The Bluestocking: To the moon and back gerbil style.

[Boiledbeetle]

Previous thread of chat and general madness below

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5506124-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-spring-is-sprunging-and-mns-name-generator-can-do-one

Women: from an orderly queue at the bar or take a seat and grab a passing gerbil.

Men: turn left at the end of the road, keep walking until you find the Staunch Ally.

Bar gerbil a full fat coke please and a packet of Scampi Fries please.

Yes, it's frustrating when you know that you should have learned it naturally, organically.

DH's daughter worked abroad for 7 yrs. Instead of enrolling her child in the local nursery and primary school, she enrolled her in the International School where everything was taught in English. DH suggested that the local school might be a good option, but was told that it wasn't happening so he kept out of it.

The result was that when they moved back to England, the child only knew how to say "My name is..." and "I live in..." in the local language.

The daughter's reasoning was that everyone spoke English.

The spacepeople are back from🌑
The spacewoman said that although it was wonderful to explore so far away
'We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other'

I noticed that in immigrant communities, there seemed to be a 3-generation cycle: the parents arrived speaking their own language and very little English; they don't teach their own language to their children, because that's the past, the future needs English, so the second generation only speaks English; the third generation regrets that they never learnt their grandparents' language, and go to classes to get back in touch with their language and culture

Well now I've seen the spacepeople round the moon - without my attention the mission would have been a total failure, obvs- I can go to bed without jeopardising their safety😄

G'night all, don't worry- the Sleep and Dream Gerbils are in low earth orbit, not going round the moon, so they'll be doing the biz for everybody tonight, I hope 🌝

Yes, I'd say that's about it.

A while back, I was contacted by a relative's granddaughter, wanting to know about her heritage. She wanted to know what religion her grandfather was and whether I knew which town or village he came from. (Her grandfather was in the same platoon as my dad and they were together all through the war.)

I was able to work it out, thanks to the genealogy booklet produced by my second cousin.

Short version: my great-great-grandpa was a widower who married a widow with the same surname as that particular granddaughter's side of the family. My second cousin named the village.

There are three of that name in former Yugo...but...my dad had told me that his relative got a degree from Sarajevo Uni, so logic suggests that it was the village between Sarajevo and my great-great-grandpa's village.

Thank you @WearyAuldWumman so interesting.

I taught in international schools for years. I understand families who move every two or three years putting their children in English speaking schools for continuity, and at least in our schools they would get lessons in the local language every day, but for families who had moved there indefinitely it always seemed a strange choice.
I did also meet quite a few families where the mum was local and the dad wasn't (often an English dad) but the family only spoke the local language and the children could barely communicate with dad's parents. There was a belief decades ago that the brain could only cope with so much language.

The theory about not teaching children other languages because it would make it hard for them to learn English is interesting. It may explain a thing I have always regretted, that my parents taught me no Irish (my mother had good school Irish, my father a few adult beginner's phrases) and did not encourage any of the lovely young women who lived with us to teach me some Spanish. I am terrible at languages - a bit of re-wiring my brain when it was young and flexible would have been so useful.

I wished my half-Italian father had taught us Italian as kids.

When I finally got round to learning as an adult, about half the class were there because they had Italian heritage.

It's very good that beliefs about language learning have (mostly) changed now.

I had an interesting friend who grew up quadrilingual. Two languages at home with parents, then a bilingual school in the local language and English. Beautifully fluent in all four. He then assumed that he was good at learning languages and tried a fifth. Disaster - he had no idea how to learn a language because he had never had to do it mechanically.

He added weight to my theory that none of us are bad at languages - we have all successfully learnt our mother tongue. However many language teaching methods don't work very well. If we can learn a language along the same principles as learning our first language we would do well.

Yes - language acquisition is the one skill viewed as ‘academic’ which we know everyone can do, apart from obviously those with particular learning difficulties.

My European colleagues range from pretty good English with a bit of an accent to sounding like native speakers.

Totally agree @ErrolTheDragon

My eldest grandson is hard Portuguese his dad speaks to him in his mother tongue, so he can communicate with his other grandparents.

Trouble is my daughter only knows rudimentary words so may well struggle in the future as the only none speaker.

WAW When I was about 8 I found a series of books in the local library about a brother and sister who travelled all through Europe. One was about Yugoslavia and included a few phrases of the local language.

That sounds like The Young Traveller In... series - is that what it was WAW?
I devoured every single one of them in our library, and learnt the phrases of all the languages - probably including the Yugoslavia one !

On the last day of the school year at primary school we used to have a little performance where we did 'party-pieces' - a song, a recitation, a funny story.. my party-piece was saying hello in about 10 different languages, thanks to those books😄

I always appreciated being brought up bilingual - growing up knowing that one thing can have two names is already a subtle and important lesson for your brain, and your awareness of the world. ' The name is not the thing' is pretty deep!

And having learnt that a knife is also a scian, it was no big deal to go on and learn that it is also a couteau and a cuchillo.

It was a big deal to observe that some words - chair cathaoir chaise - were almost the same in different languages and that others - knife scian couteau -were completely different - it started me thinking about linguistics and etymology at an early age.

