16 July 25
El Foraster
I have started doing a self-paced online introductory Catalan course through the folks at Easy Catalan. In the unit on personal pronouns they recommended looking at the Catalan television series El Foraster (The Outsider) because the presenter, Quim Masferrer, often uses the formal version of the second person singular pronoun, vós, when interviewing older people. Taking their hint, I’ve discovered this to be a quite engaging and enjoyable television show, even though I don’t know very much of the language.
The premise of El Foraster is that the host Quim travels around to the tiniest villages of Catalunya, spends 48 hours interviewing some of the inhabitants, and then afterwards shares his interviews in a monologue given to a group of the villagers. The show is edited so that it intercuts the interviews with video of the monologue to the group, the camera often zooming in on the reaction of the interviewee sitting in the group. Quim is warm-hearted and quite funny; he often concludes his monologue with saying to the villagers “… sou molt bona gent.” (you are very good people).
It’s a pleasure to see the countryside of Catalunya that is highlighted in the series. And it’s a good language learning experience. I watch it with subtitles in Catalan turned on, which helps considerably with comprehension and picking up on pronunciation. Because Quim is always meeting new people, the dialogue patterns will repeat, which is good for learning.
9 July 25
I'm Not a Spy
I had a dream last night in which I was asking a French railway ticket agent for a round-trip ticket to — where? unclear, though somewhere in France — but that I didn’t know the date of my return. I was asking this in French, which was apparently good enough for the guy to look at me, hard, then sit back and smile. Disconcerted, I assured him that I wasn’t a spy.
This dream is interesting to me because I haven’t been reading, watching, or speaking French at all, though not for want of trying. Taking advantage of VPN, I’m watching the Tour de France either in Spanish or German because the French coverage has changed and in order to watch it in French — which would be my strong preference — I’d have to disable the ad blocker on my browser, which I’m not willing to do. There are also the women’s Euros, which again, I’m watching either in German or Spanish. (I’d watch next Friday’s match in Italian only Italy are playing Spain and, well, I’m rooting for Spain as always.)
The anachronisms in my dream aside — that you’d buy a ticket from a PERSON, that the walls surrounding this person would be dingy cream and the office cluttered with filing cabinets and loose papers, and obviously that a spy might also be a person instead of AI — I think this dream means a) I need to pay more attention to my French, b) I ought to be joining the Resistance. Not a coincidence that the ICE tracker is now the most popular app in the US…
6 July 25
Artificial Intelligence and Language Learning Part Two
Pica a few days ago mentioned how she just took a German class on the theme of artificial intelligence. This seems to be a common theme nowadays among language learning groups, since the topic came up in my Spanish conversation group on Friday. It ended up being something of a debate about whether AI is a good tool in language learning. I am in the middle on this one. AI is very useful in providing translations on the fly: my favorite translation service is the one provided by Kagi, and I also like having a browser plugin that allows you to click on a word in a text and get a translation of it, such as TransOver for Chrome-based browsers (I use Vivaldi). I have never tried using a chatbot for foreign language chatting practice, and tend not to think it would work well. One person in our conversation group didn’t like using a foreign language chatbot because they didn’t seem to take the initiative in conversations. Another person in the group said that since the whole point of learning another language is to connect with others, it’s not very rewarding to be talking to a chatbot. There are other AI tools that seem useful for language students. Text-to-speech generators may be able to help with pronunciation of blocks of text. The Kagi translation tool I mentioned above has a proofreading feature which might help with correcting writing errors. As always with AI, one has to be careful since these are never perfect.
1 July 25
Artificial Intelligence
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been learning German for the past three years, initially through Duolingo and more recently through Lingoda. I’ve taken 46 classes — 46 hours of instruction in group sizes of five students or fewer (and, mostly the average class size has been three). The classes are divided up into the categories of Communication, Reading, Grammar, and Speaking. The level of instruction has been high and I’m glad to say I was today awarded a certificate: I’ve progressed through the beginner level of B2. This means I’m technically now an intermediate intermediate.
This morning’s class was talking about AI, which in German is Kunstliche Intelligenz (or KI). I’m normally the oldest student in the class which I don’t mind, especially since it allows my inner curmudgeon out to howl. I’ve been avoiding taking this particular lesson for weeks because I hate what AI is doing to people’s minds, to the planet, to the political economy, and to political life in general. There were two other students today, both in their early thirties (I’d guess). They use Chat GPT every single day both in their work and in their daily lives. There’s no point in fighting this, is there.
22 June 25
Language Learning with tv.garden
A while ago I found the wonderful app Radio Garden. The interface to this application is a globe you can rotate and zoom in on any city or town of interest. Across the globe are thousands of green dots, each a city or town containing a number of streaming radio stations. Click on the green dot, select a radio station, and listen to the stream. It’s a great way to explore the diversity of radio all across the world.
