This really is interesting stuff, isn’t it?

Well, I certainly think so ;-))

And as we are waayyyyyy at the bottom of a thread, well and truly into EPU land, I hope that EW will tolerate our eclectic digressions once again.

The whole idea of ‘language groups’ does hit home when listening to a language with such a very different grammatical and sound structure from English, doesn’t it?

It makes sense that your auditory discrimination, which you use to master opera, would be an advantage on your travels to a land where the sound of the language is so unfamiliar to you. I always find that I need extra sleep after having to ‘listen extra hard’ when traveling.

On the political front, Al Gore gave a stirring speech on Obama’s behalf, and today Carl Levin slammed a series of homers out of left field on the torture investigations in his Senate hearing. Evidently, it was too complex for some of the ‘blonder’ minds in the MSM to follow along. Unsurprisingly, MSNBC covered both stories significantly better than anything that I saw at ABC or CBS. CNN had several good video clips, but the NBC Nightly News did probably the best network coverage that I was able to locate with ‘the Google’.
Meanwhile, McClatchy continues its stunning series this week, which certainly converges with Levin’s revelations.

Safe journey, and I hope that you and your wife are able to eat good dim sum at some point on your travels. (I envy you dim sum, along with the chance to see that dragon dance!) It sounds as if you are meeting some really engaged, energetic educators; what a great reason to travel!

The language here is really interesting. I notice that I have a better chance of getting the words right than many of the people I am traveling with. It seems that my music experience really helps me hear and mimic the exact sound. Unfortunately, the sounds are truly nonsense syllables, and I don’t seem to be able to remember tham well.

I have picked up a smattering of French and Italian, and studied German in College. When we travel in Europe, I can make out some of the German all these 40 years later, but if I try to speak, there is no telling what language will come out. It seems like all the foreign words get stored in the same place, so si and oui are about equally likely, especially when I first land, or if the situation is out of the ordinary. That goes away after a few days in the country, and returns if I go to another country.

This really is interesting stuff, isn’t it?

I think that you might find a recently published book of tremendous interest if you have an interest in learning and teaching ‘ideographic writing’. IIRC, the written Chinese language has something like 5,000 symbols – so not something that any child is likely to master by the sixth grade (!). Recent neurological research supports your hunch that it is extremely complex and time-consuming to learn and master ;-))

I’d stumbled several years ago, while working on something software-related, onto some intriguing very early research on the neurology of reading (and writing) Japanese — in contrast to the neurology of reading (and writing) an alphabetic language. All of this fairly recent research relies on brain scans, and it is quite a revelation to contemplate how different types of writing systems ‘wire’ our brains in fairly specific ways.

There is a recently published book (”Proust and the Squid“) about the neurology of reading and writing; the book is written by a professor of child development who works with kids with reading disabilities, and it draws on neurological research done at Tufts in Boston. It is a remarkable book, and is generating tremendous interest among some people that I know in education (K-12).

Here’s a link to the publisher’s page, as it may be of great interest to your wife, her colleagues, and some of your hosts:

http://www.harpercollins.com/b…..cerpt.aspx

I think that if your hosts are unaware of this book, but are able to read English, it would be of enormous interest to them. (I’ve done some work with both children and adults who have problems reading, which is how the book origincally caught my attention.)

I have some [extremely elementary] ability to read (and write) basic Japanese, which utilizes three writing systems — to read the text you must be able to recognize and interpret each of the writing systems and then combine the meanings as you read. As you can imagine, this poses some pretty steep challenges for designing software displays. One element of Japanese writing (’kanzi’) draws on the Chinese system of writing.
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing
should you have time or inclination.

The Chinese may have designed their language instruction curriculum after investigating the latest neurological research about language learning; the earlier the better, but before puberty is definitely best. I recall back in the summer of 1997, the New York Times (Herald Tribune in Europe) published the first news of brain scans revealing that people who’d learned a second language in childhood literally stored the ’second language vocabulary’ in the same general regions of their brains as they stored their ‘first language vocabulary’. This helped explain why their ability to ’switch between’ languages seemed to be more fluid than the efforts of people who learned a second language in adulthood. Some researchers were wondering whether it also helped explain why ‘early second language learners’ were better able to create lists of homonyms and synomyms. As you are perhaps aware, these questions are of great interest – and importance! – to people in the US who teach English as a Second Language.

Those of us trying to learn a new language after adolescence have a far more challenging time of it — this seems to be due to neurological changes that occur during puberty. So teaching a second language to young children has a sound neurological basis! (Most of my reading and writing of Japanese occurred after adolescence, to my everlasting sorrow..). However, there are some interesting implications about language learning that seem to apply to the whole vast topic of software development — in my own case, I’ve found that most [not all!] of the really creative, best software developers that I’ve encountered are multilingual. So the processes in learning ‘natural languages’ also seem to extend to learning ‘machine languages’ as well. So it doesn’t surprise me that you feel you are seeing ‘the future’. Glad to hear that it’s very, very cute, creative, and socially responsible! We can all welcome that…)

I’ll bet those kids are absolutely adorable. How fortunate for you to also be able to meet the parents and teachers!

I hope that our kind hostess EW will indulge my extended remarks on such an eclectic topic. I have enormously enjoyed your comments. Safe journey.

In Watergate that’s when they went to court and got the court to decide what, if any, [parts of the tapes were privledged. Privlede kinda goes out the window when the president is the target of the investigation.

these are not the same judges, nor is this the same president, nor did nixon have the “all necessary power” edict from congress

nor did nixon have to balls to say, “so what, I ain’t giving it up”

the president has as much power as he wants until congress says that’s it, you are out of there

and congress is not saying it so the president is king

$2 million of the taxpayers money to try to catch the gang of traitors (how many participated in Plames outing…23?) who purposely outed an undercover agent.= Commutation

These are the priorities of our nation. This is what our children are watching. Unfuckingbelievable!