Finished my first proper exam since uni earlier today; alleviation swiftly followed. It’s a wonderful thing, after several months of study, to know you can go home and wile away the hours adding another chapter to your travel blog without feeling guilty. Such is my justification for yet another in a string of tardy entries. But in truth, little has happened since the last, little that would interest most readers anyway. In light of this, and in light of the new knowledge I’ve acquired over the past few months, I’m going to attempt to give an overall representation of the nature of language as I see it; why I love it in all its shapes and forms, and why I’ll spend the rest of my life involved with it. Might throw in an addendum about what’s actually going on in my life also, so try and stick with me.
Language is a unique commodity that all humans possess in various forms and to varying degrees. We’re not born with it, and unlike the ability to walk, which is instinctive, we are neither able to gain a foothold, nor a tangible grasp, without some helping hand from a fellow human being. Case in point: the feral wolf child who, once found by civilization, continued to parade around on all fours, all grunts and unintelligible utterances, before dying without having mastered the sentence.
Our mother tongue isn’t learned, but simply acquired, passively – no effort required. How easy was it for us to learn English? No one can remember, but it certainly didn’t require a systemic grammatical breakdown of the constituents of a sentence for me to say, ‘Mummy, I want more!’ when my satiety had yet to be satiated.
I’ve known for a while that native English speaking children never truly learn how to deconstruct their sentences, never learn the intricacies, nuances, and downright idiocies of English grammar. Ah, grammar! The very word would send shivers down the spine of any student, and you could never imagine studying anything quite so mundane or inconsequential. You could speak the language well enough, couldn’t you? So why try to dissect it like that spread-eagled frog you took a scalpel to during biology class? At least the frog clarified certain things (where your organs were), but all grammar seemed to serve was to further complicate things. Just leave it be.
According to a good Russian friend and fellow teacher, Eugi, grammatical dissection is exactly what the youth of the motherland have to do. In many other cultures I’d imagine also. And this grammatical ignorance of native English speakers seems to come to the fore when a second language is thrown into the mix. One of my most vivid French lessons at secondary school was when our English-speaking French teacher tried to explain the present perfect tense…in French, as was the norm of methodologies at British secondary schools that followed The Direct Approach - full immersion in the second language, no explanations in English. To his dismay, his explanation was rewarded with a classroom of bemused faces. Thus he resorted to English, once again explaining the usage of this extremely common grammatical form, and was once again met with uncomprehending stares. “Weren’t you ever taught this in your English classes?’’ he inquired, perplexed, and now rather disgruntled. The simple answer – no, we weren’t. So what were we taught? I’ll be damned if I can remember, though I do recollect throwing together a short story about a homicidal teddy bear who’d stabbed its owner to death with a kitchen knife when I was fourteen or so. Mum has it gathering dust somewhere in the attic I think. And yet the British take pride in the plethora of revolutionary writers that have produced timeless works across the ages: Shakespeare, Dickins, Joyce, to name but a few.
This grammatical ignorance seems to stem from the idea that certain disciplines, such as mathematics, need to be dissected in order to be fully understood and used in a purposeful manner, whereas English, whose intricacies have been inculcated subconsciously from the time when we started babbling, can be brushed aside. And I guess in certain respects this is true. Hubert Selby Junior produced a very influential novel, Requiem for a Dream, soon after adapted into an award-winning film, which had the grammatical accuracy of a disinterested teen going through puberty, but nonetheless proved to be a resounding success.
Success or not, a lack of understanding of our language seems to pervade the entire youth of the English-speaking world. It certainly did so for me; even after I’d attempted some attempts at fiction during my university years. It wasn’t until I’d read a book by (none another than) Stephen King, entitled ‘on writing’ that I’d realized the breadth of my ignorance. The book advocated, ‘write in the active voice’ and ‘omit adverbs unless absolutely necessary.’ What the hell was active voice? I knew an adjective, but had no clue what an adverb was. And yet my attempts at fiction were littered with the above, unknowingly
I knew how to write the language, how sentences were formed in such a way, but I didn’t understand why they were formed in that way, at least not on a conscious level. Take a simple example: ‘I killed her with my knife.’ Or maybe, ‘It was my knife that killed her.’ Or perhaps, ‘She was killed by my knife’. What about, ‘My knife killed her.’ How does one explain all these variations? What’s it all about Jack? Be fucked if I knew.
And such is same for the vast majority of new ESL recruits, often fresh off a course which doesn’t teach a whole lot, ‘’ready’’ to teach our fair language. I was embarrassed on my CELTA course when the only non-native trainee – a Hungarian called Anna – knew substantially more about English grammar than the rest of us natives. It happened again at my current company, when the aforementioned Eugi proved conclusively that, though Russian, she knew our language better than we did. With English being a global language these days, and the amount of native speakers moving abroad to teach it, one would’ve thought that we would be being taught how to look at it from a linguistic point of view. For me, it seems that native English speakers are amongst the most ignorant of their language, and this is a sad state of affairs.
