A few weeks ago, I went to play tennis with my friend. We found the two courts beside us booked for some kind of tennis course.

I saw about 10 students who looked like to be in their twenties, all sitting in their chairs. The coach was standing in front of them making some kind of speech, which reminded me of military briefings. This lasted for 5-10 minutes. Then the coach asked the students to watch 4 teaching assistants playing a few points, and they did not look professional at all. The coach then started his briefing again.

After another 10 minutes or so, the students finally had a chance to hit the balls for the first time. They were to hit some balls over the net onto a marked region on the other side. I heard the assistants counting the number of misses, and the student would be out after a certain number was reached. This lasted for about 10 minutes.

Then the coach asked the students to sit down again in a circle. They were each given a binder and the coach began to made a speech again. “Business meeting?” my friend whispered to me.

After the speech, the students started to write on the binders, all heads down. Then they left one after another when they finished writing. Some kind of examination?

Doesn’t this remind you of traditional language classes? The teacher talks too much on the theories (also known as grammar and rules). The students are only allowed to practice a little bit, and then get their heads down to some tests and examinations.

I have no idea how much the students paid for this course, but for sure if I were to pay to get coached, I want to hit some balls for real!

This morning I and my wife went to a Chinese café for breakfast. Somehow they offered free Chinese newspaper. I looked for the headline expecting some specular world event to unfold. To my disappointment, the headline read “華裔移民第二代 喜中西合璧婚宴” (2nd-generation Chinese prefer Chinese-Western fusion wedding banquets). It also showed the photo of a businessman who caters this kind of banquets. I showed it to my wife, “What kind of headline is this?!”

My wife looked surprised, “Hey, you recognize this guy?” I looked closely. Yes, he was the one who organized our own wedding banquet some years ago. At that time, he was only a manager working for the restaurant.

The news article also provided a bit of his background that we did not know before. He was a Chinese immigrant from Panama, and had been working in the restaurant industry for many years. One day he met two Latinos in the restaurant, and he started communicating to them in Spanish. (I didn’t even know he speaks Spanish!)

The two Latinos turned out to be the general manager and the chief chef of a hotel. They happened to be looking for someone who could help them to organize a Chinese-Italian wedding banquet, for they knew nothing about Chinese food. This was how my friend started his own business.

Knowing additional languages indeed opens up many business opportunities. One can hear all sorts of similar stories in multicultural cities like Toronto. I was recently approached by a Persian couple whom I met a few years back. They called me up one day and told me they were thinking of expanding their business into the Chinese community. They asked me if I would be interested in partnering with them.

In some special cases, knowing too many languages might actually narrow your chances. I am currently in search of a babysitter for my daughter, who can at the same time teach her Mandarin. I don’t want the babysitter to know too much English or Cantonese, so that my daughter will be forced to speak Mandarin. I have already eliminated a few candidates who proudly claimed that they know all three languages well.

There was an interesting exchange between Steve the Linguist and Benny the Irish Polyglot. I downloaded the podcast more than a week ago but only managed to get through it on a red-eye flight back from Seattle yesterday.

In brief, Steve thinks that we should first immerse ourselves into a lot of input activities and then try to speak with native speakers when we are ready. Benny argues that some people will never think that they are ‘ready’.

I am a believer of the ’silent period’ hypothesis. I don’t think we should speak right at the beginning. The million-dollar question is: how long should this period last? The quick answer is, of course, it depends on the individual learner. To some, it could be years or months. To Benny, it could be hours. But then Benny made a valid point that many people have a tendency of prolonging this honeymoon period and indulge themselves into too many input activities instead of challenging themselves to engage in any output activity. The ’silent period’ is often used as an excuse to keep ourselves well within our comfort zone. As a result, we can never improve.

One evening in Seattle last week, I decided to check out a Mexican torta place nearby. My Mexican amigo came along. Naturally enough, he made his order in Spanish and I, still thinking that I was in my ’silent period’ of Spanish, made my order in English. The Hispanic cashier asked in Spanish if we were eating in. My colleague was occupied in putting away his change, so I answered on behalf of him in Spanish, “Sí, por aquí” (yes, for here). The lady looked a bit shocked and uttered some words which probably meant, “Hey, you speak Spanish!”. Following the standard protocol, I replied, “Un poco” (a little bit).

