ON LANGUAGE AND OTHER MATTERS
Karl Hofsö – inventor of The Hofsö MethodTM – shares his thoughts on language and related topics.
Mafia country
There was an area of small restaurants to the north and west of where I rented the aforementioned double room in the apartment of a civil servant and his family in downtown Palermo. They were mostly of the same design all along the street – a few tables on the pavement if there was enough…
Spaghetti alle vongole
Around the corner from where I rented a double room in downtown Palermo there was a sort of self-service restaurant where I ate most of my evening meals. Ordering meals took some learning. The tables were on the right when you came in from the street. To the left were three counters with dishes on…
The Man Who Went North
Back to Italy… The latte at the breakfast café was good. So were the fresh rolls and, I think it was, the apricot jam. An elderly man who had not been there the previous evening with the men who stared, stood at the bar, an espresso in his hand. He saluted us politely and said…
Evolutionary Design?
In the year 2000 I wrote to the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. I asked for a meeting to discuss the possibility of cooperating on a scientific research project. The topic was a phenomenon that I thought I had observed over a period of several years. Having recently taught Norwegian to a group of…
The Castle of Scilla and the Interior of Calabria
Across the Strait of Messina from Sicily lies the region of Calabria on the Italian mainland. Some kilometres to the north of the regional capital Reggio di Calabria and just past the ferry town of Villa San Giovanni, there is a small seaside community called Scilla. One can see the top of Mount Etna from…
Football and language
World events have got me thinking… What do football and language have in common? The answer is “not enough”. It should have been more. Pupils learn a new language for several years at school. Yet most of them are not able to do simple small talk in their chosen language when they graduate. At school…
Desert sand
The pursuit of language proficiency and unfamiliar cultures, not necessarily in that order, sometimes leads you down unexpected paths. I once worked in the city of Palermo, Sicily. My boss was a sympathetic person with a scholarly bent. Now and again, he gave me a day or two off work so that I could see…
Natural intelligence (NI?)
Can children really be smarter than us adults? Well, maybe. It has been observed that children who are placed into a new linguistic environment only start speaking the new and unfamiliar language tentatively and little by little. They listen and observe for quite a long time, saying nothing. Then, after some weeks, or even months,…
Keep your speed up
It is easy to be distracted from doing The Right Thing. People are in a hurry. They will want to teach you how to say where you are from and how to ask back where they are from… and so on. You might even yourself want to learn right away how to order a meal…
Don’t read the lyrics, just listen to the song
From the song Ol’ Man River: “He don’t plant taterHe don’t plant cottonAn’ them that plants ’em is soon forgotten.” In my previous post I said it might not be as hard to learn new languages as everybody thinks. Well, if that is a fact why doesn’t everybody just go out and do it? I’ll…
The Hofsö Method 