I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.
Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.”
The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations.
Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.
I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!
Blog. Now, granted, I don’t do this every day, but I’m trying to write more this year than last year and I really don’t like taking more than one day off a week. At one point I went for around (nearly?) two years without missing a day. I don’t feel the need to build up that kind of streak again but I definitely want missed days to be infrequent.
The Whole Year Puzzle. My wife got me this thing for Christmas; that’s it up there; I probably should have taken the pieces out, but you get the idea– the months are across the two rows at the top and the rest are days, from 1-31, and supposedly you can rearrange the wood pieces to show every single day of the year. There are multiple ways for most (all?) of the days, too– every time Bek and I have compared our days (she has one too) they have been different. It’s set to Feb 11 because I try to keep it a day ahead. I didn’t do this yesterday either, so today I did the 10th and the 11th, because I can’t skip a day.
Wordle. You all know what Wordle is. Takes two minutes, most days. My longest unbroken streak of wins was 167. It’s been 292 days since I skipped one. Prepare for a NYT games streak, by the way.
NYT Mini Crossword. Generally under a minute. I occasionally go on tears where I’ll do the regular crossword every day, but the longer ones can take over an hour and I don’t usually want to burn that much time. The Mini is much shorter.
Spelling Bee, also an NYT game. I win this every day and I try to do it without any clues. I’m not successful at that terribly often– maybe once or twice a week. That said, I usually only need clues for the last four or five words at most, and there are sometimes up to 70 words. I don’t actually play Connections very often because I’m terrible at it. I lose more often than I win.
Duolingo. I’m back on my Arabic again; I deleted all my progress and started over, but I’m doing a full … circle? Lesson? Whatever they call them, I’m doing one of them a day.
Busuu. I’m keeping a streak up here as well. Busuu breaks down into chapters and lessons; I’m in Chapter 4, Lesson 5, and shit is getting complicated fast. That said, I’m still doing a lesson a day. It’s a lot harder than Duolingo but I feel like I’m learning more effectively. That said, the tiny font is still killing me. I may switch this to my iPad to see if the increased screen real estate leads to bigger letters. I could learn to read this damn language if I could just see it.
The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!
There were another couple of sentences beyond this, but you get the idea. This induced panic at first– I am nowhere near being able to translate any of this shit, but after a second what I realized is that this is actually a drill at parsing individual words out of a sentence. The underlined ones– for some reason Paul didn’t have one in his last sentence– were blank, and I was given five or six options for the word the person said to choose from. I managed to 100% it, then did it again when I decided I was going to make a blog post out of it, so … yay me.
Also, this is much bigger than the screen of my actual phone, and Christ, I’m going to need to start doing this on my iPad or something just to be able to read the letters. This font is a bitch.
I spent the rest of the evening writing practice tests for tomorrow. My day is set for the next couple of days of school, then easy intro to Pythagoras on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be an easy week. He said.
I asked a few days ago if anyone had any recommendations for language-learning apps, and while I didn’t actually receive any (you bastards) I did manage to find an app called Busuu all on my own. I’ve been going back and forth between it and Duolingo all week, and while I’m only five days in, I already like it a lot more than Duolingo, if only because 1) it’s explicitly teaching me how the alphabet works, or at least trying, and 2) in the bits in between talking about different sets of letters, it’s approaching language-learning in a way that makes a lot more sense to me than Duolingo’s style, which is … idiosyncratic.
The other cool thing Busuu does, beyond, y’know, teaching things in a reasonable order, is that it allows you to record yourself speaking or writing short sentences and then builds a social media site on top of that, where you can listen to people trying to say sentences in English and help them out, or vice versa. I’m not completely sold on this, especially since the last time I really interacted with it it told me to “describe myself or someone else,” a feat completely beyond my abilities, and then wouldn’t let me move on without entering something. I wrote “I don’t know how to do this” in the box, and have received a handful of corrections entirely in Arabic, which, of course, I can’t read, nor do I actually know how to type Arabic letters on my phone in the first place. (And, to be clear, they wanted Latin transliterations, so “Marhaba, asmi Luther,” not مرحبا، اسمي لوثر )
Also, I’m most of the way through a seven-day trial period, and the premium version is a year for $84. Which I’m willing to pay, don’t get me wrong, but is probably too steep for quite a lot of people. And the font is too Goddamn small, but that’s true of damn near every Arabic app I’ve ever encountered. I need Arabic to be about twice as big as Latin letters to be comprehensible. That size in that little bit of Arabic up there? Too fucking small.
Anyway, despite all that, early signs are definitely positive on this one. I’ll report back once I get further in and let you know if my feelings change.