An afterthought on this incident is that, if I were to go alone, I would probably be speaking English all the way and the cashier would never speak to me in Spanish. I would end up sitting in the place, reading the wall posters and watching the Spanish TV, convincing myself that I was doing well with all these ‘input’ activities.

On my flight to Seattle earlier in the week, a Chinese Canadian sitting next to me started a conversation with me in Mandarin, so I learned that he has been living in Toronto for a few years. Then when the flight attendant came by and asked him what to drink, he suddenly turned mute and started using sign language. Was he too timid to speak, even to utter simple words like ‘orange juice’ or ‘water’? Or was he simply honouring his ’silent period’?

On contrary to the above incident, I have encountered many people who are willing to struggle with their broken English. Each of these occasions reminds me of going through the same pain when I was a teen. We simply have to get used to this inconvenience, or even embarrassment, of speaking like a fool. I think Benny is trying to make the point that we need to learn to enjoy this experience and be good at it.

Benny challenges the followers of the ‘intensive input’ approach to get out and converse with people. Don’t use the ’silent period’ as an excuse. There will never be a time when we are truly ‘ready’ to speak.

Here is my latest fish-joke. It was Chinese New Year last week. My colleague of Mexican origin instant-messaged me: ‘新年好’ (good New-Year). Obviously, he had been playing around with Google Translate. So I challenged him that, with the help of Google Translate, he should not have any more excuse not to chat with me in Chinese. Then I received a weird reply: ‘如果’ (if).

If what?

It turned out that he was translating directly from Spanish to Chinese. Using his English keyboard, he typed the word ’sí’ (yes) without the accent. Google Translate faithfully took it in as ’si’ (if).

In recent years, we have all observed the amazing progress made in machine-translation. Google has even taken a giant leap when it decided to depart from the traditional rule-based translation engine, to become statistical. The result is quite remarkable. Rumour has it that the company is now working on software to translate foreign speeches almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This idea of course is not new at all, only that for decades no one has made any significant advancement to produce something even remotely resembles the Fish. Even today, human is still required if we need some proper translations.

My take is that it will still take at least several years for even Google to master machine-translation to the point which it can consistently produce reliable results. Human translators will not be out of job that soon. In the mean time, let us expect more fish-jokes from Google Translate and other machine-translation products.

About 3 weeks ago, I accompanied my 4-year-old to play in a public play area. Watching her running around, I suddenly heard a mother beside me yelling at her kids, “¡Ven acá!” (come here).

My first impression was – ok, the Latino population has indeed increased in my area. My second thought was – what is the difference between “ven aquí” and “ven acá”? (‘aquí’ and ‘acá’ both mean ‘here’).

I didn’t put in a lot of thought until a few days ago, the phrase came up in my mind again. So I decided to look it up on the Internet. No doubt, someone already came up with this question. One of the answers explained that “ven aquí” means “come here” and “ven acá” means “come right here”. What caught my attention was the illustration that followed:

“Most of the time I hear ven aca used in this particular area (like when a mother yells at their kid to come here in the store).”

However, an answer from the WordReference forum said the contrary:

Aquí mean here as in right here, acá is more flexible and mean closer from me than from you.

These contradictory explanations seem less important to me now. I bet if I encounter this phrase again, instead of thinking whether ‘aquí’ is more ‘flexible’ than ‘acá’, or the other way round, I will just remember this “mother yelling at her kids” incident. This is precisely what Dr. J. Marvin Brown in his book “From the Outside In” refered to as a ‘cascade’:

“It was like a cascade of light and sound waves rushing in and washing over nerves in my eyes and ears and then cascading on into my head to sculpture a device that could echo back similar waves on demand. A mechanism that could repluck the same nerves that had formed it.”

Dr. J. Marvin Brown is the creator of the ALG language course. According to his book, the fundamental idea behind his course is to have a lot of these “cascades”, so the students will remember what they have learned vividly through experiencing them, instead of being spoon-fed using traditional methods.

I thought for a moment. Perhaps it would be a good idea to share my own cascades in my blog. But then I think about the many times I read the “words of the day” from other people, I just seem not to be able to connect with their ‘cascades’. Surely, we need to be personally involved in them for the greatest effect.

Having said that, if you have any ‘cascade’ in any language you may want to share, you are more than welcome to leave it in your comment.