Language topic

I've taken on a private tutoring gig to bring in some extra money and today we saw the clusterfuck that are phrasal verbs. I normally hate telling students, "Just because," as an explanation to "Why is 'x' like this?" But when it comes to phrasal verbs that's exactly the answer. Just cuz and go with it.

We took a closer look at separable and inseparable phrasal verbs like, "Look up the word, look the word up" and "Get on the bus" And I realized, all phrasal verbs are separable if you use "the fuck," with them. like "checked in at the hotel" "Checked the fuck in the hotel" "get on the bus" "Get the fuck on the bus."

I kept that little nugget to myself though, lol
 
As a language teacher, it's important to reflect sometimes on the fact that language came first, and then grammar and theoretical knowledge as a way to teach and explain it.

Life goals: Once wrote "f*cking" on a university exam towards my degree dealing with with a question on affixes. (The question, IIRC, was on arguing whether or not there are infixes in English... Un-f*cking-believable!)
 
Maturin said:
As a language teacher, it's important to reflect sometimes on the fact that language came first, and then grammar and theoretical knowledge as a way to teach and explain it.

Life goals: Once wrote "f*cking" on a university exam towards my degree dealing with with a question on affixes. (The question, IIRC, was on arguing whether or not there are infixes in English... Un-f*cking-believable!)
Click to expand...

Agreed. I go over geography, history, and politics with my students and you'll always have the brave one to ask "Why are we seeing this in a language class" and having to explain languages don't occur in a vacuum. mountains, rivers and forests have been natural demarcations as to where does Italian start and french begin and the like history and politics explain why Kansas is pronounced one way and Arkansas another, etc. It's fun, I love my job.
 
We never got that in language classes, which might explain a lot. Just books full of words to memorise and grammatical rules to learn by rote. Didn't even get that in English classes, it was just comprehension exercises and spelling tests.
 
The Polish language is quite complicated, at first we're learning grammar because it can be very difficult to understand. For example: "u" and "ó" are the same letter, pronounced the same way - the difference is only in writing and in use cases. This is the easiest thing to learn TBH. Long story short - in most cases, you will use "ó" only in words when in other forms of this word "ó" will change to "o". Example: "ósmy" (eight in order ie. in a race) and "osiem" (eight). Probably that's why we're quite ok with foreigners butchering our language and we're so happy when someone is even trying to say or write something in Polish (btw. this is a great tip for any vacation in Poland - learn some basic words and 99% of people here will be much more willing to help you when they see that you tried to learn our language) :) And very ofter words have the same spelling and pronunciation but can mean totally different things like word "zamek":
- it can mean "castle"
- it can mean "lock"
- it can mean "zipper"
- it can mean "slide lock" in a weapon
and this word is usually used on its own, so good luck with guessing the context.

Going back to education - after grammar, we're learning basically how to write different types of notes & reading classics. Not very encouraging to learn more about language. Many people hate these classes because mostly we're reading books written between I and II world war about how awesome and painful it is to be from Poland (yeah, these authors loved to write long, sad books and poems about how hard it is to live here). And then teachers want us to interpret these books and poems BUT according to the historical situation in the year It was created. Doesn't sound too bad but there were some cases when author was asked to interpret his own material and failed to interpret in a way that school thought it should be interpreted.

After years of learning my language, it's no shock that this is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn. I was working in multi-cultural companies and ALWAYS we were trying to teach our colleagues some not-so-obvious things that must be known and Polish classes skip (like "zamek" :) ). My experience also shows that there are countries or languages that, if they are native, make it almost impossible to learn Polish effectively. I have worked with many people from Bangladesh, some have lived in Poland for many years, and yet they did not speak half as well as people from, for example, Lithuania or Belarus.
 
Polish is not that hard. (Every Slavic nation seems to think that their language is the 'hardest' one). But it is rather archaic.

I also absolutely hated my primary language education. It was full of grammar and transformations, and reading classics while making a stupid log about it. A table like structure where you note the page, what happened there and what's your take on it. So you would first skim though a book, then just randomly open pages, for instance, page 13, quote "A wind was joyfully playing with Ivana's golden hair", log down "I feel like Ivana really longs for freedom".

