Weekly Links! Welcome-to-Advent Edition

SOME INTERESTING LINKS FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON, SET OUT IN MY USUAL CATEGORIES OF FAITH, FAMILY, AND FICTION.

Faith 

-"The Advent Project": Biola is hosting The Advent Project again. Every day during Advent (and also, I think, every day of Christmas), they'll be posting a seasonal devotion with scripture, written meditation, art, and music. Recommended!

-My Advent Pinterest page: As I said on Twitter, this is really a "baby" Pinterest board, in that I have fewer than twenty pins so far. But it's growing, and the stuff that's already there is pretty good! Take a look, and let me know if you know of any pins I should add.


-"How to Deal with Erratic Corpulent Ginger Authoritarian Much-Married Rulers: Options for Christians in Public Life": This is very clever.


-"The Virtue of Tolerance"


-"The Bravery of Glennon Doyle Melton"-a snippet:

No amount of embracing the self will cure the ills of the soul. No Amount. There is nothing you can do to love yourself enough to rescue your soul from death. You can’t. 

-"The Church's Outsourcing of Women's Discipleship"


-"The Great War's damage to the English soul and the church": I've never read this perspective before. It was interesting.

Family 

-"Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It."


-"Advent Reading": a fantastic list of books to read to children this Advent.

Fiction 

-"How Realistic is the Way Amy Adams' Character Hacks the Alien Language in Arrival? We Asked a Linguist."

-"Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, with Horrifying Book Curses": Relevant to the interests of all devoted readers.


Have a lovely Sunday evening!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekly Links: Language, Nerds, History, and more!

My weekly round-up of interesting reading from around the web:

-When my babies were still actually babies, I remember noticing that "ma" meant "mama", "milk", and "more", and that all of those things were pretty much the same thing in their little minds . . . if you've noticed the same thing, you'll probably enjoy this article: "Why the Words for 'Mom' and 'Dad' Sound So Similar in So Many Languages".

-I've heard people talk about "pastor theologians" a lot recently; here's the flip-side: "Pastoral Theologians".

-"We Have Met the Nerds, and They Are Us: Fandom, Fanfic, and the Landscape of Desire". This article goes from cultural phenomena to a Christian insight. I appreciated that, but I think my favorite part was this very clear description of the current zeitgeist:

In the West, and in America especially, we have grown up into a system that prizes desire above all. We all, nerd and non-nerd alike, live in our separate landscapes of desire. And we all have stories to tell, stories of scars and damage. It’s a hallmark of the contemporary West that we all feel like victims, we all feel broken. And we arebroken, but we also want what we want, and who the hell are you to tell me I’m wrong?

-Author Brandon Sanderson is in the middle of a very ambitious writing project - one that spans most of his published work - and I enjoyed reading his thoughts about what he's doing here: "Shadows of Self and the Mistborn Mega-Series".

-Finally, this is a great article that knocks down some old fables about a misunderstood period of history: "How the Middle Ages Really Were".

"The Sticky Little Ball . . . and 9 more tips for successfully learning a language (almost) all on your own"

Hi folks! Today I'm delighted to have a guest post from a globe-trotting friend who's written a little book I thought y'all might be interested in. He wants to keep his identity for a surprise at the end, so I won't introduce him here, but instead just say: read on! This is good stuff. :)  -Jessica

When it comes to things you and your kids can do to sharpen your minds, open new worlds, pimp your resumes, make travel more fun, be hilarious when you least want to be, and meet a whole new set of friends, hardly anything beats learning another language.

However, let’s face it: for most people, learning another language isn’t the exhilarating adventure it’s cracked up to be. What most people learn from trying to learn another language is that they can’t learn another language, which isn’t exactly the objective. I hate that about language classes and courses.

“I can’t learn another language,” you say.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“Because I tried it and I couldn’t do it,” you say.

“AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH,” I mutter at the top of my muttery voice.

The thing is, most language learning courses promise too much too soon, so when you fail to meet your heady expectations, you decide you can’t do it. Think diets that promise you’ll lose 10 pounds a week for a year until you are nothing but a shadow with a big smile. Or exercise equipment that promises you a bronze 6-pack in three weeks if only you will do this one little thing. Those are marketing lies, but they manage to create expectations that make you feel like an abject failure when you can’t meet them. I will resist yelling ‘aarrgghh’ again.

I’ve learned several languages fluently. I’ve taught other people to learn languages fluently. My wife Tammy learned to speak Spanish on her own so well that she became a nationally certified healthcare interpreter for the hospital where she worked, without ever taking a class. I’ve worked with many people who are learning other languages, and many who have taken my classes in English and Spanish.

The thing is, the spirit is willing but the tactics are weak. Most language learning happens outside a classroom, but no one thinks to tell you what kinds of things are most helpful when you have snatches of time to work on it during your day.

So I wrote a Kindle book just for you: “The Sticky LittleBall …and 9 more tips for how to learn a language (almost) all on your own.” It’s a short, easy read, but the tips I give you pack a punch and will escort you all the way from beginner to advanced.

