fluency

SpanishPod::Behind the Podcast from PraxisLanguage on Vimeo.

Lot’s goin’ on at ol’ Studio Fiesta:

• the April T-shirt promotion is up and running, which means good riddance to the DVD promo teasers. Leo and Esti did a set of five new teasers from April; they are equally as wacky as the DVD promo teasers, but at least there’s some variety.
• SpanishPod’s Elementary and Intermediate bloggers have come on line. I’m excited about that project; I hope it’s a big success.
• My pal Amber from ChinesePod’s Dear Amber struck a deal with me; she would create a Facebook fanclub for me if I created one for her. It would have been too sad to create our own fanclubs. And that’s how Dear Amber: We <3 You and SpanishPod JP Rocks came to be. Right now we are tied at 23 fans… not that it’s a contest… The Jenny Zhu Appreciation Society is way ahead with 94 fans.
• We brought the whole team into the studio today to record a very special ¿Qué pasa? The pretext was to talk about the T-shirt promotion and the SpanishPod YouTube channel, which is all true… So the April Fools’ gag we played on Lili was just icing on the cake. We cooked up the scheme at lunch at my place.
  It was much better than the lame email I sent saying that FrenchPod had been hacked by hamsters… Follow the link above, silly. The real FrenchPod is doing just fine, by the way.

So Christophe is the new guy in the office.  He sits between me and the door to the office bathroom, so of course when I walk by his desk, I grab the back of his cheapo swivel chair and give it a friendly nudge.  You know.  French dudes like that.

Well, today when I came back from the bathroom, my mouse wasn’t working… the buttons were working, the scroll wheel was working, but the cursor wouldn’t move.

I was under the table on all fours trying to jiggle the cord when they told me to turn my mouse over.  Yah, there was tape on the laser sensor.  I told him he was very funny.

The prank wars have begun.

So we celebrated our 100th SpanishPod Lesson last Friday by launching our YouTube channel. There was also a delicious 6 o’clock bottle of Patrón given to us appropriately by our patrón, and there was all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink izakaya at Shirokiya, salsa dancing at Silver Moon, and then a couple of numbers at the big JZ Club.

Monday morning it’s back to work!

The LIMERICK FESTIVAL continues! Click here!

So this year I forgot to ask ding to take over my limerick festival.  I won’t forget next year.   I’m a little disappointed by the small number of entries, but I didn’t to a lot of promotion either.  Oh well c’est la vie.

So we finally published Pa’ que sepas…, which is the SpanishPod Q/A show.  Not a ton of fanfare, but I like how they’re turning out.  Our 100th lesson is coming up; that will be a special event.

YouTube and other video sites are blocked in China for now, which keeps us from finding out about what’s going on in Tibet.  It also keeps me from what seems to have been some stirring oratory by the next potus.

A bug has been going around; one person didn’t show up today, another went home early, another canceled dinner plans with me due to a sore throat.  Hope I don’t catch it.

So it’s only Wednesday night, and it’s already been the most hard core week for me in terms of languages.  There are some new faces at the office, and their appearance has brought about the situation where I’m having more than just superficial conversations in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Italian.  That’s a lot.  I don’t think I’ve ever been required to do so much switching.

Today I was speaking a lot of French, and where I really got sloppy today was in the passé composé, which is grammar that I use to teach, for goodness sakes.  Oh well.  I’m speaking it well enough to get by at this point, but I’m sure if I keep up the practice it will tighten up.

The LIMERICK FESTIVAL continues! Click here!

So John Biesnecker of Angry Swarm and My Chinese Life is a flash card user, and I am a flash card hater.  That’s right, I said hater.  I hate em.  Non-communicative visual recall is not part of the language instinct.  And I am 100% right.

Then again, I am functionally illiterate in Chinese, and John is not.

So I asked him into the studio with hopes that sparks would fly.  Of course they didn’t, because John uses flashcards contextually, which, anyway, is NOT what most of you flashcard people do, so there you go.

