FAQ


How many languages do you speak?

It all depends on which languages happen to have caught my eye on any given day. The more relevant question is this:

How many languages do you speak well?

Honestly, I'm only fluent in English. I was at various points in my life very nearly fluent in French, Italian, and Mandarin. Nowadays, my French is half-assed, my Italian is passable, and my Mandarin flat-out sucks. Really, I'm much better at talking about other languages than I am at talking in other languages. Which is symptomatic of my generally scared-shitless social tendencies.

How many languages have you studied?

Formally, only five (French, Greek, Mandarin, Classical Chinese, and Italian). Informally, lots and lots.

What's your favorite language?

That's like asking Pete Doherty to pick his favorite illegal substance. One of the things I love best about language is that there are so damn many of them. If I ever get bored with one, I can just hop on over to another. In other words, I don't have a favorite language - really, I'm a bit of a linguistic philanderer. Had I been more inclined toward intellectual monogamy, after all, I might have had a shot at a career in academia. But right now I'm particularly interested in Arabic, Hungarian, and Basque. (Which is kind of a cliched bunch of "difficult" languages, but whatever. I like them.)

What's the best way to learn a language?

This varies from person to person. I know some people who can use language CDs to great effect, others who prefer to work from textbooks, and some who need nothing more than a few weeks in a foreign country. The best advice I have is not to hesitate to change up your strategy if something doesn't work. If you're bored to tears by grammar texts, try something different.

I personally like to work with a combination of foreign-language media and hard-core memorization. When I study Spanish, for instance, I usually go through vocabulary flashcards while watching movies and TV shows with the Spanish audio track. (My personal favorite? Buffy la cazavampiros. If you have the DVDs, you can watch in Spanish and French.) When I was first learning Italian, I'd spend my afternoons writing out verb conjugations and my evenings watching Italian gameshows. I have a vague feeling that the more you surround yourself with a language, even if it just means having the Cantonese version of Seventh Heaven playing in the background, the more successful you'll be and the deeper the language will worm its way into your brain.

My other preferred strategy is to take a translation of a children's book (I recommend Roald Dahl's Matilda) or a book I know extremely well (in my case, usually Pride & Prejudice ) and read it with the help of a dictionary. I read each chapter twice. The first time, I read it straight through, underlining any words I don't know. Then, I look up all the words and write the definitions in the margins. Then, I read it through a second time. If you've chosen a long enough book, chances are that by the time you make it through to the end, you'll have picked up a pretty decent reading knowledge of the language in question. The key, of course, is to try to rely on context as much as possible. If you can figure out words and structures on your own, it'll be so much easier to actually retain the information.

And of course, if you have your own tips and tricks that you use to pick up languages, I would love to hear them! (Truly: I don't use exclamation points lightly.)

What do I need if I want to learn a language?

Depends on the language. If you have Internet access (which, if you're reading this, I'm assuming you do), you can learn a wide variety of languages without ever having to shell out for a shitty language textbook. Wikipedia actually has some tremendous language resources. Of course, the usual warnings about Wikipedia apply. But I have noticed that the language entries seem to be unusually well edited and policed. You can also run a search on iTunes or Google for podcasts in the language of your choice or do a Google Book search to find old-school grammars that have entered the public domain. Of course, grammarians weren't particularly interested in readability back in the day, but I find that I tend to forgive a great deal in a book I don't have to pay for.

If you like learning in hard-copy, I'd recommend picking up first and foremost a basic grammar reference and dictionary for the language of your choice. I like to buy phrasebooks as well. I personally hate most self-teaching texts - I find that they present grammatical concepts in an extremely irrational and ill-explained manner. Also, they rarely have indexes. And what kind of reference book doesn't have an index? A total crap one. But if they work for you, they work for you. Again and again and again, the key to learning a language is figuring out the tools and techniques that work best for you.

That being said, flashcards seem to be pretty universally helpful. There are a bunch of programs that will let you create and share flashcards online as well as upload them onto your iPod or whatever portable device you choose to tether yourself to. I myself like plain-old index cards.

Why do I need to learn a new language if I can just run everything through an online translator?

I think you'll find that online translators aren't particularly useful in face-to-face human interaction. Also, online translators uniformly blow.

Why do I need to learn a new language if everyone already speaks English?

Because a) not everyone speaks English and b) refusing to speak the language of the country you're in is just rude. I mean, if you're the sort of houseguest who likes to put your feet up on your host's furniture and drink all their beer without asking, sure, stick with English. But you can't bitch and moan about tourists who refuse to learn English and then be too lazy to pick up a few basic foreign-language phrases when traveling abroad. Or, rather, you can. Just be aware that you'll be a class-A asshole if you do.

Why don't you go back to school to become an actual degree-holding linguist?

I won't pretend I haven't thought about it. But I don't think that I'd be particularly well-suited to the discipline. First of all, my interests are focused on relatively mundane aspects of grammar and vocabulary. Which is to say that in the world of linguistics, I'm sort of the equivalent of somebody who really likes adding and subtracting, whereas linguists are off doing, like, differential topology. Also, as it turns out, I'm really bad at graduate school. Graduate students have to have tremendous focus and drive. Whereas I occasionally have to be able to stop what I'm doing and watch eight straight hours of Battlestar Galactica.

Why are you so obsessed with television?

Because television is the perfect companion: it's always there when I need it, and it shuts up on command. There are other reasons as well, but they're all really pretentious and so anti-snobbish that they've swung back around to snobbish.

What are your favorite shows?

My very favorite consigned-to-DVD shows are, in no particular order, Roseanne, Six Feet Under, Homicide, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, The X-Files, Blackadder, and MacGyver. And, um, Star Trek. The Next Generation.

My favorite shows currently on the air are, also in no particular order, The Wire, House, The Office, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, Ugly Betty, America's Next Top Model, Top Chef, Project Runway, The Soup, South Park, and Flight of the Conchords. I'm currently withholding judgment on Chuck, Bionic Woman, Pushing Daisies, Gossip Girl, and Reaper. I suspect that only Reaper will make the cut.

How do you plan on integrating language and television?

Through the cunning use of tags.

What does the title of your blog mean?

Well, apart from the obvious, it's an allusion to one of my favorite quotes: "Television: A medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done." Bless you, Ernie Kovacs.

Just who the hell are you to be going on and on about all this?

I'd like to think that I bring a certain combination of sass, diligence, and Midwestern practicality to the subjects that I write about. But, honestly, who am I kidding. Welcome to the modern age! I don't need credentials; I just need an Internet connection.