These days however, especially since the DELTA exam, I’ve been able to come to terms with our language. It took a while though. I can still read and write for leisure, but now I can also analyse the language, understand the what, the where, the when, the how and the why. It’s a real eye opener, and a skill you can apply to any language ever spoken or written. And I have written a lot of English, starting at uni with short stories and continuing until the present with the occasional blog post.
So why did I stop trying to write this language and try to teach it? Well, as any long-term reader of this protracted travel blog should know, the question eventually dawned: Why not teach this language you are able to speak and write half decently? Some inspiration came from one of my favourite contemporary authors, David Mitchell, who had done exactly that before penning some masterful literary pieces - Cloud Atlas, probably most worthy of note. He’d gone to Japan to teach ESL, had found inspiration, a novel had soon been forthcoming, and the rest, as they say, is history. Could I attempt a similar feat? Probably not, but I’d been on a sure path to nowhere at the time (pulling pints at a bar), and a chance to polish my grammar, to try my hand at teaching, and maybe pen something half decent seemed within the realms of possibility. So why not give it a crack?
Nerves. Insecurity. Culture shock. Homesickness. Reasons such as these have you rushing back on the first flight home to where everything ticks over and works the way you expect it to. They almost had me, but after having a big leaving party, with a, ‘thanks guys, I’ll be back in a few years to catch up,” speech, I knew it wasn’t an option. I’d come close though; very close. This new place was just too weird, too different from Western Ideals, but I’d studied some Thai, and I had my CELTA, and so I stuck with it.
Even at my first school in Thailand, where the teaching standard was all but non-existent, it soon became abundantly clear that being able to use all the intricacies, the nuances, the idiocies, of our fair language was all for naught if I weren’t able to pick them apart and parcel them off into manageable bite-sized pieces that could be easily swallowed by the non-native speaker. Because the students I was teaching were neither language-devoid suckling babes whose cerebral language centres were just dry sponges, effortlessly able to absorb the lexical moisture that was applied to them, nor were they linguists, but individuals trying to learn a second language, and an alien language at that.
My most memorable phrase from French classes: Je ne comprends pas - I don’t comprehend (understand). Easy enough translation. We can thank Will the Conqueror for that, spilling a lot of French, in some form or another, into the English lexicon. How about the Vietnamese version: Tôi không hi?u. Okay, it uses the same sentence structure and a Latin-based alphabet – thanks again to the French - but some of the sounds those letters represent don’t even exist in English, and the pronoun ‘I’ can be one of maybe twenty variants depending on relative ages, sexes, relations, and social standings between the recipients. In Asia you need to know your place before you can say ‘I’ ! Then there’s the tones; every syllable in Vietnamese can be uttered in one of six, each potentially with a different meaning. My favourite Vietnamese tongue twister: b?n Ban b?n bán bàn b?n: Mr Ban is busy selling dirty tables. How about the Thai version of ‘I don’t understand’: ?????????. Taken literally it means: not entered into the mind. And then there is the script to deal with.
Suffice it to say, the gulf between my mother tongue and that of my students was a wide one: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, all alienated because of no common ancestral forbear to the two languages. But it is my opinion that a trait of any good teacher is the ability to emphathise, to put yourself in the shoes of your students. And to that end I was assiduous in my study of Thai and Vietnamese, to the point at which I’m now literate and able to hold (albeit basic) conversations in both languages. The insight this gives you as a teacher is massive. Because you know why students are making these grammatical errors, why their pronunciation is off, why they are saying an unnaturally sounding word. And that’s the crux of it. Knowing the why of the error, and then being able to identify it, address it, fix it, and inculcate the resolution in a way such that it becomes habitual, instinctual.
But eventually the problem arises of explaining the ‘why?’ And as previously mentioned, the native English speaker is generally crap at this. The ‘how’ is easy enough: ‘repeat after me: blah blah blah.’ But why, for example, might we say something like, ‘If I could change anything about my past, I’d have studied harder at university.’ Why would we say this? The answer (when you know it) is simple enough; we are expressing a hypothetical situation in the past which we regret. Okay, no problem. In English, and many other languages, this form of expression is called the ‘subjunctive mode’, yet in Vietnamese, the subjunctive mode doesn’t exist. There is no way to express the aforementioned statement in Vietnamese. Vietnamese people see this as a past event that clearly has no possibility of ever having happened thus there is no point in hypothesising as to what might have happened. So where the subjunctive is concerned with possibility, whether real or hypothetical, the indicative, which all languages share, concerns itself with what actually is.
