I wanted you to know the amazing website of “Design Real” exhibition at serpentine gallery, london, curated by Konstantin Grcic.
This website, wich will remain a permanet and free online resources for designers, to me is the soul of the whole show: it si full of usefull information about products, materials, production processes, design history and more; Internet lacked such a great database for designers.
I haven’t visited the exhibition yet, but I already received the nice catalogue, wich features an interesting introduction by Jonathan Olivares (that you can find here) and an interview to konstantin Grcic by Serpentine’s curator Hans Hulrich Obrist.

There’s no better gift than the gift of reading.

The author of En Peru Blog, Stuart Starrs, has published his best works and stunning photographs of Peru in a four book series. These are must haves for any Andean enthusiast, backpacker, wanna-be backpacker, adventurer or foodie.

Click on the image below to visit En Peru Blog and add these books to your holiday wish-list:

Caution: This post is very long. It runs to 60 pages on the Net.

This is a continuation of the earlier post. I split it up into two parts because it had gotten too long.

In general, the post refers to which languages are the hardest for English speakers to learn, though to some extent, the ratings are applicable across languages. Most Chinese speakers would recognize Spanish as being an easy language, despite its alien nature. And even most Chinese, Navajo, Poles or Czechs are acknowledge that their languages are hard to learn. To a certain extent, difficulty is independent of linguistic starting point. Some languages are just harder than others, and that’s all there is to it.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed: Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months to 1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months to 1 year. Level 3 languages = 1 to 2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

NE Caucasian, NW Caucasian and Kartvelian

Of course the Caucasian languages like Tsez, Tabasaran, Georgian, Chechen, Ingush, Abkhaz and Circassian are some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Tsez has 126 different cases! Tabasaran is rated the 3rd most complex grammar in the world, with 48 different noun cases.

Tsez, Tabasaran, Chechen, Circassian, Ingush and Abkhaz are rated 5, hardest of all.

Kartvelian

One problem with Georgian is the strange alphabet: ქართულია ერთ ერთი რთული ენა. It also has lots of glottal stops that are hard for many foreigners to speak, a single verb can have up to 12 different parts, similar to Polish, consonant clusters can be huge – up to 8 consonants stuck together, and there are 6 cases and 6 tenses. In addition, Georgian is both highly agglutinative and highly irregular, which is sort of the worst of two worlds. Georgian is said to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce.

Georgian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ubykh, a Caucasian language of Turkey, is now extinct, but I believe there is one second language speaker. It has more consonants than any language on Earth – 78 consonant sounds in all.

Ubykh is rated 5, hardest of all.

American Indian Languages

American Indian languages are also notoriously difficult, though  few try to learn them. You almost really need to learn these as a kid. It’s going to be quite hard for an adult to get full competence in them.

Dene-Caucasian

Na-Dene

Navajo has long, short and nasal vowels, a tone system, and a grammar totally unlike anything in Indo-European. A stem of only four letters or so can take enough affixes to fill a whole line of text. Some Navajo dictionaries have thousands of entries of verbs only, with no nouns. A verb has no particular form like in English – to walk. Instead, it assumes various forms depending on whether or not the action is completed, incomplete, in progress, repeated, habitual, one time only, instantaneous, or simply desired.

For instance, the verb ndideesh means to pick up or to lift up. But it varies depending on what you are picking up.

For instance, ndideeshtiil – to pick up a slender stiff object (key, pole), ndideeshleel – to pick up a slender flexible object (branch, rope), ndideesh’aal – to pick up a roundish or bulky object (bottle, rock), ndideeshgheel – to pick up a compact and heavy object (bundle, pack) , ndideeshjol – to pick up a non-compact or diffuse object (wool, hay) , ndideeshteel – to pick up something animate (child, dog), ndideeshnil – to pick up a few small objects (a couple of berries, nuts), ndideeshjih – to pick up a large number of small objects (a pile of berries, nuts), ndideeshtsos -to pick up something flexible and flat (blanket, piece of paper), ndideeshjil - to pick up something I carry on my back, ndideeshkaal – to pick up anything in a vessel, ndideeshtloh – to pick up mushy matter (mud).

But picking up is only one way of handling the 12 different consistencies. One can also bring, take, hang up, keep, carry around, turn over, etc. objects. There are about 28 different verbs one can use for handling objects. If we multiply these verbs by the consistencies, there are over 300 different verbs used just for handling objects.

In Navajo textbooks, there are conjugation tables for inflecting words, but it’s pretty hard to find a pattern there. One of the worst things about Navajo is that every little morpheme you add to a word seems to change everything else around it, even in both directions.

It is even said that Navajo children have a hard time learning Navajo as compared to children learning other languages, but Navajo kids definitely learn the language.

Similarly with Hopi below, even linguists find even the best Navajo grammars difficult or even impossible to understand.

Navajo is rated 5, hardest of all.

Hopi is so difficult that even grammars describing the language are almost impossible to understand.

Hopi is rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavey, a Na-Dene language of Canada, is hard to learn. It is similar to Navajo and Apache. Verbs take up to 15 different prefixes. It also uses a completely different alphabet, a syllabic one designed for Canadian Indians.

Slavey is rated 5, hardest of all.

Salishan

The Salishan languages spoken in the Northwest have a long reputation for being hard to learn, in part because of long strings of consonants, in one case 11 consonants long. The Salish languages are, like Chukchi, polysynthetic. Some translations treat all Salish words are either verbs or phrases. Some say that Salish languages do not contain nouns, though this is controversial. Many of the vowels and consonants are not present in most widely spoken languages.

Nuxálk is a notoriously difficult Salishan Amerindian language spoken in British Colombia. It is famous for having some really wild words and even sentences that don’t seem to have any vowels in them at all. For instance, xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ – he had a bunchberry plant.

The Salishan languages are rated rated 5, hardest of all.

Kootenai

Yet the Salishans always considered the neighboring language Kootenai to be too hard to learn. Kootenai is an isolate spoken in Idaho.

Kootenai is rated 5, hardest of all.

Algonquian

Central Algonquian

Ojibwa and Cree are said to be very hard to learn. They are written in a variety of different ways with different alphabets and syllabic systems, complicating matters even further. They are both polysynthetic and have long, short and nasal vowels and aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants. Words are divided into metrical feet, the rules for determining stress placement in words are quite complex and there is lots of irregularity. Vowels fall out a lot, or syncopate, within words.

