English varieties and how to survive them

One of the problems learners are faced with is the astonishing variety of dialectal phonological variations in English, in Britain, in America and elsewhere. Not to mention those produced by non-native speakers.

There are several factors involved in this perception. Let's say that learners (I will concentrate on spanish speakers) come from a perceived linguistic environment:

1) Castilian Spanish is standardized and understood clearly by all speakers of the language.

2) Even the most extreme varieties of peninsular Spanish can be understood by any speaker in Spain (all right, maybe some people are really difficult to understand, but it is negligible).

3) Very often the difficulty in understanding is a matter of vocabulary choice, rather than phonology. This happens sometimes also with South American immigrants living in Spain.

Spanish speakers enjoy a number of historical advantages that have created that status quo. First of all a very early castilian Spanish grammar. In fact, it was published on the very year that Christopher Columbus discovered America. That means that from the start there was "one grammar to rule them all" and behind that grammar, a linguistic self consciousness sparked, no doubt, by the unifying drive Kings Isabel and Fernando represented.

Meanwhile in Britain, English had been for quite a while the language of the illiterate and poor until Chaucer and his generation came along. What he did for the English language in the 14th century - solidifying and giving prestige to English - was done in Spain way before, when the monks started to write in Spanish on the margins of their latin books and then started writing directly in Spanish - all of this  way before Chaucer.

While Britain had to deal with the great vowel shift in between 1350 and 1700 (roughly) which overturned a phonetic system that made more sense than the current one and which was more similar to both Latin and Spanish, the spanish system was stabilized by the political and cultural efforts of the Spanish kings. There was already a clear standard to aspire to. While Spanish was a rising soufleé, the british soufleé had been taken out of the oven at a critical point.

In addition to all of this Spanish was given a Language Academy which has managed Spanish in all senses since its foundation. English still has to have one, and efforts to create one have met with either lack of interest, suspicion or worse - lack of money.

So all this brought about a language with only five perceived vowel sounds, which are clearly reflected by spelling. There are very few spelling problems with consonants compared to English. Spaniards have it comparatively easy to learn to write if we look at anglosaxons or other cultures. There are very few voiced consonants and those that exist don't have their unvoiced counterparts, except for plosives. 

All very unlike English. English is rather uncontrolled, freestyle. Of course there are standards, but they are rather like a reference point around which speakers revolve and to which they feel attracted - or repelled by it!

If we look at North America we find this: (source: http://aschmann.net/AmEng/)

This looks scary enough to repel many people from even trying to learn any language, let alone English. For Great Britain you would find an equivalent map. How do native speakers even manage? Good news is this happens in most languages. However the problem learners face is double: empirical difficulty (producing new additional sounds, different stress patterns...) and the perceived problems (lack of systematic pronunciation that makes communication extremely difficult.

The role of the teacher/coach in this case has several parts. first of all to convey to the learner what they know about how things are pronounced. But also to explain how things fit and somehow how they fit together. It sounds like a lot of work because it is. But learners don't need to understand an American from California or a Brit from Manchester. They need to be able to understand them and our responsibility is to pass on to them what allows us to do that. When we realize and manage to transmit that kind of mental Rosetta stone we have somewhere in our brains, that is when our learners will be equipped with the tools necessary to understand many accents and dialects and not the one they are familiar with.

Some comic relief to finish this post. When I was at College, on our first year, we had both Spanish and English pronunciation. We knew nothing about phonetics so it was very steep for everyone. We worked hard. However, on the day of the exam our teacher for the British pronunciation half of the course was ill, so his wife came to fill in (they both have wonderful RP accents, but hers is even better). We couldn't understand her! The exam was a disaster and we were butchered and sent massively to the September exam (my grade was 2.5 out of 10). By September, it didn't matter if it were her, him or a cousin from Liverpool. I got it! I had that something (9 points out of 10!). I was in!

So it can be done.

Nicky Minaj's lyric videos

One of the useful things about the internet is that you can find almost anything and that also applies to sources of information and learning materials, whatever your needs might be. If your needs are learning about your favourite artist's lyrics, no matter how bizarre they are, you can find that out too!

