"The most effective way to do it is to do it"

I wonder if Nike came up with their logo as a curtailment of Amelia Earheart's "The most effective way to do it, is to do it"

The electrician's mate was saying how few people repair stuff nowadays, yes, even nowadays with the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra, how all the repair shops had gone.  This could be because of Youtube, of course. Perhaps more people, not fewer are self taught. 

I am not the slightest bit mechanical, still less electrical. I have to see something to understand it and even then it takes three tellings.   I'd have to look up how to change a plug and try to pass the job on first. But I remember the oven breaking the first time.  I looked up the symptoms, bought an element and installed it.  I've done that since, maybe even twice more. The oven is at least seventeen years old. Nine times out of ten a broken oven is the element, said the electrician.  

Is it dangerous, changing the element, I said belatedly, unnecessarily.  

He paused fractionally while he considered.  He has OCD, apparently, probably a good thing in an electrician.  'No', he said.  

Admittedly, you want to understand more than the gist when doing electrics, but I considered it sensible, not electrics at the time.    

Woodland Tribe

 

2017:

I'd already heard from Woodland Tribe when they visited Edinburgh that Copenhagen has many of these true adventure playgrounds:  

£7/child for as long as you like. They get hammer, nails, use of saws and a kind of drill and help if they want from the staff. 

The staff put up 2 main towers but over a few days children coming and going made most of the rest: other (high!) structures, ladders, handrails, a wooden wigwam, a two level shack. An amazing project.

Recycling artist Thomas Dambo did something similar.

Tigh - na - Og

Self taught

The electrician was round yesterday.  Scottish Water kindly, finally, agreed to install an electrical pump to prevent us getting flooded. It isn't that we get flooded by the river Tay, Britain's mightiest river, a couple of hundred yards away.  It's because of the inadequate urban drains or because the council forgets to close the floodgates on the park, which should act as a reservoir in heavy rain.  

The electrician's mate said he could fix anything.  So I proudly showing him the floors R and I laid, the door we hung, the loo and the new taps we installed. I asked him for his opinion on the flood gate we designed at the front from from something that looks like double, wavy perspex that I found reduced in Wickes. I didn't show him the 4m of floor to ceiling recycled custom made bookshelves we saved from a neighbour's throwout and reinstalled next door. 

The mate was the laid back guy who laid paving, concreted in paths.  A bit too laid back perhaps, once I'd seen the finish on the concrete after they relaid the path above the cable they cable they had installed. Luckily for him this was after it had dried and he had gone.   Just, don't, I heard a chorus of friends in my head.  I had, in reality, asked one of them for a quote for my Couchsurfing profile. "Could start an argument in an empty house?" he'd said.  My friends generally say nice things but a lot of them might recognise this skill of mine.  I can't quite reconcile the two.  How do they manage?

If he could fix things, hadn't he considered being an electrician?  No, he said, a bit abashed.  I guessed qualifications weren't his forte.  

He was, predictably self-taught and had built motorcycle engines.

Did you sell them?

Well, it started as a hobby.  and just took over, so yes I ended up selling them.  And then the missis blew up over the amoung of time I spent down in my unit, so...

- So how did you learn to fix things? 

- My dad was an electrician.  He used to give us old washing machines and the like.  We'd just take them apart and put them back together. 

- And make them work?

- No, they were broken anyway.

- So...? I was struggling to see the point, but that's why I'm better with language than machines.

- Just to see if we could put them back the way we'd got them.

The electrician was trying to get his youngest interested in plumbing or electrics.  There's good money in it, he said.  

And what do they want to do?

Not much, he said laughing. 

I sympathised and empathised.

I didn't doubt there was good money in it.  Dad's plumber had been round to fix a few things at our house.  He had about four holidays a year, in Mexico for instance.

No, the plumber had said, it wasn't normal that the client worked with you on a job although he had had someone crawl around under a floor with him.  

A man?

A woman! 

He is retiring this year. I knew he normally only serviced boilers now and had given up crawling under sinks to spare his knees.  He wouldn't admit it but it was helpful to have someone to hold stuff. I learned plenty, asked him if I could film, so I'd remember. 

You have to take photos when you're fixing or changing anything, said the electrician.  

I learned that the hard way, I said.

Everyone learns that the hard way, he said, laughing again.

Learning by doing

This video was taken, for reference, while installing laminate flooring in April 2022. Trying to fit a plank around a door jamb was a bugger.  We cut out paper plans and replicated them on planks at least three times. To connect a piece to its neighbour it must be positioned on its long edge, at an angle, but between the door jamb and the neighbouring plank there wasn't space. We had to slide it in instead.  All these stages were parts in a slow process of trial, error and slow realisation.