Cree adds noun classifiers to the mix, and both nouns and verbs are marked as animate or inanimate. In addition, verbs are marked for transitive and intransitive. In addition, verbs get different affixes depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses.

Cree and Ojibwa ares rated 5, hardest of all.

Plains Algonquian

Cheyenne is well-known for being a hard Amerindian language to learn. Like many polysynthetic languages, it can have very long words. náohkêsáa’oné’seómepêhévetsêhésto’anéhe – I truly don’t know Cheyenne very well.

Cheyenne is rated 5, hardest of all.

Uto-Aztecan

Numic

Comanche is legendary for being one of the hardest Indian languages of all to learn. Reasons are unknown, but all Amerindian languages are quite difficult. I doubt if Comanche is harder than other Numic languages. Bizarrely enough, Comanche has very strange sounds called voiceless vowels, which seems to be an oxymoron, as vowels would seem to be inherently voiced. English has something akin to voiceless vowels in the words particular and peculiar, where the bolded vowels act something akin to a voiceless vowel.

Comanche was used for a while by the codespeakers in World War 2 – not all codespeakers were Navajos. Comanche was specifically chosen because it was hard to figure out. The Japanese were never able to break the Comanche code.

Comanche is rated 5, hardest of all.

Quechuan

Quechua is said to be very hard to learn. Some say that Quechua speakers spend their whole lives learning the language.

Quechua is rated 5, hardest of all.

Oto-Manguean

Chinantec, an Indian language of southwest Mexico, is very hard for non-Chinantecs to learn. The tone system is maddeningly complex, and the syntax and morphology is very intricate.

Chinantec is rated 5, hardest of all.

Iroquoian

Cherokee is said to be very hard to learn. In addition to everything else, it has a completely different alphabet. It’s polysynthetic, to make matters worse. It is possible to write a Cherokee sentence that somehow lacks a verb. There are five categories of verb classifiers. Verbs needing classifiers must use one. Each regular verb can have an incredible 21,262 inflected forms! All verbs contain a verb root, a pronominal prefix, a modal suffix and an aspect suffix. In addition, verbs inflect for singular, plural and also dual. Number is marked for inclusive vs. exclusive.

Cherokee also have lexical tone, with complex rules about how tones may combine with each other. Tone is not marked in the orthography.

Cherokee is rated 5, most difficult of all.

Wintotoan

Bora, a Wintotoan language spoken in Peru and Colombia near the border between the two countries, has a mind-boggling 350 different noun classes.

Bora gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Tucanoan

Tuyuca is a Tucanoan language spoken in by 450 people in the department of Vaupés in Colombia. An article in The Economist magazine concluded that it was the hardest language on Earth to learn.

It has a simple sound system, but it’s agglutinative, and agglutinative languages are pretty hard. For instance, hóabãsiriga means I don’t know how to write. It has two forms of 1st person plural, I and you (inclusive) and I and the others (exclusive). It has between 50-140 noun classes, including strange ones like bark that does not cling closely to a tree, which can be extended to mean baggy trousers or wet plywood that has begun to fall apart.

Like Yamana, a nearly extinct Amerindian language of Chile, Tuyuca marks for evidentiality, that is, how it is that you know something. For instance:

Diga ape-wi. – The boy played soccer (I saw him playing).
Diga ape-hiyi. - The boy played soccer (I assume, though I did not see it firsthand).

Evidential marking is obligatory on all Tuyuca verbs and it forces you to think about how you know whatever it is you know.

Tuyuca definitely gets a 5 rating!

Australian

Australian Aborigine languages are said to be some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn, like Amerindian or Caucasian languages.

All Australian languages are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Papuan

Tor-Kwerba

Berik is a Tor-Kwerba language spoken in Indonesian colony of Irian Jaya in New Guinea.

Verbs take many strange endings, in many cases mandatory ones, that indicate what time of day something happened, among other things. Telbener – He drinks in the evening. Where a verb takes an object, it will not only be marked for time of day but for the size of the object. Kitobana – He gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight. Verbs may also be marked for where the action takes place in reference to the speaker. Gwerantena – To place a large object in a low place nearby.

Berik is rated 5 – hardest of all.

Afroasiatic

Semitic

Arabic has some very crazy manners of noun declension, even in the plural. For instance, the word girls changes in an unpredictable way when you say one girl, two girls and three girls, and there are two different ways to say two girls depending on context. Two girls is marked with the dual, but different dual forms can be used. All languages with duals are relatively difficult.

Further, it is full of irregular plurals similar to octopus and octopi in English, whereas these forms are rare in English. The language is full of stuff like that. When you say I love you to a man, you say it one way, and when you say it to a woman, you say it another way. On and on. There are 28 different symbols in the alphabet, four different ways to write each symbol depending on its place in the word, and on top of that, there are many different scripts. Consonants are written in different ways depending on where they appear in a word. An h is written differently at the beginning of a word than you would write it at the end of a word.

The laryngeals, uvulars and glottalized sounds are hard for many foreigners to make.

Arabic is at least as idiomatic as French or English, so it order to speak it right you have to learn all of the expressionistic nuances.

To attain anywhere near native speaker competency in Egyptian Arabic, you probably need to live in Egypt for ten years, but Arabic speakers say that few if any second language learners ever come close to native competency. There is a huge vocabulary, and most words have a wealth of possible meanings.

Arabic is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Maltese is a strange language, basically an Arabic language that has very heavy influence from non-Arabic tongues. It shares the problem of Gaelic that often words look one way and are pronounced another.

Maltese is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Hebrew is said to be hard to learn according to a number of Israelis. Part of the problem may be the abjad writing system, which often leaves out vowels. Also, other than borrowings, the vocabulary is Afroasiatic, hence mostly unknown to speakers to IE languages. There are also difficult consonants as in Arabic such as pharyngeals and uvulars.

Hebrew gets a 4 for extremely difficult.

Dravidian

Malayalam, a Dravidian language of India, was recently rated the hardest language of all to learn by the World Language Research Foundation. Tamil, a Dravidian language, is probably close to Malayalam in difficulty. Tamil has an incredible 247 characters in its alphabet. In addition, as with other languages, words are written one way and pronounced another. Both Tamil and Malayalam are very hard to pronounce and have complicated scripts.

Malayalam and Tamil are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Altaic

Most agree that Korean is a hard language to learn.

