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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 room, a small bar inside the door where one could wait for a table to become free, and a narrow room for the guests. Most had a double row of small tables along each wall. At the far end there would be a counter and a swing door to the kitchen.

On our first pay-day my roommate and I picked one of those restaurants to celebrate our first non-cafeteria meal in the city. I have forgotten what we ate and, sadly, the name of my roommate. What I do remember, though, is him showing me a newspaper front page a couple of days later. There was a large photograph of a restaurant entrance and a neon sign above the door with the name of the restaurant, the same one we had had that meal in. The day after two men had come on a Lambretta scooter, parked it with the engine left running, entered and shot dead two men at point blank range, gone out and sped off on the scooter. Nobody had seen what they looked like.

We did not go there again. In fact, I avoided the area.

We did not discuss the incident much, mostly due to the fact that his Italian was only slightly better than mine in the beginning and he knew only Turkish apart from that. I think he told me that the word for bread is “ekmek” in Turkish. Also, our working hours were not the same so he could not join our little group of exchange students who would meet at the beach after work at three o’clock in the afternoon most days. They had nice working hours in the summer in Palermo.

A la prossima volta

Karl

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 display, all with name tags and prices. The first counter held the antipasti. That is what one eats before the pasta. Then came the spaghetti with various sauces and toppings to choose from. The third counter was home to an array of desserts. It was all very nice and delicate, and priced to suit a student wallet.

In the middle of the room the restaurant’s matrona sat on a high stool on a raised section of the floor. She presided over a big, old-fashioned cash register with a manual crank and a loud pling.

The first evening I thought a plate of spaghetti would be enough. I lined up in the queue to la matrona and said, “uno spaghetti alle vongole”. I had memorised this from counter number two. I paid, got a slip of paper and went back to the counter where I handed over the slip and was served my food. Despite what seemed like a large portion, it was still not enough, as I discovered in the middle of the night when I woke up hungry.

The next day I decided to try three courses. I tried to remember the names of three dishes and lined up before the cash register. The queue moved slowly, and I forgot the name of one of the dishes. Okay, back to the counter and back to my place in the queue I thought. No such luck. I was directed to the back of the queue. No smiles, no help, just pointing fingers. Then I forgot the name of the dessert, and the same procedure repeated itself, and then again. It took a long time to get served, but that night I did not wake up hungry at least.

For a week I tried to learn the dish names – the hard way as it turned out. I had read theories on “learning by doing”. Could not be done. So, I gave in to the reality of life. On the seventh day I brought a slip of paper and a pencil, and got served on the first try! After that, I made a habit of having a piece of paper and a pencil handy. My vocabulary built up much faster that way.

This was deep mafia country at the time. I’ll give you an anecdote of how that could manifest itself in my next post.

A la prossima volta

Karl

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 he had heard there were foreigners in the village. He had come to see for himself. The villagers had not seen a foreigner, he claimed, since the German occupation many years before. Many recalled military vehicles, steel helmets and submachine guns, and so were reluctant to come forward. He, on the other hand, had lived for many years in Turin in the north where he now was retired and took it easy and was for the second time back in his native land for a visit. He would not stay long. Most of his kin had long since passed away.

He knew some French and his north Italian way of speaking was easy on my ears. We got on quite well. My Danish friend understood enough Italian to follow the small talk but was reluctant to speak himself. He was happy to just listen in the beginning. Then he picked up his courage and asked about the burnt-out house we had seen the previous day. The man looked gravely at us for a while, then quoted the opening line from a then popular Italian song: “Questo é la storia di uno di noi” (this is the story of one of us). Then he told the story:

A young man in that village had saved money for a train ticket from Villa San Giovanni to Milan, which had become a booming city after the end of World War II. Many from the south, “Il Mezzogiorno” as it is known, went there. Most stayed and never went back.

This man did, however. He had done well up north, founded his own company, had a wife and kids and a nice house. When his wife died, he thought he’d reconnect with his roots and bought a plot of land in his home village and set up a nice house for summer holidays. He equipped it with a modern fridge, freezer and gas stove. He had paintings on the walls, two TV sets (one of them even outside under a sunroof), a garage and a shiny Lancia car.

The villagers came to visit. Everything was very nice to begin with. He was welcomed and admired. Then some of the old people suggested he buy them a TV set, too. He was so rich. He thought it was a joke at first. It was no joke, it turned out. They asked for more. One of the paintings, for example. He had so many. They had none. A better gas stove for a young couple with three kids. The villagers came and went. The atmosphere soured. One afternoon, a whole mob of them assembled in his front yard looking sinister, accusing him of avarice and of being coldhearted towards his poor neighbours. He got furious, reminding them that it was he who had gone north and worked hard for many years and saved his money. Not they. They had stayed put and done nothing. They yelled back at him. He chased them away.

