Monat: Oktober 2020

The race for the American presidency is entering the final phase. More than ever, the outcome of this election will affect the whole world. If you are looking for an honest, funny and consistently insightful commentator of American politics, you should give the young New Yorker Kyle Kulinski a chance. I believe his YouTube show  „Secular Talk“  to be one of the best sources of information about the American political scene.

Kyle Kulinski’s strengths lie in his focus on policy, his sound understanding of the American political system and his uncanny ability to see through the empty rhetoric and the platitudes deployed by both Democrats and Republicans.  With the sensitivity of the talented satirist, he constantly ridicules the deception and pompousness so common in the current American political discourse. His delivery mixes straightforward analysis and commentary with stand-up style interludes and personal anecdotes.

He is extremely critical of the militarism so characteristic of American foreign policy, a position that might seem radical in the United States but is perfectly compatible with the mainstream of opinion in Germany.  Since his target audience is the younger segment of the population in United States, his videos are short and easy to understand even for a non-native viewers.

Unlike CNN or MSNBC  hosts, Kulinski doesn’t pretend to be impartial. He identifies as a social democrat and is one of the co-founders of the influential „Justice Democrats“,  the group the popular Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes out of.  To fully understand what his self-identification means, it’s important to keep in mind that the political spectrum in the United States differs significantly from its German counterpart.

From a German perspective, both the Democrats and the Republicans could be described as right-wing parties, especially when it comes to issues like health care, gun ownership and the use of military force. Bernie Sander’s „socialism“, for example, in some aspects would be a better fit for the „SPD“, the German social democrats,  than „Die Linke“, the actual socialist party represented in the German parliament.

Similarly, Kulinski’s version of  a „social democratic“ way of thinking is in some aspects more similar to the left wing of the FDP, the German liberal party. He argues for broad scale drug legalization, for example.  In keeping with the American mainstream,he supports the Second Amendment, i.e. the right to gun ownership, even though he does advocate for background checks and more stringent regulation.

The fact that the YouTube host is open about his political beliefs, what he calls his „ideology“, serves to make him  more credible and his commentary less biased.  While at CNN and MSNBC, the allegiance to the Democratic Party establishment is hidden behind a veneer of objectivity,  Kulinski makes a clear and honest distinction between his agenda and his analysis. Unlike most his mainstream media counterparts, he is even able to give President Trump credit when he deserves it.

The 32-year-old Kulinski is a great example of the beneficial effects social media can still have. Remember when that was what everybody talked about? The democratization of access, giving voice to voiceless, the Facebook revolutions? Seems a long time ago now, when the discourse, especially in the US,  has shifted to the dangers and downsides of the new media environment.

While there is a fair amount of hostility from Kulinski and other You Tubers towards mainstream media outlets like CNN, the YouTubers couldn’t exist without them. The majority of their material is drawn from mainstream media reporting and acts as a corrective to its shortcomings.

In the current apocalyptic atmosphere, „Secular Talk“ can serve as a reminder that there are many positive aspects to digitalization and the rise of social media. More than anything, commentators like Kyle Kulinski show that simplistic ideas about one form of media replacing another are inaccurate.

Check out the videos below and decide for yourself!

 

Links

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eine praktische Anleitung am Beispiel der Weltsprache

„Der Bär bringt eine Ente zur Welt“, „Der Ingenieur ist im Kühlschrank“ oder wie wäre es mit „Die Zwiebel frisst das Mädchen.“ Das sind echte Beispiele aus Duolingo-Übersetzungsübungen. Duolingo ist eines der weltweit beliebtesten Lernportale. Auffallend ist, dass die Plattform unter der gefälligen, an ein Computerspiel erinnernden Benutzeroberfläche auf die älteste Methode des Sprachlernens zurückgreift: die Grammatik-Übersetzungsmethode. Diese Methode, für die Ausbildung von Übersetzern weiterhin unverzichtbar, war bereits im Mittelalter populär.

Wir wissen, dass Spracherwerb auf diese Weise nicht gut funktioniert. Spracherwerb ist ein unbewusster Prozess, er findet statt, wenn wir Botschaften verstehen. Der traditionelle Ansatz, immer noch die Methode der Wahl für die meisten Schulen und Plattformen, ist ineffektiv, weil der Schwerpunkt auf der Form und nicht auf dem Inhalt liegt. Die Betonung liegt auf dem „Wie“ und nicht auf dem „Was“, auf Struktur und Grammatik und nicht auf Sinn und
Bedeutung, auf interessanten Ideen und wertvollen Informationen.
So gelangt man zu „Die Zwiebel isst ein Mädchen“ und den anderen bizarren Beispielen. Das soll nicht heißen, dass formbasierte Ansätze überhaupt nicht funktionieren. Für Anfänger funktioniert jede Lernmethode bis zu einem gewissen Grad. Dazu gehört auch die Grammatik-Übersetzungsmethode, die heutzutage im Sprachunterricht verpönt ist, aber in der digitalen Welt eine Renaissance erlebt.

Zur Ehrenrettung von Duolingo lässt sich sagen, dass es tatsächlich dabei hilft, sich Wörter einzuprägen, wenn man sie mit skurrilen Bildern verknüpft. Der Bär bringt eine Ente zur Welt. Auf Spanisch hieße das: „El oso esta pariendo un pato.“ Lesen Sie den Satz einmal laut. Jetzt schließen Sie die Augen, stellen sich bildlich vor wie ein Bär eine Ente zur Welt bringt und wiederholen Sie den Satz. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Sie sich zumindest die spanischen Worte für Bär, „oso“  und Ente, „pato“ eine Zeitlang in Erinnerung behalten ist nun wesentlich höher, als wenn Sie den Satz einfach nur übersetzt
hätten.

Nicht lernen, erwerben

Bevor ich darauf komme, was zu tun ist, um eine Sprache wirklich zu beherrschen, ist es notwendig, den Unterschied zwischen Sprachlernen und Spracherwerb deutlich zu machen. Sprachlernen ist was während des Sprachunterrichts geschieht: Rollenspiele und Sprechübungen aller Art, Grammatikübungen und Vokabeltraining und Übersetzungsübungen wie z.B. auf Duolingo. Auch das Erstellen und Auswendiglernen von Vokabellisten gehört dazu.

Spracherwerb ist was geschieht, wenn wir Botschaften in der Zielsprache verstehen, wenn wir uns auf das „Was“ und nicht auf das „Wie“ konzentrieren. Es ist der unbewusste, implizite Prozess des Erwerbs von Wortschatz und Struktur. Spracherwerb ist was geschieht, wenn Kinder ihre Muttersprache lernen. Auch Erwachsene haben eine Fremdsprache erworben, nicht gelernt, wenn es ihnen gelingt, sie souverän zu beherrschen.

Diese Unterscheidung ist aus verschiedenen Gründen von großer Bedeutung: Es ist möglich, ein wenig von einer Sprache auf
viele verschiedene Arten zu lernen. Eine Sprache zu meistern, sie souverän oder „verhandlungssicher“ zu beherrschen ist nur
über einen ausgedehnten Prozess des Spracherwerbs möglich.  Der Prozess des Spracherwerbs hört nie auf, denn wir lernen ja auch in unserer Muttersprache immer neue Wörter dazu.