The alphabet, Hangul at least is reasonable; in fact, it is quite elegant. But there are 4 different Romanizations- Lukoff, Yale, Horne, and McCune-Reischauer – which is preposterous. It’s best to just blow off the Romanizations and dive straight into Hangul. This way you can learn Romanization later, and you won’t mess up your Hangul with spelling errors, as can occur if you go from Romanization to Hangul. Hangul can be learned very quickly, but learning to read Korean books and newspapers fast is another matter altogether.

Bizarrely, there are two different numeral sets used, but one is derived from Chinese so should be familiar to Chinese, Japanese or Thai speakers who use similar or identical systems.

Korean has a similar problem with Japanese, that is, if you mess up one vowel in sentence, you render it incomprehensible. Korean has a wealth of homonyms, and this is one of the tricky aspects of the language. Any given combination of a couple of characters can have multiple meanings. Pronunciation is easy, with the exception of morphing consonants at the end of the word that slide into the next word. One problem is that the b,  p,  j, ch, t and d are pronounced differently than their English counterparts.

Meanwhile, Korean has an honorific system that is even wackier than that of Japanese. However, the younger generation is not using the honorifics so much, and a foreigner isn’t expected to know the honorific system anyway. Speakers of Korean can learn Japanese fairly easily.

Korean is rated by language professors as being one of the hardest languages to learn.

Korean is rated 5, hardest of all.

Japonic

Japanese also uses a symbolic alphabet, which is odd in that even Japanese speakers will sometimes encounter written Japanese and will say that they don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t mean that they mispronounce it; that would make sense. I mean they don’t have the slightest clue how to say the word! This problem is essentially nonexistent in a language like English.

There are over 2,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way. Due to the large number of frequently used symbols, it’s said that even Japanese adults learn a new symbol a day a ways into adulthood.

The Japanese writing system is probably crazier than the Chinese writing system. Japanese borrowed Chinese characters. But then they gave each character several pronunciations, and in some cases as many as 24. Next they made two syllabaries using another set of characters, then over the next millenia came up with all sorts of crazy and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse.

Chinese uses 5-6,000 characters regularly, while Japanese only uses around 2,000. But in Chinese, each character has only one or maybe two pronunciations. In Japanese, there are complicated rules about when and how to combine the hiragana with the characters. These rules are so hard that many native speakers still have problems with them. There are also personal and place names (proper nouns) which are given completely arbitrary pronunciations often totally at odds with the usual pronunciation of the character.

Speaking Japanese is not as difficult as everyone says, and many say it’s fairly easy. However, there is a problem similar to English in that one word can be pronounced in multiple ways, like read and read in English. There is also a class of Japanese called “honorifics” that is quite hard to master. These typically effect verbs. Honorifics vary depending on who you are and who you are talking to. In addition, gender comes into play. One wild thing about Japanese is counting forms. You actually use different numeral sets depending on what it is you are counting! There are dozens of different ways of counting things.

Japanese grammar is often said to be simple, but that does not appear to be the case on closer examination. Particles are especially vexing. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs. Meanwhile, honorifics change the behavior of all words. There are particles like ha and ga that have many different meanings. One problem is that everything that all noun modifiers, even phrases, must precede the nouns they are modifying.

It’s often said that Japanese has no case, but this is not true. Actually, there are 7 cases in Japanese. The aforementioned ga is a clitic meaning nominative, made is terminative case, -no is genitive and -o is accusative.

In this sentence:

The plane that was supposed to arrive at midnight, but which had been delayed by bad weather, finally arrived at 1 AM.

Everything underlined must precede the noun plane:

Was supposed to arrive at quarter to three, but had been delayed by traffic accident the plane finally arrived at three-thirty.

Speaking Japanese is one thing, but reading and writing it is a whole new ballgame. It’s perfectly possible to know the meaning of every kanji and the meaning of every word in a sentence, but you still can’t figure out the meaning of the sentence because you can’t figure out how the sentence is stuck together in such a way as to create meaning.

However, Japanese grammar has the advantage of being quite regular. For instance, there are only four frequently used irregular verbs.

Like Chinese, the nouns are not marked for number or gender. However, while Chinese is forgiving of errors, if you mess up one vowel in a Japanese sentence, you may end up with incomprehension.

The real problem is that the Japanese you learn in class is one thing, and the Japanese of the street is another. One problem is that in street Japanese, the subject is typically not stated in a sentence. Instead it is inferred through such things as honorific terms or the choice of words you used in the sentence. Probably no one goes crazier on negatives than the Japanese. Particularly in academic writing, triple and quadruple negatives are common, and can be quite confusing.

Yet there are problems with the agglutinative nature of Japanese. It’s a completely different syntactic structure than English. Often if you translate a sentence from Japanese to English it will just look like a meaningless jumble of words. Although many Japanese learners feel it’s fairly easy to learn, surveys of language professors continue to rate Japanese as one of the hardest languages to learn. However, it’s generally agreed that Japanese is easier to learn than Korean. Japanese speakers are able to learn Korean pretty easily.

Japanese is rated 5, hardest of all.

Turkic

Turkish is often considered to be hard to learn, and it’s rated one of the hardest in surveys of language teachers, however, it’s probably easier than its reputation made it out to be. It is agglutinative, so you can have one long word where in English you might have a sentence of shorter words. One word is Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz?, meaning, Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian? Many words have more than one meaning.

There is no verb to be, which is hard for many foreigners. Instead, the concept is wrapped onto the subject of the sentence as a -dim or -im suffix. Turkish is an imagery-heavy language, and if you try to translate straight from a dictionary, it often won’t make sense. However, the suffixation in Turkish, along with the vowel harmony, are both very precise, and there are few if any exceptions.

Turkish is a language of precision in other ways. For instance, there are 8 different forms of subjunctive mood that describe various degrees of uncertainty that one has about what one is talking about. This relates to the evidentiality discussed under Tuyuca above. On Turkish news, verbs are generally marked with miş, which means that the announcer believes it to be true though he has not seen it firsthand

The Roman alphabet and almost mathematically precise grammar really help out.

Turkish is only rated 2, or moderately easy.

Finno-Ugric

Finnic

Finnish is very hard to learn, and even long-time learners often still have problems with it. You have to know exactly which grammatical forms to use where in a sentence. In addition, Finnish has 15 cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. This is hard to learn for speakers coming from a language with little or no case.

For instance, talo is the house, talon – house’s, taloa – some of the house, taloksi – into/as the house, talossa – in the house, talosta – from inside the house, taloon – into the house, talolla – on to the house, talolta – from beside the house, talolle – to the house, taloista – from the houses and taloissa – in the houses.

