Language Safaris – 15 minute language lessons for the lazy
Opportunities exist everywhere to learn languages. This is especially true when you are learning a second language within the country where it is spoken. However, when we travel or when we live day to day in a foreign culture we have to deal with many difficulties, not only linguistic ones, and many times we do not find the time to make a conscious study of the language. Here’s a 15-minute language awareness idea that can help you break out of that rut.
Living in Paris, I need to speak French. Unfortunately, I don’t have much patience for studying languages at the moment and sometimes go weeks without making a concerted effort to improve my French skills. This is not good, because continued use of a foreign language for survival skills without constant monitoring of grammar rules can lead to fossilization, a pernicious and intractable set of grammar rules between languages.
Fossilization occurs when your use of the language exceeds your knowledge of the language. When you communicate with people in a foreign language without knowing all the rules, you tend to make up your own rules. Then, when people understand you despite your mistakes, you feel successful and move on to the next task without correcting yourself. Thus, you create your own grammatical patterns (interlanguage) that are burned into your mind, and as if you were trying to move your wagon wheels out of eroded bumps in the road, you find it extremely difficult to escape those mistakes and stay away from them. them. them.
For this reason, it is urgent for me to consciously think about grammar rules and the French language in general for at least a few minutes every day. I eat? Sometimes I have to fool myself. A new trick I’ve found is to promise myself fifteen minutes in the sun on my balcony, with a notebook and pencil and my dictionary.
I sit there and watch the trucks and buses go by on the busy boulevard, and I read what is printed on the sides, making sure to comment to myself on everything I see. My language lesson of the day! Fifteen minutes can provide an amazing grab bag of linguistic points to ponder. An example, today’s harvest of 15 minutes on the balcony:
An office supply truck: Just in time! So close to the English expression. Is the meaning identical? Never take it for granted. Yes, it means “just in time”.
A rental van: The cheapest driving power: a guy rolling a wheelbarrow. Is roll transitive or intransitive here? The word “roll” here does not refer to the hand truck, but to the van. This is the power to get going, to move your belongings, at the most economical price.
A moving company: It will move to xx.fr. Disconcerting at first. It means that things really “move” on www dot xx dot fr.
A rental van: praise me! rent me!
We have company because: Quality assurance. Remember that sure It’s the French word, not sure. Simple differences like this need constant reinforcement.
We have advertising platform for vans. Installation Service. Established has a somewhat different meaning in French, ie put the floor here.
Rental van: It has a name, Rent. The word rent is lease, and one word for truck is truck. Lease is another false friend, a word that looks like an English word with a different meaning. Another thing to keep in mind is that various abbreviations, apocopes, and in this case, combination words, are often gleefully used in French.
Other rental: rent a car. Car rental.
We have truck: Is it so. Handecoeur. Handecoeur is an unusual sounding name. The French genealogy website geopatronyme which shows births by surname for the 20th century agrees with me: they only have one person born with this surname in all of France over the past century.
We have a tourist bus: Trips. Trips they are not always on distant shores, overseas, as we tend to think in English.
On another bus: Cities Stations Airport. I have an anglophone tendency to say “gäre”. I practice saying station. Notice the accent on aerodynamic Always pay attention to the accents!
We have a municipal bus: The bus runs on aquazole. gouache, What a weird word. It turns out to be a diesel fuel with water molecules, and the word comes from Water More azole which is a type of organic compound that contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is nitrogen in English.
We have: Last mile logistics. Much more commonly used than the English “logistics”, it refers here to the delivery of goods and, in this case, to your end customer.
We have truck: Urgent transport course. Remember that the word for emergency is emergency. When you have an emergency, you don’t want to search for words in your head.
We have a small van: Carpentry. What a strange name for woodworking. Strange spelling, too. Double check the spelling. It comes from the Latin “minutus”, giving the idea of small pieces of wood.
We have a removal van: Company transfers. companies it is much more common in French than in English. To move means to take out, or to move out, but in the second case people use it both to move out and to move out.
We have a white van: Troubleshooting, installation, heating… I couldn’t type fast enough. Okay, just the words I got, forget the words I have to guess, I don’t want to see them without their correct accents! This prefix dé almost always has an accent, and troubleshooting refers to troubleshooting all kinds of machinery, not just cars.
We have a work van: Rental of nacelles from 7 to 70 m. Cots? my dictionary translates carrycot like “nacelle” in English too, but what can that be? It turns out to be a cherry picker.
We have a white van: Butcher shop. It means butchery. It resembles la bouche, the mouth, and le bouchon, the cork, and all the various secondary meanings of those words, but it is unrelated, since it comes from bouc, which means he-goat. Like the English word “buck”, which originally meant billy goat. Both English and French come from Old German. Now… what was he talking about?
We drank ad: Congress Palace. Remember the rules for forming plurals, in this case when the singular already has an s at the end.
We have a tourist bus: Trainers: name of the bus company Because it’s not a word we would use in English to describe a bus. But this is not English.
In a repair van: Maintenance: It’s always good to notice words that are identical to English: the tendency is to forget them, as they don’t make much of an impression on the mind. Practice pronouncing it in French. It’s all too easy to fall for an English pronunciation when the word is identical.
In another repair van: Maintenance contract This is also a maintenance contract. interview is one with maintenance.
We have company because: Home help. Another variation on the theme! Maintenance in your house.
We have garbage trucks: Paris cleaning. You’re not saying it’s owned by Paris. Own means clean and this is the Department of Sanitation. So how do you say ownership? property. with the addition of a letter, “i”.
Advertisement for a movie on a city bus: The Hills Have Eyes sounds like a loan from Italian. My Hachette dictionary says it comes from Latin. The online dictionary of the Académie Française is more specific, saying it is from Latin, imported in the 16th century. Hmm, that seems a bit late for Latin, doesn’t it? Maybe it was used on the maps?
Another movie ad: Aladdin: It only has one “l” in English. The double “l” sometimes gives a different pronunciation.
A small van: Paintwork; painting, contracting
Another small van: Ride well. Boy they really like that word roll. I have to make sure I know it at all times.
It was fifteen minutes, I timed it. Now, if you don’t live in the context of your target language, you can try other ways to get the same effect. For students learning English, an assignment might be to write down every English loan word they hear on TV, even if they know the definition. Or to copy all the English loanwords they see on a busy downtown street, making sure they know the exact meaning of each word and the exact pronunciation. A word of caution about allowing students to go on linguistic safaris, though: the teacher assigning this task had better be prepared for an unpredictable and potentially confusing batch of words. Students very often make mistakes when writing down words, or will come across unusual bits of hiphop slang and lyrics that may be unfamiliar to the teacher.
I would suggest this method only to a native speaking teacher because sometimes you will find yourself playing linguistic detective. I remember one day in high school when a fellow student asked the Spanish teacher about a line he had heard in a Spanish hit song then circulating in New York. The teacher was not a native Spanish speaker, and the phrase she mentioned puzzled her. “Saquitumi” she said to herself over and over again, “saquitumi”. She had to admit defeat. Only a few days later, we students realized that the line in the Spanish song was actually being said in English: “Sock it to me!”