I’ve jumped back into Duolingo again, trying to regain what little Arabic I had learned on the first run, and … man, the way this software works just isn’t going to do it for me. I know how to learn from books, but software still eludes me; has anyone out there actually had any luck learning a language (use whatever definition you want for “learning”) using software of any kind, whether desktop or phone app or whatever? Particularly when the language in question was written in something other than Latin script? Let me know.
According to Duolingo, I have been studying Arabic daily for one hundred and forty-seven days. And Duolingo does a lot of things, but one of the things that Duolingo has not managed to do in 147 days of daily practice is teach me to read Arabic. One would think that would be an early priority! It is not. Duolingo teaches almost exclusively through word recognition– what teachers used to call the “whole language” method of teaching reading, and for the most part genuinely seems uninterested in actually providing explanations for things unless absolutely necessary. Even then it kind of hides them in corners of the app and finds ways to make them useless anyway. There is actually a “Learn the letters” section! I have been doing lessons in there for months and it still hasn’t gotten to half the letters.
Whole language is bullshit, y’all. Even as an interested adult it’s an insanely rough way to learn a new language. It means that in-context I can recognize words but if you throw a sentence at me with no context I may not even be able to figure out all the letters. After five months. Keep in mind I already read Hebrew and once taught myself to read German from essentially scratch over a weekend so that I could pass a mandatory translation exam for my degree. I’m good at languages! But this isn’t it. And I also take issue with some of Duolingo’s choices for the sentences and phrases they’re throwing at us. For example:
تلفازي داخل أسدي
Which means “My television is inside my lion” and I swear to God is a sentence that has shown up in my exercises, I believe in a unit called “Express a problem.” That’s not a joke. It’s a real thing. Or this one, during the unit on prepositions, which consisted exclusively of things being in front of or behind things:
هناك زوجتك مع رجل خلف المطعم
That means “There is your wife with a man behind the restaurant,” and … okay! Sure! That’s a thing that has probably happened. But I don’t know how to say “hello” or introduce myself yet. They have literally not taught “Hi, my name is _____, how are you?” but I can express trepidation about the eating habits of my lion.
Anyway, over the last few days– because there is no problem so minor that I won’t try to solve it by throwing money at it– I have acquired both a fine set of Arabic alphabet flash cards and a new textbook dedicated specifically to teaching reading. I have learned more about the alphabet in an hour of perusing that book between today and yesterday than I have in five months of Duolingo. Sadly, I have not received further instructions about how to express my feelings about my lion:
أنا أحب أسدي لكني لا أحب أسد جاري.
That’s “I love my lion but I do not love my neighbor’s lion,” and again, no, that’s not a joke.
I met my Afghan student today. For the purpose of posting about her I’m going to call her Fatima, which is the second-most-common Afghan girls’ name, but isn’t hers.
I suspect I’m going to be talking about her quite a lot for the next little while.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything I was worried about with Fatima appears to have come to pass. She speaks virtually no English at all; she knew “hello” but I don’t think I heard her say even one other word of English while she was in class. She can read in neither English nor Pashto, although I was able to confirm after struggling with it for a few minutes that she does speak Pashto specifically basically by trying different names for languages until she lit up. As it happens, I have students in that classroom who can speak Urdu and Arabic; she understood neither language.
I gave her this when she came into the room:
The top language is Pashto; underneath that is Urdu, as Google Translate doesn’t have Dari available. I thought about adding Arabic but ran out of room, and it looks like Urdu is more common in Afghanistan anyway. It was immediately clear that she couldn’t read either. Later in class, I had her write her name (I wrote mine, then an arrow pointing to me, and handed her the pencil) and she was able to mostly write her first name, in shaky, second-grader’s handwriting, but it wasn’t quite spelled like it is in the computer and didn’t quite line up with how she pronounced it, so … yeah. Later I wrote 3+4 on the page; she did not recognize them as numbers, as far as I could tell.
Effectively, I am unable to communicate with this kid via anything other than gestures until I discover some sort of resource– an app, a website, something— that is able to speak Pashto. I’ve found several that can translate it (with who knows what level of quality, since I’m not able to evaluate it) but she’s effectively illiterate as far as being able to communicate grade-level content or anything close to it. So we need to work on nothing but getting her up to speed in English and basic literacy. I literally can’t teach her any math right now.
You can imagine how easy it is to find something that translates written English text intothe spoken version of a language that is only spoken by maybe fifty million people worldwide and only about sixteen thousand (as of 2010; the number has certainly jumped recently) in America. I can find dictionaries and auto translators; they’re useless to me if they don’t speak, unless I learn to read Pashto.