The first source of information is obviously the artists themselves: lyrics still come with the CD, don't they? But if you like an artist and you don't have the CD... there is still hope for you!

One of the trends for artists to promote themselves has been to create lyric videos: it is cheaper and you help your fans or potential fans learn your lyrics which may bring them to attend your concerts. Let's face it, concerts bring the money today, not selling records.

Anyway, in order for a lyric video to be successful you need to mix two ingredients: appealing lyrics and good visuals.

Some artists like Katy Perry have taken this seriously. Others have great material... but they did not do it themselves! It was the fans instead. This is the case for Nicky Minaj's song starships. A fan made this video, which I think is visually great. Judge for yourselves!

Now this is real fun, isn't it? It also helps you teach some stuff:

1) Lyrics are well timed with the sound so you can use them to work on stuff like vowel length or even intonation.
2) If your students often whine about not learning "real English" and fancy themselves streetwise, this is something you can retaliate with.

Now about the lyrics themselves, as you may have noticed there is a couple of problems: first, non-standard spelling (you can also use that to teach pronunciation as well as to emphasize how there is a place for bad spelling but out of it you should use the correct one!). Besides, you can challenge your students to find out where the video-maker went wrong with the lyrics: at some point in the lyrics he writes nigga, where Ms Minaj says "my name is Onika, but you can call me Nicky". A great example to work on the difference between /k/ and /g/.

Additionally you can use the contents you will find on Rapgenius:

Rapgenius.com Nicky Minaj's "Starships"

This is an interesting source for both teachers and students: it is a kind of wikipedia for lyrics. There is a lot of debate between comments and that is a great excuse for discussion in class.

Now, sit back and enjoy!

Alternative sources of learning or where to look at when the ordinary way is not the answer...

From time to time a thought keeps popping up... how would I have learnt and expanded my English, had I had the resources that I have now. When I was in College, my resources were basically books, the hardcopy variety. I spent more money than I could afford on them. And where my money and bookstores would not help me I completed my diet with books which I borrowed from the library, which I wolfed down either on the spot or home.

Back to the present, one of the things that anger me - yes, outright anger - is how, having the resources which are now available to them, young people in Spain continue to make slow progress (on average) with languages. Progress is progress, however slow. But languages is just one of the most important and most badly needed skills companies need to do business abroad. The spanish markets are dead and buried, paralyzed by the crisis and LatAm is limited.

But my purpose here is to reflect on what is available to young and old nowadays. Not only has the quality of teaching improved, but the books, in their most traditional sense have also improved dramatically. But there is more. The internet has driven learning of any kind into overdrive and people in any country in the world have access to huge amounts of learning material provided that they have an internet connection.

Back when I was in college, it was really difficult to find books about things like pronunciation, dialects or slang. And in order to find out the lyrics for a song you had to buy the CD!

I am going to tell you about two websites that I wish I had been able to use back then.

The first one is:  http://www.urbandictionary.com/ I discovered it over twitter and it never ceases to surprise me. It is sort of a wikipedia of slang where people contribute. It is a bit chaotic and you sometimes have to sniff your way through a lot o rubbish and nonsense. Despite these shortcomings, it is so useful a tool that even the authorities like the police are using it to solve crimes:

http://gawker.com/5836484/police-now-consulting-urban-dictionary-to-get-inside-heads-of-perps-who-want-to-murk-them

It is also interesting that through their twitter account they have, just like any other big dictionaries online a "word of the day", so even in small doses, you can learn slang almost without effort.

The other website I wanted to comment about works in a similar way, as a collaboration tool. It is called rapgenius: rapgenius.com. I discovered it when googling to figure out what some stuff in Nicky Minaj's song "Starships" meant.

Here's a screenshot to give you an idea:

This is very useful. In fact if anybody knows of anything like this other than for rap and hip-hop, I would love to hear about it! Most people like music and it is one of the big motivators for learning English. Singing along to your favourite singers, understanding what they mean gives you a great feeling of reward. And this is an incredible tool in that sense. It is moderated like urbandictionary, but still some noise gets through. Again, despite its shortcomings, I highly recommend it.