A few days later when he came back from a trip down to Scilla, his home had been ransacked and burned to the ground. Smoke was still rising from the ruins. He turned his car around, drove away and never came back.

“Ecco”, said the elderly man with his espresso cup still in his hand, finishing his story with a sad smile and arms raised in a gesture to the heavens.

And yes – there were wolves!

A la prossima volta

Karl

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 about forty refugees from Kosovo in the hamlet of Karasjok in Norway’s Finnmark county, two points about this phenomenon now seemed to be more apparent to me.

The first point was that a majority of the members of the group became fluent in Norwegian in a matter of just a few months, typically three months to be exact.

I had shown before that it takes 10 to 12 weeks to learn to master the phonology of a new language. It requires between one and two hours of dedicated practice per day. The training needs to include systematic practice, hearing and speaking, of single phonemes, single words, phrases, short sentences and long sentences. And translation. The student needs to understand the spoken words instantly, both word by word and the idiomatic meaning of sentences. One should aim for a vocabulary of some 2000 words during this initial period.

As I said, this process takes three months; no more, no less.

The second point was what seemed like a bonus, a sort of free ride: By undergoing a learning program as described above, the brain seems to emulate the grammar of the new language simultaneously. This is maybe by some evolutionary design developed during thousands of years of human history.

Students emerge speaking the new language fluently and correctly.

Unfortunately, my project proposal to the University of Tromsø, and a subsequent one, went unanswered.

Although this learning phenomenon has been observed repeatedly in my work ever since, no university or other educational institution has answered my proposals for scientific research into the matter.

That’s where it stands today; decades of strong anecdotal evidence, but no rigorous scientific studies to support the theory.

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 there. The ancient Greek god Poseidon is said to have resided in Scilla. It has a charming beach and an old castle that was disguised as a hostel in the olden days.

Amongst a group of young people around a table in the castle courtyard, a Danish guy sat across from me and lifted his glass in my direction saying “skål” in Danish. He had a car and had driven down all the way from Copenhagen and was happy for the opportunity to speak some words of Danish (Danish and my native Norwegian being quite similar). He had heard that there was some interesting mountain terrain inland from the east coast and would I care to join him for a drive the next day. He was not keen on going there on his own. My Italian seemed more fluent than his, he said. I was happy to oblige.

The road up the mountainside was steep and winding and at the crest flattened out into a sort of main street of a village. At the other end of the street there was a large burnt-out house behind what had been a white cement-and-brick wall, which had been partly demolished to allow passersby to look inside. The house seemed to have been a rather large villa in its time, but the garden was neglected and overgrown. We got out of the car to have a better look, but were practically chased away by what to us appeared to be a very hostile villager.

We drove on through a varied and beautiful, almost Alpine landscape, stopped for a meal of goat’s cheese and tomato salad with white beans and black olives, then drove slowly on.

By evening we came to a place between some hilltops that was not on the map. The place had an inn, though a rustic, very simple restaurant on the ground floor and I think six rooms to rent on the upper floor. Those were narrow, single-bed rooms with a washstand and a mirror on the wall. My Danish “compadre” picked one that faced east. Mine, across the landing, faced west towards where we came from. The innkeeper was not easy to understand, but we agreed on the price after some incomprehensible words and got a meal in the restaurant. Some elderly card-playing guests in the dining room stared at us throughout the meal, not saying a word.

In the morning my friend told me he had heard the howling of wolves outside during the night. Although there had been a full moon he had seen nothing out of the window except the dark forest.

I’ll tell you more about it in an upcoming post.

A la prossima volta

Karl (Carlo in Italian)

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 they have rehearsed grammar and word lists. They have practised reading and writing. But they haven’t done much talking.

Football then? From the first training they play ball. They do not sit in a classroom and study “football grammar”. They do not figure out the best elevation, trajectory, impact, force of a shot and so on, on paper or computer screens. They play ball.

We do not have to explain that football players need technical skills, strength, speed and good reflexes.

Strangely it seems to be necessary to point out that the same things are true for learning to speak with people in another language.

It is about neural pathways, neurons and synapses. Messages travel so fast that we “cannot become aware of it” as the guru of all linguists, Noam Chomsky, once put it.

Same as with playing football.

Let’s play ball!

Karl

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 a little more of Sicily beyond Palermo. On the east coast of the island is the city of Catania, founded by the Greeks in the 8^th century BC. One beautiful morning, together with a fellow exchange student who was from Germany, I crossed the island by train. There was much to see. The volcano of Etna could be spotted to the north. At its foot was the ancient town of Taormina with its old Roman amphitheatre. On the bus back to Catania where we had checked in at a youth hostel, we noticed that the air to the south was getting hazy and deep red. As evening came, we went to the port area with a group of youths from the hostel for a meal of fish, calamari, pasta and white wine.