That was in elementary, in high school I've completely lost interest and actually failed Croatian on the final exams. That's a complete failure (fail all finals) but the teacher was kind enough (or just normal enough) to let me pass. I've scored highest score on the other finals tests which are trade-based (electronics in this case) so she let me pass and with a middle mark (3/5) so I can avg 5/5.

About 6 years later I got a degree, and I had to write my thesis (computer sci.) in Croatian. I asked my mentor can I do it in English. The response was, yes, but we would need to have an English professor present who could ask you questions solely on your language use. As I've known and worked with professor I thought that's no big deal, but as mentor kept talking I got the impression he was trying to signal to me - don't make this complicated for us. So I said, ok np I'll do it the regular way.

In the end I did not have to send my thesis to a lector. I just ran it through Word to take care of diacritics. Turns out, my functional understanding of the language was enough for me to write on academic level, and the biggest impediment was the need to utilize the completely unnatural Croatian lexicon of computer science terms. Oh and that bullshit. That deserves a thread of its own.
 
Dušš is shower in Estonian, tušš is India ink and tuss is slang for pussy. In elementary school, a teacher wrote things we need to bring to art class on the blackboard. She meant to write tušš but forgot the little things above ‘s’ and that was pretty funny.
 
"Pijpen" means "to give a bl*wjob" but is also the plural of "pipes".
I work in a hardware store and a woman once asked for drainpipes.
 
Douche (duş) means shower in Turkish as well.

Maturin said:
Life goals: Once wrote "f*cking" on a university exam towards my degree dealing with with a question on affixes. (The question, IIRC, was on arguing whether or not there are infixes in English... Un-f*cking-believable!)
Click to expand...

Some guy in my department at uni once said to the professor "motherfucker" and "cocksucker" while making a point about censorship. Same guy had also previously said "unfuckingbelievable" to the same professor on the very issue you mentioned. (The actual English words, not Turkish equivalents)

He was promptly warned not to use such language in class, of course.
 
Last edited:
Brigantium said:
We never got that in language classes, which might explain a lot. Just books full of words to memorise and grammatical rules to learn by rote. Didn't even get that in English classes, it was just comprehension exercises and spelling tests.
Click to expand...

I should clarify it depends on the level of the students. At the university it is the classic levels 1-4, level per semester getting your full language credits in 2 years. At the Language institute it is a level per month for intensive courses and you get through the first 12 in a year. then there are four advanced courses called "PC" and then four more "Advanced PC." Either way, in theory you end up with a B2 fluency.

Whether at the institute or the University, the beginner levels deal with A LOT of repetition and memorization. The topics deal with easy things like sports and fashion. But by the later levels we're discussing things like how effective vitamins are, politics, technology, etc.

I still give students extra work. At the institute, when we see nationalities I give them homework to research one country per letter of the alphabet and give them the hint that the only letter without one is "X." They also have to tell me the nationality i.e. China, Chinese, Wales, Welsh, etc. It's hard for them, because Korea in Spanish is Corea, little changes like that throw them for a loop.

At the university students HAVE TO spend an extra hour a week doing "self-study." I have my students do 2 and that is when they practice vocab lists or grammar exercises they have issues with.

I bend the rules as much as I can in their benefit (Like handing extra credit, there is no policy for or against it.) and at times flat out break them like not speaking Spanish during class. I've realized that no matter how advanced the students are, if I give the agenda for the week/month in English, most students can't/don't follow. So to avoid, "I didn't understand" excuses I start and end classes in Spanish. In lower levels, if a student asks an interesting enough question, I'll give them a small break and discuss it in Spanish, then tell them how to do so in English and we move on.
 
Didn't know whether to rant in the Rant thread, video game thread or here. I decided ultimately to do it here as it is mainly about language.

I was finally able to purchase Fallout: New Vegas at a ridiculous discount. This game has been on my wishlist for a while now and considering it is a 360 title I figured the price would drop eventually. I download it, boot it aaaaaand... It's in Spanish. W...T...F? I go to settings... no way to change the language to English, again... TF?

