I came across this article.

Hooray for more paranoia induced ignorant racism!

I suppose this means the next time I visit an tropical island-themed hotel, I should ask Larry to change his name to something more tropical. I mean, it is part of the experience, right?

Two weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times about nomenclature. The author argues that there is something inherent about the way we name things, particularly animals, that lets us separate them into categories. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia conducted a study asking students to listen to a pair of 50 names read aloud. Each pair contained the name of a fish and the name of a bird. To combat bias, he chose names from the Huambisa language, spoken by people of the same name in Peru.

Students were able to correctly identify the bird and the fish 58% of the time, suggesting that they subconsiously picked up on linguistic cues. Somehow, the names gave a sense of “bird-ness” or “fish-ness”.

Statistically speaking, random guessing would give a result hovering around 50%. A scaled-down version of the quiz can be found here. Interestingly, I took the quiz and was able to correctly identify the bird in 9 of the 10 questions, despite not having any exposure to the language. Maybe there is something to this idea.

This got me thinking, what about non-Latinate languages? I’ve written a mini quiz for Chinese with 10 pairs of names. Each pair contains a flower and a bird. (I couldn’t find a list of fish names with audio pronunciations. However, the study suggests that this pairing could also work, in that the two categories are distinguishable with distinct characteristics. Whereas, distinguishing the name of a tree and a bush is more difficult since the defining characteristics between the two aren’t as distinct.) Can you pick out the bird? To remove visual clues from radicals, I will only give the Pinyin and an audio pronunciation. Click on the links for audio.

1. a) wu1 dong1 1a, b) shui3 xian1 1b
2. a) chu2 ju2 2a, b) he4 2b
3. a) ge1 3a, b) mu4 jin4 3b
4. a) ying1 4a, b) shu3 kui2 4b
5. a) shao2 yao4 5a, b) fei3 5b
6. a) kong3 que4 6a, b) ying1 su4 6b
7. a) bai2 tou2 ying1 7a, b) yu3 jin4 xiang1 7b
8. a) ge1 zi3 8a, b) gong1 ren2 cao3 8b
9. a) xiang4 ri4 kui2 9a, b) guan4 9b
10. a) pu2 gong1 ying1 10a, b) jin1 si1 que4 10b

So? How’d you do? Which ones are the birds?

Answers: (highlight below to reveal answers)
The birds: 1. a; 2. b; 3. a; 4. a; 5. b; 6. a; 7. a; 8. a; 9. b; 10. b

I haven’t cracked open a non-English book in weeks, including Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. I haven’t done any practice with my Anki decks either. The truth is, I was on the verge of language burnout, and then I had to work a billion hours to finish my dissertation. Brain fried.

And so I’ve been lazy.

Though this doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting worthy language practice, as it turns out.

My husband and I have been watching Code Geass. Japanese audio, English subtitles. Each episode is a little over 20 minutes long and we finished Episode 20 today. I’ve already noticed some improvement in my Japanese comprehension even with this small amount of semi-immersion.

And then I read How to Learn Spanish for Lazy People on Spanish Only:

5 Reasons Lazy People Are Better Language Learners

1. They generally don’t worry all too much.
2. They don’t use textbooks.
3. Instead, they use native materials.
4. They have all the time of the world to get massive amounts of input well before ever speaking a word.
5. When they eventually speak it’s again stress-free, aiming to get their point across (which, miracally often goes without making loads of mistakes and/or pauses).

It made me feel even better about my laziness.

Because to be honest, I hate doing SRS. I hate being glued to my dictionary. I hate being all systematic and angsty about my language progress. And trying to study three different languages every day is a good way to make your brain all ’splody.

So I’m going to relax. Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook is going on hiatus (and frankly, I was starting to run out of the funny phrases anyways).

For Japanese and Spanish, my new goal is to watch 1000 hours of TV in each language before I attempt any more formal study. For the time being, I’ve decided that subtitles in Japanese are ok, as I’m basically starting from nothing here. If I use subtitles on the Spanish TV, they must be in Spanish.

I’ve already gotten my 1000 hours of native-speed Chinese audio, so I will start reading through the massive collection of children’s books I have. Once I get through all of those (without systematically mining them for vocabulary), I’ll re-evaluate where I am.

Here’s where I am so far, going as far back as my Spanish movie-watching week (during which I also snuck in a viewing of Spirited Away):

Japanese: 9.4/1000 hours

Spanish: 7.8/1000 hours