Secrets of Learning Languages Part Two B

I may be awfully stupid, but it took me years to drop the idea that one can learn languages simply by
attending courses. It never occurred to me that successful language learning takes an enormous amount of private work, parcelled into a long series of manageable tasks. Today I suspect I could learn even mathematics, so long as the plan of work was divided into sufficiently small parts.

That's why I am hesitant in recommending language classes. However, it cannot be denied that formal classes are a good resource, if only because you have at least one fluent person in front of you serving as a model.

University Classes (Day)

At nineteen, I believed firmly that you found languages came easily or you were dumb at them. Thus, I wasted a lot of time shedding tears over my Greek textbook, feeling stupid and hating myself. I did much better at Latin, which which I was already somewhat familiar. I flunked Irish outright, in part because I hated the sound of myself struggling with the words and so ceased trying. Lord, it was awful to be nineteen.

Were I to wake up and discover myself nineteen again, only--please God--without the fear and the crippling self-hated, I would sign up for Russian and Business and work towards becoming a multi-millionaire. I would locate and befriend my best friend Trish on the proper day, but otherwise I would keep my head down, make a workable plan and memorise, memorise, memorise, speak, speak, speak.

Undergrad university programs are valuable for their resources. Both my universities (Toronto and Boston College) had excellent language labs, but unfortunately I never used the Toronto one. I often used the BC one a for French and German, which seemed to make the Language Lab Librarian happy. They also have exchange programs with other universities, and this is important because apparently immersion really does the fluency trick. Finally, they have professors who are so potty about their languages they did PhDs in them and now need to justify their courses' existence with the numbers of students who take them. Thus if you show yourself keen, they will love you and help you with all their power.

University Classes (Night)

I am a morning person, and I am afraid to be out after dark on my own. Nevertheless, I went to night classes at Edinburgh University for five years to learn Polish and brush up my Italian. The principal Polish instructor is a very dedicated and very clever teacher. If she could make her students fluent in Polish sheerly though teaching, she would.

However, the two big problems with night school classes are that (A) you are surrounded by people who also don't speak your target language fluently and, more seriously, (B) there are no tests.

No tests, no grades. I suspect the "Languages for All" program is shrewdly thinking that adult learners hated tests and grades when they are students, and now just want the fun parts of learning. I sympathise. But testing is HOW we memorise and grading is HOW we can judge our progress. We cannot learn to speak languages very well without testing our recollection. Every foreign language conversation is a kind of test.

In despair I asked my night class teacher if any of her night school students had become fluent in Polish, and after thinking about it awhile, she said yes--one. I think he was Dutch.

But despite that depressing statistic, under her watch Polish night school courses are flourishing. There is a sort of Dumbledorska's Army at Edinburgh Uni marching onward and onward towards fluency, never quitting, no matter how many years they have signed up with Languages for All.

If I were starting Polish 1.2 all over again,  I would make all the vocabulary in Dumbledorska's excellent class materials into flashcards, memorise them, and then read her meticulously written dialogues aloud to captive Polish friends, or cajole them into reading them with me.

Another advantage of night classes is that if you take them long enough, you find yourself with a small band of people just as obsessed as yourself and who (unlike other family and friends) admire you for your stubbornness. And if your mutual obsession is Polish--Hej, chłopcy, bagnet na broń just about sums it up because you are actually becoming Polish by osmosis.

Private Tutors

I have had six private Polish tutors, and one Italian one, and only three of them have been paid. In general I have operated on an Language Exchange basis: I proofread your university papers, you listen to me read Polish.

Paid-in-cash tutors are the best tutors, in my experience, for a few reasons. First, tutors who are friends are too kind and gentle and, unwilling to see me suffer, let me give up too soon.

(That said, one of my friends has been an enormous help by writing me long letters in Polish in difficult handwriting. Although the handwriting has occasionally reduced me to tears, it turns out that the longer it takes to read a word, the better you recall it. Thus there is a virtue in chicken-scratch handwriting hitherto unappreciated.)

Second, paid-in-cash tutors have skin in the game, as the kids say. Mine seem very conscientious, too.

The advantages of paid tutelage over night school classes are very important to me:

1. you, and you alone, are in the linguistic spotlight for the lesson and you have no place to hide;
2. you can meet your tutor at the time of day you are most brainy and/or comfortable;
3. you can reschedule meetings, so you never lose your money's worth; and
4. at the advanced level, you can just have conversations for most of the lesson, which is the best way to reach your linguistic goal, if that is to have conversations with native speakers. *

The disadvantage is that going to a tutor costs more than going to class, if you are the sort of person who never misses a class.

I'm very grateful for my five years of Dumbledorska's night school classes, and I do plan to return from furlough when it's feasible, but I have to say that my ability to converse in Polish has really come along only since I began:

1. lessons with my current tutor,
2. to read a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magicians' Nephew a week with
3. strict attention to the meanings of ALL the words and
4. memorising 5-10 of the new ones every day with
5. meticulous record keeping.

*You don't need a tutor for Latin. Work though Wheelock, then purchase an advanced grammar and a good dictionary, and get to work translating Caesar, Horace and Cicero.

Secrets of Learning Languages Part Two A

Unsuitable for adult learners  

Ponder the six-year-old Polish child. Since before she was born, the Polish child has been, unconsciously or consciously, listening to the Polish language. Her early attempts to speak were met with universal admiration. Her mispronunciations were corrected gently, or not at all. She has been carted around her neighbourhood by Polish-speakers, and almost everyone she has met has smiled at her and asked her simple Polish questions, initially without expecting any reply. If she has difficulties with Polish pronunciation, which is common among Polish children, she will be sent to a kindly speech therapist. Only now is she being taught rudimentary reading and writing.

I have before me the elementary reading textbook for two generations of Poles, Elementarz (1974), and it is hard to read. Here is a random example:

Kto to? To Ala i Ola.

Ala stoi i Ola stoi.

A to lalki Ali i Oli.

Lola stoi i Tola stoi.

A oto As Ali i osa.

As stoi. A osa lata.

Taka to ta osa.

Good luck finding clues to all that in a Polish for Foreigners elementary textbook. It was years before I discovered you can sometimes replace the verb "to be" with "to" and that it makes life simpler. 

Thankfully, just like a six-year-old Polish child, I am now capable of figuring out Elementarz. Unlike a six-year-old Polish child, however, I have been horribly neglected these past six years. Polish ladies don't all smile at me just for living. I don't get daily universal admiration for my Polish skills. My family doesn't slowly and distinctly repeat what I say in Polish. There are no Polish cartoons on television, and I had to find songs for Polish children on my own. 

On the plus side, I am big enough to wrestle my massive dictionary down from the shelf, I am allowed to go the library on my own, and I have enough money for Polish classes. When comparing children's ability to learn languages and adults' ability to learn languages, adults and children have different advantages. But the top lesson from Elementarz is that you should not be depressed if you can't read children's books after studying a language for three years. A three year old native speaker can't read them either. 

But books meant for native children's literacy development are not interchangeable with books meant for foreign adults' linguistic development, so Elementarz should be put aside for a long time, reserved for such advanced japes as reciting its poems at parties. The Adult Way of Doing Language is served by three principal methods: Self-Study Series, Classes and Private Tutors. However, I recommend reading books about learning languages first.  To learn more effectively, it's a good idea to learn HOW to learn.

How to Learn Languages Books and Blogs

When it came to learning Polish, I should have read "How to Learn" books first, but better late than never. I have profited very much in the past two years from reading books about language-learning and about memory-training.  Here are my favourites:

How to Speak Any Language Fluently by Alex Rawlings 

Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown

Success with Languages by Stella Hurd

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner 

Mezzofanti's Gift by Michael Erard.

Mezzofanti's Gift introduced me to the seductive world of hyper-polyglots and their blogs. My go-to online resource for language advice is Alexander Arguelles' Foreign Language Expertise. 

I am a lot more comfortable writing than I am socialising with complete strangers, so the Benny Lewis Fluent in Three Months advice to go to a bar and start repeating your three weeks worth of gibberish to native speakers and bask in their admiration leaves me cold. And skeptical. 

Self-Study Series

Pimsleur--Ideal for Pronunciation.

