
You don’t even bother to explain (being afraid that I DO mean what the comment appears to mean whatever it is) it – thus making a dialogue impossible.
I did my best to formulate it clearly. I can write one more, but from experience I know that when my interlocutor has a different frame of reference (and ours are different, they would be different anyway just because I’m from a different culture) AND is hostile it will lead nowhere. Eventually she’ll say I’m a troll, because it has been 30 comments from us both and I’m still disagreeing.
You also perfectly know that I am better familiar with history than most people (but not most people here) which means I study it. And that I did not say I’m “proud…” of anything like this.
I said a schoolboy/girl won’t necessarily benefit as an individual from knowing history (same must be true for many other school subject, it is an observation on the nature of education).
I do take moral issues seriously. More seriously than many people.
So I simply can’t belong to any ideology or poolitical movement: each has a basis of shared beliefs and ideas (sometimes even credos and dogmas and traditions) and I’m going to disagree with some, because I’m not aware of one ideology where this basis consists of ideas and beliefs that I happen to find agreable. They care about political conjuncture, I do not. They exist in contexts (but frequently overgeneralise certain tactical decisions which makes sense to them in their situation – or simply elements of their culture – as moral universals).
I can only hope to find some like-minded people within various religions (where they will form a minority) and a higher concentration among human rights activists (grass-roots especially). Both groups will likely be in opposition to their societies.
Also (and importantly) many people in my country have never heard some ideas (and corresponding anti-ideas) that form the basis for the Western left (and the anti-basis for the right). So maybe yes, the problem is my poor English culture (rather than language).
But I think while I need to take some effort if I won’t to be understood, I don’t think I should stop being a Russian at all:/ You too have to take some effort.
Please. Stop reading shit into what I write.
____
I also don’t understand why delete any comments:( Chilren will be frightened? Ladies will blush?
If it is misleading, one can always clarify what she meant. It won’t be so horrible if some readers will learn that “misleading comments” are a thing…
drasvi: Pay no attention to AntC; he likes to attack people and speaks for no one but himself.
wp has an article on whataboutism. I’m mildly surprised there isn’t one on ‘sowhatism’. [And I repeat @Bathrobe was not adopting sowhatism, but putting it in the mouth of a morally repellent colonialist]
Māori pre-European contact engaged in inter-tribal warfare. They had a tribal hierarchy that included practices of enslaving captured men and forcibly marrying/raping captured women. Māori on occasion engaged in cannibalism; eating the ‘spirit’ of the captured, to extinguish their line.
So this is to morally equate Europeans (as just another ‘tribe’) arriving with muskets, shooting Māori by the hundreds and thousands, forcing them off the productive land, and leaving many more to die by starvation and (introduced) diseases? Behaviour that would not be remotely acceptable in Europeans’ own societies.
And by the time of European invasion of NZ, slavery had been abolished more-or-less, so NZ colonists were relatively civilised.
Aboriginal Australians (particularly in Tasmania) weren’t so ‘lucky’ — but then they were even more primitive. So what?
Blackbirding — but these Island Societies had no principles of habeas corpus (too primitive to have developed firearms to defend themselves, of course). So what?
less educated than you.
Ok, I’ve particularly learned up on the colonisation of Pacifica because I live here. So am I to assume anybody posting here might be ignorant of:
This moral justifying savage behaviour against mere savages was learnt from European enslavement of Africans — heck! It was African chiefs selling bodies to the slave traders.
In America, Europeans handed out smallpox-tainted blankets to the natives. That is, when they weren’t shooting them. So what? The natives could well have died from some disease or other without European medicine.
That is what @drasvi’s words seemed to me to be morally equating.
The Russian Empire’s very own genocide of the Tatars in Crimea seems applicable here.
I daresay the Tatars weren’t saints either.
To reiterate the point: European colonialism ‘justified’ savagery on grounds they were dealing with savages; claimed their own notions of civilisation didn’t apply because they were dealing with the uncivilised/primitives/’other’.
I’m not claiming the colonised people are “better” than European societies of the time dealing with Europeans within European countries. I am claiming that’s an irrelevant yardstick: judge the behaviour of Europeans dealing with the colonised in the colonies — that is the “moral inferiority of Europeans”.
If drasvi’s words weren’t drawing the moral equivalence I took, I suggest the post be rephrased.
@Hat What DE said.
Well, yes. This post is agreeing, at length, with examples. I took DE to be (obliquely) chastising drasvi.
You were right in your interpretation: though I am sure that drasvi does not, in fact, subscribe to the view that the victims of European aggression deserved it in some way.
But I think he may have been setting up a sort of straw man: no sensible person has ever thought in good faith that that the many vile crimes committed in the course of the European world conquest were attributable to the uniquely evil nature of Europeans as individuals.* (And neither of my gurus, Marx nor Calvin, would accept such a lame-brained proposition for an instant.)