R explained a better system but I hadn't seen it so didn't know what he meant.  Later, after we had already bought the product we installed we discovered the other in a shop. The planks click properly into their neighbours.  They don't rely on a fragile sliver of cardboard pulp which degrades if you don't get it right quickly. This is why I thought he wanted to remove it. Was it mordido?  

I had been making an effort with Spanish since the previous September. Communication in Buenos Aires (2016) was difficult, despite halting conversations with taxi drivers. I rarely took the bus, terrified of ending up mapless and language-less in some unpredictable suburb.  

Between 2017 and 2020, I find I made nine trips to Spain. Going to Argentina in 2016 was the catalyst. Some were just an extended weekend.  Four of the longer trips were with the boys. It came to a surprising and substantial 60 days in all.  I didn't usually stay integrated with families being either alone or speaking English with the boys.  Somehow navigating cities, casual chat and arranging Airbnb practicalities was easy.  Beung able to get by in Spanish just happened. I could not tell you how.  

Friends I met at the start of 2019 noticed a big difference when we met again at the end of 2022.

Undoubtedly, more practice helped but if one feels safer and therefore more relaxed in an environment, it affects everything.  While porteños were warm and helpful the city was not particularly safe.  Europe, home, was very distant. There were echoes of parts of our continent in the beautiful, crumbling architecture. The lilting porteño speech sounded Italian. Still, everything was unfamiliar. After a few days of jetlag, milonga fear and being warned by Janis about everything from traffic to thieves, I was as jumpy as a cat in a bag of snakes. Speaking Spanish would have helped but my priorities just then were staying alive, not being robbed, finding milongas, avoiding getting too lost and experiencing Argentinian milonga culture, in about that order.

I started my current Duolingo streak on 1 May 2019. One doesn't learn much but it's a useful prompt to keep doing something with the language. 

Apart from that, I had translated some tangos. I watched the odd film in Spanish, poniendo atención, but hadn't "studied" the language in the conventional sense. 

Doing DIY in Scotland is how I learnt most of my Spanish, certainly all the useful stuff that's not about tango angustia y pena'

Some kind of working holiday or séjour in the target language is how many people pick up another language.  I was lucky to be able to do so at home.  You pick it up because you are focused on something else - the work, the getting around, the communicating with your host family. You don't pick up a language in a classroom with books. You sweat at it.

A lot of people's trips abroad, mine too, are to do with looking or tasting.  Compare how many photos you have of trips abroad compared to how many videos or recordings where you are trying to understand or learn something.  That is why I learned more Spanish here at home than I did abroad.  I was using the language to do something. Specifically, I learned the language by also learning to do something else.  There is very likely a clue in that.  

I have used books, or looked things up to learn languages and I know some good linguists who do too. But exercise books and, grammars are minor props, small paths, diversions.  They are not the broad way ahead for effective language learning.  Everyone is different, learns differently and has different preferences, but there is a lot of fear in learning languages.  My intuition is that people often hang on to these props and structures from that fear. We don't ever ask ourselves these questions, as language learning infants and children.  It isn't a natural way to learn.  

Many do want to understand, how another language is working, structurally.  In some cases this is almost an excuse, a procrastination for getting on with speaking and understanding.  If you want to use a book in language learning, pick up a novel, a puzzle book, a manual, a magazine, a recipe book, something that will engross you.  

Some people are not procrastinating the language; they do learn it, but more slowly. I think some get waylaid by the interest of the structure of the language; the differences are fascinating to them.  They are like the tourist or the student, agog with architectural wonder inside a cathedral instead of getting on with the business of  practical worship (or spiritual experience).

A great limitation of our culture is that rather than asking good learners how they learn, we assume they have a natural talent or a great teacher.  We are uncurious about their methods.

People can get hung up on the how and the why of learning something rather than the it just is or the just do it.  They are all But, but, but... I remember being in turn frustrated and in awe of the differences there are in French compared to English.  Ultimately, if you want to speak a good French you will have to accept them. You come to delight in them, then they become second nature. 