Es geht nicht um ein „Entweder /Oder“ zwischen explizitem Sprachlernen und impliziten Spracherwerb. Ohne eine Basis in der Zielsprache, die über explizites Sprachlernen gelegt wird, ist für erwachsene Lerner der Schritt zum impliziten Spracherwerb nicht möglich.  Ohne den darauffolgenden  Prozess des Spracherwerbs ist eine Beherrschung der Zielsprache auf hohem Niveau ebenso unmöglich. Entscheidend ist, sich nicht puristisch auf einen Ansatz zu versteifen. Auch Anfänger können unter bestimmten Umständen implizit lernen und Fortgeschrittene profitieren vom expliziten Sprachlernen,  beispielsweise von punktuellen Grammatikerklärungen und Ubüngen, sowie dem Nachschlagen von Wörtern, die sich nicht eindeutig aus dem Kontext erschliessen.

Wichtig ist, auf dem Weg zu einem höheren Niveau der Sprachkompetenz die Betonung zunehmend weniger auf das „Wie“ und mehr auf das „Was“ zu legen. Wenn die Inhalte interessant sind und dazu anregen, sich weiter mit dem Thema zu beschäftigen, wenn die Kommunikation sinnvoll ist und Sprache als Werkzeug der Vermittlung dient, dann werden sie abgespeichert, dann „bleiben sie hängen.“ Desto formbasierter, verwässerter und langweiliger die Inhalte, desto weniger wird dieses Ziel erreicht. Um eine Sprache auf hohem Niveau zu beherrschen müssen eine Vielzahl von Informationen abgespeichert werden;  nicht nur eine große Anzahl von Wörtern, sondern auch Nuancen der Bedeutung und Verwendung in unterschiedlichen Situationen.

Um zu veranschaulichen, was ich damit meine, schauen wir uns die Wortanzahl der englischen Sprache an: Das Standardwörterbuch „Webster’s Dictionary“ kommt auf 470.000 Einträge. Das ist eine noch eher geringe Zahl, es gibt andere Schätzungen, die regionale Dialekte, Slang und Fachjargons miteinbeziehen. Dann ist man schnell bei über einer Million Wörtern. Englisch ist – und zwar mit großem Abstand – die Sprache mit den meisten Wörtern.

Zu viel zu lernen

Niemand kennt oder verwendet natürlich all diese Wörter. Tests zeigen, dass Muttersprachler zwischen 20 000 und 35 000 Tausend Wörter kennen und verwenden. Setzen wir für einen Zweitsprachler, der Englisch auf hohem Niveau beherrschen will, ein konservatives Ziel: 18 000 Wörter. Das Auswendiglernen der 18 000 Wörter wäre nur ein Ziel, das der Lerner erreichen muss.

Er müsste auch den angemessenen Gebrauch der Wörter erlernen und die Unterschiede im Sprachniveau, z.B. formell oder informell, verstehen. Wann ist es angebracht, „beipflichten“ statt „zustimmen“ zu sagen? Welches ist das richtige Wort, wenn Sie den Ausdruck ironisch verwenden möchten? Ganz zu schweigen von Grammatik, Rechtschreibung und Interpunktion, den Unterschieden zwischen britischem und amerikanischem Englisch, den kulturellen Bezügen und so weiter und so fort. Für den Durchschnittsmenschen ist es einfach unmöglich, all dies bewusst zu lernen. Und es geschieht auch nie.

Wenn Menschen eine Fremdsprache auf einem hohen Niveau beherrschen, dann deshalb, weil sie sie über einen längeren
Zeitraum erfolgreich erworben haben. Sie haben viel gehört und gelesen, sie haben eine große Zahl von Botschaften in der Zielsprache verstanden. Oder, um den Fachjargon zu verwenden: Sie waren über einen längeren Zeitraum einem hohen Volumen an „verständlichem Input“ ausgesetzt.

Das Erkennen von Pornographie

Was genau versteht man unter „verständlichem Input“? In der Angewandten Linguistik wird seit Jahren darüber diskutiert;
wir halten uns einfach an die berühmte Definition, die ein britischer Richter angeblich für Pornographie vorgeschlagen hat: Sie werden es wissen, wenn Sie es sehen. Um ein Beispiel zu geben: Wenn Sie sich auf der Stufe C1 finden, also schon fortgeschrittene Kenntnisse haben, stellt eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit zum Thema Psychologie, die Sie in Ihrer Muttersprache nur mühsam verstehen, keinen verständlichen Input dar. Ein klar geschriebenes populärwissenschaftliches
Buch zum gleichen Thema, das keine besonderen Vorkenntnisse voraussetzt, schon.

Aber lernt man eine Sprache nicht durch sprechen? Nein. Was man lernt, indem man die Zielsprache spricht, ist vor allem die richtigen Laute zu formen. Man gewöhnt sich daran, die Sprache zu produzieren, man verfestigt schon Erworbenes und kann mit neu Erworbenem experimentieren. Vor allem aber: Man gewöhnt sich an das Gefühl, sich in einer anderen Sprache auszudrücken. Für die meisten Erwachsenen ist das vor allem zu Anfang unangenehm und erzeugt Unsicherheit. Die Intensität dieses Gefühls ist von Mensch zu Mensch sehr verschieden und stellt besonders Perfektionisten vor große Probleme.

Trinken zum Reden

Sie glauben mir nicht? Versuchen Sie, eine Fremdsprache zu sprechen, nachdem Sie das konsumiert haben, was Sie für verträgliche Menge von Alkohol halten. (Auch hier werden die Definitionen von Mensch zu Mensch sehr unterschiedlich sein). Sie werden feststellen, dass es besser klappt. Wie kommt das? Weil Alkohol Hemmungen senkt und Unsicherheit abmildert. Deshalb trinken wir ihn und nennen ihn ein soziales Schmiermittel. Es versteht sich von selbst, dass eine große Menge Alkohol die gegenteilige Wirkung erzielt.

Eines der Hauptprobleme beim tatsächlichen Gebrauch einer Fremdsprache hat also mehr mit Psychologie als mit Linguistik
zu tun. Je stärker Ihren perfektionistischen Tendenzen sind, desto weniger Sie in der Lage sind, sich Fehler zu verzeihen, desto schwieriger wird es für Sie werden, eine Fremdsprache tatsächlich fließend zu beherrschen. Hier kann die intensive Beschäftigung mit einer Fremdsprache einen wichtigen Beitrag zur persönlichen Entwicklung leisten: Der notwendigerweise holprige, fehlerreiche Prozess beim Meistern einer Fremdsprache dient dann als Weg sich seinen irrationalen Ängsten zu stellen.

Es ist meist Angst vor Ablehnung und Ausgrenzung, die dem Perfektionismus zugrunde liegt. Das Erlernen einer Sprache
kann Ihnen dabei behilflich sein, sich mit der einfachen Tatsache der menschlichen Fehlbarkeit anzufreunden. Der Wiener Psychologe Raphael Bonelli hat dafür den Begriff „Imperfektionstoleranz“ geprägt“, eine wertvolle Eigenschaft für das notorisch fehleranfällige Wesen Mensch. Bei „L&S“ nutzen wir konkrete Aufgaben aus dem Kommunikationstraining, wie zum Beispiel unser Präsentationstraining „Training for TED“, um unseren Trainees zu helfen, sich an schwierige Situationen zu gewöhnen und trotz Nervösität handlungsfähig zu bleiben.