Whether you want to learn a language or you want to inspire your kids to do it, The Sticky Little Ball is a resource you can revisit often. It walks you through motivation, planning, listening, reading, packing a sticky little ball, rewarding yourself, interacting and more. It shows you how hot fudge sundaes and temporary tattoos are an integral part of language learning. It offers you a way to see the Scriptures in a whole new light through bilingual Bible reading.

Most of all, I hope it inspires you to sally forth again, eager to discover new worlds one palabra at a time. Bon voyage, y vaya con Dios.

Ron Snell lives and works in Costa Rica, where he teaches English to Costa Ricans, teaches Spanish to gringos, and guides real estate clients to properties that are beautiful in any language. Currently one of his great blessings is that he’s Jessica Snell’s father-in-law. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?


This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

links

This is a good reminder for any parent with a child young enough to sit in a carseat.

This article is about how the language you speak shapes the way you think. (Hat tip Semicolon.)

Two very helpful posts from Nathan Bransford: one on how to write a novel and one on how to revise one.

Love this post from Anne Kennedy, which includes the awesome declaration:

And so, in a fit of brilliance, the idea that we should Not Ever Ever Ever let fall the contents of our hands upon the earth, and nor should our children, nor our children's children, nor also the cat, nor the dog, nor any creature that moveth in the house or in the yard hit us as from Heaven itself.

side-by-side reading: a foreign-language-learning hack

I honestly think this is a kind of brilliant idea - at least, I would think so if it hadn't taken me so stinkin' long to come up with it when it's really sort of obvious.  In other words, I'd think I was brilliant except for that I'm slow and oblivious. (Also? I'm guessing this has been done before. Which makes me slow, oblivious and behind-the-times.)

Anyway. One of the things I'm doing to work on my Spanish is reading novels in Spanish. At first, I tried El Leon, La Bruja y El Armario, thinking that because I was so familiar with the story, I wouldn't have to resort to the dictionary that often to figure out words I didn't know.

This turned out to be half of a good idea. It did work, to a limited extent. 

But I discovered something even better: if you're reading a novel in translation (and I'm hoping to get to Spanish novels actually composed in Spanish eventually, but I'm starting with the training wheels on by reading novels in Spanish that I've read before in English), the simplest way to look up words you don't know isn't to have the dictionary by your side, it's to have the English version of the novel by your side.

So I'm over halfway through Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal, and the way I'm doing it is by reading the Spanish version, but keeping the English one open to the same chapter (see header picture for an example), so that when I come across words I don't know, I can re-read the paragraph in English and figure out what they mean. Then I usually re-read the Spanish paragraph, to cement the unknown words+meanings in my mind.

I do have to be careful to direct myself back to the Spanish version! I read so much more slowly in Spanish than I do in English, and I'm enjoying the story so much that it's tempting to just go for The Sorcerer's Stone instead of La Piedra Filosofal, but the fact that I'm enjoying the story is really what makes this work for me. I'm motivated to find out what happens next (I haven't read the book in about ten years, and I've forgotten a lot of the plot) and that keeps me nose to the grindstone. It's the carrot.

Hope this is helpful to someone else! It's really a low-pain way to get in some extra practice in the foreign language of your choice. To break it down:

1) Pick a novel you've read before and really like. Something fun, so that you'll be willing to keep going when it's hard. Something you haven't read for awhile, so you want to hear it again. And, most importantly, something that's been translated into your target language!

2) Get a copy of the novel in both your target language AND your native language.

3) Read the books side by side. As much as possible, read only in your target language. But when you come across words or phrases you don't know, reread the paragraph in your native language. Then reread it in the target language, so your brain can practice understanding the unfamiliar words.

4) Be a bit hard on yourself. Before you go to the English translation, try really hard to figure out/remember the definition of the target-language phrases. You might surprise yourself.

Anyone else working on a foreign language out there?

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

the grammar stage

I just finished an excellent book called "How to Learn Any Language" by Barry Farber. It's a great encouragement as I continue to work on my Spanish.

But when I read this bit, I was reminded of nothing so much as theology, and how we perceive dogma early in our Christian walks, and then how that perception changes as we grow to know the Lord better:

You don't have to know grammar to obey grammar. If you obey grammar from the outset, when you turn around later and learn why you should say things the way you're already saying them, each grammatical rule will then become not an instrument of abstract torture disconnected from anything you've experienced but rather an old friend who now wants you to have his home address and private phone number.

Isn't that great? It's exactly that way as we learn the creeds, or struggle through some of the early fathers, or try to understand Romans the first time around. But, more and more, the more you live it and actually obey the Lord's instructions, the more what was obscure becomes clear. As Proverbs says, the path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, growing ever brighter to the full light of day.  Farber continues, saying that a foreign language's grammar, once you've got a bit of the language in you, 

becomes a gift flashlight that makes you smile and say, "Now I understand why they say it that way!"

Grammar eventually is revealed to be common sense, much like Christian dogma. Once you understand it, it's not weird and convoluted, rather it's beautiful and useful, and you understand why "they say it that way": because it's the only way it can be said while still preserving all the meaning intended.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell