I was listening to TAMIL radio on iTunes, Sunday. The music was quite different from what I am accustomed to, with a great deal having an Indian flavour; however it was the advertisements that caught my attention.
In one ad the father asked his kids where they wanted to go for dinner. The older daughter who sounded like a junior or high school student reminded her dad of a place at which the had recently dined while the younger daughter, probably a pre-schooler or maybe a first grader mentioned the name of the restaurant.
Now this would be entirely unremarkable to me had it not been for one thing: accents. The father had a strong Indian accent while the youngest daughter also sported a hybrid blend of Indian music in her speech. The elder sister spoke in perfectly accent-less English and could probably be taken for a teeneger from the USA her English was so smooth and "accent-free".
It made perfect sense to me that both daughters English would be most heavily influenced by their primary surroundings. That's the way it works. So while the older daughter was being influenced by her peers, the teachers and the school system, the younger sister would still carry the accents of her parents as they would be the people she most directly interacted with at that stage in her life.
And I thought: how international! How brilliant!
When I met Mayu she spoke with an American English accent. After dating for afew years her accent started to emulated mine and her English became more Canadian in sound. Even her homestay family commented on how it had changed just a few years after being with me.
Language can be so difficult to teach to adults, but I think that if we can find a way to employ the methods that children use for learning, the chances of success should increase. It is that method of English learning that has me focusing on a new way to teach my coworkers English. And it's actually providing very quick results to the point that I am duly imprssed!
Live, Love, Learn.
Our greatest goals in life!
I love you!
Cam
modeling behaviours (notice i tend toward the french spelling there-a holdover from french class in high school)...humans need to make associations between objects,and words are a very handy tool to communicate those associations...any language is learnable when you're dealing with the nuts and bolts of doing...
ReplyDeletemy daughter(in high school now) has caught herself Dreaming in spanish-she has become proficient
the use of the tool the word describes (and therefore making it's association active) make the word 'stick' alot faster
ReplyDeletehttp://sc10.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=comm123
ReplyDeletecurrent browsing...reminded me of this thread
Thanks, Shane. How's that garden coming along? Have you got it all shut down for winter? And what do you do once winter rolls in there? Do you have several months worth of stuff stockpiled in the pantry?
ReplyDeletemy wife susan has the pictures on her blog(sweet potato as long as a forearm and a bit larger in diameter,an icicle radish as big as a potato)
ReplyDeletewe have a freezer full of corn,cooked and puree 'd butternut squash,and several pounds of peppers of various sorts,and a five gallon jar of pickled jalapeno peppers.the brussel sprouts,broccoli,and califlower will overwinter(and keep producing whenever it's above freezing)about a dozen plants of red hot chillis and cayenne peppers,and two basil plants as high as my waist, dry in the greenhouse.....
were going to see how the rest of the herb plants(oregano,thyme,rosemary,etc )overwinter...
we experemented this year-we cut the pepper plants back to about a 4 inch stalk and put about 3 inches of shredded leaf mulch around them-we'll see if they come back next year
still raking leaves off the yard and burning them in the garden to reduce the weed seeds-would like to get a 3 inch layer of shredded leaf mulch over the whole thing,but dad's shredder bag mower(commercial size) is having problems this year,although it held out long enough to mulch around most of the fruit trees.moles ate about a third of our sweet potato before we dug them up.
ReplyDeletei need to regrade some of the soil,it's been flowing downhill a bit.
i could spend another week or so at it if i get time
the local grocery is just a few miles down the road too,we just enjoy growing our own stuff.we could live off this land if we needed to,but i'm not particularly fond of hunting
ReplyDeletewe planted 17 nut trees this fall and.......i could go on,but i'd better quit now
ReplyDeleteHow far from the nearest big city do you live? What city would that be? How often do you go in if you go at all? And... you guys should make a reality TV show!
ReplyDeletebtw...got any ideas on this one?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scientistswithoutborders.org/m/answers/ILP/Maternal_Health_and_Nutrition
ReplyDeletegot any ideas on that one?
(searching for folic acid supplementation for the third world)
ReplyDeletewe're 45 min from columbus (capitol of ohio) 25 min from newark/heath (nearest walmart,and chain stores)...15 min to the nearest krogers(big grocery chain)
susan works in newark as a nurse-so she's there 4 or 5 times a week.
my daughter lives in the greater columbus area,and we get there occasionally to visit(and catch Shakespeare in the park etc...)
And...i don't own a tv,and wouldn't do a 'reality tv' show for a million bucks ICK,yuck *shudders* no thanks
deleted the other comment because the wrong link posted....
ReplyDeleteJoin the "No TV Club"!
ReplyDeletetv is to f'n slow *grins* what about the link?
ReplyDeleteDoing all this on my cellphone. Will check the link when Im back on a computer in a couple days, OK?
ReplyDeletek
ReplyDeleteI looked at the website, and see the problem. But I am unable to offer any suggestions, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteinnocentive has stuff like that up all the time,they usually have a few hundred going at any given point.
ReplyDeletewas just recalling your work in the nutrition field and thought i would forward
Thanks. I have an excellent article that just came to my desk today, that you might find interesting:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21Epilepsy-t.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general
reading now,susan read page one also.
ReplyDeletechecking your blog next
ReplyDeletewe both read all of it....man! how we are ever going to cross link all this information so it never gets lost again....reason # 45 i was working on A I concepts.....
ReplyDeleteIt's going to be a tough thing to do. This knowledge comes and goes, a small amount of people learn about it, it gets buried... and then Big Pharma sweeps in, and pushes out everything not related to their profits. It's what we are up against regarding health and living naturally.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading it.
i Will agree with you about big pharma and the money trail....fund wiki...disputed work may be published...along with peer reviews or lack thereof noted..along with documented request for peer review and refusal response...keep the timestamps/envelopes postmarked for the courts and the press or kiss it goodbye
ReplyDeleteand you've got to get a study funded,documented,and reviewed in any nation to start with...etc...etc..
ReplyDeleteit's science-you have to Prove it,even though others get in your way...and you have to be ready to be proven wrong.
I agree. Regarding Brian and his stuff, he independently funds his research so there are no conflicts of interest, and nobody is paying him to find certain results (which is most often the case, unfortunately). Brian keeps forging forward proving over and over again that everything he talks about is right, based on the science proven by Nobel researchers and more over the past hundred plus years. Most scientists are not ready to be proven wrong, and so they hold onto their pet theories even when the science disproves it (as happens in this field of nutrition).
ReplyDeleteOne of the fundamentals of researchers is that "it takes an infinite amount of results to be absolutely right, but only one result to be proven wrong". You have to accept that. You as in the researcher.
It is one of the reasons why I have such respect for Brian; he is not making this stuff up. He has been tying it all togethe for us, and basing everything upon science, biochemistry, physiology and such.
Now if only more medical researchers would start focusing on the same thing Brian is pointing out, we would make leaps and bounds in so many illness preventions that it isn't funny.
and on that i will agree...given that the clarity of experiment is beyond the capacity of most independent researchers budgets...then correlation is the best that can be hoped for...cause and effect is much more rigorous to prove
ReplyDeletebut i have also always said...that we don't have a few thousand years of diet recommendations in the old texts for nothing-but we do have to figure out which ones are valid for whom and why....why don't you ask bill and melinda to set something up to test this sort of thing?
ReplyDelete