Drei Schritte

1) Lassen Sie die Anfängerstufe, A 1 bis B 1, so schnell wie möglich hinter sich. Wenn Sie eine Fremdsprache tatsächlich beherrschen wollen oder müssen, nehmen Sie sich die Zeit für Intensivkurse. Ideal wäre natürlich, wenn Sie die Möglichkeit hätten, die Kurse über einen längeren Zeitraum zu besuchen. Wenn das nicht möglich sein sollte, gilt: Viel hilft viel. Desto länger die Dauer des Kurses, desto besser. Anfänger haben eine steile Lernkurve und Ihr Ziel ist, das reine Sprachlernen schnell hinter sich zu lassen.

Die einfache Faustregel: Desto ähnlicher die Zielsprache der Muttersprache ist, desto schneller gelingt der Schritt vom
Sprachlernen zum Spracherwerb. Wenn Sie sich für eine Sprachschule entscheiden, bitten Sie um die Teilnahme an einem
Probeunterricht. Wenn der Unterricht stark grammatiklastig ist und die meisten Sprechanteile bei der Lehrkraft liegen, gehen Sie woanders hin. Glauben Sie nicht, dass das stille Leiden sich am Ende auszahlen wird. Sie müssen sich so schnell wie möglich mit Aussprache und Sprachmelodie Ihrer Zielsprache vertraut machen.

Wenn die Lehrkraft sich weigert, Zusammenhänge zu erklären, stattdessen die Antworten immer den Teilnehmern entlocken
möchte und die Gruppe zwanghaft zu Paaren zusammensetzt, gehen Sie woanders hin. Natürlich sollte der Großteil des Unterrichts in der Zielsprache stattfinden, aber wenn eine gemeinsame Sprache existiert, spricht nichts dagegen, den Teilnehmern das Leben mit einer schnellen Erklärung oder Übersetzung zu erleichtern. Gerade ältere Teilnehmer wissen das zu schätzen.

Die „kommunikative Methode“ ist das aktuelle Dogma des Sprachunterrichts. Sie ist nützlich und sollte Teil jedes Sprachkurses sein, aber viele Lehrer übertreiben es damit. Wenn Sie allerdings nur die Wahl zwischen kommunikativen Dogma und stillem Leiden unter Grammatikfolter haben, entscheiden Sie sich für das kommunikative Dogma. Idealerweise sollte es ein Gleichgewicht zwischen Interaktion, Paararbeit, Übung und Erklärung und strukturellem Überblick geben.
Achten Sie darauf, dass die Schule im 21. Jahrhundert angekommen ist und authentisches Video- und Audiomaterial verwendet und nicht nur CD-Player, Lehrbücher und Fotokopien.

Wenn Sie nicht an einem Intensivkurs teilnehmen können, bleibt Ihnen meist nur das allgegenwärtige 90-Minuten-Einmal-die-Woche-Format. Ergänzen Sie es mit viel einfachem Video-, Audio- und Lesematerial. Seien Sie kein Snob. Sehen Sie sich Kindergeschichten und Zeichentrickfilme in der Zielsprache an, lesen Sie illustrierte Bücher und Comics. Bilder sind sehr hilfreich und Sie werden merken, dass Sie sich wesentlich besser an die Bedeutung eines Wortes erinnern, wenn Sie ein Bild vor Augen haben. Beschäftigen Sie sich oft und regelmäßig mit dieser Art von Material. Zehn Minuten am Tag sind zu wenig, wenn Sie schnell Fortschritte erzielen wollen.

2) Wenn Sie das Niveau B1 erreicht haben, experimentieren Sie mit vielen Arten von verständlichem Input. Auf dem B1 Niveau sind kurze Präsentationen, Bücher in einfacher Sprache, Comics, Graphic Novels, Erklärvideos und Geschichten auf YouTube der richtige Weg. Probieren Sie auch Filme und Shows auf Netflix aus, achten Sie nur darauf, dass Sie Untertitel in der Zielsprache haben. Verwenden Sie keine Untertitel in Ihrer Muttersprache.

Generell gilt: Wenn Sie jedes Wort verstehen, ist das Material zu leicht. Finden Sie ein Verhältnis von bekanntem und unbekanntem Vokabular, mit dem Sie sich wohl fühlen. Das richtige Maß wird individuell verschieden sein, aber im Allgemeinen müssen Sie Ihre Fertigkeit trainieren, Wörter aus dem Kontext heraus zu verstehen und weniger abhängig von Übersetzungen und Wörterbüchern zu sein.

Nachschlagen dürfen und sollen Sie natürlich, aber nicht reflexhaft, sobald Sie ein Wort nicht kennen. Streichen Sie sich das Wort an und versuchen Sie, es aus dem Kontext zu verstehen. Wenn es ein
kürzerer Text ist, lesen Sie ihn zu Ende, bevor Sie nachschlagen. Bei längeren Text oder Büchern können Sie seitenweise oder kapitelweise vorgehen. Zum Nachschlagen nutzen Sie am besten dieses Online-Lexikon: www.linguee.com.  Der große Vorteil von Linguee ist, dass Sie neben der reinen Übersetzung immer auch eine Vielzahl Sätzen sehen, in denen das Wort verwendet wird. Manchmal kann es sinnvoll sein, sich eine wortwörtliche Übersetzung von Sätzen oder ganzen Passagen anzuschauen, nutzen Sie dafür dieses Tool: //www.deepl.com/en/translator.

So unterstützen Sie auch die heimische Wirtschaft: Das Kölner Unternehmen ist eines der wenigen deutschen KI-Startups, das Google in seine Schranken weist. Wo wir gerade bei Nachschlagen und Übersetzen sind: Die Konzentration auf Sprachaneignung bedeutet nicht, dass Sie auf Grammatikerklärungen und Übungen komplett verzichten müssen. Es kann hilfreich sein und Sicherheit geben, sich einzelne Themen gezielt anzuschauen. Eine gute Möglichkeit, das online, kostenlos und in deutscher Sprache zu tun, finden Sie hier: https://www.ego4u.de/

Wenn möglich, suchen Sie ruhig das Gespräch mit  Muttersprachlern oder bilden Tandems, aber denken Sie nicht, dies sei der wichtigste Teil Ihres Spracherwerbs. Es wird Ihnen helfen, sich in der Sprache wohler zu fühlen, und es wird Ihnen helfen, Imperfektionstoleranz aufzubauen. Auf dem Niveau B1 kann die Interaktion mit Muttersprachlern jedoch schnell überwältigend und frustrierend werden. Lassen Sie sich nicht entmutigen. Sie sind dabei, sich die Zielsprache anzueignen, in Ihrem eigenen Tempo, ohne Stress.
Vertrauen Sie auf den Erfolg des Prozesses. Wenn für Ihre Zielsprache verfügbar, machen Sie hin und wieder einen der Einstufungstest, die viele Sprachschulen online anbieten. So überprüfen Sie Ihre Fortschritte und rufen sich Struktur und Vokabeln ins Gedächtnis. Betrachten Sie Tests generell besser als Lernhilfen, nicht als Bewertungsinstrumente. Hier ist der Link zu unserem Einstufungstest: https://www.language-and-skills.com/home/placement/

3) Sobald Sie das Niveau B 2 erreicht haben, wenden Sie sich spannenderem Material zu. Halten Sie sich von Sprachlernmaterial fern. Das meiste ist verwässert, langweilig und verbirgt den Fokus auf Form hinter eindrucksvoll klingenden Markennamen wie „Financial Times“ oder „Economist“. Lassen Sie sich nicht täuschen. Dahinter verbirgt sich der altbekannte Mix aus Lückenfülltexten, Grammatikhäppchen und Verständnisfragen. Filme und Serien in der
Originalsprache sind besser, wenn möglich Untertitel in der Originalsprache zuschalten.