It gets much worse than that. This web page shows that the noun kauppa – shop can have 2,253 forms.

A simple adjective + noun noun phrase of two words can be conjugated in up to 100 different ways.

Adjectives and nouns belong to 20 different classes. The rules governing their case declension depend on what class the substantive is in.

As with Hungarian, words can be very long. For instance, lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas which means a non-commissioned officer cadet learning to be an assistant mechanic for airplane jet engines.

Finnish, oddly enough, always puts the stress on the first syllable. Finnish vowels will be hard to pronounce for most foreigners. However, Finnish has the advantage of being pronounced precisely as it is written. This is also part of the problem though, because if you don’t say it just right, the meaning changes. So, similarly with Polish, when you mangle their language, you will only achieve incomprehension. Whereas with say English, if a foreigner mangles the language, you can often winnow some sense out of it.

However, despite that fact that written Finnish can be easily pronounced, when learning Finnish, as in Korean, it is as if you must learn two different languages – the written language and the spoken language. A better way to put it is that there is “one language for writing and another for speaking.” You use different forms whether conversing or putting something on paper.

As in many Asian languages, there are no masculine or feminine pronouns. One redeeming feature of Finnish is a complete lack of consonant clusters. On the plus side, Finnish is very regular.

Finnish is rated 5, hardest of all.

Estonian has similar difficulties with Finnish, since they are closely related. Estonian has 14 cases, including strange cases such as the abessive, adessive, elative and inessive.

Estonian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ugric

It’s widely agreed that Hungarian is one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Even language professors agree. For one thing, there are many different forms for a single word via word modification. This enables the speaker to make his intended meaning very precise. Hungarian is said to have an incredible 35 different cases, but the actual number is probably just 18. Verbs change depending on whether the object is definite or indefinite. There are 5 different types of verb conjugations. Nearly everything in Hungarian is inflected, similar to Lithuanian or Czech.

The case distinctions alone can create many different words out of one base form. For the word house, we end up with 31 different words using case forms.

házba – into the house
házban – in the house
házból - from [within] the house
házra – onto the house
házon – on the house
házról – off [from] the house
házhoz – to the house
házíg – until/up to the house
háznál – at the house
háztól - [away] from the house
házzá – Translative case, where the house is the end product of a transformation, such as They turned the cave into a house.
házként – as the house, which could be used if you acted in your capacity as a house, or disguised yourself as one. He dressed up as a house for Halloween.
házért – for the house, specifically things done on its behalf, or done to get the house. They spent a lot of time fixing things up (for the house).
házul – Essive-modal case. Something like “house-ly” or “in the way/manner of a house.” The tent served as a house (in a house-ly fashion).

And we do have some basic cases:
ház - nominative. The house is down the street.
házat – accusative. The ball hit the house.
háznak - dative. The man gave the house to Mary.
házzal – Similar to instrumental, but more similar to English with. Refers to both instruments and companions.

The genitive takes 12 different declensions, depending on person and number.
házam – my house
házaim – my houses
házad – your house
házaid – hour houses
háza – his/her/its house
házai - his/her/its houses
házunk - our house
házaink – our houses
házatok - your house
házaitok - your houses
házuk - their house
házaik - their houses
egyház (literally one-house) means church, as in the Catholic Church.

There are also very long words such as megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. Being an agglutinative language, that word is made up of many small parts of words, or morphemes. That word means something like for your (you all possessive) repeated pretensions at being  impossible to desecrate.

Another long word is töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek.  And I’m not even really sure what that means.

The preposition is stuck onto the word in this language, and this will seem strange to speakers of languages with free prepositions.

Hungarian is full of synonyms, similar to English.

For instance, there are 78 different words that mean to move: halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál , andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál , bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér , botladozik, őgyeleg, slattyog, bandukol, lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng, csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol , tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog and mozgolódik .

Only about five of those terms are archaic and seldom used, the rest are in current use.

In addition, while most languages have names for countries that are pretty easy to figure out, in Hungarian even languages of nations are hard because they have changed the names so much. Italy becomes  Olazorszag, Germany becomes Nemetzorsag, etc.

As in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, word order is relatively free in Hungarian. Further, there are quite a few dialects in Hungarian. Native speakers can pretty much understand them, but foreigners often have a lot of problems. Accent is very difficult in Hungarian due to the bewildering number of rules to determine accent. In addition, there are exceptions to all of these rules. Nevertheless, Hungarian is probably more regular than Polish. Hungarian spelling is also very strange for non-Hungarians.

There are many irregularities in inflections, and even Hungarians have to learn how to spell of these in school and have a hard time learning this. Hungarian phonetics is also strange, and to make matters worse, there is tons of slang.

One of the problems with Hungarian phonetics is vowel harmony. Since you stick morphemes together to make a word, the vowels that you have used in the first part of the word will influence the vowels that you will use to make up the morphemes that occur later in the word. The vowel harmony gives Hungarian the “singing effect” when it is spoken. The gy sound is hard for many foreigners to make.

It’s hard to say, but Hungarian is probably harder to learn than even the hardest Slavic languages like Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Polish.

Hungarian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Sino-Tibetan

Sinitic

It’s fairly easy to learn to speak Mandarin at a basic level, though the tones can be tough. This is because the grammar is very simple. Short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. But with Japanese, you can keep learning, and with Chinese, you sort of hit a wall, often because the syntactic structure is so strangely different from English (isolating).

Actually, the grammar is harder than it seems. At first it seems simple, like a simplified English with no tense or articles. But the simplicity makes it difficult. No tense means there is no easy way to mark time in a sentence. Once you start digging into Chinese, there is a complex layer under all the surface simplicity. There is aspect, serial verbs, a complex classifier system, syntax marked by something called topic-prominence, a strange form called the detrimental passive, preposed relative clauses, use of verbs rather than adverbs to mark direction, and all sorts of general weirdness.

The alphabet uses symbols, so it’s not even a real alphabet. There are at least 85,000 symbols and actually many more, but it’s said you only need to know about 3,000 of them, and many Chinese don’t even know 1,000. Actually, you need to know a lot more than 3,000 characters to be proficient in Chinese. To be highly proficient in Chinese, you need 10,000 characters, and probably less than 5% of Chinese know that many.

It’s a real problem when you encounter a symbol you don’t know because there is no way to sound out the word. You are really and truly lost and screwed. Mandarin is similar to German in that you need to learn quite a bit of vocabulary just to speak simple sentences.