Enjoy the podcast; we’ll try to record a more confrontational one next time.

 

 The Great Flashcard Non-Debate: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Welcome to the 2008 San Patricio Limerick Festival!

The 2006 and 2007 Limerick Festivals over at my other blog, you don’t have to read 2.0, were so much fun, I couldn’t resist doing it again. If you are a fan of the Limerick Festival, please post a link to this post at your own blog, and encourage all your readers to come check it out, or even better, submit limericks of their own!

A limerick, of course, is a five line poem with the rhyming scheme of AABBA. Some famous limericks you might know are Hickory Dickory Dock, and There once was a man from Nantucket… There are more limerick resources here.

Limericks are often naughty, so I don’t want to put a lot of restrictions on what kind of entries you can send. However, please only post PG-13 limericks to this site, and send the racier ones to my email. If you do choose to post a super-raunchy limerick, I promise I will enjoy it, but I can’t promise it will stay posted.

Please post your original limericks in the comments section of this post, or email them to me if you’d like some peer editing.

I will award eShamrocks to entries which distinguish themselves in both form and substance. Enter as many times as possible.

Theme? There’s no theme, is there? This is an election year. Bonus points if your limerick links to SpanishPod!

P.S.  If you’re in China, and the Great Firewall is getting you down, and you’re a Firefox user, try installing the Gladder plugin.   Works for me!

So the sun has set in China on National Grammar Day, a day that as a linguist I would care more about if there were also, say, a State Pronunciation Festival or a even a Municipal Lexicon Fair. As usual, the Language Log says it all.

So as a linguist and a professional, Standard American English is just a tool to me; I use it when writing official letters… and that’s about it. I have no particular affection for it as a register; much less to I buy into the myth that there are native speakers of Standard American English, all of whom are in an alarming state of Standard Language Decay due to stranded prepositions and split infinitives.

Anyway, I’m making no effort to write this blog in Standard American English, so if you see some non-standard elements of my writing, that’s how it is my friends. Actually, a friend wrote me an email the other day, alerting me to an error in a conjunctional phrase involving pronoun declension… I said “Leo and I” rather than “Leo and me.” She said that the error was like fingernails on a chalkboard for her, and I certainly don’t begrudge her for that, and that a blog called “fluency” shouldn’t have such an error. And I can appreciate her point of view.

But I’m a linguist, not a grammarian. My career is centered not on the way that people should talk, but rather on how they do talk. And frankly, I know too much about English syntax to be bothered by English’s defective pronominal case. My friend is lucky that I didn’t write “me and Leo,” which is certainly how I would have said it in conversation.

So, an overdue disclaimer: I’m writing in a register that may sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to you. I’m much more interested in writing in my own voice than by impressing you with flawless, flavorless, Standard American English.

The grammarians don’t love you like the linguists do, people. They want to build themselves up by tearing you down. The linguists, we want to listen to you, observe you, theorize about you. You can keep your language garden segregated (nominative pronouns on one side, ablative on the other) or you can walk into the jungle and watch what the pronouns do in the wild.

So, in fact, I’m taking back National Grammar Day and making a stand. My Grammar Day party is going to be a prescriptivist’s nightmare. You may hear fingernails on a chalkboard, but trust me, the analysis will be much more fulfilling.

Dr. Orlando Kelm from the University of Texas at Austin was nice enough to drop by Studio Fiesta while he was here in Shanghai doing research for his new book, which is going to be cool. He was nice enough to give me a copy of his first book, which has anecdotes and analysis of Brazilians and Americans doing business with each other.

Check out Dr. Kelm’s student wiki, his Tá Falado podcast for English-speaking students of Portuguese with previous knowledge of Spanish, as well as his Spanish Proficiency Exercises, where you can find hundreds of videos of native speakers using Spanish, along with bilingual transcripts.

 

 A conversation with Dr. Orlando Kelm: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download