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…
10 June 25
On Catalan and Occitan
As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’m now dabbling in Catalan. I think I got drawn into the language in the following way. Pica just related how she herself started dabbling in Catalan because of the arrival of our Catalan neighbors. At that point, I watched a couple videos from the YouTube channel Easy Catalan. Easy Catalan is part of the Easy Languages network of language learning content that is built around street interviews that are doubly-subtitled in English and in the target language. When listening to these street interviews in Catalan, I thought to myself “Oh, I really like the sound of this language! It sounds a good bit like Old Occitan.”
How on earth do I know what Old Occitan sounds like? I don’t, of course, but long ago I discovered troubadour song and became enamored of that 800-year-old world of music and poetry. I collected many recordings of modern performers interpreting troubadour songs. One of which that stands out is a 1991 recording by the Camerata Mediterranea entitled Lo Gai Saber. The salient feature of this recording is that the singers all had contact with modern Occitan in their youth and assimilated the sounds of the language. Modern Occitan is not the same as Old Occitan but this is probably as close as one can get to recreating the medieval language’s phonology. This recording is at the present moment streamable on YouTube.
Catalan and Occitan are very closely related languages, described in an article in a site on troubadours as being one diasystem, two languages. Here is a YouTube video showing their mutual intelligibility. In it Laura (aka Couch Polyglot) has a conversation with Gabrièu (aka Parpalhon Blau), with Laura speaking Catalan and Gabrièu speaking Occitan. Laura has had very little exposure to Occitan prior to this point.
9 June 25
Why Learn a Foreign Language?
As Numenius mentioned in his blog post yesterday, we’ve both been actively learning new languages. In my case this deep dive into German has now moved into its fifth year. But why? I don’t live in Germany, nor do I intend ever to move there; I haven’t even been there. Most people in Germany speak good English (at least in the cities) and will reportedly answer in English the second they get the sense your native language is English. No: my reason for learning German is to get a massive monkey off my back.
When I went to boarding school from Madrid at age 13, I was compelled to choose three of the four following subjects: history, Latin, geography and German. Latin and history were obvious choices to me; geography seemed like it would be a lot easier than German plus I still had a residual antipathy to German (it was the early 1970s and English war comics featuring hollering Nazi officers were a staple in our house.) In the event I got invited to leave my geography class only three weeks in because I kept correcting the teacher’s pronunciation of Spanish place names like a brat. I should have joined the German class but thought I’d never catch up. (I would have, of course: three weeks is nothing at beginner level.) The monkey? It settled in and looked forward to a lifetime of mischief.
I’ve started other languages in the interim (having taken Spanish and French at University): Italian A Level in Cambridge in 1982 because a friend had, Irish at Harvard so I could calligraph 18th century Irish poetry (this was too hard and I never made it very far), Hebrew so I could calligraph a ketubah for some friends (and read prayer book Hebrew, later), Catalan because our Catalan neighbors gave me a good excuse in 2024; Ukrainian because fuck Putin. (Keep your armchair neurodivergent diagnoses to yourselves, please.) But German? I am determined to reach a C1 level sometime and am finding Lingoda classes to be well-suited to my learning style. I practice daily (I find myself writing more postcards in German than in English through Postcrossing) and am now running the Advanced German Conversation sessions for International House on Zoom. (I also delved into writing Chinese script so I could write addresses in Chinese on postcards, though it turns out I send most of my postcards to Germany, the Germans are avid postcard writers.) Languages keep my brain a) active; b) distracted from the cacophony of political turmoil. But mostly: it’s stimulating and incredibly fun to do this.
8 June 25
Journey Into Language Learning
Language study has become a major activity in our household. In common with many people, this is something we took up when the pandemic began early in 2020. Pica decided to rectify a lacuna in her prior language studies and began working her way through German in Duolingo. She has continued with her German studies to this day (she had a Lingoda lesson in German late this afternoon) but also had side excursions into several other languages. I followed in her path: soon after Pica started her German I decided to work my way through the Hebrew Duolingo tree. Having last studied Hebrew seriously as a child, I wanted to see what I retained and could pick up.
I completed the Hebrew tree in about two years, and settled upon Spanish as my subsequent Duolingo language. Previously, I had taken three quarters’ worth of Spanish at the local community college about 20 years ago. This is not the spot for a Duolingo rant, but I was quite glad I discovered the concept of comprehensible input before I got very far along in Spanish Duolingo, starting with the wonderful program Dreaming Spanish. (Dreaming Spanish has been a commercial success, and their team has just announced they will be launching Dreaming French very soon). Nowadays I try to get at least an hour of Spanish comprehensible input though Dreaming Spanish and other sources each day, and also do a bit of daily Duolingo, and participate in a weekly conversation group through Easy Spanish. Looking ahead, I’m also dabbling with Catalan right now, watching some of the comprehensible input videos mentioned here.