The tones are often quite difficult for a Westerner to pick up. If you mess up the tones, you have said a completely different word. Often foreigners who know their tones well nevertheless do not say them correctly, and hence, they say one word when they mean another.

A major problem with Chinese is homonyms. To some extent, this is true in many tonal languages. Since Chinese uses short words and is either monosyllabic or disyllabic, there is a limited repertoire of sounds that can be used. At a certain point, all of the sounds are used up, and you are into the realm of homophones.

Tonal distinctions is one way that monosyllabic and disyllabic languages attempt to deal with the homophone problem, but it’s not good enough, since Chinese still has many homophones, and meaning is often discerned by context. Chinese, like French and English, is heavily idiomatic.

It’s little known, but Chinese also uses different forms to count different things, like Japanese. Many agree that Chinese is the hardest to learn of all of the major languages. Language professors have rated Chinese as the hardest language on Earth to learn.

It gets a 5 rating for hardest of all.

However, Cantonese and Min Nan (Taiwanese) are even harder to learn than Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones to Mandarin’s 4, and in addition, they continue to use a lot of the older traditional Chinese characters that were superseded when China moved to a simplified script in 1949. Min Nan also has a more complex tone system. In addition, Cantonese has verbal aspect, possibly up to 20 different varieties. Furthermore, since non-Mandarin characters are not standardized, Cantonese cannot be written down as it is spoken.

Cantonese and Min Nan get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Austroasiatic

Mon-Khmer

Vietnamese is also hard to learn because to an outsider, the tones seem hard to tell apart. Therefore, foreigners often make themselves difficult to understand by not getting the tone precisely correct. It also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on. Vietnamese grammar is fairly simple, and reading Vietnamese is pretty easy once you figure out the tone marks. Words are short as in Chinese. However, the simple grammar is relative, as you can have 25 or more forms just for I, the 1st person singular pronoun.

Vietnamese gets 4, extremely difficult.

Khmer has a reputation for being hard to learn. I understand that it has one of the most complex honorifics systems of any language on Earth. Over a dozen different words mean to carry depending on what one is carrying. There are several different words for slave depending on who owned the slave and what the slave did. There are 28-30 different vowels, including sets of long and short vowels and long and short diphthongs. The vowel system is so complicated that there isn’t even agreement on exactly what it looks like.

Speaking it is not so bad, but reading and writing it is pretty difficult. For instance, you can put up to five different symbols together in one complex symbol.

Khmer gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Hmong-Mien

Hmong is widely spoken in this part of California, but it’s not easy to learn. There are eight tones, and they are not easy to figure out. It’s not obviously related to any other major language but the obscure Mien.

It has some very strange consonants called voiceless nasals. We have them in English as allophones – the m in small is voiceless, but in Hmong, they put them at the front of words – the m in the word Hmong is voiceless. These can be very hard to pronounce.

Hmong gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Austro-Tai

Austronesian

Malayo-Polynesian

Bahasa Indonesia and the related Malaysian are fairly easy languages to learn. For one thing, the grammar is dead simple. Verbs are not marked for tense at all. And the sound system of these languages, in common with Austronesian in general, is one of the simplest on Earth.

Bahasa Indonesia and Malaysian get a 1 rating for very easy.

However, Tagalog is considerably harder. Tagalog is an ergative-absolutive language, not a nominative-accusative language. In the former, phrases are marked not according to subject or object as in the latter, but according to whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. The subject of a transitive verb is marked one way, and the subject of an intransitive verb and object of a transitive verb are marked a second way.

Compared to many European languages, Tagalog syntax, morphology and semantics are often quite different. Unlike Malay, verbs conjugate quite a bit in Tagalog. However, articles and creation of adjectives from nouns is very easy. Compare ganda = beauty (noun) and maganda = beautiful (adjective).

Tagalog gets a 3 rating, moderately difficult.

Maori and other Polynesian languages are said to be quite hard to learn, but details are lacking.

Maori gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Kwaio is an Austronesian language spoken in the Solomon Islands. It has four different forms of number to mark pronouns – not only the usual singular and plural, but also the rarer dual and the very rare paucal.

For instance:

1 dual inclusive (you and I)
1 dual exclusive (I and someone else, not you)

1 paucal inclusive (you, I and a few others)
1 paucal exclusive (I and a few others)

1 plural inclusive (I, you and many others)
1 plural exclusive (I and many others)

Pretty wild!

Kwaio gets a 5, hardest of all.

Tai-Kadai

Thai is a pretty hard language to learn. There are over 100 symbols in the odd script, there are no spaces between words in the script, and vowels can come before, after, above or below consonants in any given syllable. There are five tones, including a neutral tone. Tones are determined by a variety of complex things, including a combination of tone marks, the class of consonants, if the syllable ends in a sonorant or a stop, and what the tone of the preceding syllable was.

There is a system of noun classifiers for counting various things, similar to Japanese. In addition, common to many Asian languages, there is a complicated honorifics system. The vowels are different than in many languages, and there are some odd diphthongs: eua, euai, aui and uu. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants.

Consonant pronunciations vary depending on the location of the syllable in the word – for instance, s can change to t. There are many vowels which are spoken but not written. There are many consonants that are pronounced the same – for instance, there are 6 different t’s, not counting the s’s that turn into t’s. The Thai script is definitely one of the most difficult phonetic scripts. Nevertheless, the Thai script is easier to learn than the Japanese or Chinese ones. In spite of all of that, the syntax is simple, like Chinese.

Thai gets a 4 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Niger-Kordofanian

Niger-Congo

Bantu

Bakjalukasha, a Bantu language spoken in Ivory Coast, is also said to be hard to learn. Many of these African languages are tonal and can be quite complex. They also divide nouns into different categories (noun classes) like Caucasian languages do. Further, they are often seriously inflected.

Bakjalukasha gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Nguni and Xhosa, two languages of South Africa, are quite difficult, with up to nine click sounds in both. Clicks only exist in one language outside of Africa, an Australian language, and are extremely difficult to learn. Even native speakers mess up the clicks sometimes. Nelson Mandela said he had problems making some of the click sounds in Xhosa.

Nguni and Xhosa get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Zulu and Ndebele also have these odd sounds. These languages also make plurals by changing the prefix of the noun, and the manner varies according the noun class. If you want to look up a word in the dictionary, first of all you need to discard the prefix. For instance, in Ndebele, river = umfula, rivers = imifula; but stone = ilitshe, stones = amatshe; yet tree = isihlahla, trees = izihlahla .

