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If I could have a Superpower...
Well. Flying and smashing and being superstrong might all be cool... but if I'd get to choose a superpower, it would be Universal Incredible Language Skills - as in speak, read, and understand any language like a talented native speaker. toBecause that would make things so much easier. Archaeologists still publish their research in their home language, usually, so if you are looking for things outside your own country or language area, you need to at least know about some basic terms in your goal language to have a chance of finding stuff.
On a side note - there's pros and cons for publishing in your home language as well, of course. If you publish in English, you might have colleagues in your own area who don't find the research; if you publish in your language, it won't be as visible from outside your language area. Unless, of course, your home language is English. Then you're lucky - though you might then be one of the people who, when young, never got far with learning a foreign language because you could always get by with your own...)
Anyways, I was able to find a lot of non-German and non-English articles and books and publications when I was working on my thesis, and had to brush up my language reading skills considerably to be able to handle them. For some of the very exotic things, I had help from friends and family (my Dad was able to help with the Czech articles, and I had friends and fellow students help with Polish, and Icelandic; plus people to ask about the finer points of Middle High German. I also had some help for the not-so-exotic-but-still-hard-for-me Italian.
I was a lucky lady to find all that help. It didn't hurt either that I quite like languages, and that I had lessons in English, French, and Latin in school (though I was so bad at Latin that it doesn't really count), and learned a bit of Dutch, Spanish, and Swedish while at Uni. In most of the languages I can read, my passive understanding skills are way, way, WAY better than my active skills - which is to say I can read simple everyday things in newspapers and more or less understand the gist of them; I can read archaelogical papers and understand them (better than the news in most cases, funnily); but I will have a hard time understanding spoken language and will probably not be able to speak beyond very limited, very simple short sentences. I also have a sort of mashed-up language slurry in my brain for some groups; for instance, I read "Generic Scandinavian" and it will take me a while and some thinking to be able to tell Danish or Norwegian apart. Telling those apart from Swedish is easier, but I will still have to take a second look. My Spanish is so bad that it once took an Italian guy about 15 minutes of me talking at him to realise it was Spanish, not Italian. (It was a fun conversation nevertheless.)
So. Superpower of choice - Universal Language Skills.
In case you should happen to have them, or in case you happen to read Finnish, you can find the original documentation of excavations, plus a lot of other resources, at Kulttuuriympäristön Palveluikkuna. Have fun!
Comments 9
The first years of the National Curriculum in England removed teaching of a lot of grammar and language structure in English (as you can probably tell from this sentence). This meant that when starting to learn a second language at 11, no one knew or understood how their first language worked. The second language was an entirely new set of ideas that no one met outside the 2 hrs of lessons a week, so there were no examples to encourage practice or learning. The assumption in the content and approach of the second language lessons was that it could simply be bolted on to a full understanding of structure and working of the first language, which didn't exist.
Anyone struggling with English was excused a second language as early as possible. Everyone else was left in permanent confused frustration and dropped the second language as quickly as possible, replacing it with a subject they could succeed at which offered better grades and opportunities.
As an adult, learning a second language is still seen as impossible, especially to a standard that allows it to be useful, but the impact of not understanding the first language is still visible: my PhD was proofread by someone two years older than me, who had been taught language structure, who found a mistake about every second line.
Oh, yes, that would be a great super-power. As a native English-speaker, I have a massive advantage. However, trying to learn a language as an adult (Swedish) and ... oh, boy, it is HARD.
Technically, I have high school-level qualifications in French and Spanish. In reality, I got through that almost entirely due to my love of history, biology and fantasy books (and thus my large English vocabulary). You can guess your way through a lot of high school French if you know, e.g. not only the English words 'work' and 'job' but also 'travail'.
My manager and I visit Germany at least annually. When the brexit vote happened, we sat sadly and quietly, asking each other, "How are we meant to learn German before December?!" His point was that as two registered professionals we'd need a much higher level of fluency to top-up training and function in an equivalent role. The whole thing was overwhelming.
I’m trying to teach German (an increasingly abandoned second foreign language) in Scottish schools where teaching of grammatical structures in English was also abandoned long-ago. Classes of entirely mixed ability pupils, born speaking the most widely-spoken and understood language for a large part of the world they live in... It’s an uphill struggle to convince the majority of its value.