On top of that, I had to bite some heads off in the morning, from kids who should have fucking well known better, for enthusiastic and obnoxious use of the word “Ay-rab” and jokes about the kids blowing up the building. I made it clear in all of my classes today that I’m landing on anyone bullying these kids like the wrath of God. We’re putting a stop to that shit with a quickness.
So, if anyone can make some suggestions for some “learn the alphabet” types of activities that work well for ESL kids, I’d love to hear it. Because our ESL teacher? Is out with Covid right now.
I have four or five of Zen Cho’s books by now, and I’m pretty certain I’ve only talked about one of them on here, her Sorcerer to the Crown, which came out way back in 2015, before the world went to hell. I’m not in the mood to bury the lede here, so I’ll put this right up front: this is my favorite of her books, and by a pretty substantial margin. Black Water Sister tells the story of Jess, an American in her early twenties born to immigrant Malaysian parents, who moves back to Malaysia with her family at the beginning of the book, with a Harvard degree under her belt but no real plan on what to do with her life.
Then her grandmother’s spirit moves into her body, and she learns all sorts of things about Malaysian religion and Malaysian gods, and she has to protect a temple from a local gangster who also happens to be the fifth-richest guy in Malaysia, while fighting with her long-distance girlfriend and pointedly not starting a relationship with the only person her age she talks to throughout the entire book, who is a guy and would be a romantic interest in any other book.
And, yeah, it turns out her grandmother is … maybe a little malevolent? Just a titch? A little wee bit? It throws some curveballs you’re probably not expecting.
That’s not why I liked the book, though. This one is a great example of a Book I Liked For the Writing, although I have fewer problems with the story than I usually do with books I enjoy in that particular fashion. The interesting thing here is that this book reads as far more personal to Cho than her previous work– she is, herself, a young Malaysian woman, and while she’s writing a character younger than her I have to assume that some of Cho’s own experiences have made it into the book. If nothing else, the way she writes Malaysian dialogue is just fantastic. Don’t know any Malaysian? Too bad, she’s going to throw some words and phrases out there and if you can’t intuit them from context you’re out of luck. That said, the dialogue in this book is almost entirely at least translated intoManglish if not explicitly written that way; most of the time the Malaysian characters are speaking English to Jess, and the deeper I got into the book the more sidetracked and fascinated I got by how the creole actually works. Malaysian uses a lot of emphatic particles that English doesn’t use, for starters– lots of ending sentences with “lah” and “ah” and “meh” and other syllables like that, and while I never quite pulled together exactly what was going on (and the damn Internet has been no help) the name system they’re using is interesting as hell too. I loved listening to these characters in a way that I haven’t in a long time; I have lots of writers I like whose dialogue I’m big fans of, but this is the first time I can think of where the author’s representation of speech in a culture I was unfamiliar with was so interesting.
(Also, and this is a minor detail, but some of Jess’ relatives are Christians, and it’s fascinating to see the way that Malaysians apparently treat Christianity as an item on a buffet of religions, to be sampled as needed. Conversion to Christianity is pondered at one point in the book as a way to get another god (no shit) to leave them alone, and they treat it about as seriously as I might ponder picking up a new pair of shoes upon discovering that my current ones hurt my feet. It’s like “Oh, we could do that,” and that’s it.)
I can’t attribute reading this one to #readaroundtheworld, as Cho is not only an author I’ve been following for a while but isn’t even the first Malaysian I’ve read this year– that honor went to Cassandra Khaw’s All-Consuming World, and I think Khaw has another book coming out in a month or so, so I’ll have read at least three books by Malaysians this year. But it definitely pairs nicely with the project, and this is exactly the type of book I was looking to read more of for the project. My one complaint? This may not be something that bothers you, but Jess is a bit of an asshole, and not always in a good way. She’s got a filthy mouth in a way that feels jarring compared to everyone else (Jess, as the only American-born, first-language English character in the book, talks significantly differently from every other character) and the couple of times she tells her grandmother to fuck off are … kind of a trip. She also does a bit too much lying in the book for my tastes; she’s lying to her parents about being gay, among other things, and while she’s got a long-distance girlfriend she’s also lying to her through most of the book, as her girlfriend is described as too rational to want to hear Jess complaining about things like being possessed by local deities and gangsters trying to kill her. It means a lot of the book’s energy is devoted to Jess keeping secrets from everyone around her, and keeping track of who knows what, and it can be kind of wearying, to be perfectly honest. But as weak spots in a book go, a young MC acting like a selfish young person isn’t necessarily the worst fault the book could have. I enjoyed this one quite a lot. I think you will too.