Now I know what you're thinking, "But Onhell, you're Mexican, surely you have no major issue with it being in Spanish." WRONG. I do, very much. Playing a dubbed game is no different than watching a dubbed movie. So much subtlety and detail get lost in translation. What makes it worse is that it's dubbed in European Spanish, not Latin American. I personally can''t stand the accent, it is jarring, not to mention half the time I have to translate the slang back into English from context for it to make sense. Spaniards are very blasphemous and it's "I shit on the Host" this" and "Host!" that. (Me cago en la hostia, tío. Hostia!) Expression I NEVER use and even if I'm familiar with them as cultural difference from mine.... it sucks. One character says, "Ya le estas tomando a esta vaina!" Which, again, from context, I assume she meant, "You're getting the hang of it." What the fuck is a "vaina?" No clue. At another point they say, "brevage" for, obviously, "beverage," yet "beverage" is an ucommon term, one would normally say "drink," "bebida." Is that what they originally had in there? Who knows!

I'm very disappointed and of course Microsoft does "no refunds." I'm seriously debating either to push through it or just wait for a trip to the States to get a physical copy.

I mentioned it is a 360 title. Initially I saw a glimmer of hope when I realized that maybe since I changed my xbox One's location to Mexico to be able to enter payment information that that was why it was downloaded in Spanish (still doesn't make sense as ALL my other games download in the original or give language options). I boot up my 360, and start downloading it there. It works! it starts to download, yay! Wait... too soon. the download stops and restarts at 80%. W...T...F? It does it again. I google the problem. I have to empty my caches, ok. Done. Still does it. Look it up again, did I miss something? Yes. I have to TRANSFER the license. Even though I changed my location to Mexico on my 360, it still thinks it's in the US and everything in the store is in dollars and won't let me put in my Mexican payment info (which is why I hoped it would download in English). So I transfer the license... STILL doesn't work, because not all licenses are available in all countries and if you downloaded a certain game under one country's VPN it won't let you do it in another. SERIOUSLY?

That's where it stands. Either bite the bullet and play a horribly dubbed version or wait to get it physically. Fing BS.
 
Onhell said:
Didn't know whether to rant in the Rant thread, video game thread or here. I decided ultimately to do it here as it is mainly about language.

I was finally able to purchase Fallout: New Vegas at a ridiculous discount. This game has been on my wishlist for a while now and considering it is a 360 title I figured the price would drop eventually. I download it, boot it aaaaaand... It's in Spanish. W...T...F? I go to settings... no way to change the language to English, again... TF?

Now I know what you're thinking, "But Onhell, you're Mexican, surely you have no major issue with it being in Spanish." WRONG. I do, very much. Playing a dubbed game is no different than watching a dubbed movie. So much subtlety and detail get lost in translation. What makes it worse is that it's dubbed in European Spanish, not Latin American. I personally can''t stand the accent, it is jarring, not to mention half the time I have to translate the slang back into English from context for it to make sense. Spaniards are very blasphemous and it's "I shit on the Host" this" and "Host!" that. (Me cago en la hostia, tío. Hostia!) Expression I NEVER use and even if I'm familiar with them as cultural difference from mine.... it sucks. One character says, "Ya le estas tomando a esta vaina!" Which, again, from context, I assume she meant, "You're getting the hang of it." What the fuck is a "vaina?" No clue. At another point they say, "brevage" for, obviously, "beverage," yet "beverage" is an ucommon term, one would normally say "drink," "bebida." Is that what they originally had in there? Who knows!

I'm very disappointed and of course Microsoft does "no refunds." I'm seriously debating either to push through it or just wait for a trip to the States to get a physical copy.

I mentioned it is a 360 title. Initially I saw a glimmer of hope when I realized that maybe since I changed my xbox One's location to Mexico to be able to enter payment information that that was why it was downloaded in Spanish (still doesn't make sense as ALL my other games download in the original or give language options). I boot up my 360, and start downloading it there. It works! it starts to download, yay! Wait... too soon. the download stops and restarts at 80%. W...T...F? It does it again. I google the problem. I have to empty my caches, ok. Done. Still does it. Look it up again, did I miss something? Yes. I have to TRANSFER the license. Even though I changed my location to Mexico on my 360, it still thinks it's in the US and everything in the store is in dollars and won't let me put in my Mexican payment info (which is why I hoped it would download in English). So I transfer the license... STILL doesn't work, because not all licenses are available in all countries and if you downloaded a certain game under one country's VPN it won't let you do it in another. SERIOUSLY?

That's where it stands. Either bite the bullet and play a horribly dubbed version or wait to get it physically. Fing BS.
Click to expand...
Pinga!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top