Because I was easily embarrassed six years ago, my first attempts to learn Polish involved Pimsleur. I took out the first Pimsleur Polish lessons from the library, and eventually my generous father bought me the whole Pimsleur Polish program as a gift. I will never forget shutting myself in the Georgian linen closet/library/laundry room in our flat with Pimsleur Polish 1 Lesson 1 and my acute embarrassment at repeating "Przepraszam" after the CD. To put this in perspective, I was alone in a huge house with thick walls in a spacious park with no neighbours, and yet I felt mortified. 

Pimsleur programs are both incredibly brilliant and incredibly limited, and I recommend them as starting points because they are all about pronunciation and drilling the basics into your resistant brain and clumsy tongue. There are no reading materials. You will learn very few words, but if you obey the program you will learn how to say them perfectly. 

Colloquial... (Routledge)--Good start to Grammar.

Our church organist very kindly gave me his Colloquial Polish (by Bolesław W. Mazur) set,  and I never gave it back. I never finished it either, which is a pity, and I should take another look. I was working my way through when I began Polish classes a year later.  Like Pimsleur, the "Colloquial" books have crucial listening materials, but they also teach reading and grammar. 

Specialized Stuff--Keeps you going. 

If you are learning one of the Big Languages--French, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic--you will have no trouble finding self-study courses. Less popular languages for study, like Polish and Urdu, aren't covered by all the big publishing houses. But that's okay because there are smaller publishers who do cater to learners of one particular language. 

The elementary Polish for Foreigners series in Poland (and at the University of Toronto) is Krok po Kroku, but a Polish friend gave me the text for Polish in 4 Weeks, and I read it from cover to cover. I did most of the exercises, and I was sad that the CD was missing.  

After visiting it at the store a few times, I bought Part 2 of Polish in 4 Weeks. I listened religiously to the CD although I see I gave up on the exercises. This is probably because I felt class homework was enough. 

(Suddenly I realise why Benedict Ambrose worried that I did nothing all day for years but study Polish. We interrupt this program so I can go tell him.) 

Although I really loved Polish in 4 Weeks, and it certainly improved my grasp of grammar and listening comprehensions, it didn't adequately pour Polish into my stubborn brain. I now realise--thanks to Fluent Forever--that this was because I never studied the material.  

Eventually I began to memorise the Polish in 4 Weeks dialogues, but I did this by writing out them out over and over again. In real life, you don't write out dialogues over and over again. You speak them. And yes, you do repeat the same things: who you are, where you are from, why you speak X, what you think of X-land, how your husband is doing today, and what you think of the appalling social changes sweeping your own miserable country. 

Preprinted Flashcards

I do have a set of Polish flashcards, which I basically had to go to Poland to get. Although I think flashcards are crucial to learning a language, I think they are more effective when you make them yourself and when you use words taken from an ongoing lesson, book or film.  Flashcards isolated from context aren't great. And, besides, when it comes to words crucial to Polish social life like "oczepiny" (a series of traditional Polish wedding rituals), good luck finding them in a box of preprinted flashcards. 

No matter what self-study series you use, you absolutely will not advance quickly if you do not do the hard work of memorisation and recall, preferably aloud.

Next up: university classes, day and night

Secrets of Learning Languages Part One

They look a lot more worn now.

I can no longer resist the lure of my blog, so here I am with some Secrets of Learning Languages (Part One).

1. You don't need talent.

There is probably such a thing as talent, a mysterious gift that separates the Very Good from the Outstanding. However, you didn't need talent to learn your native language, and you don't need it to learn other people's languages either. One of the most damaging things a child can believe is that she can't do something because she's simply not talented. Her logical assumption will be not "Try, try again" but "Why should I bother?"

A grown-up told me when I was 19 or so that I wasn't "good at" languages. I had been taught French for twelve years, Italian for three and Latin for one and received A or B grades in them all.  But I believed the grown-up and went on to do abysmally in university Latin, Greek and Irish before switching my major to English Literature because I knew the A's would come easily (talent!), and they did.

I am now reasonably fluent (see #7) in Italian and Polish, and use both languages for work, but this is not through talent.

2. Interest + Application + Time = Language

So you don't need "talent" for learning languages. You need to work. Unfortunately, "how to work" is not often taught in school, and if you sailed through elementary school, you might not have learned it on your own before you hit the wall in high school. Also unfortunately, a capacity to work (in my culture anyway) is treated like a virtue, not a skill, and even then it is second banana to "talent."  So here are the main components of language work:

Language work involves interest, application and time.

Interest: When learning languages it is best to pick a language you have good reasons to learn. However, these have to be compelling and personal reasons, not merely practical. The most practical (and one of the hardest for anglophones) language you can learn right now is probably Mandarin. But unless you have deep personal reasons for learning Mandarin, like an all-absorbing love of China, Chinese cuisine, your Chinese boyfriend, Kung Fu or eavesdropping on Mandarin-speakers on the bus, you are probably not going to power through the pain involved in learning Mandarin.

I picked Italian in high school to avoid Art class, but also because it was the most widely-spoken European language in my city at that time. Learning to speak it was also a sort of revenge on the Italian-Canadians who bullied me in elementary school. Years later it became the Language of Vacations Abroad.

I started Polish to help sell the Polish translation of my first book and didn't quit because a kind friend told me not to bother even trying because I would never, ever learn Polish.

And now that I can read it, I'm too scared. 

Application: I have been studying Polish for about six years, two months, and I have used many different materials: textbooks, class handouts, films, songs, dictionaries, grammars, novels, talking books, prayer books, poetry books, tourist brochures, and food labels. I would have become fluent years ago had I studied a little EVERY DAY. My current level of fluency has come about because I  have studied for at least an hour EVERY DAY without a break since October 8.  But more importantly, I never quit (for longer than one angry night). Never quitting is the secret to language-learning because of the magic of time.

Time: Given what I now know about how I learn languages, I predict that I will be able to function in Polish society without linguistic problems in three years. If I begin Urdu this January and study every day, I will be able to converse biographically in Urdu in three years.

If only I would give Italian half an hour of my daily attention outside of work ....

Well, I don't do that badly chatting to my Italian tutor and translating what Marco Tosatti thinks because I started learning Italian 31 years ago. Every time I have learned, recalled or relearned and (especially) heard or spoken an Italian word since September 1986, my Italian skills have been strengthened.

I have often praised my high school Italian teacher for her excellent teaching, but I was a dud when she enrolled me in an Italian language contest c.1989. (More on the inadequacy of classroom learning later.) To my horror, after three years I couldn't actually speak Italian. (I assumed I lacked talent.)

Flash forward to 1997. At the end of 1997, I decided to relearn French, Italian, Latin and Greek. French and Greek eventually fell by the wayside, but I worked my way through my high school Italian textbook and Wheelock's Latin Grammar. I also borrowed a Passport Books "Teach Yourself Italian" set from the Library. In 1998 I went to Italy for the first time, and I could speak Italian. Not comprehensively, but well enough for touristic purposes. Well enough for my workplace, too.

The fact that I can chat away with my Italian tutor twenty years later probably has as much to do with that intense relearning in 1997-8 as it does with the initial learning in 1986-9. But there is another very important factor:

3. Getting so used to feeling stupid you no longer fear it. 

By embarking on language learning, you are risking feeling stupid at regular intervals for years. That which you have been able to do well in your own language since you were six (or sixteen or twenty for reading and writing) you will no longer do well.  You will stammer, blush, feel stupid and hate yourself. You will think "Language Fail" again and again, especially when the object of your Target Language communication answers you back in English.

But I have many thoughts on this subject, too:

a) even native speakers don't speak their native language perfectly (or intelligibly)* all the time, so even if you achieve "native-like" fluency, you will still make mistakes;

b) governments across the world pour money into teaching children English, and that's why all those young people in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland and even Russia speak at least tourist-level English;

c) humility improves your character;

d) it's scientifically proven that the trauma of embarrassment over mistakes helps you memorise the corrections;

e) the better you get, the more impressed other people are that you speak the Target Language at all;

f) realising that the process of learning a language is psychological, not moral, helps kill shame;

g) the shame wears off the more often and the longer you speak to native speakers.

