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| That's SAT, behind the bus |
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| it's not the carpaccio but Hector's kicks ass |
Then, I saw the owner of my Spanish school out on Friday who told the folks at the bar that I was having trouble. So now all of Antigua knows that I am stupid. LOOK LADY I AM NOT A GOOD CLASSROOM LEARNER AND I NEVER HAVE BEEN GET OFF MY BACK. I study around 2-3 hours a day, and I can speak fine when I need to but when my teacher asks me about a word, I am struck stupid for some reason. It's always been that way. No idea how I got through law school, which is literally nothing but that, but here I am.
Also, in other scooter-related news, I still haven't figured out who has the right-of-way here which is sure to result in my getting t-boned and dying on the cobblestone streets of Antigua. I think it's Avenidas traffic, which is north/south, but motorcycles and scooters don't seem to care either way. So I drive like a granny at intersections, and everyone zooms past me.
People here are hyper sensitive to the slightest temperature changes. I saw today that friends in Alabama had a nice day in the 70's but were expecting freezing temperatures tonight. Antigua would lose its collective mind if that happened here. It's basically the exact same every day: 72-78 in the day, 50-55 at night, but one day is a few degrees colder than the past, you'd think a blizzard has rolled in. Heavy sweaters, puffy jackets, the whole deal. I'd also like to point out that shorts aren't really a thing here. Everyone wears pants or jeans. Soccer was a spring sport when I was a kid, so I guess I got used to wearing shorts in cold weather, so it takes alot for my legs to get cold, so I'm the idiot who always walks around Antigua in shorts, looking like a clown.
I've clearly buried the lede here, but we had an earthquake this week. Well, notsomuch us as the folks close to the Pacific had an earthquake that we felt. It was a 5.4 on the Richter scale which isn't a big deal I don't suppose. Earthquakes aren't what you think they are. Well, maybe if you're slap ass in the middle of one, it is, but when you aren't there really isn't any shaking, it's more of a rolling sensation. The best analogy I can give you is that you're in a wave. Either way, Steve was having none of it, and there's just not a way to tell a dog to calm down during a quake.
Which reminds me, my buddy Harvell tells me that there was a 4.7 quake in Mobile. I don't understand that, but he said his store shook a little and everything. We don't have any fault lines, so I dunno.
Mosquitos. Brah. They everywhere. I think it's because my apartment is next to a plant nursery and across the street from a coffee farm, but as much as I want to leave my doors and windows open because the weather is literally nice all the time, I can't because of them skeeters and only one window has a screen. If I know where to get screens that would solve the problem, yet I do not and nobody else seems to know either. So if you come visit, bring bug spray.
Happy Holidays to all if you celebrate. If you do not, have a good week. I leave for New Orleans on Friday. Not sure of my plans at all, but if you find yourself that way, give me a holler.
Greg the below text is some advice on language learning. "most language teaching practices seem to concentrate on teaching the language and not on the process of learning the language, so it is not surprising that many key factors are overlooked.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need is the scaffolding in which we can locate vocabulary. And here lies one of the main reasons why learners easily forget vocabulary – they don’t locate it in the scaffolding, they are not quite sure where to put it and how to use it – they just set out to learn it by translation hoping by some miracle their brain will be able to put it in a place where it can be used. Here is some interesting research on how infants learn vocabulary in this way.
If the scaffolding is shaky or the understanding of where the word sits is not carefully defined by the learner then forgetting is the only sensible thing the mind can do, because it makes no sense of the new word beyond its connection to the first language. That link is a very weak one and is not the link we call upon when we attempt to use it in our natural speech.
Eg. Imagine for a minute that you are learning English and want to know the meaning of ”tűzőgép“ (or choose any word in another language you know) So you turn to your bilingual dictionary and find that it means “stapler“. So now you think you know the word.
Compare that to writing out or speaking the following from your own work ( not from a dictionary):
I use my stapler to hold together many pieces of paper. I bought my stapler at the supermarket. I forgot to buy staples for it. I had to go back and get them later. My stapler will only staple 6 pieces of paper together.
To do the latter, you need to have a basic understanding of the language and how it “hangs” together. You need to be thinking in the language, at some level, to form these sentences. You are linking the word, contextually, syntactically, grammatically, historically and personally! Isn’t that better than just linking the vocabulary item across languages?
If language learners spent more time initially in concentrating on how the language is held together, then once they had the basics in place it would be MUCH easier to add vocabulary to that working understanding. Of course we need some vocabulary to do that. But by minimising the vocabulary that is learned initially and focussing on how the language works and how we can use it, it is possible to build that structure in which later we can easily place the vocabulary. The trouble is that many language learners try to do both at the same time and hence succeed in getting frustrated. This is because our brain is working at vocabulary learning at the same time as trying to sort out the way that the language is held together.