Hier hätten wir also einen Teil der Lösung für den langen Pandemiewinter: Binging ohne schlechtes Gewissen. Denken Sie
allerdings daran, dass auch beim impliziten Lernen von Vokabeln die Verarbeitungstiefe eine Rolle spielt. Je aufmerksamer Sie sind, je mehr das Material Sie zur Reflexion anregt und sich mit schon bekannten Informationen abgleichen und verknüpfen lässt, desto besser werden Sie es im Gedächtnis behalten. Bei Netflix also auch den Dokumentationen mal eine Chance geben.

Generell bietet das Internet bietet Ihnen die Möglichkeit, die englische Sprache zu erwerben ohne den Fuß vor die Tür zu setzen. Das Netz bieten tausende Stunden von hochwertigem häufig kostenlos verfügbarem Material. Beginnen Sie beispielsweise mit den TED-Präsentationen unter www.ted.com . Schauen Sie sich die ersten paar Minuten möglichst vieler Vorträge an und  finden Sie Themen, für die Sie sich interessieren. Falls Sie schon auf dem C 1 Level sind, bieten sich die Autorenvorträge bei Google an: https://talksat.withgoogle.com/

Wenn ein Referent versucht, Ihnen sein Buch zu verkaufen und Ihnen das Thema gefällt, bestellen Sie das Buch und lesen es. Wenn Sie nicht so hoch einsteigen möchten, schauen Sie, ob sie online eine Zusammenfassung finden, beispielsweise auf www.blinkist.com/. Oder Sie suchen in einer englischsprachigen Zeitung nach einer Rezension. Der britische Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ bietet sich an, da er bisher auf eine Bezahlschranke verzichtet.

Die Macht der MOOCs

Eine noch zu wenig für die Sprachaneignung genutzte Plattform sind die MOOCs. MOOCs, kurz für „Massive Open Online
Courses“, sind Online-Kurse auf akademischem Niveau. Die MOOCs bieten ein extrem breites Spektrum von Themen, von Buddhismus über Wertpapierhandel bis zu Künstlicher Intelligenz. Teilweise werden die Kurse aufwendig für das Videoformat produziert, teilweise sind es simple Mittschnitte aus Seminarräumen. Eine Vielzahl der Kurse ist ständig verfügbar und lassen sich kostenlos nutzen.

Einige müssen in einem bestimmten Zeitraum absolviert werden, bieten die Möglichkeit mit den Lehrenden in Kontakt zu
treten und bei erfolgreichen Abschluss den Erwerb eines Zertifikats von renommierten amerikanischen und englischen
Universitäten. Für die Nutzung dieser Kurse wird normalerweise eine moderate Gebühr, zwischen 40 und 80 Dollar verlangt.
Schauen Sie sich „Coursera“ :/www.coursera.org/ , „edX“ : /www.edx.org/ und „Future Learn“ /www.futurelearn.com/   an.

Viele MOOCs Videos sind mittlerweile auch bei „YouTube“ gelandet. Die MOOCs haben das Versprechen, die akademische
Bildung komplett zu revolutionieren, nicht eingelöst. Die angeleitete Diskussion in der Lerngruppe wird uns erhalten bleiben, und sei es nur, weil das gemeinsame Lernen eine schöne und bereichernde Erfahrung ist. Auf jeden Fall sind MOOCs aber ein fantastischer Weg, zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe zu schlagen: Sich eine Sprache auf hohem Niveau anzueignen und dabei etwas Neues zu lernen.
Häufig werden Romane empfohlen, dieser Empfehlung stimme ich allerdings nur eingeschränkt zu. Wirklich gut funktionieren Romane zum Spracherwerb nur für Literaturbegeisterte. Romane sind sprachliche Kunstwerke, sie sind nicht geschrieben, um gut verständlich zu sein.

Für viele Erwachsene funktionieren populärwissenschaftliche Bücher besser. Im amerikanischen Wissenschaftsbetrieb gilt das Schreiben von erfolgreichen Büchern für gebildete Laien als Auszeichnung und
es gibt eine Vielzahl lesenswerter Werke. Viele unserer Kunden haben sich  für „Behavioral Economics“, d.h. Verhaltensökonomik begeistern können. Hinter diesem sperrigen Begriff verbirgt sich eine spannende Synthese aus Wirtschafswissenschaft und experimenteller Psychologie, die versucht, der faszinierenden Frage nach der Natur des Menschen auf den Grund zu gehen. Ein guter Einstieg ins Thema sind
die Bücher und Videos des akademischen Superstars Dan Ariely: https://danariely.com/

Suchen Sie den Kontakt mit Muttersprachlern, idealerweise in Situationen, wo es um ein Thema geht, über das es sich zu
sprechen lohnt und die Sprache als Werkzeug dient. Das ist häufig das Problem mit Tandems; sie werden schnell langweilig
und verlaufen im Sande. Als Alternative zu Tandems bietet sich „Inter Nations“ an: www.internations.org  Inter Nations ist ein erfolgreiches deutsches Startup mit Sitz in München und hat eine weltweit aktive Plattform für Expats aufgebaut. Für die Sprachaneignung eignen sich besonders die „Activity Groups“ Eine (virtuelle?)  Weinprobe auf Englisch, zum Beispiel, ist unter dem eingangs erwähnten psychologischen Gesichtspunkt das ideale Event für Sprachaneignung und Sprechtraining.

Theoretisch können Sie eine Sprache alleine meistern, so wie Sie auch ohne Fitnessstudio und Trainer in Form kommen können. Das Hauptproblem, sowohl beim Fitwerden als auch beim Beherrschen einer Sprache, ist die guten Vorsätze einzuhalten und den Absichten Taten folgen zu lassen, regelmäßig und langfristig. Die Zusammenarbeit mit einer guten Sprachschule hilft, denn die regelmäßigen Treffen und die Beziehung zum Trainer machen es leichter, den inneren Schweinehund an die Leine zu nehmen.

Spracherwerb funktioniert. Die besten Sprachschulen bauen ihre Methode auf dieser Einsicht auf und gute Trainer tun mehr
als nur einmal die Woche einen angenehmen Plausch zu moderieren und hin und wieder Grammatik zu korrigieren. Gute
Trainer werden Sie auf interessantes Material hinweisen und es mit Ihnen diskutieren. Sie werden Ihren Horizont erweitern und bereit sein, von Ihnen zu lernen. Wenn Sie auf der Suche nach einem guten Trainer sind, besuchen Sie uns unter : www.language-and-skills.eu

 

 

Links

https://www.linguee.com/

https://www.deepl.com/

https://www.ego4u.de/

https://www.language-andskills.eu/de/start/placement/

https://www.ted.com/

https://talksat.withgoogle.com/

https://www.blinkist.com/de/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

https://www.coursera.org/

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.futurelearn.com/

https://danariely.com 

https://www.internations.org/start/

https://www.language andskills.eu/de/start/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A practical guide using the example of English 

“The bear gives birth to a duck”; “The engineer is in the refrigerator”. Or how about: “The onion eats the girl.” All these are real examples of sentences for translation exercises from “Duolingo”, one of the world’s most popular platforms for language learning. It’s striking that under the sleek, gamified surface it relies on the most old school of methods: the Grammar-Translation method. This approach, useful for training translators, was already popular in the Middle Ages.