Zulu has pitch accent, tones and clicks. There are 9 different pitch accents, 4 tones and 3 clicks, but each click can be pronounced in 5 different ways. However, tones are not marked in writing, so it’s hard to figure out when to use them. Zulu also has depressor consonants, which lower the tone in the vowel in the following syllable. In addition, Zulu has multiple gender – 15 different genders. And some nouns behave like verbs.

Zulu and Ndebele both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

The African Bantu language Ga has a bad reputation for being a tough nut to crack. It is spoken in Ghana by about 600,000 people. It has 2 tones and engages in a strange behavior called tone terracing that is common to many West African languages. It also has many sounds that are not in any Western languages.

Ga gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Ndali is a Bantu language with 150,000 speakers spoken in Malawi and Tanzania. It has many strange tense forms. For instance, in the past tense:

Past tense A: He went just now.
Past tense B: He went sometime earlier today.
Past tense C: He went yesterday.
Past tense D: He went sometime before yesterday.

Future tense is marked similarly:

Future tense A: He’s going to go right away.
Future tense B: He’s going to go sometime later today.
Future tense C: He’s going to go tomorrow.
Future tense D: He’s going to go sometime after tomorrow.

Ndali gets a 5, hardest of all.

Khoisan

!Xóõ (Taa),spoken by only 4,200 Bushmen in Botswana and Namibia, is a notoriously difficult Khoisan language replete with the notoriously impossible to comprehend click sounds. Taa has anywhere from 130 to 164 consonants, possibly the largest phonemic inventory of any language. Of this vast wealth of sounds, there are anywhere from 30-64 different click sounds. In addition, there are four types of vowels: plain, pharyngealized, breathy-voiced and strident. On top of that, there are 4 tones. Speakers develop a lump on their larynx from making the click sounds.

Taa, gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Eskimo-Aleut

Inuktitut is said to be extremely hard to learn. Inuktitut is polysynthetic, and roots can take many suffixes, in some cases up to 700. However, suffixation is extremely regular. In a typical long Inuktitut text, 92% of words will occur only once. This is quite different from English and many other languages where certain words occur very frequently or at least frequently. Certain fully inflected verbs can be analyzed both as verbs and as nouns. Words can be very long. Inuktituusuungutsialaarungnanngittuaraaluuvunga – I truly don’t know how to speak Inuktitut very well.

Inuktitut is also rated one by linguists one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce. Inuktitut may be as hard to learn as Navajo.

Inuktitut is rated 5, hardest of all.

Paleosiberian

Chukchi is a polysynthetic languages, so clearly it must be hard to learn. In polysynthetic languages, very long words can denote an entire sentence, and it’s quite hard to take the word apart into its parts and figure out exactly what they mean and how they go together.

Chukchi gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Basque

Basque, of course, is just a crazy language altogether. There are 24 cases, and the verbs are quite complex. This is because it is an ergative language, so verbs vary according to the number of subjects and the number of objects and if any third person is involved.

If you don’t grow up speaking Basque, it’s hard to attain native speaker competence. It’s quite a bit easier to write in Basque than to speak it. Nevertheless, Basque verbs are quite regular. In fact, the entire language is quite regular. In addition, most words above the intermediate level are borrowings from large languages, so once you reach intermediate Basque, the rest is not that hard. In addition, on the plus side, pronunciation is straightforward.

Basque is rated 5, hardest of all.

In a small hamlet, near the town of Ollantaytambo, a few hundred devotees hold festivals in honor of the Virgen del Carmen, known locally as Mamacha Carmen, patron saint of the mestizo population. The gathering, that raises the curtain on these days of celebrations is held in the main square, where troupes of musicians play their instruments while richly dressed choirs sing in Quechua. The setting gives way to a series of ingenious choreographies that portray events in Peruvian history.  The main and much bigger celebration of Virgen Del Carmen is in the town of Paucartambo, about four hours from Cusco, Peru. Mountain Spirit Institute participants, guide Guillermo Seminario, and host Anna Sequeros are in this clip.
done

Nono : Car je veux déjà que l’année finisse.

En 2009 c’est le revival 20’s, les afghans de gare de l’est remettent à la mode la galle.

En 2009 la jungle ce n’était plus Tarzan et Cheeta mais Oslof et les associations.

En 2009 les gens ont travaillé plus pour sauver leurs jobs.

En 2009 on a remis le chômage central.

En 2009 la liberté d’expression s’est réduite sur Internet.

En 2009 on a abandonné toutes réflexions construites pour l’information (presqu’) en temps réel de Twitter.

En 2009 il fallait n’avoir que le bac pour se présenter à l’EPAD.

En 2009 les étudiants sont descendus dans la rue mais que dans les bons quartiers.

En 2009 il fallait réseauter socialement avec des cons qu’on déteste sur… les réseaux sociaux.

En 2009 les agriculteurs n’étaient pas contents contre l’Europe… comme l’année dernière.

En 2009 Mickael Jackson est devenu Christique.

En 2009 on a perdu la plupart des stars 80’s.

En 2009 un noir c’est fait élire au pays du KKK.

En 2009 aucun beur ne s’est fait élire au pays du fromage.

En 2009, il y’a eu un génocide au Gabon ?

En 2009 il existait des prostituées male de 40 ans en Thaïlande.

En 2009 on a cri(s)é.

En 2009 on se tuait à la tâche… surtout à France Telecom.

En 2009 personne ne peut t’expliquer clairement Clearstream.

En 2009 l’album de Carla Bruni comme si de rien n’était ne s’est pas vendu…comme si de rien n’était.

En 2009 L’otage franco-colombienne était humainement pire que ses propres tortionnaires.
En 2009 les auvergnats sont la cible d’attaque raciste.

En 2009 le mot anglais mood était très proche de mode.

Pablo :

En 2009 il fallait être cinéaste pour se faire pardonner sa pédophilie.

En 2009 le FN a lu des livres paru 4 ans plus tôt.

En 2009 on n’a pas parlé de “canicule”.

En 2009 on n’a pas non plus parlé des tentes Quechua.

En 2009 les anglais ont découvert que les matons racistes existaient… surtout dans les camps de rétention de demandeurs d’asile.

En 2009 des femmes ont été lapidées par des barbares.

En 2009 des noirs ont reçu une injection létale par d’autres barbares.

En 2009 quelques chanceux ont toutefois pu y échapper grâce à leur physionomie.

En 2009 tous les barbares n’avaient donc pas la même efficacité.

