A Few Grad School Observations

The past few weeks have gone really fast!  It still feels a little scary to be back in school, rather that working at a job and earning money, but I also think it's entirely possible that my whole five-semester program will go by in a flash.  Here are some thoughts on the experience so far:

• I'm really busy.  I thought I knew what I was getting into time-wise.  I thought I might be busier in this master's program than I was in my last one, so that isn't a surprise.  But what is a surprise is that I'm also busier now than I was in the past couple of years working full time and taking classes on top of that.  Gulp.
• Learning ASL has given me another way to be uncoordinated.  Usually language classes aren't too difficult for me.  At this point, ASL is proving to be the exception because it involves a level of coordination that I don't seem to have.  It reminds me of trying to learn the moves to the Macarena when I was in high school...by the time I learned, the dance had become unspeakably uncool.  I hope it will come in time.  I do think it's a fascinating language.
• I have a distinguishing feature of some sort.  When I was teaching, it was very important to me to learn all of my students' names.  However, it was not an instantaneous process.  The way it worked for me was that the first names I'd learn would be those of students who had some distinguishing feature.  For instance, if there was, say, one student with red hair in the class, his or her name would be easier for me to remember.  All of my professors seemed to learn my name quickly...which leads me to believe that I perhaps have a distinguishing feature of my own.  I'm willing to bet that that distinguishing feature is my age, as I have at least ten years on all of my classmates (more in many cases!).  It's also very possible that I'm older than one of my profs.

The good thing is that people routinely get through these programs, so it should all be okay in the end.  This will, however, almost certainly be my last degree-seeking program.

My Dialect Is Deficient!

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Phonetic Transcription.  I've had some questions about what exactly that means, so in a nutshell, this is a way to represent speech as people are actually pronouncing it.  Instead of using standard spelling, you use International Phonetic Alphabet symbols to represent individual sounds.  As you might imagine, this is a great way to uncover patterns of sounds people might be having trouble producing.

Anyway, we've been discussing vowel sounds in American English recently.  The official line is that dialectal variations are fine, and that no one dialect is superior to another.  (I can say from experience that many people's attitudes differ from this official line).  One feature of my own dialect that has re-entered my mental universe is that I generally do not distinguish between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/.  For people who do distinguish between these two sounds, think about the difference in the vowel sounds in cot and caught.  I've known for some time that I don't usually distinguish between the two sounds (I think ahh... vs. aww... might be the only time I distinguish between the two), but what I didn't realize until now is that I'm not consistently correct about where the /ɔ/ sound "should" be. I don't mind not distinguishing between the two sounds, but for some reason, I find not knowing where /ɔ/ might show up vaguely annoying.

Another thing I've noticed is that while I, like many other people, have tried to rid my speech of certain "non-prestigious" features (see my observation above regarding people's attitudes about different dialects), I have not been totally successful.  For me, the feature I've focused on is distinguishing between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before nasal consonants (pin vs. pen is a classic example of this).  I've gotten that particular pair of words down for the most part, but then in class, our instructor mentioned friend as an example of a word with the /ɛ/ vowel sound.  I pronounce it with /ɪ/.  Fortunately, of course, in this case, the difference in pronunciation does not change the meaning of the word.

I'll be interested as time goes on to learn more about which dialectal features are associated with which regions.  I was born and raised in North Carolina, and my parents are from Alaska and Michigan.  In addition to North Carolina, I have lived in Ohio, Wisconsin, Maryland, and Virginia.  And I've also had several stints living in other countries.  I'm curious if my speech fits into a certain regional profile fairly neatly, or if it's a hodgepodge of all the dialectal influences I've had.

Trilingual Tissues

Yep, that's snow outside my kitchen window!

When I went to the little store in the dormitory the other day to buy tissues, I was more concerned with having something softer than paper towels to blow my poor nose into than I was with the design on the box.  But when I brought it home and took a look at it, I thought it was interesting.  The design on the box has cartoon hippos showing us how to say certain words (basket, flower, butterfly, and ball) in Kazakh, Russian, and English.

I've always had some trouble wrapping my mind around language use in Kazakhstan.  Both Kazakh and Russian are widely spoken, but since I don't speak either one, I get only occasional insights into when each of them are used.  I know that the government is working hard to increase usage of Kazakh.  It also seems that some parts of the country prefer one language over another.  When I traveled to southern Kazakhstan last spring, I was interested to hear from some of the Russian speakers I traveled with that some of the locals seemed to have trouble conversing with them in Russian.

Scott and I are taking a semester of unpaid leave in the spring, and one of my classes threw a lovely going-away party for me last week.  The language situation in Kazakhstan was one of the topics we chatted about during the party.  I asked them if they thought that the use of Kazakh was growing in Kazakhstan, and they thought it was.  They told me that Kazakh pretty much disappeared as a language of instruction in most of the schools for a long time, and that the textbooks were in Russian.  They said that even now, most films and literature are in Russian, so it was useful to maintain Russian skills.  One student pointed out that it was also useful to have a way to communicate with people from other former Soviet republics.

One thing that I found particularly interesting is that the students said that while they often mixed Kazakh and Russian together when they talked, there were certain words that they always said in Russian.  One student said that she had a four-year-old nephew who was saying those words in Kazakh because he heard them on a Kazakh cartoon show.  So, it seems that Kazakhstan's language use is evolving over time.

Interestingly, one of my students also asked me if it was true that Americans speak Spanish as well as Kazakhstanis speak Russian.  I had to reply that although Spanish is a popular language to study there, foreign language education in many parts of the US is very weak and many Americans did not think learning a second language was very important.

I do think American attitudes toward foreign language education are changing.  I know some communities are starting foreign language classes in elementary school, and I know preschool foreign language immersion programs have become popular in some areas.  But I will be surprised (and thrilled) the day I find an American equivalent of the trilingual tissue box I found in Kazakhstan.

Slippery Cakes Up Ahead!

I received the following in an email, written as usual in English, Russian and Kazakh:

Due to the weather conditions, roadways and sidewalks areas were covered with icing.

Ha!  Icing would have been easier to walk through than what we actually had.  Scott and I had been out of town, and returned to ice so hard and slippery that I was sliding around even in YakTrax.  One of our friends told us there had been freezing rain in Astana right before we got back into town, which is unusual here.  Usually, we get snow instead.

I know how difficult it is to learn foreign languages, and I would never want to make light of anyone's attempts to try, but I'm very comfortable calling this one a Google Translate tragedy.  Just for fun, I plugged the Russian version of this email into Google Translate, and got the exact sentence that I saw in the English version of the email.  Interestingly, that's exactly the sort of thing that I and other instructors and professors here have gotten after our students about.  A cautionary tale on the importance of learning (i.e., studying and practicing) foreign languages, perhaps?

A Linguistic and Housekeeping Note

As I was trying to be a responsible adult and clean the apartment today, the following occurred to me:

Depending on which definition of the word you choose, our vacuum cleaner either does or does not suck.

Maybe trying to be a responsible adult is overrated.

The Dumpsters Have Dreams of World Domination! Or...

I suppose the more boring and likely possibility is what I've come to call a "Google Translate tragedy."  I received an email yesterday in three languages:  Russian, Kazakh, and English.  Here is the quote from the English portion that provoked my concern about the dumpsters' intentions:

We hereby inform you that due to the sport event in the Sport Center on September 19-20, 2015, the territory was liberated from the dumpsters.

On a related note, I'm happy to say that I don't think those of us who use foreign languages on the job will be replaced by machines any time soon.

Danube River Valley

Before we traveled to Austria, we booked a tour of the Danube River Valley for the Wednesday we were there.  We figured it would be an easy way to see some of the countryside.  Ordinarily, we aren't big tour people, but considering how tired we had been in the weeks leading up to this vacation, I'm glad we planned a day when we didn't have to do much thinking.  The company that operated the tour seemed to do a very brisk business.  We were picked up from our hotel in a van.  At first, I thought that we were going to be on a very small tour with only a few other people.  But then, the driver of the van took us to some sort of central depot where there were several large tour buses taking people on a variety of different tours.  Our guide moved very ably between German, English, and Spanish.

Our first stop was Krems, a very picturesque town, where we were given an hour to wander around.

Then we started heading toward Emmendsdorf for lunch.  The guide showed us barriers that were put up to protect the valley from flooding (he described them as ugly and expensive), and told us that most people in the valley make a living either from tourism or wineries.  He also told us that apricots would be in season in a few weeks.  I was regretful to have missed out on that, although I will say that I got to eat plenty of other tasty things over the course of the trip.

After that, we headed to Melk.  The purpose of going to Melk was to visit a Benedictine abbey, but Scott and I also nipped into town before the abbey tour started.  While there, we saw a few quirky sites:

A bicycle covered in yarn...

A polished stone machine...

And a sign in Arabic advertising apple strudel!  Too bad the words are both backwards and disconnected!

Part of me wanted to skip the abbey and see what other amazing surprises Melk had in store, but the abbey was lovely, also.

View from the abbey

All in all, a lovely day.  When we returned to Vienna, we ate dinner in a tiny, decidedly non-touristy restaurant (no languages on the menu except German!).  The employees there were very gracious about translating for us.  We split a whole steamed artichoke as an appetizer--no doubt the last one I'll have in a long while!

Searching for Time

Scott and I finally signed up for Russian lessons today.  There is a woman who arranges private lessons with people who are interested and comes to the university on a predetermined schedule.  Our class meets late Sunday morning and Thursday evening.  We'll have to study and do some homework in between sessions.

This is probably a necessary expenditure of time at this point.  Very little English is spoken here outside the university.  We need help completing all but the very simplest transactions around here.  Even trying to arrange fun activities is difficult.

But…we are not sure where we are going to find the time.

We had been optimistic about having more time for research here.  Really, though, we are finding that bureaucracy takes up most of the extra time we have.  Last week, none of my students could access the websites that accompany their textbooks.  This led to me testing the websites out in different locations to see if the problem was with the websites or the university (it was the university), contacting IT to see what the problem was and when it might be fixed (they did ultimately fix it, but they were quite vague on the schedule), and not being able to complete my lesson plans in my office because I needed to be able to reference said websites.

Also last week, the powers that be decided to stop providing free, but unreliable internet service in our apartments.  That would have been fine, except that they shut off their service before the paid service guys could come around and set everyone up.  This led to our not being able to work at home for several days, a lengthy email exchange between Scott and the manager of our building, and me having to rush home after teaching, only to sit around for an hour and a half, unable to work, waiting for the internet guy to arrive.

I would also be remiss to not mention the latest trip to customs.  I wrote here about our last trip there, which was lengthy and tiring, but at least resulted in the acquisition of more of our belongings.  Scott went again on Friday with a university employee.  They spent a couple of hours there, only to be told in the end that the computer system was down there, and that they'd have to come back again.

So, at this point, I don't know what to think.  Stay tuned--will we learn any Russian, or will our attempts be subsumed in teaching/meetings/customs visits/internet woes?