Dreaming
in Hindi: life in translation by Katherine Russell Rich
Portobello Books, 2010. ISBN: 978 184627 261 5
Portobello Books, 2010. ISBN: 978 184627 261 5
L1 = First
language L2 = Second language L2WS = Second language
writing system
The book
chronicles her year of learning Hindi through total immersion study in India
and some facts and theories about language learning.
There is a
critical period for language acquisition which ends around puberty when brain
lateralization is complete. For most right-handed people language systems end
up in the left hemisphere. Some experts contend that there is a sequence of
cut-off points for different aspects of language. Prosody (intonation) is
thought to be the first to ‘close’. Others are phonology (sound patterns),
morphology (combination of small sound splices – ‘can’ plus ‘dy’ – into words)
and syntax (the ordering of words into sentences. Only one, lexicon
(vocabulary) continues after maturation.
Procedural
(automatic) knowledge is acquired incidentally and at a young age, e.g. tying
shoelaces, walking upstairs, speaking a first language.
Declarative
knowledge is what you learn later in life – maths, telephone numbers and PIN
numbers, other languages – and is stored diffusely in the brain.
When using
another language you use different combinations of brain circuits and draw more
on context and gestures processed in the right hemisphere of the brain and less
on the limbic system, which deals with emotions, at the base of the brain. For
first languages, emotions help language set – e.g. a mother’s approval of
infant speech.
An English
child of 6 or 7, taken to live in France, will go through a silent period. They
won’t use the target language initially but after several months will speak
fluently. Adults and teenagers tend to feel they must talk straightaway but
listening without speaking is important. In total immersion your first language
seems to fall apart while you concentrate on the new language.
Studies have
shown that various other skills do not help second language acquisition:
poor visuo-spatial skills, a gift for music or intelligence. What does help is
motivation, good phonological memory (the capacity to reproduce and retain
sounds), a knowledge of other languages and a willingness to play and pretend
to be someone else.
Each language
is related to its own culture and will not always directly match the first
language – some words will be ‘missing’ and others not directly translatable
into the first language. In cultures where timekeeping is fluid, words for
appointment, minutes and seconds may well be missing.
‘Transfer’ is
the way a first language interferes with a second language. One theory argues
that a German-English bilingual speaks a German different from a monolingual
German speaker and an English different from a monolingual English speaker.
At birth our
brains are already tuned to the prosody of L1 and by 6 months our ability to
detect another culture’s vowels is waning, though consonants remain clear for a
while longer.
There are two
kinds of language learners: the ‘i-dotters’
or analyticals who want to know the reasons for each usage and the ‘globals’ who can listen and learn and are
intuitive, visually oriented and approach problems spatially.
Most
languages have one central vowel, which shapes the face at rest. In English
this is the ‘schwa’ sound, while in French it is the ‘Uu’.
The ability
to detect and predict patterns is crucial to conversation.
People are
slower at reading foreign scripts not only because they are reading in a
foreign language but also because of the alphabet or syllabary or ideograms
used. The brain has to gauge contextual meaning, calculate the phonemes
(sounds) encoded in the script and analyse the lines of print as letters and
not random squiggles. Chinese ideograms fit the tonal language of Chinese
(tonal variations on a single sound give a number of different meanings) better
than Roman script.
Spoken
language is a biological specialisation but there is no natural reading zone in
the brain, so it is a challenge for brain plasticity and there is no biological
cut-off point for reading – people can learn to read at any age – but this does
not mean is easy when older.
Languages are
not codes but maps of reality. Speakers of each language comprehend the world
differently. Within a particular language you can only say things in a certain
way. In Spanish you are ‘in’ the bus, while in English you are ’on’ the bus.
One study investigated the effect of gender on nouns and found that Spanish
speakers described a key (feminine in Spanish) using more feminine adjectives (intricate,
shiny) while German speakers, for whom the word key is masculine, used terms
like heavy and jagged.
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