* Elijah Muhammad, maybe. White people were created by an evil scientist from the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakub_(Nation_of_Islam)
QED.
the return voyage from the Chathams … to be one of the most difficult ones in all of East Polynesia.
Aha! (Your correspondent has been risking arrest, loitering in bookshops, fingering the produce without purchasing a swanky coffee-table book.)
There’s no tree coverage on the Chathams. So once your ocean-going canoe arrives, there’s no materials to repair it or build another. Nor any materials to make sails. When Europeans arrived, they observed the natives paddling about the lagoon on rafts made from tree-ferns. No sailing.
Te Reo on the Chathams bears closest relation to NZ South Island dialect. And even if you didn’t know there were islands to the East of NZ, you could observe dense bird migrations streaming out from around Banks Peninsula (Kaitorete Spit/Te Waihora lagoon). The Roaring Forties would get you there in a trice. But not get you back.
I quoted Michael King above “a single settlement of people at one time”. The linguistic evidence is that Chatham-Island Reo ossified at an earlier Polynesian state; linguistic innovations in Te Reo Māori post-loss of Polynesian contact didn’t appear in Chathams.
The ‘no tree coverage’ would also explain why Easter Island was a terminus ad quem. Large tree ecology had already gone before humans got there. (climate change?) The humans then proceeded to cut down what was left, for housing and to roll the Moai into position. See also ‘ecocide’ on that wikipage (controversial).
DE, I meant specifically this:
“If a people A keeps a people B in slavery, it does not mean that you can come and enslave people A“.
I did not only mean it. It is an actual line from my original comment.
I deleted it before sending it because somoene could think that if I say so, then I’m (a) ascribing this opinion to someone (b) in order to disagree with this “someone”.
Or someone could think that I’m telling that some specific people A kept some specific people B in slavery.
Which is not true: when I share/remind of facts of reality – “Volga flows into the Caspian sea” – it is not because I expect “someone” to disagree in order to start a debate. Likely I’m trying to establish some common ground. And it was just an example of some random bad thing someone can in principle do.
I also did not speak about “individuals” and “nature” anywhere and…. no one in this thread did.
We were discussing peoples. Colonialism is too about peoples, states, nations, etc.
I’m not sure why you’re speaking about these two things now.
I said: ”Colonised people quite frequently are not “better” than colonisers, so anti-colonialist criticism must be based on something else than moral inferiority of Europeans.”
First, note that I’m speaking of foundations of our moral system (specifically anti-colonialist criticism).
Second, if we choose as our foundation the principle “Colonialism is bad because Europeans did bad things to others, while others did NOT do such things to anyone” – it is appropriate to call the principle “moral inferiority”. But it is definitely not appropriate to speak of “individuals”, “nature” etc. – all which is discussed here is (a) nations (b) who was in habit of doing what.
And I find such a foundation very shaky. Because even if this is true for one colonised people, it will be false for another such people.
Such a colossus (the system with such a foundation) is only waiting for an opportunity to profit from colonising someone. Once it meets such an opportunity, it will suffice to say: “they are not better than us!”.
But for all I know, people quite systematically find other nations (as nations, societies, not as individuals) worse then their nation – and can adduce any required number of arguments. After all we tend to behave according our values and others tend to behave… differently.
Third, when the two sides of the debate focus on this component, when the anti-colonialist crowd focuses their efforts on demonstrating that the colonised people did not do something bad or anything bad at all – your society as a whole may (and to an extent will) conclude that this is what the criticism is all about.
That the foundation of your system is the above principle (which I call shaky).
But this “third” is not what I wanted to say. Of course there is a place for discussion whether some people (colonised or not) did or did not do something bad or good.
I wanted to say that it is not going to work everywhere.
Just found that Glossika intended* to add Formosan languages to their list. Apparently without producing new materials, just supplying pre-existing texts (and videos, by subtitling) with tools for learners. Which of course would be much better because I’m not fond of translated materials.
That would have impressed me a lot… if they did it:(((
* The post has a fashionable title “Formosan languages meet AI” but nowhere in the body AI is mentioned. Chomsky is, with hidden disapproval. It seems its job was supposed to be simply determining “complexity” of each new Formosan recording.
PS. From the post: “One of the requirements for getting [the Taiwanese government’s] recognition is a full fledged dictionary of at least 2500 roots.”
Weird. Weird anyway, but if “roots” means “roots”, 2500 can be a VERY large number.
Possibly related/in a New Zealand context:
ERO Let’s keep talking: Oral language development in the early years
I see nothing in the report specifically highlighting ‘screen time’. Indicators mentioned relating to the ‘significant group’/not kids-in-general:
* boys
* from low socio-economic community
* parents of low educational achievement
Nothing very surprising.
I’m not by any means saying the discipline isn’t nuts, but the Austronesian family most definitely is.
There may be feedback from there to the discipline, as in “going mad from the revelation”.
How common is that in IE? Are there supposed cognates known only from, say, Germanic and Marathi?