4.  The highs make up for the lows.

Speaking in Polish is much more difficult than speaking in Italian, but when I use either successfully,  my brain seems to flood with dopamine. I leave Italian class feeling high: happy and hilarious. I'm not quite there with Polish classes although I do enjoy reading Polish very much.

When I finish a week's work on a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew, I feel very satisfied. And naturally I am pleased when I recall enough words to ask a Polish interview subject some questions. However, there is still a lot of fear/shame mixed up in my Polish communications, and it will probably linger for at least another year or so.

Fear/shame is obviously one of the lows. Other enemies to your language-learning happiness are skeptical friends, alarmed members of your family, and unsympathetic or merely clueless native speakers of your target language.  However, you can turn these negatives into plusses.

First, you can use the friends' skepticism as a goad, as I did. "I'll show them" may sound like an odd inspiration, but as I mentioned above, it has worked for me twice.

Second, your family members' alarm will wear off as they get used to your new hobby. Eventually they may start to brag about it. After complaining for six years about how impractical learning Polish is, Benedict Ambrose volunteered me as his hospital ward's Polish translator.

Third, if you can't take the heat of a nation's character, get out of their language kitchen. In general, the French hate French spoken badly. In general, the Poles are blunt. In general, non-anglophones do not understand just how insulting rude English words sound to anglophones, so if Francophones or Allophones tell you in English how you sound in their language, it may hurt more than they mean it to.

The way to deal is to find unusually kindly people who are native speakers of your Target Language and practise on them. These include teachers, but remember that not all teachers are kindly or able.

śłedź! śłedź! yummy śłedź!

5. Yes, you have to memorise. 

The good news is that language classes aren't useless (more on this later). The bad news is that you will have to supplement classes with memorisation.

For about forty years I laboured under the delusion that to learn something all you have to do is go to class, do the homework and cram for the exam. If despite doing all these things, you don't get an A, you don't "have talent", so give up.

What the last six years, two months have taught me is that the only way to stuff hundreds of words and dozens of grammatical points into an adult human head (or my adult human head) is through constant memorisation through testing.

It makes me a little sad, now, thinking about the five years of Polish night school classes I took without spending every other night memorising the new words presented in the lessons. I did the homework, and I participated in the classes, and I never fell asleep once, despite being a morning person. However, there were never any tests, and so I never actually studied, and so my spoken and written Polish progressed but slowly.

I read, yes, and I looked up words in the dictionary. (Working with a Polish dictionary is a skill in itself, let me tell you.) Reading is the easiest part of language-learning for adults. I also wrote letters, and occasionally got a Polish friend to correct them. But I couldn't speak Polish very well, and I had a very hard time concentrating hard enough to comprehend spoken Polish. Eventually I found this so frustrating, I finally began reading books about fluency. And they all said the same thing: you have to memorise.

6. There's a problem with Anki.

The fluency books recommend memorisation though flashcards in  Spaced Repetition Systems like Anki or, for the less electronically inclined, Leitner boxes.

Gabriel Weiner of Fluent Forever believes that using English on flashcards impedes memory so, not being electronically inclined, I made hundreds of flashcards with pictures on one side and Polish words on the other. Drawing passable pictures took SO LONG I gave up and turned to Anki.

However Anki has a big bug. If you miss a single day of review, Anki will present you with more cards than you can cope with. Miss a week and Anki will hit you with a blizzard of pictures. You will go out of your mind with impatience waiting to come to the end of your afternoon-long Anki exam.  The more new words you put into Anki, the worse the problem becomes.

Another problem is that you might not remember what concept you were trying to indicate with your pictures. This is a particular problem for any word not a noun.

Besides, it turns out that Weiner is not quite right. Although young people may learn faster with images, older learners may learn faster with words. This is, in fact, true for me.  I am much more likely to recall text than a picture. I have noticed this while speaking, When I need a Polish word I can't quite remember, it comes floating up before my mind's eye in my own handwriting.

I now have a new Spaced Repetition System to cope with the overload and work with my script-loving brain. After reading a new chapter of The Magician's Nephew, I write down all the words I don't instantly recognize. That came to 144 this week. I divide the list by 6. From Monday to Saturday, I look up the dictionary definitions for a sixth of the words, e.g. 24.

Then every day I look at the list and choose the five to ten most useful-looking words.  I make English-Polish flashcards for them. They go into the "Test tomorrow" part of my Letter box. The next day, after I learn them again, they go into the "Test Sunday" section. After Sunday's test (and relearning), they go in the "Test a Month from Now" slot.

On December 26, I will test myself on the "Sunday cards" from November 26, and then they will go in the "Test in Two Months" box.  This is not at all scientific, but I suppose in February I'll put them in a "Text in Six Months" box. Or maybe I will throw them on a bonfire. It is impossible to count how many words a language has, but my Oxford-PWN Polish-English Dictionary contains "200,000 words and phrases".

That's a lot of cards.

7. Fluency is a continuum.

My Polish tutor is guilt-striken because she doesn't think she is earning her fee. Mostly she sits in a hipster cafe listening to me chatting away about my week. She attempts to teach me grammar, but either I know something very well or not at all. And every week I turn up knowing 30 more words she didn't teach me. What's a Polish tutor to do?

"The problem is that you are fluent," she said.

"No, I'm not," I replied, astounded. I was astounded because, for one thing, I understand only half of whatever she ever says, and for another, the only way I can really get going in a Polish conversation is to travel down the well-worn track of "When I was ..."

It may be truthful to say that I am fluent compared to all my tutor's OTHER clients, or that I am fluent next to the vast majority of non-Poles, or that I can rattle off ungrammatical Polish for five minutes at a stretch. At any rate, it is probably a good idea not to get too hung up on the word "fluent" although for six years, two months I have longed to become fluent and waited in vain for the magical switch I've heard about to flip so I can understand all Polish.

Suddenly I remember the exchange between my night school teacher and me when I was feeling particularly disgruntled with my lack of progress. "I have been studying for X years, and I still can't have a conversation," I said, or words to that effect, in Polish.

"But we're having a conversation right now!" protested my night school teacher.

First year of learning Polish: no grey hair. 

*I have met many English-speaking Continentals who have a hard time understanding Scottish accents for the first few years of their residence in Scotland. Some Scottish accents still give me trouble, and I've been here for almost nine years.


To be continued...

Deep Work

This week I wrote 10 articles and visited Benedict Ambrose in hospital everyday. On Friday evening he told me that the doctors had done all the tests they deemed necessary and wanted to send him home. So I asked a nurse to get me a wheelchair, and after a conversation with a doctor, I took B.A. and all his stuff to the taxi rank.

B.A. was sick on Saturday afternoon, and I stared out the window, collecting my thoughts, before stripping B.A. and the bed, redressing B.A. and the bed, and then doing the laundry. B.A. wasn't sick in that way while in the hospital, so obviously there was something wrong with home. It was a very unwelcome thought. 

After an online consultation with Ma Belle Soeur, I decided what was wrong was the bed: if B.A. lies down all the time, it is very bad for him. However, sitting up in bed is apparently very uncomfortable. A hospital bed costs £4,000, so that's out of the question. A domestic reclining bed, though less expensive, is still expensive--especially as we bought a new bed this year. Thus, tomorrow I will go to a special shop for the elderly and chronically ill for a back rest and see what else they have for sale that might be useful. 

On bus rides to the hospital, I read Cal Newport's Deep Work, and while at home, I put its principles into practise.   Deep Work teaches "knowledge workers" how to concentrate hard enough and long enough to get more work done in a shorter amount of time. Controlling how much time you spend on the internet--and how you spend it--is very important. 

Now every morning, I write down all the tasks I have for the day, and I write a bullet-point plan for how I am going to do them, even outlining how I am going to structure complicated articles. This is very helpful later when I am tired. 

I also identify which tasks are "deep work" tasks--tasks that take a lot of hard thinking--and give myself 90 minutes to do them, as 90 minutes is apparently the maximum time you can really concentrate on an intellectual task. After 90 minutes of hard work, I take a break with some "shallow work", like reading emails or finding stories to write about or even research. Research is easy compared to writing pieces.