APP OF THE DAY: THE PHRASAL VERBS MACHINE (CAMBRIDGE)

I am always on the lookout for new apps to help me in the classroom, and my digital savvy students outside it. One of the most original I have come up with is the Phrasal Verb Machine from Cambridge University Press. I just checked and it is available for android (I use OSX and IOS) and can be used on both the Iphone and the Ipad. If you want to go to it directly, you may click here:

http://www.cambridgeapps.org/vocabulary.html

Or go to the corresponding app shop (apple or android)

What's so good about this app? It is specific about phrasal verbs and it also refreshing in its appearance. It makes me think of the aesthetics in the latest blockbuster film version of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It also makes me think of the kind of cartoonish drawings I could find in my school books as a kid. 

Here are some screenshots to give you an idea:

You seldom see such original graphics in an app of this kind. It is refreshing. But it doesn't stop at the gates. As you go on, it is consistent throughout. But what about the content? It is very straightforward: you have a number of options:

You can go to the phrasal verbs view, where you can become familiarized with them thanks to "The incredible Phraso".

You can go to the help section, where you will learn what you need about this unusual hybrid of Victorian machinery and twenty-first century technology. If only H.G. Wells could see it!

Do you feel up to the challenge? Go for it in the exercise section. But beware! You are only given a certain number of chances for mistakes! However if you do it well, you can post it to Twitter or Facebook!

All in all I think this app is a success in many aspects: it is original, it is entertaining and funny while it is certainly educational. The big but for me (I know this is a very personal opinion) is that the approach it follows doesn't make sense of phrasal verbs at large (see my post about phrasal verbs). However, if only because of my experience in learning german vocabulary with visual elements, I think this might be useful, at least to those learners who, like me, are of the visual kind. Probably it will be very useful with  children and teenagers (it brings to mind the kind of Nintendo game like "Doctor Layton".

The problem with Spanish learners is...

Spanish learners have a list of problems but they can be widely categorized in two groups: language based and psychological. Speakers with other mother tongues have some of these problems but this is what happens to Spanish native speakers.

When you learn anything you ask yourself questions about what you are doing, unless it is something simple. I will point out today some of the stuff with which I coach my clients to help them along the learning process.

Both aspects are combined and cannot be separated. People get blocked in their learning process because of psychological hurdles triggered by specific linguistic aspects. This applies to pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and everything else.

The first thing that a learner needs to internalize is that they are going to learn to use a different way of doing the same things. Since many people in Spain live in flats I use my flat metaphor: imagine that you live in a flat (the Spanish language) and your neighbour lives in his flat (The English language). One day he invites you over and surprise: most of the walls are in different places. You wonder: how can they live with this floor plan?

People don't speak English, they live using it. That means that you are learning not to say things but to say things differently. Their way. And for them it works the same as your system (insert language of choice) works for you.

So that was the first hurdle: things are different and that is OK. Other alternative worlds are possible. A second hurdle, not specific for spanish learners is stage fright. Years of experience, on both sides of the trench, have told me that the biggest problem is not fear of poor performance, but peer review. I don't know about children today in schools, but in the traditional education system in Spain, listening and not speaking - keeping a low profile - was more often than not a formula for success. Or at least for survival. Volunteering to do things in class was suspicious and doing things well all the time was high treason. And producing strange sounds in a foreign language could bring you to the category of laughing stock.

Not very long ago(five years or so) I had a student come to me in an intensive course. He was getting ready for NATO STANAG English levels (so a military course) and at the end of the course he had a test. That would qualify him in the vicinity of B1 of the European common framework.

But he had a problem. He confided to me that he had never spoken a word of English. And in less than four weeks he had to pass a test that included writing, reading, listening and speaking skills.

Lack of practice has never made masters. Many spaniards do not practice their English. Not because they do not have the chance. They do not dare. And he did not dare. He had been learning English - rather studying it. he was not bad at any other skills. But speaking... he had never even tried. The worst part is he had been able to get that far without it.