We know that language acquisition doesn’t work well this way. Language acquisition is a subconscious process. It happens when we understand messages. The traditional approach, still the method of choice for most schools and platforms, is ineffective because the focus is on form rather than content. The emphasis is on “how”, not on “what”, on structure and grammar rather than on meaning, interesting ideas and valuable information.

That’s how you end up with “The onion eats a girl” and all the other bizarre examples. This is not to say that a form-based approach doesn’t work at all. For beginners, almost every approach works to a certain extent. This includes the Grammar-Translation method, which is frowned upon in the language classroom these days, but has seen a renaissance in the digital sphere.

To Duolingo’s credit, it can be said that linking them to bizarre images actually helps to memorize words. The bear gives birth to a duck. In Spanish this would read: „El oso esta pariendo un pato.“ Read the sentence out loud. Now close your eyes visualize how a bear gives birth to a duck.  Repeat the sentence. The probability that you will at least remember the Spanish words for bear, „oso“ and duck, „pato“, for a while is now much higher than if you had simply translated the sentence.

Don’t learn, acquire

Before I talk about how to apply this knowledge to master a language, let’s clarify the distinction between language learning and language acquisition.

Language learning is the conscious effort associated with the language classroom: translation tasks like the ones on “Duolingo”, grammar exercises and vocabulary practice but also role plays and fluency practice of all kinds. The underlying similarity is that the language is the topic to be learned, it’s not used as a tool to communicate messages.

Language acquisition is what happens when we get the message in the target language, when we focus on the “what” rather than the “how”. It is the subconscious process of acquiring vocabulary and structure. It’s the way children learn their native language and it’s also the way the grown-ups master a foreign language.

The distinction is crucial for a variety of reasons.  It’s possible to learn a bit of a language in many different ways, but it’s only possible to master a language through the subconscious process of acquisition. The process of language acquisition never stops. We are always learning new words and phrases in our second language as well as in our mother tongue.

It is not about an „either/or“ between explicit language learning and implicit language acquisition. Without a foundation in the target language, laid through explicit language learning, the step to implicit language acquisition is impossible for adult learners.  Without the subsequent process of language acquisition, mastery of the target language at a high level is equally impossible.

It is crucial not to be fixated on one approach. Under certain circumstances, even beginners can learn implicitly and more advanced learners can benefit from explicit language learning, through focused grammar explanations and exercises, as well as from looking up words that cannot be deduced from the context.

It is important to place less emphasis on the „how“ and more on the „what“ as you progress towards higher levels of language competence. If the content is interesting and encourages further engagement with the topic, if the communication is meaningful and the target language is used as a tool of communication you’ll remember it more easily. It will stick. The more form-based, diluted and boring the content, the less you’ll achieve this goal.  To master a language at a high level, you need to store a lot of information, not only a large number of words, but also nuances of meaning and use in different situations.

To provide some perspective, let’s look at the word count of the English language. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary includes some 470,000 entries. This number is on the conservative side, there are other estimates that include regional dialects, slang and professional jargon which come up to a million words.

Too much to learn

Nobody knows or uses all of these words, of course. Tests show that native speakers know and use between 20 000 and 35 000 thousand words. Let’s set a conservative goal for a second language speaker who wants to master English: 20 000 words. Memorizing the 20 000 items would be just one goal the language learner has to reach. She would also have to master the appropriate use of the words, understand the differences in register, formal or informal, for example.

When is it appropriate to say “I concur” rather than “I agree”? What is the right word to use if you would like to use the expression ironically? Not to mention accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation, the differences between British and American English, the cultural references, so on and so forth. It is simply impossible for the average person to consciously learn all of this. And nobody ever does.

If people do master a language to a high level of proficiency, it is because they have successfully acquired it over an extended period of time. They heard and read plenty of stuff that in the target language that they understood, that they were able to make sense of. Or, to use the technical jargon: they were exposed to a high volume of “comprehensible input” over an extended period of time.

Recognizing pornography

What then, is comprehensible input? There is a long standing debate in applied linguistics what exactly constitutes comprehensible input which need not concern us here. We’ll stick with the famous definition Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward provided for pornography: you’ll know it when you see it. To give an example: if you are at the B 2 level, a scientific paper about psychology that you will have a hard time understanding in your native language does not qualify as comprehensible input. A well written, clear popular science book about the same topic does.

But don’t you learn a language by speaking it? No, you don’t. What you learn by speaking the target language is making the right sounds.  You get used to producing the language, you solidify what you have already learned and you get the chance experiment with newly acquired words and expressions.

The most important benefit of speaking practice is: you get used to the feeling of expressing yourself in a foreign language. For most people, that feeling is uncomfortable and produces the unpleasant sensation of self-consciousness. The degree of intensity of this feeling differs greatly between individuals and ironically, it is especially challenging for the most ambitious types, for the strivers and the perfectionists.

Drinking to talk

Don’t believe me? Try speaking foreign language after consuming what constitutes a moderate amount of alcohol for you. Again, definitions will vary greatly between individuals. You will find that your performance will improve after a few drinks. Why? Because alcohol lowers inhibitions, it lowers the inhibiting sense of self-consciousness. That’s why it’s popular and why it’s called a social lubricant. It should go without saying that large amount of alcohol will have the opposite effect.

What is the point? The point is that the main problem with actually using a foreign language has more to do with psychology than linguistics. The more perfectionistic you are, the more you are invested in getting it right and avoiding mistakes, the harder it will be for you to actually to become fluent in a foreign language.

This is where learning another language can render an additional benefit of personal growth, beyond the obvious one of broadening your circle of communication. It can help you to face the fear of rejection that lies at the bottom of perfectionism. It can help you to come to terms with your simple human fallibility. Psychologists call this “imperfection tolerance”, a truly valuable trait to acquire. At „L&S“, we use communication training, like our „Training for TED“, to help our trainees get used to difficult situations and remain capable to act under pressure.

So, what should you be doing to master a language?

 Three Steps

1) Leave the beginner stage behind you as quickly as possible. If you actually want or have to master a foreign language, try to make the time for intensive courses. It would be ideal if you could attend the courses over a longer period of time. Beginners have a steep learning curve and your goal is to leave pure language learning behind as quickly as possible. As a rule of thumb, the more similar the target language is to the mother tongue, the faster the step from language learning to language acquisition.

Three to six months should do the trick for most learners and most languages. When you choose a language school, ask to participate in a trial day. If the lessons are very grammar heavy and the teacher does most of the talking, go elsewhere. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this pain will pay off in the end. It won’t. You need to get used to making the sounds as soon as possible.

Likewise, if the teacher refuses to give straightforward explanations, wants to elicit everything from the students and obsessively puts the group into pairs, go elsewhere. The “communicative method” is the current dogma of language teaching. It is useful and should be part of every language course, but many teachers have had too much of the Kool-Aid and overdo it. If you only have the choice between communicative dogma and silent suffering under grammar torture, choose the communicative dogma.

Ideally, there should be a balance between interaction, pair work, practice and straight forward explanation and structural overview. Make sure that the school has arrived in the 21st century and uses authentic video and audio material, not just CD players, textbooks and photocopies.

If you can’t attend an intensive course, use the ubiquitous once a week, 90 minutes format. Make sure you have the grammar basics down. The web is your friend, there are plenty of useful grammar training sites online. www.ego4u.com  is a good site for learners of English, for example. Supplement it with plenty of simple video, audio and reading that you can understand. Pictures are very helpful and you’ll find that you’ll remember the meaning of a word much better when you can connect it with an image.