En 2009 des gens ont regretté Jacques Chirac, même des gauchistes.

En 2009 les bus n’avaient toujours pas d’air bag.

En 2009 les bus volants ont connu des turbulences.

En 2009 des rafales ont fait des étincelles.

En 2009 Marie Trintignant n’a pas ressuscité, pas plus que Noir Désir.

En 2009 la ligue 2 était plus intéressante que la ligue 1.

En 2009 l’affaire clearstream n’a fait peur à personne.

En 2009 le FMI a été harcelé sexuellement.

En 2009 Ségolène avait mauvaise haleine.

En 2009 la presse a perdu des lecteurs.

Nono :

En 2009, Sarkozy cassait le mur de berlin…en 1989.

En 2009, on aimait toujours les artistes, pas les majors.

En 2009, le grand politologue et scientifique Bigard nous apprenait que le 11 Septembre était un complot en se basant sur les propos des grands philosophes Cotillard et Kasovitz.

En 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort deux fois le même jour, une fois physiquement, l’autre fois quand BHL lui a rendu hommage

Si vous voulez rajouter votre pierre à l’édifice, marquez vos phrase en commentaire, sur twitter ou tatouez-le vous sur le bras.

Si la propuesta hubiere sido de cualquier otro cantante quizás podríamos haberlo considerado apenas un gesto publicitario, pero que un intérprete de la jerarquía de Juan Diego Flórez anuncie que cantará en quechua con Magaly Solier en el concierto que ofrecerá en el Callao el próximo 14 de noviembre, es una afirmación del valor que le reconoce al idioma materno de millones de sus compatriotas, y expresa el afecto por una artista que es, hoy en día, una de sus más importantes difusoras.

En su reciente aparición en “El show de los sueños”, el famoso tenor peruano ha informado que está aprendiendo quechua, para poder cantar a dúo con la también actriz ayacuchana. “El quechua es una lengua muy bonita e interesante, y aprenderlo es un tema de respeto, quiero pronunciarlo bien para honrar el trabajo de Magaly Solier”, ha dicho Juan Diego, quien además planea incluir un tema en quechua en su próximo disco.

Que Juan Diego Flórez haga pública su admiración por el quechua es positivo. Sirve para que otros artistas y ciudadanos reparen en lo hermoso y rico de un idioma que pese a ser oficial es postergado por quienes lo desconocen, e inclusive por muchos de sus propios parlantes.

Pero antes de Juan Diego fue Magaly Solier. Fue conmovedor escucharla durante el acto de premiación de “La teta asustada”, como mejor película del prestigioso festival de Berlín, cantando una hermosa tonada en quechua. La emoción de los presentes en esa gala, así como la de quienes pudimos verla a la distancia, fue muy grande. No solo era la primera vez que una película de nuestro país lograba un importante galardón, sino que fue la primera vez que un público como el del referido festival tuvo ocasión de escuchar y admirar el idioma quechua. Que manera tan bonita de conocerlo.

El quechua es bello, y sonará maravillosamente en el concierto del 14, tan es así que incluso otro de los destacados intérpretes que cantará allí, Pedro Suárez Vertiz, ha señalado “eso es algo que no me quiero perder. Me gustaría ser testigo vivencial de esto, voy a pedir que me pongan un plasma en mi camerino para no perderme ese momento, ver a los dos juntos, a Juan Diego y a Magaly Solier cantando en quechua, eso será inolvidable, me gustaría ser parte del público para no perderme ese momento porque será bien bonito, no puedo ni imaginarlo”.

Hemos escuchado al carismático Gianmarco Zignago hacer una preciosa interpretación, en quechua, de “Valicha”, el huayno más tradicional y popular del Cuzco. Seguramente muchos hemos vibrado también cuando escuchamos “Tusuy Kusun”, en la voz de Damaris, canción que le permitió ganar la competencia folklórica del Festival de Viña del Mar 2008. Que el quechua sea aprendido y admirado por tan talentosos artistas es positivo, pero aún habrá que hacer mucho para que sea por todos respetado.

Para lograrlo bien podría empezarse por transmitirlo, y eso es algo que puede hacerlo mucha gente en Ayacucho, y en nuestro país. Si usted conoce y habla el quechua, enséñeselo a sus hijos. Será un acto de amor por lo nuestro, y por los suyos.

photo by makelessnoise

“There’s the llama, look!”

Above me were a billion, tiny stars, shining brighter than the sequins of a Las Vegas showgirl, but no llama.

“To the left. Up a bit. Near the Southern Cross.”

Squinting hard and shivering with the cold, I scanned the skies again. Faced with such an all-singing, all-dancing celestial light-show, it seemed ungracious to be focussing on the shadows.

Then I saw it; a black swathe of cloud that looked uncannily like a llama grazing happily among the stars.

Northern Chile, with its clear dark skies is considered to be one of the best places in the world for star-gazing. It’s less well-known for its llamas. But for the indigenous Quechua/Aymara peoples of the high plateaus, the Milky Way is a mirror of life on earth. As there are few sightings of archers or water-carriers in these parts, it’s no surprise that the heavens are a veritable Noah’s Ark of foxes, armadillos and condors.

Once I got used to spotting constellations made of ‘dark stains’, I found it hard to stop. To the horror of my astronomy-loving friend, I pointed out a man riding a turtle and Bob Dylan.

As we walked further away from the lights of Pisco Elqui, I stopped dead. A huge, dark, majestic mass was taking shape in the sky. What was it?

“Is that …is that, the condor?”

“Urm, no”.

There was a long pause as my mental well-being was clearly being brought into question.

“That’s the Andes”.

www.gowander.com

Located 65km southeast of Sucre, the small indigenous village of Tarabuca is famous for the festival of Phujllay (meaning ’to play’ in Quechua).  The village is also well-known for its beautiful weavings and colorful, sprawling Sunday market.  The people of Tarabuco are easily identified by their traditional dress; woven red, maroon or black ponchos and decorative hats. 

Chewing coca leaves is common practice throughout much of Bolivia.  Apparently, chewing the leaves helps to eliminate hunger, eases the effects of the cold and provides energy.  The leaves are sold very inexpensively just about everywhere.  Pictured above are two local men in the traditional dress of Tarabuco shopping for coca leaves in the market.