Magpie - I missed a gap in the posts to say this yesterday - good luck with the job app, keep us posted

In Ireland teaching everyone Irish, while accepting that most of them were English speakers at home, has been an educational principle since the foundation of the state. In addition, to 'pass' the state exams you needed another language, Maths, History, and/or Geography (they were lumped together when I did my Inter cert), a Science. After that you could do any other subject you fancied and could find someone to teach you.

Everyone nationally takes the same exams from the same papers (different levels are available) on the same day. They are 'reforming' the system at the moment and there is some pessimism about that. As it is, there's been a sense of fairness, and a chance to get a broad grounding, and the country does fairly well in the international league tables.

Kitty let you get away with an unfinished blanket, @Boiledbeetle!

The finished version would have had more stripes & more cats. But it wouldn’t have fit in your swag bag.

It might have been - can't remember. I do remember reading as many as the library had...part of the attraction was that we were allowed three fiction tickets and one non-fiction. That series (plus the 'legends' series - including Roman and Greek tales) was included in non-fiction.

@ChristmasStars

My SD had expected to be abroad for many years, but eventually decided to move home to England the year before the child started secondary.

Her partner (English) was adamant that their child would not attend a local school. There was no point, we were told: everyone in the country spoke English and he didn't like the behaviour he'd seen as the local children came home from school.

The SD and child kept completely within the ex-pat community. The SD turned down the language lessons offered by her company. The SAHP, funnily enough, did acquire the language over the 7 yrs that they were there. (He was older, had been in the same line of work as her, but had retired early.)The child was supposed to have language lessons at the school, but they seem to have been very basic. The focus was on English acquisition.

I still have my suspicions about the partner's reasoning - so far as I could see, he very much ruled the roost.

A fortnight before they were due to fly back home to England, he had a medical emergency and my SD phoned emergency services, only to be shocked that the call handler couldn't understand her English. She had to run for a neighbour's assistance.

The partner didn't survive.

I recall my DH's anguish at not being able to fly out. He was waiting for open heart surgery and in a bad state. Fortunately, his ex was able to fly out to support her daughter, but they had to rely on others all the time, given their lack of the language.

When I was working, I found myself being very suspicious of the fathers who acquired English but didn't afford their SO the same advantage.

ETA Even though I have very poor B/C/M/S I quickly learned that your perception of things in another language is very different, particularly in the way that the grammar is concerned.

In the Translation Faculty at the Moris Torez in Moscow, we were taught "Translate the sense, not the meaning."

Bloody sleep gerbils.

Just to add that one of the reasons that I get mixed up with my B/C/M/S is that it's very similar to Russian in some ways, but the grammar and thinking is very different.

Dad only spoke the language in front of me when we were over there (unless he was speaking to an older Slav who hadn't managed to pick up English when were down the high street).

Once I had started to learn Russian at school, I could understand my dad quite easily when he spoke his own language - perhaps because I knew his body language? So the very few times that I was in Yugoslavia with my parents was when I picked up some phrases naturally from Dad.

We had friends who used to go out their every summer once the passports were sorted out - the father left the pits and started his own business and drove them there every year.

His wife and sons learned not one word of the language. "I just do my knitting and let them get on with it," quoth the wife.

By contrast, Mum used to try really hard to interact with people and picked up a few words. She was also really good at understanding body language.

The gerbils have acquired a set of chimney sweeping rods, 6 of them, that screwed together are 2m/6ft long.

They have also made a cup of Edith's favourite beverage.

So you'll hear a knock on the door, Edith, and when you look out, there'll be a cuppa on your doorstep, nobody to interact with, nothing but a slight rustle in the shrubbery about 6 ft away. And maybe a tiny squeak, quickly stifled...

Totally agree. My dad had only a very basic education. (3 years at primary school, as opposed to the experience of the relative with the degree. The difference was that dad's family were still all farmers. His first job was as his dad's goatherd when he was 10.)

Prior to reaching the UK, he was in British Army run DP camps in Italy and Germany. (The DPs drove for the British Army and did bomb damage clearance and other work.) Only a few months in Germany, but two years in Italy.

He picked up Italian and German while he was out there. He pretty much forgot it through lack of use over here, but I'd see him turning and breaking into a broad grin any time we passed Italian tourists in Edinburgh, etc.

Could the gerbils fix my dishwasher?

It’s showing a code for a suspected leak. The kitchen appliances are all built in with one long kick board & no obvious place to remove it & look at the pipes, so I’m going to have to get hold of the original installers 🙄.

'Can they fix it?'
'Squeeeak squeeeak squeeeak!'

.....but only if they can get the kick board out of the way and to them it looks like the impossible north face of the Eiger, so I'd keep trying the original installers if I were you....😒

@MarieDeGournay yes! All that about understanding one object two names etc. also just being used to things like different word order. I learnt BSL a few years ago and most of my classmates found the different word order a real obstacle and wanted to know why. I was able to quickly accept it as a characteristic of the language and put it into practice.
@WearyAuldWumman that is just tragic. What a waste.