Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 4)

Remember: this is a continuing series...if you haven't read volumes 1-3, I recommend doing that because
there is a developing argument and I refer to things I've said previously...enjoy!

So to be clear, I want to say that normalization is a process during which our feelings (or unarticulated meaning) become conditioned by sustained use of words to come to us already habituated to the form (that is, the specific meaning) of those words, and that this conditioning gives rise to thoughts (or articulated meaning yet unexpressed).

Normalization is what happens as babies acquire language for the first time, and similarly, as we learn a second language. For a baby, this process deals directly with raw feelings, in the normalization of feelings and words, and therefore is a deep and fundamental kind of learning that informs nascent modes of thinking itself.

The difference in learning a second language however, is that we are basing the acquisition of our new words (in this case the Spanish ones) on our understanding and competence with our old words (the English). Our feelings and words have already been normalized, our modes of thinking established, and now we are attempting to substitute our old words for new ones.

This kind of learning is not as deep and fundamental as with that of the baby—instead, this kind of learning seems to be lateral, almost shallow. Learning another language could be just swapping out old words for new ones without considering making amendments or adaptations to the underlying meaning. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be like that.

Here we begin to butt up against the role that culture has in this discussion of language and meaning. What I mean is, in order to truly understand a language, one has to be sensitive to the meaning and significance of words within their cultural context. For example,  I could know the literal Spanish translations of every English word in the dictionary, but I would still sound like a bumbling gringo idiot in a Spanish conversation without certain knowledge of cultural norms, speech patterns, phrases, idioms, inflection, and pacing.

So an important part of learning a second language is learning a second culture as well—in addition to the lateral movement of word substitution that exists on the surface, one must also take care to really understand the meaning and significance of new words within the second language. This contextual learning comes from an understanding of culture; that is, from an understanding of the attitudes and behavioral characteristics of a given social group.

~

I view my learning of Spanish in Nicaragua almost as the birth of my “Spanish-speaking self.” I have tried to think of my burgeoning language abilities as mirroring the same kind of development a Nicaraguan baby goes through as it picks up language for the first time. Sure, I base a lot of my learning on what I’ve learned as an English-speaker, to ignore all of that would be insane, but for many things, especially aspects of social life and custom, speech patterns and inflections, I try to forgo my American cultural inclinations and search for a new Nicaraguan base understanding.

In this way I’m striving to realize a process of normalization analogue to the deep normalization that establishes fundamental modes of thinking in babies. I don’t want to think that I’m replacing the modes of thinking I learned as a baby developing in America, but rather that I’m expanding those modes of thinking, giving them more dimension with the addition of new cultural and linguistic norms along with the new words themselves.

So, if in the future I happen to travel to another Spanish-speaking country or have the opportunity to converse with non-Nicaraguan Spanish speakers, I assume that it will be glaringly obvious to them that I learned Spanish in Nicaragua. I will have a Nicaraguan accent, speaking cadence, diction, etc because in effect, my Spanish-speaking self was born in Nicaragua. I am interested to see if it will be possible to adopt different Spanish accents in the future. Will speaking in an Argentine accent for example, always feel affected in the same way that speaking English with a British accent feels affected?

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4 ***
• Pictorial Supplement

Perrita Perdida: Production Slate

Recently I’ve been editing a short film. The piece, called Perrita Perdida, was written, directed, and recorded by my good friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer Jason Outenreath here in Nicaragua. I thought it might be cool to share a little about the project and generate some interest even though it’s still not finished.

A little over a month ago I went to Camoapa (Jason’s site) with my camera and tripod and we shot this little movie in one long and tiring day. Jason had written the script and sent it to me some time before, so I had an idea of what to expect, but like any production, we had a fair amount of challenges to deal with.

And like any production, the biggest challenges were posed by the actors and the weather. We shot the first few scenes in the morning with minimal problems, took a break for lunch, and were planning to finish filming in the afternoon and early evening, which we did, but there was a period of time when we thought we might not be able to…

The script was short, thank gawwd (about five pages long), which meant that the cast was also going to be extremely small; there were only five actors involved, BUT, during lunch, as we were preparing to shoot the only scene that involved conversational dialogue, the girl who was cast in that scene called Jason to say that she didn’t want to do it. This was maybe an hour before we were scheduled to shoot.

Qué mala onda, right? Correcto. SO, obviously we were kind of pooping our pants for a while, scrambling to find a replacement. To be fair, it was Jason doing most of the scrambling since all of the actors were from his site and he knew them—I was just living the dream, along for the ride— anyway, he called our lead actor Diethdrich to see if he could help us out.

Diethdrich, playing the part of the smooth leading man on AND off camera, assured us that there would be no problem and that he could whip up a replacement easy. And sure enough, at the snap of his fingers (after he made a few calls of course) a replacement actress stepped out of a taxi and began looking over her lines.

Now when I talk about “actors” this by no means is to insinuate that these people had any kind of prior acting experience. I really just mean that for that particular day, they had to act in our movie.  This absolute lack of acting experience made the job of directing quite a challenge so I tried to help Jason out as much as possible.

