Kaufmen and Language Learning

My favourite Kaufman would have to be Charlie. Charlie Kaufman has penned what I consider some of the most entertaining and intelligent films made- Adaptation is one of my favourites. Particularly notable for me was the line "I can be that cool script writer guy who speaks Chinese".
His twin-brother Donald Kaufman was most charming, and we shall miss him dearly*.

Andy Kaufman too was a memorable wag- the Tony Clifton character of his particularly.

But theres a new Kaufman on the block. In fact he one-ups all previous contestants with the addition of an extra 'n'.

I came across Steve Kaufmann whilst checking out the entertaining series on YouTube "Westerners Speaking Cantonese". That series, by the way, is a total monkey-act, no doubt about it. But just like a Russian cat-show, it's worth the price of admission.

And so I stumbled across Kaufmann, having an interview partly in English, and partly in Mandarin. That's here. Hilarious, by the way, is the interviewer, with his unintentional comic timing. But what do you know? Kaufmann's Mandarin is very good. Not as good as Da Shan or Da Niu, to be sure (Kaufmann has a bit of an accent compared to them), but way better than mine, and Kaufmann apparently speaks 8 languages in addition. Very impressive.

Anyway, he offers his opinion on language-learning, and some of them I find quite agreeable.

In particular:

• It's probably a waste of time to ask why. As in, asking "Why do Chinese people say this?" This used to happen a lot in my Chinese classes, particularly in the introductory level. It hardly ever happens, though, in the advanced conversational classes, because by now we've just accepted the obvious and unchangeable. And most of those who asked 'why' all the time dropped Chinese out of frustration. It probably only rears its head again at the linguistic level, and that's cool then. But if your goal is to learn the language (as opposed to learning about the language), all that effort is probably better spent remembering what they say rather than why they say it, at least while you're still learning.
  
• Reading and listening are really important yet often overlooked. In particular, reading something that you find interesting, and something that isn't too hard. For me, I love to read interviews with Christopher Doyle. His Chinese is very, very good, but not so native-like as Da Shan whereby he speaks only in obscure idioms and such. And most importantly, I'm really interested in what Doyle has to say.
  
• Consistency seems to be more effective than pure volume. Take me as an example: This semester most of my time spent on Russian was on a Tuesday and a Wednesday. Tuesday was getting all the homework done at the last minute, and Wednesday was 4 hours of class. Other than that, I didn't do much. And I tanked Russian last semester! Yet my Chinese workload was spread out so that I was doing a bit each day, and I've been quite a spot more successful with it.
• Learn contextually, and don't get anxious. If you're worried about getting the sentence right, you won't. And since you're prone to get it wrong anyway, why worry about it? Just relax, speak, and the native speaker will tell you what you're doing wrong. This is also much more memorable (for me at least) than reading the line out of a textbook. Most of the words that I have in my long-term memory I learned contextually, either from watching a film, reading an interview, or chatting with a friend. Not from studying a word list.

Kaufmann writes a blog, too.

So some qualifying statements. I don't want to downplay the importance of linguistics. For an excellent example of applied linguistics which is useful to a language learner, look no further than John Pasden's excellent article on pronouncing Chinese. Linguistics is also a fascinating area, and I'd be lying if I said I don't admire socio-linguists for the insights they give to a language, which as an added extra can also aid greatly in memorizing Chinese characters, for example. But, in the earlier stages, I'm not convinced one needs to know a whole lot about it.

Also, I don't want to downplay the importance of textbooks and grammar patterns. There are times when you just need to know how a word functions. Good textbooks provide patterns which are easy to follow, and things progress in a logical fashion. And at a translation level, I would think that you do need to know exactly what a word implies and what the closest thing to an equivalent is.

So far there is just one point of contention I might have with Kaufmann, when he states that vocabulary is far more important than grammar. I suppose that depends upon what he means by grammar. If he means those big, nasty books of pure grammar, then I wholeheartedly agree. But there's a difference between that, and knowing the basic cogs of a language. Like knowing the order involved in basic sentence construction. Or knowing what a verb is, what an adjective is, and so on. And I don't see a lot of use in knowing a whole bunch of words in say, Russian, and having no idea of how to conjugate them. You just won't be understood.

But regardless, his point is a pertinent one- spend lots of time working on your vocabulary!

Finally, a question I think is worth asking. Would you rather speak two or (if you're lucky) three languages with native fluency, or 9 languages pretty damn fluently? I don't have the proper answer to that, except to say that I'm focusing on Chinese for the foreseeable future, and any Russian I can come to terms with along the way is a bonus.



*Yes, I'm kidding about Donald.