The haze we had observed from the bus descended on us between the wine and the food. It was no haze, however. It was sand blowing slowly in from the Sahara Desert. The phenomenon is known as the Scirocco in Italian. With it comes a steep rise in temperature. While we ate and drank it rose from about 30 degrees Celsius to 45. We were dripping with sweat. Dew formed on our chilled wine glasses and the Formica tabletop became sticky with a layer of sand. The waiter recommended that we sip the wine slowly and leave the last drops in the glass. He smiled and said, “Wait and see”. 

What we saw was a thin sediment on the bottom of our glasses. It was sand. The waiter said, “Bits of Africa have come here. Taste it.” But the taste was that of white wine. No African flavour. The wine was good with or without African sand in it, so we ordered more while we practiced the new word “scirocco” with much laughter and merriment.

There is a point in this beyond the anecdote of a tourist. The absence of the opportunity to speak your mother tongue seems to enhance the sense of sound perception – and thereby also the perception of cultural nuances. I spoke German with my travelmate as we moved around, but also Italian, after a fashion. At the seaside “scirocco table” more languages were used. English was not so predominant back then as it is now. My German friend knew some, but not much. There were people from the former Yugoslavia who were unfamiliar with English. We therefore all threw tentative words in several languages across the table and managed to forge a very stimulating conversation. The sanded white wine may have been a help.

A la prossima volta!
Karl

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, they start speaking a few words to their new play pals. The first few days they try out short sentences and a few words at a time. Then the neural connections seem to consolidate, and the child speaks fluently with his or her newfound vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation all in place. And then the vocabulary grows as they play.

You probably have an idea of what I am trying to say by now. But don’t misunderstand. Trying out new words and phrases is strongly recommended. It reinforces the building of new neural pathways. Trying to find a response too early to something you hear, on the other hand, risks playing havoc in the sorting mechanisms of your brain and directing your efforts back to the structure of your first language, which is exactly what we want to avoid.

How to choose training material then? Countless sources are available. You will need a few thousand words if your ambition is to speak with people, so it does not really matter where you start. But some topics pop up more frequently than others so it might be smart to begin there. Food is one of them. In northern countries the weather is always discussed and commented upon.

I’ll show you a few tricks in coming posts.

Hasta luego
Karl

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 at a sidewalk café in your chosen country. 

You can indeed learn these things quickly. But then the sound barrier stops you from moving on, because people talk back before you have established the necessary neural infrastructure to catch the words that come flying at you.

My advice is: 

• Don’t slow down. 
• Change direction from short-term satisfaction to long-term contentment.
• Keep the speed up. 
• Concentrate on building that neural infrastructure – new neurons, a myriad of new synapses and neural pathways to connect them. (I’ll show you how in coming posts.)Avoid, at all times, using your mother tongue’s neural pathways for your new language.

Many think that listening comes naturally. It does not. It takes patience and perseverance to learn the art of listening accurately. It is not for nothing that professional singers routinely practice do-re-mi-fa-sol and other scales. Musical sound patterns need maintenance and constant practice. So do linguistic sound patterns.

It may sound far-fetched to liken language acquisition to sports. In all sports the goal is to win competitions. That requires intensive training over long periods of time – volume training, as it were – as well as attention to detail.

Linguistic training is not so different. The goal is to win the attention and interest of the listener. I’ll show you a few techniques on how to achieve that in my next posts, one of them being the instinctive wisdom of young children.

Hasta luego
Karl

From the song Ol’ Man River:

“He don’t plant tater
He don’t plant cotton
An’ 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 try to answer that. But beware, this simple thing might need a complicated explanation. 

As I said last time, it is all about doing The Right Thing as opposed to doing things right, and about starting at the beginning.  

So, we need to find out where the beginning really begins. I did say that language begins with the sounds,or rather sound patterns. But therein lies the problem. Sound is volatile; once uttered it’s gone, gone forever. Even whole words, as the famous singer Paul Robson sang: “… is soon forgotten”.

The first task, then, is to make sure you catch the string of sounds that you hear; after that to catch them accurately; and finally, that they’re not forgotten – neither soon, nor later.

I advise you: do not read the lyrics. Not a word, nothing. Listen to the song instead.

The spelling rules that you know are tied to your mother tongue and your brain is easily fooled, no matter how smart it otherwise is. New sounds are apt to travel down old neural pathways and to choose the wrong route, like following your usual exit off the motorway.

How this trap can be avoided? I’ll try to explain that in my next post.

Until then

Karl