• Completo 2 Pedro. #
• My review on the book “Sorry, I Don’t Speak French” on the language struggle in the recent history of Canada. http://tinyurl.com/awfzbu #
• Hoy revisado más de 100 palabras españoles en Anki. #
• Changed my blog theme. How does it look? http://www.towerofconfusion.com/ #
• Leyendo el cuento corto “Casa tomada”, gracias a Eleena http://tinyurl.com/bxt96d #
• 點解最近LingQ咁鬼慢… #
• Hay una estación de radio en Español en Atlanta FM105.7. Escucho cuando estoy en el coche. Creo que se llama Viva. http://tinyurl.com/c5w8ha #
• I wonder if any multilinguist can actually earn big $$$. Anyone? #
• Envoyé un écrit dans lang-8 pour la correction. http://tinyurl.com/bulutr #
• Reçu ma correction de lang-8. Il est vraiment rapide! #
• Returned to the 20th position on the LingQ ladder for Spanish. I rarely take it seriously anyway. Their ‘activitiy score’ system is biased. #
• Importé 2 episodios de Lingus.tv a LingQ. #
• Got off the plane last night and heard about the crash. It was Hudson River in NY. This time it landed on a house in Buffalo! Hate flying! #
• Spoke to Chinese bakery lady in Canto & Mando, responded in English. Switched to English then. Later heard she spoke to colleague in Canto! #
• Anki question: Anyone knows how to have contents of imported cards overriding existing ones, while retaining review data? #
• Esta increíble niño memoriza los títulos de un libro de historias biblicas. http://tinyurl.com/b35bzs #
• “Hasta de un tonto a veces se aprenden cosas.”, dijo la blogger más vieja del mundo. http://amis95.blogspot.com/2008/11/preguntona.html #

I recently read the book “Sorry, I Don’t Speak French“, which gave a very comprehensive account on the language struggle in the recent history of Canada.

To those who are not familiar with the issue, French has been spoken predominately in the Quebec province, and English in the rest of Canada. The Quebeckers resent the lack of recognition of their language in other provinces. The rest of the country wondered why so much time and effort are wasted in forcing them to learn French.

There are a lot of points to ponder after reading the book. I am going to share two of them in this post.

The author quoted William Mackey who pointed out decades ago, that there would be fewer bilingual people in bilingual countries than there would be in monolingual countries. This is not difficult to understand. A fully-functional bilingual country will guarantee the maintenance and use of either language, hence there would be no urgency for them to learn the other language. On the other hand, in a monolingual country, people (often immigrants) have to learn the official language, and becoming bilingual as a result.

The author’s interview with Stephen Harper also turned out to be very interesting. While Harper was working on improving his French back in the late 80’s, he became interested in international language policies. After studying the history, he concluded that governments in the past could not change the actual language use of individuals by simply enforcing laws and policies. It could only be done through displacing populations, through genocide, or through what is now called ethnic cleansing: mass movement of populations. The author obvious disagreed with Mr. Harper, but I tend to agree with the Prime Minister.

The author concluded that the contemporary Canada language policies have been a failure, and this I agree with him very much. He gave a few recommendations, mostly by creating more policies. I am sceptical about this. I think the real issue is not about languages. It is fundamentally a conflict of cultures.

The author was a bilingual (fluent in English and French), but he was certainly not a linguist. Sorry, I don’t think Japanese is a tonal language.

This incident happened about 2 months ago. I and a colleague arrived at the airport in Atlanta. He was a Mexican-immigrant from Toronto, and it was my first time working with him.

We hopped into our rental car. After spending about 5 minutes or so figuring how to start the car using the state-of-art ‘keyless’ key, we entered the destination address into the GPS. I started spelling the street name : “R … A …”. To my surprise, he started typing “A … E …’!

So I tried again: “R … A …”. Then he repeated: “A … E …”.

We had been communicating in English all the time, but somehow when I spelt, his mind switched to Spanish.

My new year plan is not late. It is right on time. Happy Chinese New Year!

The global financial crisis has lead me to reorganize my priorities. Thousands of jobs are being cut across the globe in recent weeks. In fact, I just managed to survive a bloodshed last week. It seems to me that at this time it is much more important to sharpen my sword than anything else. Thus, my new year direction will be to invest in anything that would increase my own value in the job market.

Putting this direction into the context of language learning, I would need to re-prioritize my target languages. No doubt, English will come first, followed by Mandarin. Then I have decided to put Spanish next, before French. Cantonese, my native tongue, will be the last.

I will probably not go into details about my plan, as it will run for too long, and will probably not interest many of you.

Another area which I promise to do is to post more often in this blog. In the coming year, I have decided to shorten my posts, and hopefully I can produce more of them and still keep them interesting.

Language learners often agonize at occasions when they try to practice a language with the natives, only to receive responses in their own language (often English). Imagine the reverse happens. Someone greets you in your learning language. But the fact that the language was also foreign to her was so obvious that you would not even try to embarrass her by replying in the same language.

I went into a French café restaurant tonight in Atlanta, GA. I was at once greeted with a “Bonsoir” by a waitress. Come on! All the servers in the restaurant looked so American! I was nice enough to reply with a “Bonsoir”. But later I wondered why I bothered to do so. If they thought I was a francophone, and tried to speak my language, then I would appreciate their effort. But please don’t try to impress your customers by pretending to be a foreigner. The authenticity of the restaurant is judged by its food, not by the greetings, the music, nor the paintings on the walls. I cannot imagine how embarrassed they would become if a real francophone drops by and starts throwing some French at them.

This phenomenon seems to come up quite often in many supposedly-foreign restaurants. In Toronto, most Japanese restaurants are run by Chinese (the rest are run by Koreans). Sometime, they would greet the incoming customers with a loud “IRASSHAIMESA”! That is annoying. Stop it!

This also reminds me of those gondoliers singing in the fake canal inside the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Can’t they hire someone who at least look a bit like an Italian!

Having said that, I feel sorry for those servers and gondoliers. Quite often, it is their bosses who forced them into performing those stupid stuns.