Deal with this kind of material often and regularly. Use going to the gym as an analogy: you will only see results if do it regularly and when you stick with it. The analogy to the gym has its limits. It won’t hurt if you do a language work out of some kind every day, especially at the beginning. Vary your activities and get into the habit of using material aimed at native speakers. Don’t be a snob. Watch children stories, cartoons, read books and comics for children.

2) Once you have reached the B1 level, seek out all kinds of comprehensible input. At the B1 level, short TED presentations, comic books, graphic novels, graded readers, simple explanatory videos and stories on YouTube are the way to go. Try movies and shows on Netflix, too, just make sure that you have subtitles in the target language. Don’t use subtitles in your native language.

If you understand everything, the material is too easy. Find a ratio of known and unknown vocab that you feel comfortable with. This will differ between individuals, generally, you need to train your ability to figure out words from context and be less teacher and dictionary dependent.

You can and should look up words, but not reflexively, as soon as you do not know a word. Highlight the word and try to deduce it from the context. If it is a shorter text, read to the end before looking it up. For longer text or books, you can proceed page by page or chapter by chapter. The best way to look it up is to use this online dictionary: www.linguee.com. It doesn’t cover as many languages as “Google Translate”, but the quality is better.

The great advantage of “Linguee” is that it will show you a variety of example sentences in addition to the pure translation. Sometimes it can be useful to look up a literal translation of sentences or entire passages. To do so, use this tool:  www.deepl.com/en/translator

Seek out every-day interactions with native speakers or tandems, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this is the most important part of your language acquisition. It will help you to become more comfortable in the language and it will build imperfection tolerance. At the B1 level, however, interactions with native speakers can easily feel overwhelming and frustrating.

Don’t get discouraged. You are acquiring the language, by yourself, at your own pace, away from the stress of having to perform in the situation. Trust the process. Assuming they are available for your target language, take one of the assessment tests language schools provide online to check your progress. Here’s a link to our assessment test: https://www.language-and-skills.com/home/placement/

3) Once you have reached the B 2 level, turn to more interesting and challenging material. As a general rule, stay away from dedicated language learning material. Most of it is watered down, boring and hides the focus on form behind impressive sounding brand names like “Financial Times” or the “Economist”. Don’t be fooled. It’s the same old gap fill, grammar tidbit and comprehension question approach with a fancy label. There is a lot more you can do beyond the obvious Netflix and movie watching.

By all means do that, but know that in order to retain vocab well, you need what cognitive scientists call “depth of processing”. The more alert you are, the more the material makes you think and challenges what you thought you knew, the better you will remember it.

If your target language is English, you certainly live in the best of times. There are thousands of hours of free or cheaply available high- quality material to be found online. Start with the TED presentations, www.ted.com, find a topic that you are interested in and research it in the target language. If you are already at the C 1 level, do the same thing; but with presentations given by authors at Google: https://talksat.withgoogle.com/.

Another good place to find long, in depth interviews is Joe Rogan’s podcast, the “Joe Rogan Experience”: https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerfulJRE Rogan is a controversial figure in the United States, but his views are safe enough for people not deeply involved in the American culture wars. Rogan’s podcast is extremely successful, probably because he embodies the average American guy better than anybody else. You won’t get sharp, critical journalism from him, but a sincere interest in learning and time for the guests to fully explain their views.

If a speaker or podcast guest tries to sell you his book and you like the topic, order the book and read it. If that seems a little too extreme, see if you can find a summary online, for example at www.blinkist.com. Or look for a review in an English language newspaper. The British Guardian,  www.theguardian.com, is a good choice, as it has so far dispensed with a paywall.

 The Power of MOOCs

Platforms which aren’t used enough for language acquisition are the MOOCs. MOOCs, short for „Massive Open Online Courses“, are online courses at an academic level. The MOOCs offer an extremely wide range of topics, from Buddhism to securities trading and artificial intelligence. Some of the courses are elaborately produced for the video format; others are simple recordings from seminar rooms. Many of the courses are permanently available and can be used free of charge.

Some have to be completed within a certain period of time and offer the possibility to get in contact with the teachers, to hand in coursework and get it corrected.  A number of MOOCs offer the possibility to obtain a certificate from high profile American and English universities for a moderate fee, normally between $40 and 80. Check out „Coursera“: www.coursera.org   „edX“ : www.edx.org and „Future Learn“ www.futurelearn.com.

Many MOOC videos have also made it onto YouTube. The MOOCs haven’t lived up to the hype of revolutionizing academic education, but they are a fantastic way of killing two birds with one stone: mastering a language while learning something new.

Many language teachers recommend novels, but novels for language acquisition will only work well for literature buffs. Novels are linguistic works of art; they are not written to be easily understood. For many adults, popular science books work better. In the American scientific community, writing successful popular science books is considered a distinction and there are plenty of works worth reading.

Many of our clients like “Behavioural Economics“. Behind this unwieldy term lies an exciting synthesis of economics and experimental psychology, which attempts to get to the bottom of fascinating questions about human nature. Good introductions to the topic are the books and videos of academic superstar Dan Ariely: www.danariely.com

By all means look for contact with native speakers, ideally in situations where there is a topic to be discussed and the language serves as a tool. This is often the problem with tandems, they quickly become boring and peter out. As an alternative to tandems, „Inter Nations“ is a good choice: www.internations.org Inter Nations is a successful German start-up based in Munich and has established a globally active platform for expats. The „Activity Groups“ are particularly suitable for language acquisition.

Theoretically, you can master a language by yourself, just like you can get into shape without a gym and a personal trainer. The main problem, both with getting in shape and mastering a language is compliance.  Working with a good language school helps, because the regular sessions and the relationship with the trainer will boost compliance.

Acquisition works. The best language schools base their method on this insight and good trainers do more than just have a pleasant chat and correct your grammar once a week.  Good trainers will point you toward interesting material and discuss it with you.  They will broaden your horizon and be just as eager to learn from you. If you are looking for a good trainer, visit us under www.language-and-skills.eu

 

Links

https://www.linguee.com/

https://www.deepl.com/

https://www.ego4u.de/

https://www.language-andskills.eu/de/start/placement/

https://www.ted.com/

https://talksat.withgoogle.com/

https://www.blinkist.com/de/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

https://www.coursera.org/

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.futurelearn.com/

https://danariely.com 

https://www.internations.org/start/

https://www.language andskills.eu/de/start/

 

Book Review: “How to have impossible conversations – A very practical guide” by authors Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. “How to Have Impossible Conversations” is a terrific book in many ways and it does contain some directly applicable practical advice. What it isn’t, however, is very practical, even though it makes that claim in the title.

“It’s easier to write 10 volumes of philosophy than to practically apply a single principle.”

Tolstoi, Diaries 1847

The blurb states that authors Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay will “guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation, whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control.”

In my edition, the back cover comes with praise from atheism’s number one ideologue Richard Dawkins, who calls it  “a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate and gently persuade” and claims that “The world would be a better place if everyone read this book.”  There is a certain irony in having one of the most ideological “New Atheists” praising a book that has a whole chapter on dealing with ideologues but since Mr. Boghossian previously wrote “A Manual for Creating Atheists”, it fits.

For the purposes of this review, it makes things easier that the authors seem to agree with the categorization of their work as a “self-help book”. Leaving aside the misgivings about the genre, the relevant questions are: Does it do the job? Does it help? Mr. Dawkins says that the world would be a better place if everybody read the book. I hope what he means is that the world might become a better place if people actually applied the lessons from the book.

