Interjection, also referred to as exclamation, is used to express an emotion e.g. oh! shh! oops! and it is usually to be found at the beginning of a sentence.
Ouch, I stubbed my toe!
Hey! Don’t be moody!
Oh no, I lost my key again.
Interjections are also used to fill in the pauses in sentences, and then they express hesitation e.g. er, um, hm.
Interjection is not grammatically related to any other parts of the sentence and is often followed by an exclamation mark.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the series so far. We’ve covered parts of speech and next week we’ll be moving on to verb tenses. Have you subscribed to English Focused yet?
What do you understand by fluency?
Recently I've become aware of more and more pseudo-polyglots who claim to be able to learn languages within relatively short time spans. This idea appeals to people of the 21st century where everything must be instant. Some are even stupid enough to pay money to the aforementioned pseudo-polyglots for their precious tips on fast language learning. No, their tips won’t work like some magic pill and you won’t turn into a fluent speaker of a foreign language in a couple of weeks’ time. You want to speak a foreign language fluently? Let me give you my tip… for free! What about you try the old fashioned way and actually make an effort? I don’t understand what happened to good old scepticism and critical thinking ability. Are we humans just becoming increasingly gullible? Copy-paste from Google Translate and a video in which you read out some pre-prepared text in a foreign tongue is not what I understand as the ability to speak a language fluently. Perhaps it’s all about how we define fluency then. The "polyglots" will conveniently use their own definition of the fluency so as to satisfy their need for goal-achieving. The rest of us, however, will know we are fluent when we can sustain a lengthy conversation in our target language. Don't kid yourself; this is more likely to take years rather than months. The younger you are and the more effort you make will hasten the point at which you realise you really are fluent. Good luck.
So you think Polish is hard?
The truth must finally come out. I’ve heard enough of this utter rubbish about how difficult Polish is. If you’ve tried to learn Polish and failed to achieve decent levels of communication and understanding this means you're either not trying hard enough or are just plain stupid. You can’t just say English is easier, because it isn’t! Sure there are grammatical concepts in Polish that are absent in English but don’t forget this works both ways.
Although some grammar books claim there are 16 tenses in English this isn’t true. It doesn’t make it any easier though as there are two tenses (present and past), four aspects (simple, progressive – also referred to as continuous, perfect and perfect-progressive). This is a formidable combination for foreigners, difficult enough to confuse us along with the very unclear rules surrounding the tense usage. I mean…. There are differences even between BrE and AmE as far as tenses go so are we supposed to get the right ones? Ugh. Now compare that with Polish: three tenses (present, past and future – couldn’t be any more obvious, right?) and two aspects (imperfective and perfective – pretty straightforward and all it takes is to learn the correct verb forms). We like it easy, don’t we?
Foreigners cringe when they hear about seven cases in Polish and I agree this can be a nightmare to grasp for a native speaker of a language that lacks this concept but all it means is that you’ll need to make an extra effort and pay a bit more attention to it while learning. On the bright side Polish has no articles. YES! YES! YES! (I hate articles in English and even though I’m super fluent I still make mistakes when using them).
Stop moaning. People always point to something difficult in every language and the sad ones use it as an excuse for not learning it. Fail! Fail! Fail! What I hate even more are Polish people spreading these rumours about how difficult our language is. No, it isn’t! Put this silly point of national pride behind you. The fact we have lots of consonants is not a problem, we are all humans and if my speech organs are capable of articulating something, yours are too no matter where you come from. I might have struggled with my th in English but here I am pronouncing it like a native. Make the effort! Polish, being almost fully phonetic, is actually easier than English, if you slowly pronounce each and every single letter in a word you’ll pronounce it right (NEVER the case in English, in fact even native English speakers don’t know how to pronounce certain words e.g. schedule).
No language is hard. Depending on your native language, some languages can be easier for you. However, it doesn’t make them easy for everybody. I would probably find Czech much easier than English and similarly if you’re a native English speaker you will find German easier than Polish. Lastly, I wanted to say it’s a pleasure to learn Polish. Why? Because most Poles you meet when you come here will be amazed to see you’ve made the effort to try to speak Polish (even if only a little Polish). We’re quite nice chaps, really!
So…. What are you still doing? Get back to studying Polish. I don’t want to see you back around here again until you’ve learnt some more. Good luck!
Second language acquisition
Children who are exposed to two different languages at once are indeed able to acquire both of them simultaneously but certainly the majority of people have only one native language they learnt in this process of "sponging". Furthermore, the foreign language we learn in later life will be very rarely assimilated to the same degree as our native tongue even if studied for years. The puzzle here is how are children able to acquire languages so effectively and why does this skill apparently die out as we grow older? Why do other mental abilities and systems of knowledge we might be familiar with in our lives only ever develop in adult brains e.g. mathematics, physics, psychology. Children seem to have an unfair advantage, a spark of genius, when it comes to perfecting their first language acquisition. How is this possible?
Learning vs. acquiring
Of course, we may say that learning strategies of adults differ from those employed by children. There is an important distinction between learning and acquiring. Learning a language is an unnatural process and results in knowing “about” language whereas acquisition refers to developing the ability to speak a given language while using it everyday life. The latter normally brings much more success. Even under perfect conditions putting a person into a foreign country and forcing them to interact socially for long periods rarely results in the ability to speak L1 and L2 at matching levels.