I think it’s a question of degree, rather than all-or-nothing. After all, all historical reconstructions are hypothetical: it’s just that there is more evidence for some than others. It ranges from overwhelming to highly likely to probable to “maybe.”
I’ve done something like this on occasion with proto-Oti-Volta.
There are four fairly clearcut major branches of Oti-Volta: Outer Oti-Volta (my new name for the “Bugum Group”, for those of you following at home), Gurma, Core Eastern Oti-Volta, and Waama.
Ideally, to reconstruct a word to POV, you’d want evidence from all four branches, but given the distance between these four, even two branches seems enough unless there is evidence of borrowing. Because most of the languages are poorly documented, that quite often means that one of the four groups can offer a presumed cognate in just one language.
(A case in point is “fuck”, clearly reconstructable for Outer Oti-Volta, but otherwise represented in my data solely by Moba nyáb́, for Gurma. Well, most of the dictionaries are the work of Bible translators …)
Well, in the case of Austronesian, there are hundreds of dictionaries at the level of Sinaugoro, from all over the family. So did the word survive in Proto Polynesian and most of its daughters, in Sinaugoro, on a faraway branch of Oceanic, spoken thousands of miles away, but lost elsewhere? Or is this like a chance correspondence within the same large language family, like much and mucho?
You might get some idea from seeing whether the forms showed the expected changes from the protolanguage in each language: if those changes were not simply “natural” commonplace ones, you could be more confident that the relationship was actually genetic. (And, of course, that rules out much/mucho.)
An analogy from Oti-Volta again: Moba, as a Gurma language, is not a particularly close relative of Western Oti-Volta languages like Kusaal and Mooré, but it borders on the WOV territory and does show some signs of areal influence from WOV (like loss of class-based gender in pronouns.)
There are a dozen or so words which seem to be found only in Moba and Outer Oti-Volta (though, significantly, there are less than I once thought, now I’ve got a better Gulmancema dictionary.) That immediately makes you wonder about loanwords, but when you start looking at some of them, they correspond in the ways that cognates ought to, for example with Moba low tone corresponding to Outer OV high tone and vice versa, e.g. Mooré yẽ̀be “fuck”, Moba nyáb́) or have relatively unproductive derivational suffixes attached e.g. Nawdm víígú “owl”, Moba fììùnŋ̀ (with an *-n suffix added to the stem; Moba f for v is also regular for cognates, but that doesn’t mean much here, as Moba actually doesn’t have a /v/.)
For “faint, pass out”, I have a grand total of: Kusaal vib (with mid tone, from proto-WOV high), Mooré vubgi (tone not recorded: the -gi is a very common monactional suffix), Moba fìb́ (low tone.) Does it go back to proto-Oti-Volta? I think the answer is, Yes: but it’s certainly not in the same category as “person” or “eat” or “woman”, with cognates in every single Oti-Volta language.
but lost elsewhere?
Absence of evidence in PolLex isn’t necessarily evidence of absence. Great as PolLex is, it isn’t very well cross-referenced. [**]
Samoan and Tokelau ‘moni’ true, sincere, honest reconstructs to MAQONI — which is a separate protoform with exactly the same set of meanings.
But neither includes NZ Māori ‘meka’ to be true(v)/fact(n).
And I can’t find a protoform on PolLex to which ‘meka’ reconstructs. *maaqoni > meka ?? too much of a stretch. If you don’t like that word, there appear to be others. [**]
[**] That PONO.2 entry has several senses for NZ Māori, one of which looks suspiciously like it should be under PONO.1.
Great as PolLex is, it isn’t very well cross-referenced.
I was thinking of the Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, which is the one linking the Polynesian and the Sinaugoro words as POc reflexes.
Ah, ok I apologise for being dumb. And in advance for probably being more dumb:
LoPO pp 552-553 (which is what PolLex is ref’ing) mentions three non-Oceanic languages: Balawaia (as you say), Bola aka Bakovi (West New Britain/East of PNG [**]), Buli (Indonesia, Western New-Guineau) wrt *molaŋ — which is a sufficiently non-soundalike we’d have to justify sound pattern changes, as DE suggests.
[**] And from there only a skip and a jump (relatively) to the Solomons/Arosi language discussed wrt *molaŋ > mora and *mana bottom of p553.
So I’m not seeing linkages as nuts as Cañari Comal > Kumara.
I was only looking at the forms reconstructing back to *ma-qoni. The others you mention are those, plus the ones going back to *ma-qoli.
Are these related by some recurrent sound change which affects daughter languages here and there? Or do they have some deeper relationship? Or is the relationship coincidental? The experts offer no opinion, and I don’t either.
There is also such a thing as independent derivations from the same root in two different sub-groups.
___
The comparative method works well where it works well.
But the farther we step into the dubious territory, the more we need I think a theory that would help us quantify all the likelihoods. It is weird (and stupid) that we don’t have/use such a theory.