Reading a book is easy, even writing a book is easy, compared to the notoriously difficult task of  changing one’s behavior. This is where the book falls short; it overwhelms with extensive lists of skills and challenging concepts, while providing next to no guidance of how to go about practicing and actually applying them.

However, before we get to the problems and suggestions on how to remedy them, there is some useful advice that you can hopefully take away from reading this review. In order to avoid the trap that the authors fall into, I will limit it to three points. Two of them are taken from the “Beginner Level: Nine Ways to Start Changing Minds”, the third one is hidden in the end notes to the “ Six Expert Skills to Engage the Closed Minded.”

1

 Beginners are advised to model to the conversational behavior that they would like to see in their counterparts. In order to stop your partner in the conversation from obfuscating or refusing to answer a direct question, Boghossian and Lindsay suggest this refreshingly simple and straight forward idea: Tell your counterparts to ask you the same question. When they do that, “give them a succinct answer (that is, model what you’re seeking) and then immediately ask them the identical question.”

There is an interesting example for the application of the technique at the beginning of Chapter Three, where Boghossian successfully used the technique with a Muslim community leader in Australia who tried to obfuscate the fact that he was in favor of stoning adulterous women. Everybody with teaching or leadership experience and every parent knows how important consistent modelling is and how much more effective than the popular “Do as I say, not as I do” school of trying to influence behavior.

2

The second useful idea from the Beginner Level is the “Unread Library Effect.”  It refers to “the well-known phenomenon of people who believe they understand how things work better than they actually do, i.e. the “tendency to believe we’re more knowledgeable than we are because we believe in other people’s expertise.” The authors invite us to think about this very common phenomenon with the analogy of “borrowing books from the great library of human knowledge and then never reading the books.”

A way in which self-help books can be useful is making something explicit that many of us know implicitly.  Giving it a name and describing it as a skill makes it easier to apply, like the human tendency to get into arguments about issues we don’t know very much about. The practical application of the “Unread Library Effect” that the authors suggest is to “model ignorance”. Instead of getting into a discussion about an issue that both parties know little about, the idea is to start with a question about the “how” rather than the “what”.

Using the contentious topic of immigration, they give this example: “I don’t know how the details of using mass deportations of illegal immigrants would play out. I think there are likely pros and cons and I really don’t know which outweigh which. How would that policy be implemented?”

The more ignorance you dare to admit, the greater the likelihood that your counterpart will not switch into adversarial mode but will try to explain the issue to you. Using this approach you get the chance to either learn something about immigration policy or it can lead your conversation partner to the realization of her own “Unread Library Effect”. This is a more effective way of sowing doubt in somebody’s mind than arguing your point.

Giving others the “gift of doubt” is the main theme of the book, in this way it is a philosophical book in the best sense. The authors seem to have great faith in the human ability to reason, the whole book can be read as an encouragement to reflect and to lead an “examined life” in the meaning attributed to Socrates. For Socrates, the examined life meant the attainment of wisdom and intellectual humility by questioning our superficial certainties.

There is a dangerous political naivety and inability or unwillingness to see the limits of their faith in reason and civil discourse that I will examine in the last part of this review.

3

One of the most common dead ends in conversation is what the authors call the “true for” stance, meaning this is true for me and therefore cannot be questioned. Everybody has encountered this maddening stance which insists on the only superficially understood relativity and subjectivity of knowledge. What it fails to understand is that rational discourse is only possible if both parties agree that there are things which are “objectively” true in the sense of a shared description of the world.

A simple way of understanding this is to use the example of the natural sciences. There are no final truths in science. This doesn’t mean that it is a free for all, however. There needs to be a shared understanding of the method of deriving knowledge and there needs to be shared insights to build on, in order to make discourse possible. Would you want to fly in a jet constructed by an engineer who strongly believes in her truth, even though it substantially differs from the laws of thermodynamics?

Boghossian and Lindsay suggest this ingenious intervention, one my favorites being: “If someone says something is true for them, ask to borrow one of their possessions, such as their water bottle, sunglasses, phone or keys. Then claim that you believe “Possession means ownership is true for me, so it is true for me that this is mine now.” When they object, you can immediately ask them “Why can things be true for you, but not true for me?” I love this idea and am looking forward to applying it.

I hope I have convinced you at this point that “How to Have Impossible Conversations” is a terrific book, a treasure trove of interesting ideas, backed up by solid research and a thorough understanding of philosophy and science. From the point of view of reaching its objective, however, of actually helping people to change their behavior, there is a problem. It is an academic book written by a mathematician and a philosopher who seem to lack an equally thorough understanding of didactics and the psychology of learning.

Say Please and Thank you

Here is the table of contents of “Seven Fundamentals of Good Conversations”:  Beginner Level: Nine Ways to Start Changing Minds, Intermediate Level: Seven Ways to Improve Your Interventions, Five Advanced Skills for Contentious Conversations, Six Expert Skills to Engage the Closed Minded, Master Level: Two Keys to Conversing with Ideologues. 36 skills you need to master, with a large number of subordinate skills, all in one book, which claims to be a “Very Practical Guide”.

Even if I build a “golden bridge”, skill two, intermediate level and grant that some of the skills are very basic and most people won’t need to train them, like for example “be courteous, say please and thank you” subskill nine, from main skill three,  “rapport”, this is simply way too much to handle and nearly impossible to operationalize.

Be the change

I have been working on “active listening” skills with participants in communication training for years. I would argue that active listening, i.e. fully concentrating on listening and understanding, suspending judgment and quelling the urge to discuss or formulate a reply while the other person is talking, actually covers a lot of the ground that Boghossian and Lindsay aim for.

They list it merely as skill four of the “Seven Fundamentals of Good Conversations”. The insight I’ve taken away from training active listening and trying to apply myself is how very difficult it is to actually do consistently. The instances where people are able to apply active listening after the first time they encounter it is rare.

I am referring to a training situation, where the trainees first get an explanation, then watch a video and read a text about the skill. Once they are asked to apply it in a role play, the majority of trainees struggle to suspend judgement and many fall into the trap of turning the conversation into a friendly discussion and the normal exchange of views.

The Noble Quest

This doesn’t say anything about the intelligence or level of education of the trainees. Most of them were highly educated, intelligent and competent people. It just shows how difficult it is to break the habit of a lifetime. Modern organizations are competitive environments where wisdom and intellectual humility are not regarded as career enhancers. What is rightly seen as career enhancing is intellectual dexterity, strong rhetorical skill and the ability to intelligently bullshit when you don’t know the answer.

How many times can you honestly say “I don’t know” in a meeting or a presentation, subskill 17, Skill 9, Beginner Level, before your boss and/or your colleagues will have the impression that you are incompetent rather than wise and intellectually humble?

They might make the counter argument that their advice is not intended for the workplace but that is where people spend most of their time, if they are lucky enough to have a well paid white collar job. If people can’t train and apply the insights from the book there, its value is questionable.

This discrepancy between the ideal world the authors are painting and the reality of the existing professional environment again points towards the political naivety I will deal with at the end.  For the time being, my focus is on how to help people actually apply all of the great ideas the authors present in their work.

The Psychology of Religion

If my task was to develop a full time curriculum to train all of the skills up to “Master Level”, where they delve into fascinating questions regarding the connection between identity and morality, I would say that a year long full-time course would still be an ambitious time frame. And it would certainly entail a fair bit of reading after class.

