Things that interest me
I’m in the middle of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I’m at the chapter where he moves to Detroit after converting to the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm mentions the NOI’s Temple No #1, citing an address on Frederick St. That wasn’t the Temple’s first address, nor was it the final one. Temple Number 1 now stands at 11529 Linwood Street, in Detroit’s Dexter Linwood neighborhood. Although it’s formally known as Temple Number 1, it is also referred to as Masjid Wali Muhammad [1].
I just finished an 8 day trip to Montréal (with 2 days on either end in Toronto). I had some expectations about this trip that I don’t think were met, but still learned many lessons from it that I’ll share today.
My expecations about this trip
This is my second long solo trip. The first one was when I went to Mexico City in February 2020 for 10 days. I went to explore the city, get out of the cold Michigan winter, and see the Monarch Butterfly Preserve. I also wanted to immerse myself in a Spanish speaking environment, and use Spanish. I ended up speaking a decent amount of Spanish to get around, but ended up speaking mostly English with the other people at the hostel.
Since I’ve been writing about languages for a while, I thought it was time I outline my language learning method, and some reasons why I think this has been successful for me.
For background, I am fluent in Spanish (with a B2 certification from the Instituto Cervantes, and I’ve used it to tutor monolingual Spanish students in a local high school) and am conversational in French (see this post). I previously learned tourist Hebrew when I lived in Israel for the summer. Because of my family, I can also understand and speak some Telugu, though my comprehension decreases the more someone speaks “pure”, rather than English influenced Telugu.
Jan 2023: See an update to these goals
I find that having a plan, even if I don’t follow it to a T, helps me feel like I’m moving towards a goal. I also find that publishing a plan makes it feel more concrete. Hence, I’m posting my three year plan. This plan should guide me from now until the end of the 2024 Olympics in Paris (I started thinking about long term planning when I was watching this year’s Olympics).
My plan is divided into two categories – languages, and writing.
I speak Spanish fluently, and even took a language exam to prove my proficiency. I find languages to be a pretty high reward activity, but one that requires significant delayed gratification. For many years I never thought I would be able to communicate in Spanish fluently, but now I can almost think in Spanish. My Spanish is not perfect, but there’s not a ton of incentive to get to C1 or C2 level unless I started working in Spanish. I can carry out most interactions with Spanish speakers that I encounter in the United States.
July 2022 Update: For a number of reasons, I didn’t end up following through with this plan. I’m starting this challenge again, see this post for more information.
Telugu is one of the languages I have wanted to improve for a while. I now have more time (and better time management skills). This post will outline my current level of Telugu, what I want to learn, and how I plan on learning it.
I’m posting this online to hold myself accountable and to help others understand how I go about learning languages. Hopefully this can help guide your own language learning journey.
Contrary to popular perception, Detroit is great place to bike. The city’s roadways are engineered for traffic three times larger than the current population, so there are plenty of wide roadways with few cars. Because Detroit follows a grid, there are also plenty of parallel neighborhood streets that can be used to avoid busy roads. On top of that, the city has been investing in protected bike infrastructure, and is beginning construction on the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27.5 mile biking and walking trail.
You can combine roads with protected bike infrastructure and roads that are naturally ideal for cycling (wide road with little traffic) to produce long routes that are low stress. These routes aren’t often marked on maps, and are usually learned through experience. To make it easier for new cyclists, I’m going to outline one of those routes, which connects downtown Detroit to Ferndale. I call it the Cass / Hamilton / Livernois bike corridor, or the Hamilton Bikeway for short.
I have long been fascinated with Canada. I grew up less than two hours from the border in western NY, and we used to go to Niagara Falls (the Canadian side) every time family visited us when I was little. The thing that always interests me is that (English speaking) Canadians are very similar to Americans both linguistically and culturally (well, maybe except for hockey) yet it’s a completely separate country with their own cultural variations.
On Sunday was the Superbowl, the culmination of the NFL Playoffs. The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots to be crowned the 52nd Superbowl champions (and Philly nearly burned down after). I watched more out of a duty to American culture rather than a desire to see either team play. I ended up rooting for the Eagles, but that was more because I was cheering against the Patriots (Go Bills!).