Life is much easier when you stop fighting. Dad said this, for years. When I stopped fighting weirdness in other languages my linguistic life became much easier.  You see this in British teenagers all the time. They are baffled by the sheer oddity of constructions in other languages.  It isn't weird, anyway, it's just different. You accept the difference.  I decided early on in Spanish to acknowledge the differences, accept them, imitate them. Just copy the common templates  - of phrase, of idiom, of exclamation - that native speakers use all the time. They are in songs too. Songs help you learn so called "advanced" grammatical tenses easily. And don't copy too consciously, do it as part of doing something else and self-consciousness drops away.  If you pay attention to language, to what people are saying, you don't have to consciously file phrases away with a note to self.  Your brain will offer up the right phrase at the right time, eventually.  Trust in the process, give it time and don't be too demanding.

Language is a wonder, but it is fundamentally a tool for something else. 

Sliding in the plank meant removing the cardboardy stuff that was supposed to make it slot in to its neighbour. This is what R was trying to explain and this is probably the day I learnt that it's not mordado, but mordido, which means something like chewed/gnawed / bitten. I say "something like" because nowadays I only look up words if I can't guess the likely or approximate meaning.  I might have stupid for a second, more so looking back but there is no need.  This is how we learn.  It's normal and it's fine.

There might be another word  for gnawed, specifically; in fact I think it starts with 'r', but until I need to use it or understand it I will let it lie.  

New experiences

Atrevida, my Spanish friend called me, years ago.  I am recently back from five days sharing a gite with three strangers and for someone protective of personal space perhaps it's true.  I don't know how it is that a cautiously inclined person is known as adventurous but I enjoy trying new things.  

The photo is of a hike I had never done before through some local tunnels.  Trying to get to them was fraught, someone brought too many children, they were not properly equipped, on a bakingly hot day we had insufficient water for our numbers, we lost the route, eventually had to turn back and to this day I think I saw a ghost.  But it was a memorable day.  New experiences often don't feel that fun at the time and are better at a distance.

For years I have said that tango dance class actually inhibits them from dancing. Also, that dancing tango movements to alternative or non tango music feels somehow wrong. I didn't feel that though until someone told me.

In some ways I had a very strict tango “upbringing” that indelibly marked me, maybe that trammelled me in some ways and yet that might be unfair because no-one forced me. Then again, when we are new we are malleable. This is why I like to dance with beginners, to get them before anyone else does, before they are ruined by dance class. I remember my mum saying that was why she liked teaching the youngest in primary school.

It is also true that most of the lovely dancers I know have come through tango dance class. But I have said before my belief that they have become good dancers through a lot of social dancing, so, despite class, not because of it.

Perhaps then it was a teenage rebellion phase, ten years later that took me to a tango - contact workshop, in my imagination, a free movement, let-it-all hang-out sort of thing, with alternative music.  Though actually, the impulse to go was more an intuition, something that kept bugging me for weeks, right up to the day itself. Dance class, alternative music, free movement that isn't dancing tango, that might not involve partners, why would you do that? The prospect worried me, so much so that I couldn’t face going in cold to a whole afternoon.  I sent the guy a voice message saying that I was nervous, that classes stressed me out and that I was worried about being forced to dance with people in a class.  I said I didn’t mind dancing with women so much, but I absolutely didn't want to dance with guys where the choice wasn't mutual.  I was worried that guys I see in the milonga and don’t dance with, which is most of them, might see me as cornered and fair game.  

The reply came back:

Te entiendo y comparto lo que decis. De hecho una parte de la clase es acerca del consentimiento, de saber poner límites y poder elegir!! Todo el tiempo estar eligiendo, y que nadie se lo tome personal. Me parecen muy bien tus reflexiones.. que te escuches y respetes! Tambien, está la posibilidad de venir con alguien a la clase y no cambiar de pareja... esas cosas obviamente están permitidas

[I understand and share what you say.  In fact, part of the class is about consent, on recognising limitations and on choice.  We choose all the time and no-one takes it personally.  I like your thoughts, I hear and respect you.  There is also the option of coming to the class with someone and not changing partner - that’s obviously allowed.]

So far, so good. I inveigled an hour from a friend, away from his dogs, and we walked there together to join the open practica which was short, maybe half an hour. It was immediately obvious that I was very far from my comfort zone, as indeed I had expected, but it is one thing to imagine a different reality and another to be confronted with it. 

A journey into Spanish

This is not about dance but in the past I have written about the similarities between learning to dance Argentine tango socially, and learning a foreign language largely intuitively, so I include it here. 

Before I started translating tangos a few years ago, the little Spanish I had was courtesy of a year's worth of study done over thirty years ago as an adjunct to my A-level course. My parents had bought an apartment in Catalonia in 1982 which they had kept for over fifteen years.  While I had loved the holidays in that idyllic, rocky, coastal corner of the Costa Brava (now very sought-after), my exposure to both castellano and Catalan had been limited to road signs and menus. Though I was still able to read some Spanish I couldn't say much.

In 2017 I started trying various language learning platforms and apps: Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Busuu, Memrise, Language Zen, Beelinguapp and in the following year, Tandem. I had started my children on Duolingo perhaps the previous year and was myself becoming more interested in the lyrics of the songs I heard in the milonga. Not being fluent in Spanish meant that I had been afraid to take the bus in Buenos Aires in 2016 in case I accidentally ended up in some far-flung barrio of that insecure city and was not able to safely make it home.  I still remember that sense of fear and lack of independence caused by not being able to converse fluidly. These factors may have motivated that 2017 exploration of language apps. The key thing though was that in March 2017 I went to Barcelona for a few days to dance.  Spain tugged at me again. I went to Madrid for a few days in May, again to dance and did the same again in Salobreña in Andalucia over the New Year of 2018.   While I can't remember how much Spanish I used on these trips, it probably wasn't much more than conversing briefly with my Airbnb hosts, yet just being in Spain was an ever-present reason for learning. 

I had by now lost my fear of getting about on public transport but the more language I understood, the better were my options in restaurants my opportunities for chat in the milongas or for insights into the culture. By the time I took my children to Málaga in October of 2020 I could ask for things, get about, hold simple conversations, understand a lot of what was said.  None of my conversations was sustained, simply because I didn't have Spanish friends who didn't already want to practice the English they already spoke and I didn't meet Spanish people often with whom it was normal to converse over more than life's essentials

My experiences with most of the apps did not last. The best of the software was Language Zen which was then only web-based.  It was one of the first to use Artificial Intelligence successfully. But when that company developed an app about which my phone's security systems raised flags. I see these are now resolved. Language Zen can assess your level of Spanish (and it is only Spanish-English) successfully and adapt as you improve. It is truly personalized learning which is the next frontier in education generally. It challenged me then and still does. I liked the title too, implying that there was a relaxed way of language learning, that it was more about a mindset than slogging your guts out over grammar books in school, a smart state of mind rather than hard work. I have discovered by talking to Spaniards in the thirties to sixties age bracket that the slog-a-lot way is still the way they learned in school.  Person after person has the same story: "no talking, only grammar".  That is how at least one generation in Spain appears to have (not) learned English in school.  I can sense their frustration and their desire to rectify this across our conversations in the ether.   

Language Zen also had the option of using music and lyrics to learn. I liked both the personalised element and the music. But while Language Zen is richer and more challenging than Duoling I found it somehow less compulsive & that compulsion is important to keep a language habit going. I put down Duoling's success in this regard simply to its annoying yet successful sound and animation. I had also been translating tangos for pleasure and found these the richest form of learning Spanish I had found to date.  It was also all I had time for.   It wasn't just the poetry of the tangos that was enriching, nor the insight into Argentine culture and history, but because each tango is associated with someone who helped me understand it, who brought their own perspective, insight, character, kindness and humour to those conversations. 

And yet, it is perfectly possible to be able to translate tangos and not be able to hold up a conversation in ordinary life. 

Today, similar software to Language Zen has been developed called "Progress with Lawless Spanish". It can also read and adapt to your level and map out your progress via an interesting "brain map" visualization but it offers primarily grammar quizzes.  Based on an initial test and your continued use of the product, it makes an assessment of your skill level (which you can change) and offers appropriate exercises. It tests your grasp of grammar by asking you to complete sentences using these constructs and, if you so choose, it can be very challenging.  I have used these not so much to analyze grammar, as I prefer to learn more intuitively. Instead, I use the sample sentences to hear correct constructions which I try to learn less by rules and more by sound.

On April 1 2019 I started a daily habit of using Duolingo, which remains unbroken today. But Duolingo has not really taught me Spanish. I found that app too easy and it doesn't adapt to the ability of the learner. It is the thing however that nudges me to keep up Spanish even though, for long periods I have done nothing but my daily 5 minutes of Duolingo. In 2021 I started listening to the Duoling podcasts, but soon found these too easy as well.

And yet, Spanish had somehow improved without any real study or much application, certainly nothing I would call the "hard work" so often advertised as being the thing that produces good results.  I have reasonably good French and I used to have Italian.  I took a few trips to Spain, translated maybe twenty tangos over quite a long period when the mood took me and when I could find native speakers willing to talk to me about them.  Yes, I looked out for signs and words in Spain and translated them when I found them. But I think that was about the extent of my "study". 