Deep work is by definition cognitively challenging, and I've had a lot of practise thanks to (GUESS!) frequent study of Polish. As I may have mentioned before, my memory has improved really a lot, thanks to hours of memorising Polish grammar, vocabulary and occasionally even poems and songs. Even my memory for numbers has improved. I still find writing "hard news" difficult, but I hope that eventually it will become second-nature. 

This week's challenge will be trying to keep up my work output after having returned to being B.A.'s primary caregiver. 

I am very grateful to the nurses and doctors at the hospital for all the tests they did and all the meals they brought B.A., but I am sorry they didn't provide him with very much physiotherapy or exercise. When I visited, I would take him for a short walk down the hallways, getting a little farther each day, but his mobility was clearly much worse than it was before he was admitted. I also read to him from a  children's chess book, as I am rather worried his poor shunted brain is being under stimulated. Learning to play chess will be good for both of us.

Meanwhile, the National Health Service is not the be-all and end-all of care. You really can't rely on doctors and nurses to do everything for your loved one in the UK: you have to do a lot yourself. You really do. Fortunately for "Central Belt" Scots over 65, many (if not all) local governments supply home nursing help. However, those under 65 seem to be out of luck. If you are chronically ill, under 65 and need help taking a bath, it's a good plan to be married to a relatively young and healthy person. 

Meanwhile,  the fund for Joe Baklinski, to which some of you generously donated, has topped the goal. His brother was hoping to raise $25,000 Canadian so that Joe, his wife and their eight children could see the winter out. (Joe's in construction, and in Canada that means you work hard all summer to make up for the lean winter.) Well, it was $26, 000 a few days ago, and I see that now that the goal is $30,000, there's $29, 096. That's very awesome, and I predict a very happy Christmas for all the kids.

B.A. was very pleased and edified that people donated to Joe's fund because he (B.A.) was sick. He said it meant that something good had come out of his illness. Fortunately for us, his employer has a very generous sick-leave provision, so we have a way to go before we have to start worrying about happy Christmases, etc. 

In other news, I saw Cardinal Burke yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to speak to him, but tomorrow I will write all about the Mass he celebrated in Glasgow. 

The New Life

I'd forgotten the importance of Saturdays to people with full-time jobs. Of course, not all full-timers have the luxury of Saturdays anymore, which is a doleful thought. However, speaking as a former freelancer, having a Monday to Friday job gives Saturday a golden glow.

Not that Saturdays are work-free. Saturdays are now for housework, but this has become easier since I began the Great Tidy, inspired by Marie Kondo. As usual, I have come late to a cultural sensation. Just as now I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, I have read The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. That is, I skimmed half of it at the bookstore, and then listened to the audiobook on my new-to-me iPhone.

I am hoping for some life-changing magic, but so far I have only gone through my clothes and books and a fair number of papers. Miscellaneous stuff will be a challenge, but in the meantime, I pick things up and stuff them on the pile by the attic stairs (to go down and out; we live in an attic). Sometimes a kind friend with a car comes by and takes the stuff away to charity shops. This is wonderful, and worth the interruption of my work day, should the kind friend arrive mid-week.

My work day begins at 9, more or less. I had a lovely idea that I was going to work 11 - 7, which would reasonably overlap the editors' Eastern Standard time (a morning person, I drew the line at working 2 PM - 10 PM). I'm an early riser, so I looked forward to spending a few hours in the morning studying languages.

However, thanks to doctors' home visits, plumbers, electricians, medical emergencies, Holy Days of Obligation, and sheer exhaustion, I have finally worked out that it is better to start journalism at 9 AM and aim to finish around 7 PM, except on Wednesdays (Polish class 9 AM) and Thursdays (Italian class 9:30 AM). That way, it doesn't matter so much if there is an extensive mid-day interruption. (Language study has to be stuffed into odd corners of the day.)

"It's too late," said Benedict Ambrose yesterday when, at 7:30 PM, I rousted him out of bed for some exercise. An update on Joe Baklinski reveals that Joe, despite being in great pain, his muscles turned to mincemeat, gets out of bed constantly to see what his family is up to. Benedict Ambrose is the exact opposite. He would lie in bed all day long listening to BBC 4 in the dark if I didn't pop into the room at intervals to open the shutter; bring food; transmit news; bring the post; get him out of bed to exercise, to wash, to greet visitors. He responds to attempts to drag him from bed with complaints, then apologies and finally thanks. It's exhausting.

Exercise is usually walking around and around the front lawn, which is bounded by a big stone wall, a gateway delicately barred by a chain, and some woods. People walk their dogs in the woods and, if badly brought up, gawk at B.A. and me as we make our painful way around the quad. B.A. wears a thick white terrycloth bathrobe with a hood, so he looks rather like a Carthusian monk--to me, that is. I doubt the gawkers could pick a Carthusian monk out of a line-up.

B.A. hates being stared at, so the best time to go for walks is at 5 PM, which is when we know the House will be clear of staff and visitors, but the woods haven't yet filled up with dog-walkers. Naturally it is awful having to leave my desk when I am in the middle of an article I desperately want to finish, but that is the way it is--unless it is too cold. Yesterday afternoon was terribly cold, so after I went to the office in the Historical Stable Block for the post, my conscience allowed me to keep my head down until 7:30 PM, when I filed a piece about Cardinal Burke's proposed correction of Pope Francis, and went to see B.A.

B.A., a living skeleton, was curled up in bed under the duvet.

"It's too late," he protested when I told him it was time to get up.

"It's not too late," I said. "But you don't have to go outside. It's too cold. We are doing something else today."

"Something else" was a few very gentle warm-up exercises and the rowing machine. Complaining mildly and asserting that he couldn't even sit down in the rowing machine, B.A. sat down and, to our mutual amazement, rowed 20 strokes.  It turns out he has some strength in his arms (and back) after all, which is astonishing.

Having rowed, he then sat on the sofa wrapped up in a duvet and watching "Celebrity MasterChef" on BBC iPlayer while I went to the kitchen and made potato pancakes (aka latkes aka placki ziemniaczane). Then, as B.A. was still willing to eat, I made an almond flour cake and custard to pour over it. Finally, I washed the dishes and swept the kitchen floor. 

So yesterday worked out very nicely after all, and I was very moved to discover that more of you donated to the Joe Baklinski fund. I don't know why it is, but I am intensely sentimental about Catholic dads of eight who get hurt on the job. Maybe it's because my dad is a Catholic dad of five. If a wall had fallen on my dad, we kids would have been out of our minds with worry and fear---and he wasn't a self-employed stonemason. Until April, when he finally retired, he was a briefcase-carrying professor backed up by a fire-breathing union. 

Meanwhile, I have already taken out the trash and the recycling, so before I get back to my Saturday cleaning tasks, I will begin to memorise a beautiful list of Polish trees and flowers. Hitherto my tutor has given me useful "Catholic" words and phrases (objawienie, for example, means revelation) useful to my new job. Thus I am curious as to why she has prioritised trees and flowers. Still it's a nice treat, if impractical. 

Update: Although clearly married life has tremendous challenges when something goes terribly wrong--even when it is nobody's fault--it still feels better than being Single-and-unvowed-with-no-one-but-oneself-to-care-for because the point of Christian life is service, and when your spouse is chronically ill, it is almost impossible not to serve. Service is built right-in. 

Meanwhile, being too busy also feels better than not being busy enough. One thing that has fallen by the wayside since B.A.'s diagnosis is my anti-depressant pill. For whatever reason, my brain seems to be churning out serotonin like a luxury chemistry set. Although I occasionally feel lonely, I sleep like a baby. 

Language By Osmosis

I have a newish toy. Polish Pretend Son was going to sell his iPhone 4 on eBay, but hearing that I was in the market for a new phone, he gave it to me instead. Like all computer devices these days, I have to figure it out "intuitively"--although maybe in this case it's because I don't have the owner's manual.

PPS was a model language learner in that when he heard an English word he didn't understand at a party, he would fish this very phone out of some inner pocket (PPS was invariably dressed in multiple layers)  and look up the word in an electronic dictionary. Then he would snort "Hmph" or merely raise his eyebrows, and the phone would disappear again.

I wished for this magical bilingual phone many times while on trips to Poland, and now I have it, but the dictionary is gone. PPS took the chip out, and Vodaphone gave me another to replace it, so all PPS's telephonic secrets are safe with PPS.

Naturally they include PPS's extensive music collection, which was probably highly tasteful, if eclectic, as twenty-somethings seem to be very knowledgeable about music. Well, some twenty-somethings. When I was a twenty-something, I could listen to Weezer's "Teenage Dirtbag" on repeat for hours.

But I also had eclectic tastes, and having heard an 883 song on my Conkini Italian tour bus in 1998, I hunted down an 883 CD called "Gli Anni", and that became one of my favourite albums. And now that I am trying to take my Italian skills to the next level, I bought the electronic version for my new-to-me phone.

I was very proud of my technological prowess and bragged to my young Italian tutor that my first iTunes album was "Gli Anni." Sadly, instead of feeling patriotic and flattered, my tutor groaned and giggled. I am not sure, but my little show-and-tell was possibly the equivalent of your Korean ESL student proudly exhibiting her Back Street Boys album.  Or maybe it is even worse and 883 is the Italian equivalent of some now very uncool 1960s band. Oh! Oh dear. I hope 883 isn't the equivalent of the Monkees: how embarrassing.

My Italian tutor, by the way, is a young man of scrupulous honesty who never represses a smile when I trot out some linguistic archaism.

"That's from the Nineties," he chortles.

"I'm from the Nineties," I protest.

I forgive my tutor for making me feel old, however, for he is both good-tempered and strict and therefore effective. He quite won my heart by saying he couldn't at first place my accent (in Italian, as I refused to speak to him in English for as long as possible), but thought the vowels sounded Polish.

My second Apple album is, unsurprisingly for long-term readers, Polish Popular Hits 1930-1940, Vol 1.  This is full of what Reader Julia would call "Polish Old People Music," and I know some of the songs already from long study.  Polish Old People think these songs are the epitome of nostalgia  and, sad irony, since I first heard them in happier days, they fill me with nostalgia, too. A few more years of studying Polish, and I will be impulse-canning supermarket fruit and swapping homemade cold remedies with Polish Pretend Daughter.

I also have two songs of the Disco Polo variety, such that if I lost my phone and a young Polish hacker cracked the password, he would assume that I have very bad taste in music, which I probably do. But there's a method in my music madness, and it's trying to learn non-English the way most of the world learns English: hearing pop songs day in and day out.

My walks to the supermarket and the railway station are now enlivened by Max Pezzali telling me (in 1998) that he'll be with me ("Io Ci Saro") and Zula Pogorzelska explaining to a suitor (in 1931) that her material needs are few ("To Wystarczy Mi"). Neither album is quite the thing for my vigorous  rowing-machine sessions,  though, so I shall splash out and get entire albums of bad-taste Polish dance music.

Language Updates

My brother Nulli is an expert at switching from English to French to English again. This is a normal activity in his Canadian village. I suspect he is even more comfortable doing this than just speaking English all day, for when he came to visit us in Edinburgh, he seemed almost relieved to speak French (and English) to French (and French-learning) salespeople and waitstaff.

I find this very interesting because it is difficult for me to switch from one language to another, or to speak Italian or Polish to people to whom I normally speak English. This is why, when I met my new Italian tutor, I answered his English greeting in Italian and answered his English questions in Italian. I try not to speak English to my tutor because whenever I see him, I want my brain to think "Parliamo italiano adesso."

As I was in Italy with Benedict Ambrose and as we spoke a lot of English with friends, Italian came less rapidly to my tongue in Firenze than it does when I see my Edinburgh tutor. Although in Edinburgh (speaking to my tutor) I am reasonably fluent, my Italian skills were sludge by the time I popped into a Florentine beauty shop. It also turns to sludge when I see an Italian friend at Mass, for we have spoken English--just English--for years.

This is also why it is difficult to speak to Polish Pretend Son in Polish. However, where there is life there is hope, and I have little trouble writing to Polish Pretend Son in Polish, perhaps because I have done so for at least two years.

As Benedict Ambrose gloomily divined long ago, I am having a stormy love affair with the Polish language. In this situation, I feel like I am the man and Polish is the woman because my anglophone brain is simple and straightforward whereas Polish is complex, mercurial, difficult and unfathomable. Poles can argue all day long that they only have three verb tenses (untrue--there are at least four), but they have two sometimes entirely different words for the past tense of almost all verbs. And that's only the beginning of the labours of the anglophone Hercules.

The world speaks English not just because of rock and roll but because English is objectively simple compared to Central European languages like Polish, German and (dear heavens) Hungarian. The reason English-speaking peoples have difficulty learning other languages is NOT because we're stupid or lazy but because it is difficult for human beings to go from the simple to the complex. (I suspect this is also the secret to the French reluctance to speak non-French.) When they learn English, Germans and Poles (but especially Poles) are moving from a highly complex language to a simpler one.  The Poles get stuck on when to use definite (the) or indefinite (a, an) articles, but big deal.  For English-speakers an apple is always an apple, not a jabłko, jabłka, jabłku or jabłkiem depending on the context.

Occasionally I am so furious at the complexities of Polish that I burst into tears and take some furious action like packing up my Polish books and stuffing them in the hall closet. Or I swear I won't buy a Polish book until I have finished reading the ones I already have. Or I decide that I really can't afford to go to night school this term, especially as my brain is really quite tired at night. But then I go and buy a £32 grammar, and the affair is on again. How appropriate that my Polish education began with seething tango songs from the 1930s.

****
Diet-Vocab Pact Day 3.  Squirrel had a 300 calorie lunch, but then she couldn't get out of a dinner engagement, and so ate a 800 calorie steak, plus salad. Still, she kept off the sugar, including booze, so well done, Squirrel.

10 stone 12

Bust 36

Waist 32

Belly 35.5

Hips 42

Thigh 24

I have memorized yesterday vocab, and have made a new list for today.

Italian Magic

Cherubs, the stress. All I do is write and telephone strangers and eat lunch at my desk and occasionally remember to get up and walk around a bit and do bits of housework at odd moments. I haven't been this busy since theology school.

Today I did an hour's work before rushing off to my new Italian tutor. He greeted me in English.  I greeted him in Italian. He switched to Italian and got me a coffee. We spoke Italian for an hour--about Italian-Canadians in Toronto when I was growing up (and when he was there), about Norcia, about  my new job, about where in Italy I have been. It was like being on holiday in Italy. I was suffused with sunny, on-holiday feelings. When my hour was up, I felt high on language and sunshine. I could almost smell the bougainvillea in Lazio.

"Italian literally makes me happy," I thought.

Sadly, I had to work late tonight and so couldn't get to Polish class. But eventually I will get my work-language balance sorted out.

Here's my latest news article, improved by my editor. It's on-the-job training, and I have a lot to learn! Gone are the days I could lackadaisically work on just one piece, taking my time but getting it all done in one uninterrupted sitting. However, when I consider the circumstances in which I have sometimes filed--e.g. in an underground internet bar in Warsaw--I realize that I am no stranger to journalistic challenges.

Teaching Attic

Good coffee with useful packaging

When I was asked to teach  Attic Greek to Catholic home-schoolers, my first thought
was to text a recent Classics grad from Edinburgh Uni to see if she would like the job. However, she had not done any Greek; her specialization began and ended with Latin. I cast about in my mind for someone else among my Edinburgh friends and acquaintances, but I could not think of anyone who had studied Ancient Greek within the past 25 years save my unworthy self.

As I passed Ancient Greek 101 and 102 only by the skin of my teeth, my conscience would have cut up rougher had I not sat down eight years later and worked through the bally stuff. That was the year I lived alone in a bachelor flat and spent my evenings reviewing Italian, French, Latin and Attic Greek. Eventually French and Greek fell by the wayside as I concentrated on Italian and Latin. My Italian was in super shape by 2000, and I actually used it at work----but let us return to Attic Greek.

Although I have little "natural talent" for foreign languages, I know a lot about learning them, thanks to a steady reading diet of popular works on language acquisition and years of grappling with Tym Pięknym Językiem.  I also know something about teaching, which I have been doing off-and-on since the year 2000. A three year stint under the Ignatian Pedagogical Method taught me some great teaching tricks, including repetition and getting students to really "ENGAGE" with the material. All that stuff about marking your "consolations" and "desolations" in the margins of photocopies and writing "questions for reflection" turn out to be key to memory work.