Critical Period
There must be some crucial moment in our life, the so-called Critical Period that once passed, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to acquire or learn a foreign language to perfection. To illustrate this point let me introduce the story of Joseph Conrad who, despite not becoming fluent in English until he was in his twenties, went on to write novels at a level remarkably higher than most native English speakers but… until he died he retained a very strong Polish accent in his spoken English. This might make us think about how, perhaps, some features of a language can be acquired more easily i.e. grammar and vocabulary than for example pronunciation.
Emotional Reaction
What I find intriguing is that there is also some type of emotional reaction in adults who are naturally more self-conscious than young children, which seems to reduce the levels of L2 acquisition. This might have to do with fear of pronouncing words and even single sounds that seem strange and unnatural in their native language. This would explain why foreigners often struggle with English th sound and why English speakers of Polish can’t deal with sz or ś sounds. It’s not like our speech organs are built any differently or our tongues are too stiff to explore new ways of positioning. Fear might indeed be one of the reasons or perhaps the inability to acquire a foreign language fully stems from the fact that we consciously or unconsciously dislike a language or its speakers. If we move to another country and don’t align ourselves with its culture and inhabitants or have particularly bad experiences while living there we might be less likely to “pick up” the language on quite the same level as we’d like to in different circumstances.
I recently wrote about first language acquisition and received several interesting comments. I’d love to hear from you this time as well. Do you think that first and second language acquisitions differ from each other and if so, on what terms? And finally, more importantly, what methods of learning simulate first language acquisition in order to improve the effects of our efforts?
Step by step grammar 7: Conjunctions
Conjunction joins two words or sentences together. A few examples in bold can be found in the sentences below:
Lucy smokes and drinks a lot. Attractive she may be, but nevertheless stupid. Would you really go out with someone like that or rather find a girl you can have a conversation with?
We distinguish a couple of types of conjunctions depending on their function. Some of them join two single items e.g. Tea or coffee? Others introduce a dependent clause to our utterance e.g. He kicked the oven door in fury; therefore, it was then broken.
I hope this was easy. If you haven’t subscribed to English Focused yet do it now as there’s more to come. Next Wednesday we will explain what an interjection is.
First language acquisition
Some of you might know that I have recently moved into a new flat in sunny Kielce, city in the south of Poland. I still haven’t met all of my new neighbours but I was pleased to find out that there is a married couple next door with three lovely children. Their 8-year-old put a smile on my face, the day I first met him, when he said Jest Pani bardzo ładna (You’re a very pretty lady). I thought it was cute and wondered about how nice it is to be a kid and be able to say exactly what you’re thinking without worrying about social awkwardness. My new admirer’s little sister struggles with language a bit more. I asked her how old she was and she replied with Mam 3 roki (I’m three years old – this should be Mam 3 lata in Polish as plural from year – rok is irregular – lata). Children make mistakes such as that one by logical analogy as normally in similar words in Polish plural would be indeed created by adding –i e.g. smok – smoki (dragon - dragons) or krok - kroki (step - steps). The newest addition to the family – another little girl is still an infant and makes no more than cooing and babbling noises. So… all of them three kids communicate on different levels.
How do we do it?
All normal children, regardless of what culture they are born into develop their language skills at roughly the same time. The theory has been suggested that the language acquisition develops together with learning motor skills and kids first learn words for laying down, sitting up, crawling, being held up, eventually standing up and walking. This means that we learn language as babies while doing physical activities. At the same time, however, studies demonstrate that the child’s early environment has a huge impact on their linguistic development and this indeed differs from one culture to the next. N. Chomsky describes language development as language growth and sees it as growing just like parts of baby’s body.
Caretaker speech
The fascinating thing I noticed is that the parents next door help their children in their language acquisition by so called caretaker speech – simplified expression of ideas, full of diminutives, rhetorical questions, repetitions and all manner of what we understand as baby-talk. In English it includes words such as daddy, mummy, poo-poo, doo-doo, pee-pee. The difference can be, however, seen in the way my neighbours speak to their oldest son – here their speech is a bit more elaborate as he certainly is able to understand more than his younger sisters and also uses more language. They don’t do it consciously but they change into teachers and are extremely flexible with switching from one level to the next depending on which child they’re talking to. I guess this skill must be buried deep in our brains and we intuitionally know how to mentor our offspring.
Let me know how it’s going!
Without sounding too creepy I’m trying to keep my eye on the family next door as I find it extremely interesting how their children assimilate language. Those were just first few things I've noticed so far and I’m eager to find out more. If you ever wondered about the process of first language acquisition feel free to share your views. I’d especially love to hear from parents about their children’s learning process. Thanks!
Rhetorically Speaking 4: Similes
He is as hard as nails
(Nails are by their very nature tough)
Many similes make reference to members of the animal kingdom
As stubborn as a mule (mules are characteristically stubborn)The examples so far have used like and as when making the comparison. Not all similes use this construction, here an example from Shakespeare’s writings:
He took to the task like a duck to water (water is the duck’s natural environment)
He was like a bear with a sore head (you might use this expression to describe someone with a bad hangover, bears are supposedly mean and grumpy, and one with a sore head even more so)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s dayWhen you want to say that something is distinctly lacking in a certain property or the opposite you might use an ironic simile:
It’s as clear a mudNext week we’ll be looking at a related subject, metaphors.
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