Being with Language

Being with Language

We are on a mission here. Let us help protect the art of learning foreign languages from two contagious diseases. One of them is called “achieving” and the other “evaluating”. They usually team up against us, as a couple.

Most of the time we are trying to milk our languages. We choose or are made to choose the language that promises to be most useful for our career or our general “success” in life, meaning income, popularity etc. Once we have chosen a language that is hopeful in terms of generating income, we proceed to looking for the right method or the right habit or the right teacher who will ensure our learning has an outcome (which we think we need for our income). This outcome-income charade then lends itself perfectly to the part of us that is hooked on evaluating everything around us. Is our English good? Have we made a breakthrough into a higher level? Have we hit our “target language” right into the bull’s eye? (I am wondering – is a language still alive if so many people treat it as their prey and keep firing their arrows at it?)

Yes, language is communication, so for instance choosing communicative methods of learning or methods featuring meaningful context makes sense. But it is also true that when you are reading a textbook article or listening to the radio or even doing a mundane grammar exercise, then any one of these activities is communication, too, albeit a special kind. Nobody except yourself can stop you from diving into it wholeheartedly. Apart from being communication, a language is also a set of sounds that you can treat as a song or a picture if it is written down or a dance if we are talking about sign languages.

You can play the goal game if you wish and it may be a lot of fun sometimes, but it may also be relaxing to know that it is not the only option of how to approach languages in a meaningful way. Another possible ground for our language learning is simply enjoying every word we meet and every little idea conveyed in a language foreign to us. Every encounter with our (target) language can be perceived as a success, because just like nature or music, language is a miracle. As for career, being there and doing meaningful things sounds like a great career choice and if we really go for it, I bet it will never disappoint us.

Why Don't We Quit Procrastinating on Mindfulness?

Now is the time to come back to the now.

Now is the time to be in the now.

Now is the time to be the now.

Now is the time.

As Special as Everyone Else

(A prologue to a series of posts about Giftedness and Talent)

Are you gifted? Are you highly gifted in some domain? Perhaps exceptionally gifted? Are you talented? What do those words mean anyway?

If you have had anything to do with gifted education, you probably know that the mere definitions of giftedness and talent are a potentially endless source of exercises in thinking and debate. I do not want to spend here too much time on academic wordplay, but for the sake of clarity of the upcoming posts, I cannot completely evade definitions either.

In practical projects for gifted children, we have mostly been treating the two magic terms as synonyms. I have nothing against such casual usage. To be honest, I even think that an educator can afford not to distinguish between them, because it mostly does not matter. You just do your best to help the kids or adults who are right in front of you and you do not need to ponder whether a particular teenager is gifted or rather talented of neither or both as defined by the European Union or by somebody else. Such concept defining questions only matter when we are taking decisions on strategic level. For instance, when we are determining who can participate in a talent development programme.

This being said, you may have noticed that you are reading "a blog about the alchemy of turning our gifts into talents". For this blog, I have deliberately chosen to go by the model of Françoys Gagné. With some degree of simplification, we can say that Professor Gagné's approach uses the word giftedness for our innate qualities, while talent denotes something already developed. The distinction makes sense to me, because I want to underline the hard work factor, that complex process of unfolding our potential which we know can be both fascinating and difficult to facilitate.

Vladimir Dockal, a Czech giftedness expert, called his book "Everybody is Gifted". (A more literal translation of the title would be "Everybody has giftedness.") I would like to support such point of view. The line we draw between "(exceptionally) gifted children" and the rest will always be only arbitrary, never natural, whether it is based on classically perceived intelligence or on something else. Moreover, looking for a line to draw may be a completely unfortunate attitude. We are looking at how gifted somebody is in comparison with other people. As far as I can see, comparing oneself to some other self usually triggers envy or pride, not happiness. What seems much more valuable is to look at our gifts just as they are. From this simple perspective, we would have to be blind not to see that everybody around us has "been given" a potential to think, learn, change and grow. They just may not have discovered their gifts yet or maybe they need to learn to appreciate them enough. Unless you are a zombie or some non-human reading my post, you are certainly a very gifted learner of the art of breathing. You probably understand what's written in this paragraph or you wouldn't be reading it and I bet you can do some basic additions or read a graph in the newspaper. Those are all very useful capabilities and we could continue this way naming a plethora of other simple but beautiful gifts many of us have at our service. And yet we so often take them for granted and want to see something special, be it in our pupils or in our own children or even in ourselves. I do not want to preach. What I do want to do is to help inspire the world of gifted education to make the leap from the paradigm of "being special" into the paradigm of being "just as special as everyone else".

You may be wondering now whether we need something like "gifted education" at all. Do we need a special branch of education dealing with "gifted children"? Is gifted education justified? Those are big questions indeed and we are going to explore them in the next post of this series: "Why Gifted Education Is Both a Beast and a Beauty". Stay tuned.

When I'm Big

When I'm big

I am
a completely full vessel

a wellspring deeply rooted underground

Let all the surplus water flow freely

into mugs and jugs and mountain brooks

and waterfalls that wash off the dirt from tired faces

And you
are
big
bigger
bigger than big
the biggest of them all

Does that rhyme with small?

A Way to Recognise a Word Nerd

(A prologue to a series of posts about languages)

One of my very happy memories consists of strolling my sleeping baby through a beautiful park. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. OK, I'm pulling your leg. It was actually a very ordinary street with no birds, but the sun really may have been switched on that day. If it was, I wouldn't have noticed anyway, because at that moment I was too busy eating some delicious organic caramel waffles while at the same time (here comes the weirdo part) deciphering the tiny letters of the contents list on the package. I was looking at the similarities and the differences between the words for "cinnamon" and "wholegrain wheat flour" in all the romance languages I could find there. (Canela, canela, cannella, cannelle, harina de trigo integral etc.) If you ever catch yourself, your child or someone else doing this sort of thing with sparkles of excitement in their eyes, you can be sure you are dealing with a word nerd. The waffles do not necessarily have to be organic.

I know that most people are not so head over heels in love with language. But almost everyone has a hobby, a job or a cause they are passionate about. Maybe you are someone who is interested in ice-hockey or history or in advancing animal rights. You may like science or science-fiction or punk music or celebrity gossip magazines. You name it. Whatever is "your thing", it is highly probable that there are people out there talking, writing and maybe even making videos about it in English / Spanish / Polish / Chinese.

Here lies one of the secret weapons of how to learn a foreign language: Find ways to use the language you are learning for the same (or at least similar) purposes that you use your mother tongue or another language you are already comfortable with. Use it to read a story you would find endearing in any language. Use it to talk to a person whose company you would enjoy even if they were speaking in your mother tongue. Write about something that is meaningful for you. This sort of thing becomes easier as you are getting more and more advanced in your language, but I think that even for beginners, there are choices what and how to learn. For example, I often study lessons about food earlier than others, because they tend to be more tasty. Like with so many activities in our life, we often learn the most in the moment when we are not pushing ourselves to learn at all, at moments when things are just flowing.

I wish you a lot of flow in your language learning and elsewhere.

The 90-Day Language Challenge. Are you game?

I have just joined the 90-Day Challenge at the LingQ language learning web page. It means that I have committed to learning a foreign language (in my case Swedish) every day for 90 days in a row. I'm trying to spread the word about it, because I think this approach to language learning (i.e. learning often) really works for many different people. It certainly did work for me last year when I decided to resurrect my long lost Spanish. If you want to make a breakthrough to a higher level in a foreign language, you do not necessarily need to study for hours per day, but you need to somehow meet your language often, if not every day, then almost every day for at least a couple of months. This sort of intensity seems to be especially important when beginning with a new language, because you are still developing your language core (a term from Italian multipolyglot Luca Lampariello).

I think this simple strategy of frequent exposure to a language may actually be the biggest open secret of successful language learning. That's why I would like to challenge you (some of my friends and language students and anyone else interested) to a learning streak of at least 90 days. If you do not like LingQ for any reason, you can still join me in the challenge mentally by doing another method for 90 days or just with your own freestyle language learning. (It's true that to actually meet your "weekly targets" in the LingQ challenge, you have to be a paying member. But they also offer tons of learning material for free in about 20 languages.)

At LingQ, we're starting on Wed 15th Jan 2014. Has this date already passed? Then make it your 85- or 72-Day Challenge. Or start your own 90-Day Challenge on the day of your choice. Just do it. I have heard somewhere that public commitments are generally harder to break and it sounds logical, doesn't it? It's supposed to be one of the tricks how to create a habit and keep it.

So, are you game? If not, no need to look for excuses ;-) It's your life and your priorities. Otherwise, my knowhow is at your service. I am a talking encyclopedia of language learning Android apps, websites, youtube channels, software, audio courses etc. (Just kidding, there are certainly many more than what I have used. But I have tried many.) 

I wish you a lot of strength for any new habits you are creating or any challenges that you want to rise up to.

About this blog

The purpose of this blog is very simple: To inspire you and me to thrive and to share.

I would like to write about three distinct, only sometimes overlapping areas:

Language Learning

I am a freelance teacher / skype tutor of English and my mother tongue Czech (as foreign languages). My vision for teaching is to be someone who teaches how to fish for words and the meaning behind them, rather than just someone who gives out packaged grammar explanations and word lists. (I do like the term "language coach" a lot.) I am also an enthusiastic language learner myself, juggling five foreign languages at different levels. Right now, as I am starting this blog, my head is a pressure cooker bursting with ideas and practical tips about language learning from various sources, so you can expect some posts about languages soon.

Gifted Education

I have been lucky to have had the chance to work for a unique extra-curricular programme for children gifted in/interested in science and mathematics and I also did some qualitative research in full-time special classes for young gifted children for my thesis. In this series of posts, I would like to discuss what seems to work in gifted education, not just for the child, but also for the whole society. Hopefully, I will also find some time to share (especially with educators and researchers from other countries) some of our Czech and Slovak findings about giftedness and education as well as insights from both Czech and foreign books, articles etc. Because of what I do for a living, I am particularly curious about linguistically talented children, teens and adults, those who are particularly skilled with language and usually also "hooked on language(s)". Which educational circumstances help them thrive and inspire them to develop their talent as well other skills in meaningful ways?

Meaningful Life

What sort of posts will come under this tag? You will see :-) Actually, it may surpise me, too. The articles can be about many different aspects of live, but the bottom line of most of them will be a partial answer or a new partial question to the big questions of this blog: What are the secrets of turning the seeds of our gifts into blooming talents? How do we do that? What enables people to thrive, to develop their potential and be happy? And above all, how and why some people share the fruit of their happiness and their talents with others?

I know each of these areas is interesting for a different kind of readers and I have never been good at writing and publishing at a consistent frequency, so if you like an article here, thank you for your patience and for staying tuned.

I wish you all that you can develop your best potential.

Yours,

Iva