"Revel in your chagrin," I yell at my students when they perceive their errors. "Feel the pain of your errors! Or feel the joy of your successes! Joy or pain! Whichever! Feel it!"

I am all about pedagogical method. When my first Attic Greek pupils were sent away to be educated by a proper teaching order on the Continent, I asked them to discern the sisters' pedagogical method. They're still not sure what it is, but I hope it has lots of sneakily useful teaching tricks. Meanwhile, I have been engaged to continue teaching them Ancient Greek by correspondence as the girls their age are already reading Homer, Herodotus and the gang. Fortunately, we have a brilliant textbook.

My first and favourite Greek teaching trick is to make pupils cut out, bake and eat the Greek Alphabet. Subsequent testing has led me to believe that this step should never be skipped. Apparently Jews taught their children the Hebrew alphabet with cookies for centuries, and it makes complete sense. Children love cookies, so their love for cookies becomes linked to the alphabet being consumed. If the children are made to cut out the stencils and then the dough themselves, this engages their eyes, ears and hands. In fact, since they eventually bake and eat the alphabet cookies, all their senses work together.

My most recent Greek teaching trick was to make up Leitner boxes for my senior students. A Leitner Box is a classic Spaced Repetition System. In short, one has vocabulary cards which one reviews according to a fixed schedule, moving them closer to the back of the box as one's memory for them strengthens. As per the instructions in Fluent Forever, I left the backs of the cards blank so that my students could draw pictures or symbols denoting the Greek word (or word pair) on the front. English is not allowed.

The amusing thing about my Leitner Boxes is that the actual boxes are made from cardboard Union Coffee coffee bag supports, and as my favourite brew has this vigorous name, my students are returning to their consecrated preceptress from their Jesuit-trained, Easter-holidays tutor with boxes marked Liberacion. No pun was intended, and I rather wish I preferred "Bobolink", whose name is surely more in keeping with Traditional Catholicism, homeschooling and convent schools. But there it is.

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The Nursini

This is a hard post to write for a few reasons. The first is that I am as guilty as anyone on focusing on the expatriate English-speakers in Norcia when reporting on the earthquakes and the aftermath of earthquakes. In recent years so many English-speaking Trads have been to Norcia, we speak as if it belongs to us.

The second is that my Italian is not as good as it was when I was, say, 27, and so most of my interactions with the Nursini have been fraught with anxiety and embarrassment.

The third is that a Norcia shopkeeper once ran off with my change, and I had to throw a bilingual strop to get it back. To be honest about a place, you can forgive the foibles, but not forget. Meanwhile, I seriously hope he is okay.

Norcia is a town that depends on tourism. Tourists are the people who give the Nursini money. They depend on us for a living, but we aren't them, are we? The relationship between the local and the tourist (and the expat) is problematic, as we saw in my resentment at being poked by an African bag-seller in Rome. I'd be curious to know if the Italians in Rome accept the bag-sellers as Romans. This may depend on whether or not the bag-sellers speak Italian. I'd also be curious to know if Scots accept me as an Edinburgher, since I certainly do not have an Edinburgh accent. Incidentally, there a lot of tourists (and expats) in Edinburgh, too.

We tourists can be a demanding bunch. What is it that we are looking for when we roam the world? A number of things. Sun or snow, relaxation or adventure, new foods and new sights, a chance to meet locals, perhaps. This last aspect of tourism makes me very nervous, as tourism is acquisitive. An American tourist told me that she'd rather collect experiences than photographs (sure enough) but most of all she'd like to collect people. I felt very uncomfortable. Although the young have different rules, the natives of a place are really unlikely to invite tourists home to experience the "Real Edinburgh" or the "Real Bonn" or the "Real Venice". Relationships with locals are fleeting. Tourists may remember them forever, but the locals will forget the tourists in seconds. There are just too many.

That's another reason it's difficult to write a post about the Nursini: who am I to say anything about them? However, I feel as if they have disappeared behind the mostly-American monks, the expats and the rubble of the historic buildings. Therefore, I will give it a shot.

In Norcia there is a beautiful Art Nouveau style café called the Caffé Tancredi. Behind the counter there is a dark-haired, wide-eyebrowed male server in semi-formal waiter dress or a blonde lady or a dark-haired lady slightly younger than the blonde. It is the custom of many of the Nursini to drop in at least once a day and down a coffee and a "pasta" chosen from the plexiglass display. Promiscuous use of chocolate syrup is the hallmark of the Caffé Tancredi: unless you ask him or her not to, the server pours a good dollop of chocolate into your cappuccino. The locals chat, or sit at one of the few tables and looks at a newspaper.

In Norcia there is an old-fashioned jewellery store with windows like display cabinets. When I said regretfully that the gold crucifix pendant I admired was too expensive, the proprietor took out an example of  the silver version. He named a price, and it sounded reasonable to me, so B.A. left the shop to get his wallet. This gave the jeweller a chance to establish that I was Canadian and to tell me all about his relations in British Columbia. When B.A. arrive with his wallet, the price of the silver crucifix had mysteriously dropped by 20 Euros or so.

In Norcia there is a luxury goods shop that includes a hairdressing salon. One day last month I decided that instead of buying a bottle of conditioner and doing a long-overdue dreadlock seek-and-destroy mission, I would pay the Nursini hairdressers to do it instead. I popped into the shop and began to gabble in a bizarre and shame-making language made up of Italian, English and Polish. Our phrasebook had no useful phrases for the hairdressers, and although I now remember the verb "pettinarsi" (to comb), I'm not sure I remembered it then.

However, I convinced the hairdressing staff to take me on as they examined the terrible state of my hair and said various things I couldn't understand, and a young woman took me away for a hair-washing. I felt very sorry for her, as presumably did an older hairdresser, for she eventually came along to help her junior pick apart the dreads. They were worried that this hurt me, and frantically suppressing the Polish that came to mind, I tried to assure them that it didn't. Meanwhile, the hairdressers chatted to each other about my hair, and perhaps it is lucky that all I understood exactly was their astonishment that I wasn't screaming.

Then I was moved from the sink to a chair, and we agreed that my hair was now better, and again there was a team effort, as the clock ticked speedily towards lunchtime, to comb out the last of the snarls. The hairdressers exchanged approving remarks about the colour of my hair, which they observed was natural. Then there was work with a blow-drier. and my shame-making attempts to explain that I'd be happy if they just put the hair in braids, and the job was done, and I was well and truly hosed at the cash register.

When you have twice as much hair on your head as do most other heads, being hosed at the cash register is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. When it doesn't happen, I tip heavily out of sheer gratitude. However, on this occasion I didn't have enough money on me, or my cash card, so I had to ask if I could come back after lunch to pay. The young lady behind the cash register--and the male boss--were fine with this, so off I went to lunch.  I returned later with a handful of cash and left a tip. The young lady behind the cash register had the same shifty, self-conscious look as the shopkeeper who, after Christmas, ran off with my change. I felt a bit bad about that, but I couldn't think of a way to say, I don't really care. I'm on holiday, and I suspect the [August] earthquake has left everyone badly off.

There are other Nursini I'm thinking about, too. There are the waiters and waitresses at the Granaro del Monte and other restaurants in town. How are they? Are they working? There are the women serving behind the counter in the bakeries, and the friendly lady who runs the kitchen goods store. Do they have enough to eat? The lady in the fruit-and-vegetable store, the lady in the cheese shop, the men and women in the butcher shops.... How do you deal with perishable stock in the wake of a natural disaster?

There's the couple in the wine shop who, at Christmas time, directed us towards an expensive bottle and then, when I wittily managed to say we were too poor, towards the cheaper stuff. Have the bottles survived?  Then there's the young lady in the Campi di Nursia who led us on our donkey-trek. Is she alright? Are the donkeys and mules all right? And then there are the children who threw firecrackers at Christmas and the teens who queue up to be taken by mountain bus to high school in Spoleto. Are they okay?

There are almost 5,000 Italian Nursini, which means that there are almost 5,000 stories about Norcia that are not being told in English. I'm not equipped to tell any of those stories, or even to help the Nursini--unlike the monks who have remained in the area, at risk to life and limb, to minister to them. But I can at least offer a link. The easiest way, I have been told, to get money directly into the hands of the Nursian needy is to send it to the monks, stating explicitly that it is for the people. Here is a link to the Monks of Norcia donation page. 

The Unexpected "The Unexpected Professor"/Brideshead

I have finished reading The Unexpected Professor, which challenged many of my ideas, but was nevertheless quite enjoyable if, ultimately, unconvincing. I am all for grammar schools and merit over the inherited privilege of the children of the rich, but he lost me when, on page 310, he admitted to having had Anglo-Saxon made optional for first-year Oxford students of English Literature. Not only does this seems like an outrageous dumbing down of Oxford and of students of English Literature, it is a posthumous slap to  the woman who so kindly praised his Viva examinations: the great Anglo-Saxonist Dorothy Whitelock.

I was named (in part) for Dorothy Whitelock, and my father began his career as an Anglo-Saxonist, so perhaps I am taking this too personally. On the other hand, when I contemplate my rich, crazy, agonized year at the Graduate School of English at the University of Toronto, the courses I did that seemed the most scholarly and least subjective were those in Anglo-Saxon. 

(I am suddenly reminded of the superiority of Christian Latin to all other classes when I was attempting a PhD in Theology.) 

Starting a serious study of English Literature without Anglo-Saxon strikes me as ridiculous as beginning a history of Canada with Confederation in 1867 or of the United States with the Declaration of Independence or of Scotland with Kenneth McAlpin. 

Anglo-Saxon is English without the French; it is the source of our most basic everyday language--house, roof, child, kin, sheep. It tells the English and Lowland Scots who we are, deep down in our cultural cells: not French but Germanic--and Christians, to boot. Those of us who have forsaken Christ worship not Venus on vendredi but Freya on Fridays. Chaucer's English is a linguistic compromise with a foreign oppressor. Wyrd bith ful araed.

The other revelation to which I strongly object is a disbelief in objective standards for art. Benedict Ambrose is tremendous well-read in the philosophy of aesthetics, and I am not, but even I know there is such a thing as "techné", or craft. 

I am willing to believe that anything anyone puts together deliberately for display is "a work of art", but not that it cannot be dismissed as trite, cheap, or even a bullying, exploitative demand for attention. I am also willing to believe that "conceptual art" is art, for any expression of a new idea is a creation. However, you can sign a urinal only once: you can paint the "Coming of the Magi" any number of times, and when you do, training, hard work and technique really matter. 

Thinking about Brideshead Revisited again--whose attitude toward Oxford and privilege Professor Carey indirectly and  unconsciously condemns--I see it as a paean to Youth, written by a man who was so desperately unhappy when he left Oxford, he attempted suicide. Its nostalgia and us-against-Hooper snobbery is so potent that it sets up the too-young reader to look upon university not as an apprenticeship to professional life but as a superior social club where one lives one's best days. 

Charles Ryder, as much as any girl going to Franciscan U. for the M.R.S., goes to university not to be trained in a discipline but to fall in love. He becomes a painter in spite of, not because of, his Oxford education. The same can be said for Sebastian Flyte and all their friends. Charles' cousin, whom we are invited to mock, and Charles' former pal, whom we drop when Charles does, actually enter into college life instead of using it as stylish backdrop for their social lives. In terms of the realities of university training, Brideshead Revisited is Animal House for the bookish. (Be sure to cite me when you quote that)

That said, it provides excellent lessons in sensitivity to surroundings and celebrates the ardours of youthful friendship. Anthony Blanche recites "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" through a megaphone, and sometimes when I was an undergrad I drank deeply of the vine and strode through the St. George St campus declaiming the same poem with my best friend. I also founded an all-female poetry club: we met in each other's rented apartments, drank a lot, read a lot of poetry, annoyed a shared ex-boyfriend. Some of us were pro-life Catholics (including two ex-Muslims), others were deep-dyed pro-choicers: we all thought of ourselves as feminists, naturally. I admired the dappled sunshine, pouring through leafy trees, by day, and I wrapped myself in the electric-starred darkness by night. Brideshead promised aesthetic experiences for those who sought them, and I found them. 

However, swimming about in aesthetic experience is not enough to achieve good art, as I discovered when I tried to write funny stories. My mistake was to try to write about Catholicism and lampoon Catholic feminism instead of writing prose about the student world I was living in. It's a pity, for my landlady, the late Mrs P, could be the basis for a great comic character. 

Mrs P was very suspicious of her upstairs renters, and I eventually discovered she feared catching AIDS from us via the house plumbing. In short, she thought we were the most awful sluts, but eventually she discovered that I was a Nice Catholic Girl and, after some tragedy in my personal life which I have since forgotten, she tried to comfort me with dry little Portuguese biscuits and a photo album of life back on Sao Miguel. I have rarely spent such a boring afternoon.

But to return to The Unexpected Professor, John Carey has considerable writing techné himself, and so I heartily recommend reading this autobiography and look forward to grappling with What Good are the Arts?

Dobra Zabawa

It's Polski Piątek, so what else is new? I may have to quit the Polish Friday feature because most of my leisure time is taken up by Polish seven days a week and I need a break.

This is thanks to Polish Club, which was my own brilliant idea, and little did I know then that taking charge of your learning by organizing fellow obsessives students into a weekly study club is, according to research I have since discovered, one of the best things you can do to learn.

It is definitely one of the best things I can do, since I was born to teach until cruel fate interfered. Naturally I cannot actually teach Polish, but I can facilitate like a pro. But enough about me.

The club has had 12 meetings, and every one has centered on a book about a dog. When we ran out of book, we read a news article about the dog and then a book review. We shall end our dog days of summer next week with a theatre review, for the book about the dog was made into a play.  Little does my club know that I have been employing a Jesuit educational technique called "Ignatian Repetition". Basically you keep applying the same terms over and over again in different contexts. It's how my beloved Canadian Jesuits profs bang Lonerganian concepts into their students' heads. I learned as much about pedagogy as about theology from these wonderful men.

(In case you are fainting at this encomium to the SJ, you should understand that not all Jesuit Provinces, let alone not all Jesuits, are the same. For example, everyone can agree that St. Ignatius of Loyola was a stellar guy, even if you take Thomistic exception to his take on 'thinking with the Church'.)

Needless to say, I approach all meetings with great seriousness and was so devastated when error appeared in my vocab lists that I took to sending them to a Polish proofreader before handing them out. And yesterday when, for the first time, we followed up our vocal Polish readings with our own English translations, I was momentarily confused when, during my turn, fellow club members laughed merrily. I had just given the English as, "I recommend this book for children of five or six years of age."

For a moment I thought I had made an error, but no! Their mirth was (obviously, in retrospect) triggered by the fact that we anglophone adults are well out of the age range. Hey, listen, I challenge any Polish six year old to read this book on his or her own. Forget it. They will need an adult to read it to them. I mean, "wścieklizna"(rabies). No way.

My conclusion is that I am beginning to have serious sense-of-humour failures, and it is a good thing B.A. and I are going on holiday in ten days. Off I go to our linen closet/library to find my Italian cassettes.

The Friday Night Language Soak

The answer to yesterday's pop quiz was odcisniętymi. It means "imprinted". It falls in the sentence  "Są tablice z odcisniętym rękami słynnych polskich aktorów i reżyserów," i.e. "There are tablets with the handprints (imprinted hands) of famous Polish actors and directors."  Odcisniętymi was the hardest word to remember and pronounce, so I tried the picture method, with mixed results.

ODD + Cheech + knee + Ent + Timmy is as close as I could get to it. However, by focusing on the photos, I get the spelling wrong and keep leaving out the knee.

I discovered myself tongue-tied when I tried to pronounce the fatal odcisniętymi to Poles last night. We were in the Polish veterans' hall, which was rapidly filling with Poles of all ages, waiting for a controversial Polish journalist to give us a speech. My friend was there with her boyfriend, and he wanted to know what I found most difficult in Polish. To give an example, I tried to trot out odcisniętymi, and as my friend had just told him how well I spoke Polish, it was embarrassing.

Oh gosh, it was hot in there. It was very humid outside, and so very humid inside and my dress stuck to me and I was terrified someone--the speaker, for example--would ask me a question. I had already been asked questions in the hallway and naturally got the answer wrong the first time. I could answer "Dzień dobry" (Hello!) perfectly, but when asked if the meeting was upstairs, I said "Nie znam na pewno." ("I don't have acquaintance for sure.")

"Ahhhh....nie rozumiem," ("I don't understand") said the woman who actually had a right to be there.

"Nie wiem na pewno," ("I don't know for certain.") I corrected myself, and rushed up the stairs as much to escape as to find out.

I was very, very, very, very, very relieved when my friend turned up; I was irrationally concerned that I might be mistaken for a spy or a hostile journalist or someone who ought not to have a seat as she was unlikely to understand much anyway. (Personally I estimated that I might understand 30%.) She introduced me to her boyfriend, I explained about odcisniętymi, and then I played Polish vocabulary games on my tablet until the speaker was introduced.

Well, I think I did better than 30%. The speaker had a clear, expressive voice, and if I didn't hear a word (as a word, not a noise) it was because I had never heard it before. Taken individually, I understood most of them. The problem was that he spoke at a normal (i.e. rapid) pace, so I usually didn't have enough time to put them together. I most definitely got such emphasis words and phrases as "However", "and so", and "Please, ladies-and-gentlemen".

I also got what the speech was about. There was a whole hour about the Polish constitution, how it could be changed, and how one defines democracy. There was about twenty minutes on what was holding back the Polish economy. Then there were about ten minutes on either insurance (ubezpieczenie) or security (bezpieczeństwo). Then there were questions.

Two hours of solid Polish, people. And no word of a lie, my attention did not flag once for the first hour, for I was in the second row, and I didn't want the lecturer to know I couldn't understand what he was saying. I thought it might put him off his game: he didn't use any notes. He just talked off the top of his head for an hour and a half and then for most of the half hour of the question period I was still there. (Half an hour in, I was done. Done like Polish Christmas Eve dinner when the first star appears.) The questions seemed a bit aggressive, so I'm glad I left when I did.

I might have been mistaken for a keen student of Polish political science, for I took several notes. These notes, however, were merely jottings to anchor my attention and reassure myself that I did actually know the outlines of what was going on. There was a lot about monarchy versus republic, the Russian Empire, Baron de Montesquieu, democracy ("Nie prawda, że democracja jest najlepsza...." --"It is not true that democracy is the best...")... Oh gosh, then there was a bit about how the Cardinals elect the Pope and how the Pope appoints bishops as an example of an alternate state.

There was also some stuff about the European Union, which is headed by Donald Tusk, and the Sejm (Polish parliament) and bringing the Sejm to heel ("co do nogi!"), and something about the UK, and a lot about France, and (I think) a call to return to a proportional system of government. There was a mention of Bonapartism, whatever that is, and a slight on Lech Wałęsa, I'm pretty sure. There was an awful lot on "wyborcza", which I see is not just a newspaper but another Polish word for "election". And when a question seemed to worry about Poland's reputation for intolerance, there was a lot about Gramschi, homosexuals and the normalization of what is actually not normal.

And that's it. I will have to ask my friend to fill in the very large gaps; I am sure she is wondering how much I understood. Two hours, people.

It was not at all like watching a foreign film, for not only to foreign films have subtitles, the kind of foreign films you can buy at your local store tend to be visual. It was more like listening to a Polish homily, except with much better delivery than usual and no mention of love.

This is a stage of language-learning to which I am a stranger. As a teenager learning Italian I was taken to a play by Dario Fo, and as soon as I discovered how hard it was to understand, I went into a dream and waited it out. When I finally got a work ethic, I listened to advanced Italian conversation tapes, but those I could play (and do play) over and over again.

I have sat through relatively short French, Italian and Polish sermons, and I am working on sitting through whole Polish films (without subtitles), but that has been the extent of it. Listening will all my strength to a foreign language lecture on politics was a completely new experience, and it was certainly interesting to see that I could so much more quickly comprehend such words as dlaczego (why), dlatego (because), no... bo  (well, because), jednak (however), natychmiast (immediately) than most nouns and verbs.

The Altar of Truth

Oh, how nice. My  latest Toronto Catholic Register column is not behind a firewall.  As this is Polski Piątek, you'll never guess what it is about!

Update 1: Pace mother on the ten talents stuff. (She loves the traditional interpretation of that story.)

Update 2: Another super book for teaching yourself how to study 20+ years late is How to Improve Your Memory for Study by Jonathan Hancock (Pearson, Harlow--UGH, town of Pole-bashers, 2012).

I love his ideas about drawing pictures to remind yourself of words. Guess what the following means:

OD +

 +

 +

+

=

Doesn't have to be Lech, of course.

Hint: genitive instrumental case, plural. Answer tomorrow. I don't imagine anyone could get it but me--or a Polish-Canadian of my generation!

At The Risk of Becoming Very Boring

It's Polski Piątek, and I must admit that every day has been Polish Day this summer, which is very boring for most non-Poles around, especially poor Benedict Ambrose. It has been helpful for my Polish club, however, for whom I strive by making vocabulary lists and crossword puzzles. It has also been at least mildly diverting for local Poles who have volunteered to listen to us anglophones stammer our way through their beautiful language. Possibly they are reminded of their own, rather more youthful, struggles to learn English.

I hope I am sufficiently diverting and not imposing on my Language Mother down at the café. Her dog has been ill recently, and after she told me that she was going to call the vet on Friday and feared she wouldn't be able to get an appointment until next week, I nodded, said "Yes, yes" and asked how her dog was and if she was going to take it to the vet on Friday.

Hugh sigh. Involuntary eye roll. Patient repetition of everything she had just said.

You know, there aren't a lot of stories like this in the  Fluent Forever -type books. Bestselling polyglots' manuals--always by men, I notice--stress how the polyglot studied for half an hour and then started speaking Polish, Turkish, etc. to a startled Pole or Turk, et al., who thought him truly marvellous.

Well, it is true that people-not-the-French are surprised and pleased when the Mighty Anglophone deigns to speak their Heathen Tongues, but come on. It's a long, long road from "Hello, how are you? What's your name? I would like six pierogies and a beer, please" to  "In my opinion, Poland's PIS party is centre-left, not right-wing, and there's an article in Standpoint you should see." Along this road there are many sighs, involuntary eye rolls and patient repetitions; I don't care how large and efficient the polyglots' electronic Leitner boxes may be.

At the risk of becoming very boring, I cannot but stress again the importance of developing a thick skin or, rather, bearing the pain when your self-love is stabbed to death yet again by a native language speaker, especially your professor, and even feeling grateful for the stabbing. The worst, however, is giggles from classmates. I really hate that, but I have chosen to believe the gigglers can't help it.

Humility, I have just opined in an article freshly sent to one of my editors, is not self-abnegation but facing the truth about yourself and wanting to improve. Therefore humility is absolutely essential to learning. You need to know and assert the truth about your strengths, you need to know and asser the truth about your weaknesses, and you have to base your self-esteem on something other than "I am wonderfully gifted and smart". It's probably a better idea to examine exactly how God put the human mind together and think of yourself as a learner who, like everyone else, has to learn at least some things through bloody hard and intelligently focused work because that is how God made us.

If someone tries to cut you down maliciously, you must not feel ashamed but contemplate the truth about yourself, which may very well be that you have worked very hard and have come very far since you first set off on your intellectual journey. It seems very odd to me now that there was a time in which I could not read or write in English. And yet I recall being five or so, and my mother being cross that I couldn't read, and my working my way through her own frayed orange primer.

To spice up this homily, I will ask for everyone's opinions of this carry-on knapsack. I mean, £88 is a lot of money for us, and yet this has got some stellar reviews and it fits the Ryan Air carry-on limit. I keep thinking I could get a durable wheeled carry-out suitcase for less, but I prefer the ability to carry my stuff wherever I go. I will be in Warsaw for 1-2 weeks in November, so I will have to pack a lot of tights and warm shirts and more than one skirt and, if humanly possible, my favourite Polish dictionary, which weighs 450 g.