Radio Garden isn’t often ideal for language study; for one thing most of the world’s radio stations are playing music most of the time. Yesterday I remembered that the application now has a spin-off, tv.garden. This has a similar interface with a globe, but instead providing access to streaming radio, the application lets you click on a country and see live TV programs from stations that have a free-to-view internet stream. One shouldn’t expect to find streams of major sporting events this way, but news programs are pretty common. As an example, the listing for Spain is on the right in this view. At the furthest right is the language code: in this example most of the stations are in Spanish, but some are in Catalan, with a scattering of other languages such as Basque. Catalan seems particularly well-served by free TV streams, I think because the Generalitat de Catalunya (the regional government) has invested a lot in making Catalan language resources freely available to its population.
The tv.garden application is built upon an open project to catalog the publicly available internet TV streams around the world. On this page there is a section labeled Grouped by language with a tab that expands to the scores of languages that are available for streaming. In addition to tv.garden, there are dozens of applications for viewing these streams on every platform.
21 June 25
Othering Oneself
Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, was published in 1961. It chronicles the journey of a white man who had his skin darkened to pass as black in the American deep South. I’ve known two people personally who have done a “passing” experiment and written a book about the experience: Ted Conover had already published his account of riding trains with hoboes, Rolling Nowhere, when he attended Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies to study for an M.Phil while I was the secretary there in the early 80s. The second was Norah Vincent who was a work colleague at Harvard University Press in the early 90s and who subsequently spent a year as a man, as told in Self-Made Man.
I have been reminded of this by a sentence in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about needing to look like a revolutionary militiaman in order to blend in in Barcelona in the early months of the civil war, and then needing to look bourgeois once he was on his way home through France after being wounded. From what I’ve read of Orwell, he could move comfortably through these different spheres, always being a little on the outside of them. When Orwell was on his way to Spain he dropped in on Henry Miller in Paris, who thought he was absolutely nuts to go and fight fascism in a country where he didn’t even speak the language—that he must be propelled by guilt or obligation. (Orwell wasn’t alone: thousands from all over the world volunteered to fight in Spain.)
And this is my big question: why do I feel the need to join the fight for those outside my group? For African Americans who have faced centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and police violence, for Mexican Americans who right now fear for their livelihoods and indeed lives? For those with less privilege than I have? A friend raised a possible answer this morning: this is what constitutes civilization. Most, if not all, animals are propelled by instinct to ensure the survival of their offspring even if it means endangering others in their own species. We have evolved as humans to become altruistic when it is in our interest to protect the group beyond our own family. But when we expand this outside the group, expand our definition of community to include everyone, this gets us labelled lunatic fringe lefties.
In a sense I’m continuing a political fight I had with my father while growing up, and he dead for more than 25 years now. The decades have taken a toll on my enthusiasm but they have never stopped my feeling that this is where, as a moral person, I ought to stand. What action to take is always the question, but it doesn’t stop the need for it. It is a comfort to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.
20 June 25
Bread and Roses
As Pica discussed yesterday, we have both recently read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and I have just finished a good follow-up book, Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. This is a beautiful account of how despite his fierce political activism and writing, Orwell had a side to him that was rooted in the countryside, tending his vegetable garden, planting his beloved roses. For instance in 1946 Orwell wrote an essay praising the common toad. From its second paragraph:
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.
The phrase “Bread and Roses” is the title of the third section of Solnit’s book. The phrase originates in 1910 in a conversation among several woman suffragists. One of the activists, Helen Todd, later declared that women’s votes would “go towards helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter, and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, the government of which she has a voice.” The phrase soon got incorporated in the labor movement, and lives on today in the name of a socialist feminist movement in Latin America, Pan y Rosas. Orwell has similar sentiments. In January 1944 he writes:
A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.
19 June 25
Homage to Orwell
I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?
The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
18 June 25
Crucigramas
Our local newspaper on its comic page prints four of the New York Times crossword puzzles each week. Lately I’ve been enjoying trying to do these, a good pastime while at the kitchen table. Sometimes I succeed in completing them, sometimes not. I’ve been musing about how hard it would be to do a New York Times-level crossword puzzle in a language I’m learning, let’s say Spanish. If nothing else, these crossword puzzles rely on a high level of cultural knowledge.
Happily, I just found a source of crossword puzzles for language learners. I was looking for a platform to provide verb conjugation exercises and came across Linguno which has a variety of exercises in five different languages. One of these is crossword puzzles at a number of levels of difficulty. I’ve been doing the A2 and B1 level puzzles in Spanish. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to develop vocabulary. I showed these to Pica and she’s trying out the puzzles in German. Tonight she shared a puzzle with her German conversation group and the activity was a hit!
11 June 25
Stricken auf Deutsch
I think I’ve said elsewhere on here that I got back into knitting after a 35-year-break because I was supporting a bike ride as a radio SAG and ran into a Davis Bike Club volunteer who was knitting a sock. This was back in 2008: Ravelry was still in invitation mode and the knitting craze was really revving up. Since then a lot has happened, a lot of drama, and the community is as fractured as the political landscape.
I’ve been able, however, to combine my hobbies a bit. There are at least 30 groups on Ravelry that are at least partly in German (Deutscher Stricktreff is a group I’m a member of). I’ve been watching a lot of German YouTube content and a new favorite is Sylvie Rausch of CraSy Creative Things.
This book was brought back from Germany last year by a friend of mine. She’s returning there on Sunday and has asked whether there’s anything I’d like her to bring back this time…