It's about time!

This last week here’s flown by between meeting all sorts of new people and going to class for 5 hours a day and, supposedly, studying for however long you’re supposed to study when taking this many classes during the summer. I didn’t quite expect coming here for linguistics training to feel so much like being back in school. I’ve had to readjust to living in the dorms and walking everywhere and carrying heavy books wherever I go and eating in the cafeteria. (Fortunately, the cafeteria here is much nicer than Eastern’s.) My classes have been altogether quite interesting. Here’s a quick overview.

Second language acquisition is altogether the easiest and the most fun. We sit in a lecture every morning that is there basically so we can have the super cool lab. Our professor just goes over the psychology of how to learn a language and steps that can be taken to do so. The lab is the fun part. The class is divided into groups of 4 (or sometimes more) and assigned a coach and a “language nurturer.” The language nurturer is someone who’s native language is not English. Our coach sets up a variety of objects and has the nurturer (my nurturer is named Pascal) point to them and tell us what they mean. After that, he repeats the names of the objects and we have to point the one he said. He also acts out verbs for us and when he repeats them, we have to act them out. Already after a week, Pascal is telling us in sentences to act out different things using the objects we know the names for and we can usually figure out what he’s saying. Our language is Kirundi which is from the country of Burundi in Africa. Neat, right?

Articulatory phonetics is probably my second favorite class. We get to learn how to make different sounds that make up language (including the tongue clicking everyone keeps asking about). So far we’ve been learning what words like bilabial, labiodentals, alveolar, and fricative mean, and the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant. It’s a funny class, too, because for homework we get to practice making all the funny noises which is pretty different from any other class I’ve taken.

Syntax and morphology is the study of the grammatical makeup of sentences. I like this class because it’s mostly made up of trying to figure out puzzles. We’re given a couple (or quite a few actually) sentences in another language and then given those sentences’ English gloss (translation) and told to find the stems and prepositions and pronouns and whatever else we can find. It’s pretty fun.

The last class is the one I still haven’t figured out if I like or not because a lot of it seems like psychology. It’s called Introduction to Sociolinguistics and is basically the study of the uses of different languages. I like it because it kind of addresses questions I’ve thought about before, but everything is pretty fuzzy. It’s like trying to explain to somebody how you know the sky is blue.

Well, that’s kind of a general overview of everything. There’s a ton of other stuff I want to talk about but I either have forgotten it for the moment or am too lazy to write more. So hopefully I’ll be blogging a little more later on.