Language issues depend mainly on the differences in "floor plan" that I mentioned in passing before. There are substantial differences (obvious!) but learners are not aware of where the differences lay (not so obvious). You don't need to be a linguist to know some of these things:

The sound system of both languages is very different. Yes, but how is it different. Most learners have no clue what is really happening when they try to pronounce English and fail to sound native-like.  There are several factors: vowels, intonation and priority/emphasis settings among others. English has twelve vowel sounds, whereas Spanish has five. In addition to this, vowel sounds in Spanish are linked to how they are written. As if this were not enough, English has short and long vowels and they establish lexical differences. Finally, not only are similar vowels in both languages pronounced slightly differently, but there is a central, vital vowel sound in English, called "schwa" in phonetics, which according to studies, amounts to roughly 45% of vowel sounds pronounced in any variety of English. This sound does not exist in Spanish and it overlaps with the areas of the mouth for all five vowels in Spanish.

Consonants are an additional problem. Whereas all vowel sounds involve vibration, consonants can be pronounced with or without it. For example the difference between /p/ and /b/ which exists in both languages. However, many of the existing "vibrating" consonants in English (technical term "voiced") just don't exist in Spanish. Other than plosive sounds like /p/ and /b/ and the affricates, there aren't any consonant couples, which means that Spanish speakers don't have any contrast elements to be aware of such differences. That's why it is so difficult for them to achieve those important nuances.

Intonation is also different: at word level the intonation in each word is fixed by different systems, but at sentence level English uses intonation much more - and uses it much more efficiently - to achieve emphasis and to process old and new information. Vowel length and specially systematic vowel reduction (using schwa or even syllabic consonants) is alien to Spanish. Not knowing this impairs listening skills and speaking quality. Intonation contrasts add relief and heavily contribute to emphasis.

Emphasis in English is achieved mostly by two means: intonation (see above) and sentence structure. Most Spanish learners are unaware of two facts: sentence order is quite fixed in English (not as much as in other languages like German). In comparison Spanish is anarchic. Every system has its advantages, but getting used to a rigid order and the reasons for it is a cultural shock: from "almost everything goes" to "everything has a place and a reason to be there". Inversion for questions, re-inversion for questions in reported speech, adjective placement or the existence of a default order for some verb complements are puzzles that may well make the learner give up if left unsolved.

Spanish learners are ironically famous for being strong on grammar, but they have been, so far, in an almost medieval way. Many of those who have succeeded have done so by trial and error and without knowing very well why. Grammar is a backbone that has to be there, but should not be seen. And learners need to understand what they are doing. Not until they stop feeling confused, helpless and puzzled, will they really make progress. But so far, for many, it is a matter of arcane and mysterious things.

A relaxing cup of café con leche

Besides the obvious reaction to losing the 2020 Olympics and not even making it to the "silver medal", here in Spain and specially in Madrid, attention has been drawn to how far the choice was affected by the English proficiency of the city Mayor, Mrs Ana Botella.

I must admit I expected the president of the Autonomous community to have been equally embarrasing, but since nobody seemed to say anything bad about him, I doubled checked by looking at videos online showing the public television broadcast of the event and my impression is he spoke fluently and correctly.

Then there was the symptom of the voice-over. The video I found had a voice-over from the public television broadcast which made it very difficult to follow the "original soundtrack". And this got me thinking about the overall attitude of Spain as a country towards foreign languages - even to more than one national language.

If Mrs Ana Botella is our Frankenstein monster, it is a Frankenstein we all created. And there are millions like her.

First, a little bit of historical perspective. People would go and put all the blame on Franco, but again Franco is a product of centuries of evolution - or lack thereof - in Spanish mentality. In a nutshell, given our historical links, allegiances and conflicts, spaniards had reasons (valid or not) to distrust anything coming from the British Isles. Besides, we had the experience of being invaded by Napoleon's army and at that time the concept was fixed: don't trust them if they speak the language of the enemy. They must be the enemy. And if you want to be trusted don't learnt it.

This concept, which had been brewing for a long time, brought about the approach to foreign - and internal languages - other than Castilian Spanish, during Franco's dictatorship. A smugness extended itself, and a phrase was coined "let them learn Spanish. Anything but French, because it was admitted that French had class. It was the language of diplomacy...

And although the country was internationally isolated, you had to speak something other than Spanish, right? And French was sort of easy...