Okay, so we have our two actors. They’ve rehearsed their lines a bit. We’ve got the equipment ready: the camera, the tripod, the microphones, the headphones, the cables. We set out for the location. As we arrive on the street corner Jason had picked out for the scene (depicting a chance encounter between the protagonist and a female acquaintance, perhaps ex-novia), we hear a loud thunderclap announce itself from the hills. The dark clouds advance quickly and a few moments later it’s pouring down rain. We take shelter under the roof of a nearby house, the four of us, maldiciendo our bad luck. There was no rain in the script.

We waited there by that house for a good 45 minutes, hoping for the rain to stop. It’s times like these, the apparent low points, which can really be the defining moments of a production and ultimately an entire project. You can let the setbacks get you down and watch as your negative attitude spreads like black ink in a glass of water, or you can look at the situation as an opportunity to exercise some creativity, improvise a bit.

We went for the latter. From the stoop Jason started getting some cool shots of the rain: the clouds, a kid on a bike, a guy on a horse, the water dripping from rooftops… We started talking about how to work the rain into the story. For our patience and tenacity, the fates rewarded us: a beautiful arching rainbow right over the house we were using as shelter.

So we changed the scene a bit. Instead of running into her as they both turn a street corner, Diethdrich walks through the rain and happens past the acquaintance sitting in the house. She calls him over and they have a short and awkward conversation. Diethdrich continues on. This all happens under the arch of the rainbow.

There were some other challenges later on that day…all the walking we had to do to the different locations in the city, the crazy dog we had to try and get to act, the race against the rapidly diminishing light in the evening…but the rain was definitely the defining moment of the production. I’m proud of the way we were able to spin a potentially debilitating setback in our favor, and hopefully end up with a better movie for it.

So right now at this moment I’m finishing up the final cut of the film. It will be the third cut (unless Jason has other crazy ideas he hasn’t told me yet, in which case there might be a fourth). Like production, the editing process is often times a big puzzle as well. I originally edited the film to this great salsa tune called Tu Cariñito but we realized that if we ever want to submit this project to a festival, we’ll either need to buy the rights to the song (on a Peace Corps budget??) or come up with some original music.

So I took it upon myself to write some tracks. For the last 3 weeks I’ve been recording these little songs on my laptop in the evenings. The featured instrument in these songs is a seven-note finger piano (kalimba) that I brought with me to Nicaragua, but I also used a simple thumb flute made of cane (which I also brought with me) and found items like a cracker wrapper and an old wine bottle. For the majority of the beats, I just kinda tapped on my computer.  You can listen to the tracks here.

The editing of Perrita Perdida will be finished for good in the next week or so, then we’re going to send that final cut to the States around Christmastime for sound mixing and color correction. We’re looking at getting the finished product back sometime in the beginning of February. We’re pretty excited to see how it turns out!

Watch the trailer on YouTube! --> Perrita Perdida (Lost Dog) Trailer
The premiere at the 2012 Palm Springs International ShortFest

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 3)

This is my vision—maybe my illusion; at any rate, this is how I imagine stuff works inside my head. There is an amorphous, amoeboid thing, a feeling, that emerges undulating out of some foggy corner of my brain, I know not from whence it comes; it is a notion, strangely-shaped with subtle topography—sometimes pockmarked, jagged, sometimes glossy and fluid—ridged, channeled, crevassed. Its hue is a sunset or a dawn, a tinge in variation, like an octopus changing its color. This feeling is complex—ineffably so.

Then the words come. They come like shipping containers; they come to package the feeling. Words are envelopes, packets, parcels, bags, boxes and crates—a whole diction of vessels of standardized sizes and shapes. With luck, there is a lexical package that closely matches the feeling’s multiplex form, fitting it as best it can. The better the word, the better it conforms to the feeling’s shape, thereby retaining and transmitting its essence.

 But in every case on some level, the process of packing feelings into words makes the feelings lose their subtlety, their complexity, their absolute authenticity. Feelings are infinities, and words, by virtue of being finite units, leave something out that existed originally. Words are necessary however, because despite the net loss of meaning, once feelings have been jammed into words, we can think.

~

I imagine that this idea, this cramming of feelings into words, eventually feeds back into itself and stabilizes, and I think the feedback loop that emerges can help explain how we learn language and develop the capacity to use it as a tool to think and communicate, thereby gaining efficacy in the world.

 After a long period of using certain words to describe certain feelings, we grow accustomed to them; that is, our feelings are affected by the containers (the words) we pack them in. They emerge in our brain not as impossibly fluctuating dynamic entities, but as quietly undulating things pre-molded into the shape of their packages, into the shape of the words themselves. In this sense, thoughts and words become one in the same. I’ll call this the process of normalization, and it’s the birthing rite of thoughts.

 After sustained use of words our feelings are no longer ineffable infinities, they become verbal and thinkable—they become thoughts. After normalization we mean what we say and we say what we mean.

I want to mention here before moving on that I think genuinely new ideas, creativity, poetry, inspiration, innovation, all come from this pre-verbal place. These things are born of feelings, of pure unarticulated meaning. Es decir the Muse resides in feelings but must be tamed by thoughts, that is, by words.

In the next post we'll try and figure out how the process of normalization plays into learning another language...what fun!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3 ***
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement