17 Foreign Words English Desperately Needs
[Abbiocco: Italian for ‘food coma’.]
[Schnapsidee: German for stupid ideas, like arranging furniture late at night while drunk.]
[Ubuntu: Zulu for “I am because we are.”]
[Sommer: Afrikaans for “just because”.]
[Tartle: Scottish for not remembering the name of someone you just met.]
[Mamilhapinatapai: Yámana for everyone wanting the same but noone acting on it.]
[Treppenwitz (staircase wit): German for thinking of a comeback too late.]
The German prefix “zer-” is a tiny Terminator.
legen: to lay zerlegen: to destroy
teilen: to share, to split zerteilen: to destoy
siedeln: to settle zersiedeln: to destroy (by settling)
setzen: to set zersetzen: to destroy (by corrosion)
drücken: to press, to squeeze zerdrücken: to destroy (by squeezing)
Zerjoy our language!
After eating a rich and filling tapioca, I sat satisfied, staring into space. The woman who cooked it saw me and asked if it ‘deu uma moleza?’.
[Teaching a language vertically is quickly tedious. Nobody makes a sentence from only prepositions. Better to tie together various concepts to enable creating simple expressions.]
[Teach common words after the necessary knowledge to understand them, not at the beginning.]
As language methods often completely ignore the language of instruction, they tend to have an irritating habit of describing absolutely everything a language does. Learners are often forced to spend too much time trying to make heads or tails of grammatical descriptions provided to them for a new language, without ever realising that the target language functions in the same way as the base language, or indeed realising it when it’s too late and the knowledge can do little to spare the learner any effort. What’s worse, is that superfluous descriptions run the risk of becoming mental debris that the learner is unsure how to apply. They may lurk in the shadows and raise their ugly heads later on, interfering with other thought processes (often in fascinating ways, mind!).
In short, we don’t need to describe everything the target language does, and what should remain unsaid will have much to do with the structure of the language of instruction. To describe certain things in the target language which are indeed the same in the base language (without a particular reason for doing so) would serve to make our learner feel less in control than they would have with less information. We will avoid burdening our learners with irrelevant observations they’re not sure what to do with, and in this way we also cue that what we do tell our learners is important.
[We often already know, without realizing that we know.]
When it comes to importing vocabulary, we are almost always using the vocabulary for something other than learning a word. When Complete Spanish opens with -al words, it is not so we can learn legal, normal and metal, but so that we can begin dissecting what vowels sound and look like in Spanish, whilst raising the learner’s consciousness of word stress, too. In the same course, when we access verbs through the pattern ‘cancelation - cancelar, we do so to highlight the infinitive and its function, to then begin establishing the infinitive as a launchpad for building other tenses. The vocabulary conversion itself is secondary to these goals. Our learner will be taken aback by all the free words, of course, but our own focus as writers is elsewhere!
Old English had “he walks not there today”, similar to other languages with negation after the verb. We change/contract that to “he doesn’t walk there today”. Perhaps a useful explaining device.
[Languages don’t exist: there are only dialects, and some of those get promoted as a vehicle for national purposes, which makes it a political event.]
[They only know what we tell them when we tell it to them.]
[Often what looks like one concept to someone with experience is really several concepts to a beginner. Make a list of all the elements involved and there will usually be one that can be learned in isolation.]
[The learner should rarely feel like something is missing. The teacher presents one idea at a time, and the learner tries to apply it feeling complete and resolved.]
[Maintain an optimum cognitive load normally and increase or decrease tension deliberately to create contours of peaks and valleys so that the experience feels dynamic and engaging.]
I have taken few steps to simplify its content, deeming any simplification a complication in waiting.
Está rojo is what we might say when referring to the state of a glowing hot piece of metal, while es rojo, as a characteristic, would be used to describe a painted piece of metal.
it is this thought that we must transcribe into our new language, rather than the base language itself.
Introduction to Arabic, Track 12
Writing words down creates an external loop that becomes part of your process and means you aren’t building affordances to recall without it.
Similar to language, it might be useful to perform songs slightly under-prepared so that you can start accommodating shortcomings sooner.