In February 2019 at a largely Spanish tango 'encuentro' weekend in Murcia I remember going round the cathedral on a Spanish tour and understanding almost nothing.  But I think this was the period when I was translating the tangos.  And yet, the language of the tangos is not modern Spanish.  Most of the time I didn't know if a word I didn't know was  'lunfardo', a kind of evolving Buenos Aires slang or Spanish until I couldn't find it in a modern dictionary.   

By January 2020 I joined a similar tour in Cordoba and understood perhaps 80%. I still can't really explain this.  I had been on a number of brief trips solo trips to Spain since 2017 - to Barcelona, Madrid, to Valencia, to Málaga and Granada and a solo tour of, Cádiz, Sevilla, Córdoba.  I went three times with my children, to Calpe with the grandparents, to Málaga and to Valencia / Alicante.  It was perhaps eight trips altogether, each time for a long weekend or up to a week.  But I had not felt that I had spoken a lot of Spanish.  

In October 2021 I started a Spanish Higher because I planned to teach French and I had been told you need a second foreign language to at least A-level standard.  The local authority took months to approve my request and I joined the course a month late.  After another month I asked to move up to the Advanced Higher (pre-university) course.  I was predicted an A, obtaining 88% in the mock exam and 40/40 in the writing exercise.  A career as a modern foreign languages teacher looked like it wasn't going to be possible for bureaucratic reasons. But with my predicted grade and the love of learning Spanish I wanted to take the exam.

In terms of resources I was essentially on my own. With the rise of Omicron I had been asked not to come into school after only a month on the Higher course, so never met the other Advanced Higher students who were allowed to continue attending.  Nor was I able to use the material they were studying. I was put onto a self-teach online programme called SCHOLAR developed by Heriot-Watt university but its content was in some cases more than fifteen years out of date and full of bugs. 

The only other option was to forge my own way. But with no travel available and the first exam in 5 months, the question was, how? I had made friends with a Spanish man at the end of 2018. We were sitting next to one another at my first and possibly only meeting of 'Españoles en Perth', in McDonalds. I was the only non-Spanish person present.  He couldn't speak a word of English. I could barely say anything. He chatted away to me in Spanish, presumably thinking I understood more than I did, which was almost nothing. I offered him a lift at the end of the meeting as I was going past his past. We exchanged numbers and thereafter, very occasionally met for coffee. With the pandemic this all finished and we didn't pick up the threads until October 2021 when we started to meet up more often.

From October 20201 meeting my friend regularly and around the same time starting the academic course had a dramatic effect. The month I spent in school raised the bar in terms of what vocabulary I should be learning, the speed of native speakers which I ought to understand, the topics and sentences I ought to be able to read and the fact that I ought to be able to write and put forward analysis and arguments in Spanish. This raising of expectation was key to my progress. The practice with my friend let me speak and practice listening. I had had almost no practice speaking Spanish during my month in school. The teacher did what she could, going around the class asking individuals to supply short phrases. Conversation practice in pairs was rare and short. I simply could not see how we would go from that in October to holding a fifteen-minute conversation in March.

When I asked the school if I could see a booklet of Advanced Higher material, I was able to get a sense of the level of that material and scoured the internet for similar material. It became clear to me that I could simulate this level not by classroom learning materials but by simulating real-world experience of Spanish - reading news articles in Spanish, listening to the radio, watching films with only Spanish subtitles, finding language partners online and putting myself in situations where I had to speak Spanish. I wrote emails to friends in Spanish using whatever technology was available to help and twice my new partners offered to correct my written texts, which was invaluable. These activities were enjoyable but not particularly easy. And yet you set our own challenge. If I want and today still, if I want to understand completely what is being said I have to look up a lot of words. But the more you look up the fewer you have to look up next time. This learning curve is steep but relatively short. You can quite quickly reach a sort of plateau where you can hold a conversation, where you understand the gist of film or a news article, where you can speak without translating in your head. To learn in this way does require probably greater commitment than most people are willing to make, depending on how quickly you want to learn the language. It also requires motivation and a belief that you can simulate an immersive language learning experience, not to the same extent as being in a foreign country but to an extent that is valuable and transformative.

I did not go to Spain at all between January 2020 and today  I don't sound Spanish, my mistakes are scattered like mines across the littoral of my linguistic landscape.  I stumble, I encounter holes where I want a word, but that's how children learn too.  And in the last six months through simulating, as far as I am able, an immersive experience, my Spanish has improved measurably and is still improving.