So, a whole cohort of Spanish people learnt some French at school. Most never used it and let it get rusty. In the meantime, the world changed and the US was the dominant power (other than the USSR which Franco abhorred: learning Russian was the worst thing you could do). Eventually Spain had to open itself up to tourism and this meant funny people who spoke an assortment of foreign languages.

But still the "let them learn Spanish" was the general attitude. Those who learnt some English or other languages, were generally happy to "get by", which is a very flexible concept. This concept has transformed nowadays in Spain into the equally elastic "intermediate English".

Certainly there was an landslide of american and foreign material on television in Spain which had started in cinemas before Franco's time. But there were tools to avoid that "contamination". In the first place, censorship often altered or even denied access to some materials. Then there was dubbing films, which is the usual practice to this day. This was vital in the malnourishment of multilingual skills in Spain.

An aside: there are four possible approaches to foreign content: dubbing, which assimilates the content completely to the country's culture and language; voice-over, which reduces the original soundtrack to background noise; subtitling, which is a somewhat cumbersome compromise between bilinguals who want to hear the original and those who can't speak the language and finally just watching/listening in the original version.

(Also, you can watch things with subtitles in the original language and learn a lot!)

In Spain dubbing was promoted to the extent that it became an industry and its specialists made it into an art. There are many excellent dubbing jobs both in film and television in Spain, just to name one "The fresh prince of Bel Air". The downside of this was that people continued to avoid what has become now an urgent need: becoming bilingual. Will Smith spoke such good Spanish!

As a language consultant I have to deal with the results of this wreckage every day. Not until the crisis struck did companies - and their employees at an individual level - realize how urgent their need was. The spanish market evaporated overnight, LatAm is limited. They look for other markets. Oh surprise, suddenly I need more than just the "get by" attitude. No English, no business.

And in this sort of "they don't know what hit them" eerie state, we can include Ana Botella. With all this background she can't be blamed completely for her non-existent English. However, it wouldn't have hurt if she had gone to class hand in hand with her husband, once he became ex-Prime Minister.

He was the laughing stock when his efforts to learn English and put it to use were publicly known. As a professional in the field I must praise his guts. His starting point was the same as his wife's but he decided to solve the problem. And that's a decision that many people and many companies still have to take in Spain.

Back to the Ana Botella controversy, her advisor, Mr Terrence Burns, is an expert advisor and consultant and has succesfully helped several other cities in becoming Olympic. I don't know much about what was going on in the background, but from the outside it seems that Mr Burns has never seen himself in such dire straits.

Let me explain. Mr Burns had to do many things, including coaching Ana Botella for the promotion of Madrid 2020. An obvious bonus would be, someone thought, if she defended it with a speech in English. What a great idea! As a marketing strategy it is a logical move.

Not really. Because it backfired.

People who learn things phonetically are typically people with a musical training which I expect Ana Botella does not have. A famous case in this sense was Pavarotti. He had that skills, to the point that he couldn't read music scores but could sing incredibly well in languages he did not speak.

One thing which I do with my clients is explain them where the problems lay and how things work. Obviously in order to do that, you need an insight into the topic. That's where, in my opinion, the training of Mrs Botella should have been handed to a language expert. I have no doubt about other skills that Mr. Burns may possess, but the language hurdle was one which he was not ready to address.

Yet another aside: my opinion is that Mrs. Botella's english proficiency did not play a significant role in not getting the olympics for Madrid. It was just a very public and very notorious embarrasment.

Alternatives to what happened in Buenos Aires: she could have spoken in Spanish (after all it is not a tiny, irrelevant language that a bunch of people speak on a small island somewhere) or even better, she could have introduced briefly someone who could do it better, like some spanish athlete or maybe the councillor for sports (if there is one and if he can speak English).

It is a national sport to laugh at people in disgrace. Mrs Botella made it crystal clear that she completely lacked a skill that is vital if you are the mayor of a world-class capital that aspires to hosting the olympics. But she is the tip of the iceberg. The employees and executives of many companies in Spain are in similar situations and their business opportunities are seriously compromised by their deficiencies or their lack of english skills. Many unemployed people in this country would have a job abroad if only they spoke decently other languages besides Spanish.

Solutions to this? that is a topic for a different post. This is long enough!