 When finding your car requires divine intervention.
My husband and I had taken our daughter on her first trip to Israel several months after her Bat Mitzvah. After visiting the Ein Gedi spring near the Dead Sea, an excursion she enjoyed, then hiking under the blazing sun to tour ancient ruins, which she did not appreciate, we decided to make our way back to our rental car. We didn't know how to get to the parking lot but fortunately chanced upon a local on our way back.
After rehearsing "Excuse me, sir, where is the parking lot?" in Hebrew a few, oh, hundred times in my head, I approached him and very carefully (and nervously) articulated my well-rehearsed phrase.
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Pretend to pronounce.
Are you frustrated by how difficult it is to pronounce a new language? Don't be. There are easy things you can do to get better, and you're never too old to improve your pronunciation if you really work on it.
First, know that listening to native speakers on your language CDs, radio, television, or music, even passively, does a lot for your pronunciation skills. So, load up your MP3 player with any kind of foreign language audio, and never put it down. You need to train your ear and learn to hear the sounds clearly in order to be able to pronounce them well.
But distinguishing sounds well is just one part of the job.
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Little words such as pronouns—I, you or we—carry more important meaning than we usually give them credit for. If you listen more closely to the political speeches that are everywhere around us in this exciting election year, you'll notice that the candidates use the pronouns in rather picturesque ways. I'm particularly thinking of the pronoun we.
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Also on the blog this month:
Make Mine a Quaranta Have you ever thought about what it means to order a venti coffee?
Are you a jerk, or just a creep? New languages are formed by sudden, possibly violent, disruptions.
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 ...all the colors of the rainbow?
Of course, in order to answer that, you first need to know how many colors there are. Believe it or not, that information varies from language to language.
A common example of this is with the colors blue and green, which are of course different colors in English and would be counted as such in a census of the rainbow. However, these colors are covered by a single term in Vietnamese, xahn.
Does this mean that a Vietnamese person is incapable of distinguishing blue from green? That would be pretty wild, suggesting that language determines how we experience reality.
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