![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Metafilter is having a, uh, lively discussion on whether or not this study proves that contemporary English majors can't read.
There's a lot of potential ways to divide the commenters into two groups, but the one I expected the most was "people who think the correct way to deal with unfamiliar references in literature is to immediately look it up" and "people who think the first group needs to learn to use context clues already".
As always, I am in the second group, and every time the first group appears in real life I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets! (To be honest, they were a little hit or miss for me - 95% of the time they just used text with words they assumed the students would be unfamiliar with, which I was never actually unfamiliar with. But the other 5% of the time they used text with made up words or with blacked out bits of text, and that was fun, and presumably we all learned a great deal. Or at least in theory... one of the reasons I had such a good vocabulary as a kid was because I read so much and never looked anything up except for fun, so... well, the point is, my classmates probably learned something! And I use that skill every time I try to read something in Spanish.)
Anyway, I'm really posting this because of two reasons.
1. Somehow, nobody has posted about the lawyer cat from the pandemic. Did they all forget? Or not see that?
2. This paragraph: One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...
Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.
Edit: No, I thought of a third thing, which I forgot because of the second thing.
3. When your kids are very little, every well-meaning person everywhere will tell you that it's all right for them to watch a little TV, just so long as you watch with them and discuss what you're watching, and ask them questions about it. Watch actively, and train them to do so. And it wasn't until the niblings were in middle school that I realized I wasn't actually doing that the way people keep saying - instead of talking about the plot and "what do you think happens next" my running commentary during TV shows and movies goes "Wow, that background music is awfully forboding for such an apparently hopeful scene" and "Ugh, he put a blanket over her, I guess they'll hook up now" and "That transition sure is cheesy!" and, once, "You think you'll be happy when you get to Omashu , but obviously not", which prompted the kids to ask why and I had to actually think about it. (Because they left the secret tunnel and then had to climb a mountain which blocked their view of the city while chatting about how amazing it'd be to get to the city. If everything was hunky-dory then there would've been no mountain, they would've emerged from the tunnel and seen the city right there.) I don't know if the way I did it was better or worse than what people kept saying to do, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the kids and their ability to pick up on foreshadowing!
There's a lot of potential ways to divide the commenters into two groups, but the one I expected the most was "people who think the correct way to deal with unfamiliar references in literature is to immediately look it up" and "people who think the first group needs to learn to use context clues already".
As always, I am in the second group, and every time the first group appears in real life I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets! (To be honest, they were a little hit or miss for me - 95% of the time they just used text with words they assumed the students would be unfamiliar with, which I was never actually unfamiliar with. But the other 5% of the time they used text with made up words or with blacked out bits of text, and that was fun, and presumably we all learned a great deal. Or at least in theory... one of the reasons I had such a good vocabulary as a kid was because I read so much and never looked anything up except for fun, so... well, the point is, my classmates probably learned something! And I use that skill every time I try to read something in Spanish.)
Anyway, I'm really posting this because of two reasons.
1. Somehow, nobody has posted about the lawyer cat from the pandemic. Did they all forget? Or not see that?
2. This paragraph: One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...
Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.
Edit: No, I thought of a third thing, which I forgot because of the second thing.
3. When your kids are very little, every well-meaning person everywhere will tell you that it's all right for them to watch a little TV, just so long as you watch with them and discuss what you're watching, and ask them questions about it. Watch actively, and train them to do so. And it wasn't until the niblings were in middle school that I realized I wasn't actually doing that the way people keep saying - instead of talking about the plot and "what do you think happens next" my running commentary during TV shows and movies goes "Wow, that background music is awfully forboding for such an apparently hopeful scene" and "Ugh, he put a blanket over her, I guess they'll hook up now" and "That transition sure is cheesy!" and, once, "You think you'll be happy when you get to Omashu , but obviously not", which prompted the kids to ask why and I had to actually think about it. (Because they left the secret tunnel and then had to climb a mountain which blocked their view of the city while chatting about how amazing it'd be to get to the city. If everything was hunky-dory then there would've been no mountain, they would've emerged from the tunnel and seen the city right there.) I don't know if the way I did it was better or worse than what people kept saying to do, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the kids and their ability to pick up on foreshadowing!
no subject
I've been translating some Agatha Christie novels for my own amusement. I'm not exactly a kid anymore, and there are a very few words in the text, that I've seen many times in many places, but if you asked me to define them, I wouldn't come close because I don't use them actively. I've used the "in context" method in English so much that basically I ignore the word and only care about the context. That's fine if you are reading to get on with the plot and you don't need to care about some stray adjective. But when translating, yeah, I need to stop and think and probably look it up to be sure.
Why can't you rely on just looking it all up? Well, that's fine if you are looking up one word in a page or even as many as one in a paragraph. But studying Russian many times I'd have to look up three words in a sentence, and literally would forget the definition of the first word by the time I was looking up the third, particularly if every sentence on the page had three words I'd needed to look up! It gets to be a horrible grind. At some point even in a foreign language you have to use what you understand to help get through the parts you don't, or you'll just give up.
no subject
Definitely not! And I'm reasonably sure that all the "looking it up" people can rely on context at least a little because if you can't you could never learn how to talk.
But sometimes context just isn't enough. Like that time fantasy writers all learned the word "lambent" and started applying it, of all things, to eyes.
(It means "flickering or gleaming, like a candle". But if you don't set that up properly in the text I guarantee your readers will all think you're talking about sheep.)