During the fall of 2008 I had the privilege to serve alongside one of our South American Extreme Teams at 13,000 feet.  A major prayer request that I shared upon my return has now be answered.  Read on and rejoice with me… 

Good News, posted by former journeyman and Extreme Team member M 

Many of you were with me from the beginning when I started working with the Quechua.  Our first trip we went to a small village called Q where we left because the whole town was drunk.  We went back and were able to work a day with the mayor only to be asked to leave the next day because the people did not want us there. The second time in two days we were at the point of wiping the dust off our feet but before we left an elderly woman asked us to come back to work with her husband and she would cook us good food.  This was enough hope to bring us back.  

Many months later we returned with that promise though never to find that sweet elderly woman.   We stayed in this small hut and worked with several different people in the community.  Working like dogs those couple of weeks, we woke up every day not knowing if we were going to get food or work and even dreading the food and work we would receive.  In the last week of that trip we met a man, whom we nicknamed “Don”.  Ironically we had never met the owner of that small hut where we stayed and it turned out to be Don who became our “Man of Peace”. 

The next trip my partner, A, told the parable of the lost sheep to which Don said he felt like the lost sheep.  It was clear to us that we had a place to start the work with a man who was interested in the stories.  We came back months later to start the stories of the Bible and the two weeks we were there we face much spiritual warfare, losing Don’s confidence and almost losing our place to stay.  We were at the point of wiping the dust off our feet but once again God gave us enough hope to continue on.  We thought we had a different man to tell the stories of the Bible.  

Returning for my last trip we thought we would do the stories with that different man of the community and just use Don for our place to stay and to work and to eat.  That man never showed up much to our discouragement but Don asked if we could teach him the stories.  It was all the Holy Spirit working in His heart.  From that point on he had a burning desire to learn the stories of God’s redemption of man.  We got to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which was the last story I told (leaving on a high note, eh?)  Then I left to come back to the states. 

The work was continued through the most incredible men of God.  My Colombian partner, Ef, and J from Peru and R from Argentina, also J from the States kept telling the stories getting to the death and resurrection of Christ.  They have worked so very hard this year to see these people hear the Good News of Christ. Facing many a trial and tribulation they have not given up and it has been my greatest joy to hear of their work and sacrifice. God has blessed them as well.  On this last trip the last story told was Pentecost to which Don said he wanted to get baptized!  All to the praise and glory of our King! 

There have been so many obstacles along the way including but not limited to being asked to leave on more than one occasion, having no food, no work, working too much, being in danger by the political climate, lack of funding, lack of interest, warring within and without; it has been a long road.  I am thankful for every step because it bears His mark that only He could have done any of it.  I left greeting this promise from afar, the promise that God was not done with Q yet.  

The Quechua culture in Q is much like the pagan cultures back during the time of the New Testament where the gods were angry and had to be appeased.  The Good News was that Christ had killed the hostility between man and God, and that man could be loved by God who is love.  In the postmodern culture it is almost like we have to give bad news (that of our sinfulness before a Holy God) before the Gospel (dying to our sin so we can live in Him) can be Good News. 

I share this Good News with everyone because everyone that has read this blog and prayed God used to bring this man to His throne of grace.  Thank you for your prayers.  He is our joy and our salvation and He is doing a work above and beyond anything we could ever imagine.  Christ is our Good News.  In Him we have life and our joy and there is nothing else that satisfies.  I praise Him for the miracle He is doing in Q and with Don.  Please continue to pray for the work done there and pray for E, J, and R.  God willing there will be more to be baptized on this following trip, more added to the Kingdom, and more to tell the Good News of Christ, our hope, our life, and our joy.  

Praise God from whom on blessings flow, praise Him creatures here below, praise Him above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy, Ghost.  Amen.

 Please take time to record your thankful prayer in the comments.

The entry below is a response to the book Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance, written by my sociolinguistics professor, Dr. Nancy Hornberger.  It is an ethnography of language policy written during the eighties while she was living and researching in Puno, Peru. I used an article by Martin-Jones as a lens for understanding Dr. Hornberger’s work.

The schools of a nation can be seen as stages where the society’s larger power struggles are enacted. In a review of research practices and discourses on bilingual education, Martin-Jones (2007) writes, “The commitment to developing a critical approach arose out of a shared concern with the ways in which educational policies and classroom practices contribute to the reproduction of asymmetries of power between groups with different social and linguistic resources” (p. 171). Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance (Hornberger, 1988) is an example of this critical approach in a postcolonial setting. While language can be cast as a power commodity, Hornberger’s research finds identity and language inseparable and, in some cases, interchangeable. Within this context, I argue that bilingual education could be used as either an agent for positive change and affirmation of usually subordinated identities (immigrants, minorities), or as an agent for maintaining the status quo of the white, western face of the world.

Quechua speakers, a marginalized Andean identity, are strongly tied to their communities, and their communities are represented by the Quechua language. Much of Hornberger’s book (ibid) is based on the premise that the language, community, and speaker form a circle of identity (p. 75). Just as their identity is permanent to them, the Quechua language is seen as permanent to its speakers. However, as Hornberger concludes, the future of the language is ambiguous at best, and must be actively maintained through extra-linguistic sources like media and societal roles in order to survive (p. 225). Otherwise, the Quechua identify, along with the language (or vise versa) will be subsumed in the dominant colonial identity. Education can potentially prevent this, but as seen below, it depends on the method employed.

In Peru, the general model of education used for Quechua speaking children was one of Spanish submersion.  If successful, this type of model leads to what Martin-Jones (2007) discussed as subtractive bilingualism, “A shift on the part of the learner to his or her second language and subsequent loss of his or her first language” (p. 167). While the student is gaining access to the tools of power, she is using a traditional and transitional channel to achieve her goal, and her fist language and identity are abandoned. The PEEB, a bilingual approach, was an attempt on the policy level to both address this devaluing of Quechua and to improve educational opportunities for the rural poor (Horberger, 1988). However, the greater use of Quechua in the classroom could be a factor in the overall phase-out of the language, as it was a means to an end. Spanish fluency was still the overall goal, and access to the roles of the dominant society were still emphasized.

The conclusion of Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance (ibid) instructs that a language-as-resource policy and a two-channel approach will lead to a beginning of new power discourses. As an ESOL instructor, to use methods that do not, “reproduce existing relations of dominance” in the bilingual classroom, I must ensure that the subordinate language is valued by the curriculum (Martin-Jones, p. 174).

Martin-Jones, M. (2007).  Bilingualism, education, and the regulation of access to language resources. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 161-182).  New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Hornberger, N. H. (1988). Bilingual education and language maintenance. Providence: Foris Publications