Everyone thinks in the language they speak, you can’t help it. But if you speak in a language which is devoid of the subjunctive mood, for example Vietnamese, do you then think in a different way? Of course you do, because the predominant language you think in is the language you speak. But perhaps not always. I had a dream when I was living in Bangkok and the dream was purely in Thai. It was at that point that I realized that the language I’d been learning had permeated through the outer cerebral cracks and into the habitual grey matter. When this happens, you know you have a decent grasp on the language because you’re no longer thinking in English, but in the language you’re trying to learn. How does this happen? There’s a simple way.
You surround yourself with the language (in this case Vietnamese) in every form. You turn your phone into Vietnamese, you read Vietnamese books, watch Vietnamese films, you only converse with your Vietnamese friends (if they’re cool with this) in Vietnamese. But I think the best strategy for being able to speak a foreign language fluently in a short period of time is this:
1. Learn the pronunciation of any sounds that are different to English
2. Practise common words where these sounds arise repetitively
3. Learn a stock set of sentences that can be used with natives to achieve something (What is this? How much? Can I have….?)
4. Learn the phrase, ‘I can’t speak English because I’m…’ (Russian?)
5. Give yourself a rule where you are not allowed to speak English for an extended period of time. Keep this up for a week.
I followed these rules when learning both Thai and Vietnamese and they definitely work.
Briefly jumping back to the subjunctive. This is a fascinating concept that links language to culture. Language is a major factor in defining a culture, and thus culture is often ultimately defined primarily through its language. Whereas I might say to my girlfriend, Nghi, ‘If we were to get married, we would probably have children,’ which is one of several possible eventualities which I perceive, her version of the sentence would be, ‘When we get married, we will have children.’ And this is because the Vietnamese language doesn’t allow for the subjunctive mood. One’s language is the way one thinks; one’s perception on life. To give credibility to this notion, a recent study found that Vietnamese people are the most optimistic on Earth, because they don’t think about what could have been, or what might be, just what is; the indicative. The most pessimistic, on the other hand, are the French, because they have two subjunctive modes; two ways to express possibility and potential regret. I guess the downside to all this South-East Asian optimism is that you’re unlikely to get the same deep, though-provoking prose from Vietnamese authors that you might from Western ones. Two sides to each coin I guess.
Are you still with me after all that nonsense? This is supposed to be a travel blog, so I guess I should include something travel related. My elder brother, Dan, popped in en route to Australia a few weeks ago. We didn’t have long, just two days, so decided on a quick sojourn to the coast, Vung Tao. Was really good to catch up and show him a bit of the country I’d been calling home for the last year and a half. We had a good hike up to the Statue of Jesus (massively dwarfed by its cousin in Rio de Janeiro) and meals both French and Vietnamese. Chewed the fat, soaked up the sun, frolicked in the waves, submerged once or twice. Nghi remained beach-bound, submerged in the shadow of the parasol; my attempts of westernisation have yet to come to fruition. The Vietnamese love their pale skin; white equals beauty, but also social standing – someone dark-skinned will generally be seen as a rice-farmer, toiling under the hot sun. I’ve tried to impress upon her the Western perception that tanned skin is attractive but she isn’t buying it. Only a hat, almost full skin coverage, and ultra-strong sun screen for the skin that is exposed will do. Feel like I’m fighting a losing battle on this front. Unless someone moves to a foreign country and is fully integrated into that culture for an extended period of time, it seems unlikely that they will disassociate themselves from the culture in which they were inculcated from birth. And perhaps it’s wrong to try and do so; I’m still on the fence with that one.
Have been able to gain some ground however; a few well-structured arguments on my part convinced the better half’s parents to let us go away and explore the North for a week. Shortly into the New Year we’ll be tourists in Hanoi before scooting over to the gorgeous Ha Long bay; our first real holiday as a couple. The parents weren’t subtle on their presumptions of marriage following said sojourn but I held my ground. There is a veritable gulf between Eastern and Western culture and both sides need to appreciate the stance of the other. I think we do now … after a fashion.
What else? Christmas is around the corner, and though acknowledged over here, it isn’t celebrated in the same spirit, despite a good proportion of Christians (roughly 30%) in the country. Tet New Year remains the Christmas of Vietnam, where gifts are given, businesses close, and families have reunions. This happens in February, the Chinese New Year; Christmas is still considered a western festival.
Other than that, my career seems to be flourishing; now being groomed for management level responsibilities by my awesome manager Moe, and will hopefully be off to Saigon before long in a similar capacity. Career is good, relationship is good, life, in general is good.
But if there is anything to take home from this blog, it should be this: speaking a first language is easy; knowing how and why your language works is hard; learning a second language is harder; knowing the how and why of the second language is impossible …. unless you know the culture. And the knowing of other cultures will only heighten your appreciation for the amazingly diverse nature of our species.