Paris is 7 hours ahead of Minneapolis, so when the Superbowl began at a reasonable 5:30pm local time, it was already 12:30 AM in Paris. Since I don’t have a TV in my apartment, my roommate and I trekked to Galway Irish Pub near the Notre Dame cathedral. It’s one of the many Irish, British, or Canadian sports bars in Paris that stayed open for the duration of the Superbowl.
We arrived on the second to last metro of the night, and made our way upstairs to a table overlooking the River Seine. The bar was pretty narrow, maybe 30 to 40 feet in length. The first floor had the bar, with a glass paned room flanking the door. Several TVs lined the walls, all turned to the SkySports stream of the game, complete with British announcers and (sadly) no American TV Advertisements. My friend from Michigan had saved us two seats, and there were already 7 other American students there with us. Behind my seat in the other corner of the mahogany lined pub were a group of French diners, and behind my friend was a group of British patrons. Kiddy corner to us were a particularly obnoxious group of French people, 2 guys, and 2 girls.
At first, I thought they were American because one of the guys was wearing a shirt that said “Rush ’17”, and on the back the greek letters for some fraternity. It turns out they were French based on their accents. What was really weird for me was that they would be speaking in French, but then would throw in English phrases or pop culture references. They began singing Hotline Bling by Drake (“I know when that hotline bling…do do do do do), but the “do do do” part was not the correct melody. They would also use what I think were American mannerisms, like taking shots (I later noticed they were taking shots of water), and chanting at things that happen. When they showed Tom Brady’s baby, the French group started chanting “La Bébé,La Bébé, La Bébé” over and over again. They would also talk in somewhat broken English for stretches at a time.
At first, I thought they were actually mocking us. But the more and more I listened in, I realized that they might actually be genuinely trying to act American. For their part, they were the only French group on the second floor that actually stayed for the duration of the Superbowl (everyone else left around 2am). When I brought this up to our Intercultural Communications and Leadership teacher, he reinforced this point. It seemed like what I mistook for obnoxious behavior was actually an attempt at acting culturally U.S. American.
I think my discomfort was that the way they were acting was unnatural. It’s as if somewhat had told them how Americans acted (or they learned it from pop culture) but they had never actually talked to a U.S. American in the process. The converse for French people would be if an American walked out of the metro wearing stripes, a beret, and carrying an entire baguette in hand. When people adopt only some, but not all aspects of your culture, it starts to produce an uncanny valley effect.
If we attempt to learn anything about a culture (mannerisms, beliefs, language) divorced from people of that culture, we are probably destined to act the way those French people acted. Lesson of the day is to always try to interact with natives and constantly evaluate the validity of the stereotypes you hold. Maybe the French do enjoy wine and cheese, but before assuming so, we should try to talk to some actual French people to see 1) if it’s true, and 2) how they actually express that fact.
Update: Here is a video of my progress towards the end of my challenge.
Salut de Paris!
Today marks the 25th day of my “50 days of French” challenge. This halfway update will be split into three parts, what I’ve done so far, how I’ve used my French, and what I intend to do for the remainder of the challenge.
In my previous post outlining my challenge, I said I was going to focus on a few key thematic areas for my study, including transportation, shopping, food. I decided I was going to set milestones for completion (i.e., I can say I’ve learned “food” sufficiently when I can order a meal completely in French). When I said this, I thought that meant I would go through section by section and memorize the relevant words and phrases – but that didn’t happen, for two reasons.
One is that it was too compartmentalized, and it felt like a chore to memorize all these different phrases. If there’s anything I know about language learning, it’s that it has to be fun and interesting, otherwise it gets really boring. I quickly switched out of this because this method….
I will be studying abroad in Paris for six weeks of next semester. I leave for Paris on January 7th, and leave Paris on February 17th. From this point, I have approximately two months to learn as much French as possible, not unlike the two months I had for my Hebrew challenge.
I’m aiming for around the same level I aimed for in Hebrew, “tourist” level. Using the CEFR as a reference, this is somewhere around the A2 level, with some modifications to focus on the things that are most important for me to know in French. These include shopping (buying things), transportation (getting to things), and food (eating things) as well as the obvious emergency phrases (Where is the bathroom? Help me, I am in pain, and “My hovercraft is full of eels”).
I’m going to use the same methods I used for Hebrew: spaced repetition with Anki, mnemonics to remember words, and speaking as much and as early as possible. However, this time I want to be more rigorous about the content I intend to learn and about setting more definitive checkpoints.