Especially the “Master Level” covers a lot of challenging content and you need to wrap your head around quotes like this one: “The psychology of politics is really the psychology of religion, understanding national elections is not about what’s the most efficient policy. It really is the psychology that we evolve to be religious; we evolve to do intergroup conflict; we evolve to make things sacred and encircle around them.” If you are not familiar with evolutionary biology, the work of Jonathan Haidt and the psychological turn in philosophy, you have a lot to read up on.

Communication seminars normally last 2 or 3 days and if they are good, the majority of the time is devoted to actually practicing the skills. It is obviously impossible to even cover the “Beginner Level” in such a time frame. The only way to deal with the wealth of content accumulated by Boghossian and Lindsay would be to break it up into a series of seminars, streamline the content, boil the 36 skills and innumerable subskills into something a lot more manageable, say five skills each for every level.

That would be an interesting project and a valuable series of seminars. A crucial point would be to create practical exercises for every single skill. It would take time to get the concept to a level where it flows well since creating good seminars depends on actually running them several times to smooth out the kinks. So much for some constructive criticism and a suggestion on how to remedy the book’s shortcomings.

Let’s now turn to the problems that have no obvious solutions. The main problem that I see is the insistence on “civility” and “rational discourse” being the solutions that America needs right now. We find ourselves in their version of the “agora”, the public square of ancient Greece where the philosophers assembled to hash out their differences, jointly seeking truth through the application of reason.

Straight White Guys Are Liars

If only, they seem to say, the United States could be more like this, less divided, less ideological, less irrational, then America would be great again. You can read the whole book as an academic version of “Why can’t we all just get along?” They have very little time for “radicals” and “extremists” and seem to conceptualize politics in the United States as a failing debating society that needs to read their book.

They are amusingly tone deaf to the anger of minorities since they see the righteous anger not as necessary propellent of social change but as something to be avoided at all costs. There is a very telling example in the book, where they talk about a feminist colleague who said to Boghossian: “At this point, if a straight white male told me 2 + 2 = 4, I wouldn’t believe it.”

The two communication specialists take this statement at face value, not as an expression of exasperation with a society that continues to treat women and minorities unfairly. They hilariously suggest applying their methods to the statement and recommend asking questions such as: “If you went to the emergency room and the doctor happened to be a straight white male, would you believe him if he told you that you need an immediate emergency surgery to save your life?”

It would be interesting to know how they would react if a black man said the same thing to them. Since their underlying philosophy is nothing if not conventional, they would probably shy away from giving such a silly, patronizing response. Convention has made white Americans very sensitive about belittling the righteous anger of black people but it’s still ok to mock the feelings of women and queer folk.

This is not the place to discuss the real problems of identity politics. Suffice it to say that America’s gravest problems are not to be found in the powerful position of the “grievance studies” in American academia.

More Than Rational

The most serious intellectual error they commit lies in their shortsighted critique of ideology and the assumption that the problems of ideology can be remedied by a good helping of “reason” and “rationality”. As much as they might dislike Focault and modern political philosophy, it is baffling that they fail to appreciate that politics in modern mass democracies is not a debating society, especially since they hail from a country which came into being through a violent revolution.

Ideology, understood correctly in this context, is the necessary legitimization for a political struggle that is fundamentally about power. It’s not amenable to reason, its very point lies in the fact that it cannot be questioned and thereby legitimizes action. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. Very little room for sowing doubt there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classics tend to be books which people would like to have read but never did. Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to Death” is a classic which doesn’t deserve this fate. His counter-intuitive take on how our media shape our understanding of the world is more relevant than ever.

Prophecy is a notoriously difficult business and many great minds have embarrassed themselves trying.  In “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, first published in 1986, Neil Postman passes the prophet test with flying colors and writes whole passages which now read as eerily accurate descriptions of the present.

Even though the main focus of the book is on what Postman calls “the epistemology of television”, i.e. how a new medium like television shapes our understanding of what constitutes knowledge and how we acquire it, he briefly turns his attention to what in his day was called “computer technology” and has this to say about it:  “a central thesis of computer technology – that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data – will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the  massive collection and speed of light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations, but have solved very little of what is important to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

Written in 1985, when Mark Zuckerberg was still a toddler, 13 years before Google was founded and two years before the term “big data” was allegedly coined by John Mashey.

The Concept of Truth

The core of Postman’s argument is that television’s rise to the position of America’s leading medium has transformed the American understanding of what constitutes knowledge and valuable information. In his view, media aren’t simply conveyors of information but define what is understood to be as true and important. He says that “the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not and never has come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the truth is a kind of cultural prejudice. “

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” delivers a significant part of the explanation for the success of serial liar Donald Trump: “television provides a new definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. Credibility here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality testing.   It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity and vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one more) conveyed by the actor.”

Complex phenomena like the rise of Trump don’t lend themselves to monocausal explanations, but Postman’s observation regarding the changing nature of a culture’s perception of truth goes a long way in making sense of his appeal. The main point here is that Trump’s rise to power is not an aberration. It is the logical consequence of a culture which has adopted television as its most important medium. Donald Trump is nothing if not a creature of television and it is his authentic-seeming style, honed by years as a reality TV host, which represents truth in an age shaped by the epistemology of TV.

Don’t blame it on the Kardashians

The problem with television Postman warned about in 1986, isn’t that it produces trivial entertainment. His argument is more sophisticated than the standard conservative trope about the success of the Kardashians being a sign of decadent times. He doesn’t want to be misunderstood this way: “to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as a standard brand academic whimpering, and kind of elitist complaint against junk on television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow.”

The problem he warned about wasn’t that television produced entertainment, but that on television, everything becomes entertainment.  He calls entertainment the “supra ideology” of television and says: “No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”

By reframing the world as the wellspring of a constant visual stream meant to entertain us, television has probably fueled what the American writer Chris Hedges calls the “cult of the self”. Information changes from something we need to adapt to our local circumstances to something we constantly consume, mostly without any meaningful consequence.

More than a Moral Critique

Television strengthens the illusion that the world exists to entertain us that we don’t live to serve, but that our infantile, insatiable consumer selves sit at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of books and articles have already been written about this dangerous development, so there is no need to pursue this train of thought further here.

Postman take was prescient and remains unique and interesting because it doesn’t just come in the form of a moral critique. There certainly is an element of that in the book, best exemplified by the ominous sentence on the back cover of my paperback edition: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.”

It’s hard to deny that Trump and the current state of public affairs in the US spring to mind, but it would be facile and foolish to lean back in the armchair over here in Europe and assume that the dark prophecy has become true. The future remains open, the complexity of the world doesn’t fit neatly into the confines of any single theory.

Writing this in Germany, it is interesting to note in passing that part of the reason that Germany has been to significantly delay these problematic developments might be the national penchant for regulation, seriousness and the inherent conservatism of German society. Television, for example, still hasn’t become as ubiquitous as it is in the US.

From Telegraph to Television 

The true value of Postman contribution is his perspective on how different media shape of our understanding of who we are and what we perceive to be true. His perspective helps us to get beyond the naïve misunderstanding that media are neutral and that it doesn’t matter how the message is delivered.

The foundational medium of Western-style societies is the printing press. Postman says:   “Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition. Typography assisted in the growth of the nation-state but thereby made patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion.”

These are sweeping assertions and it doesn’t matter if they are a 100% true or not. Postman helps to think about media and the way we understand the world differently. He invites us to switch our perspective.  Here is another example of this refreshing switch: “The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And that, though few would have imagined that connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy then all treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”

Postman’s story, the story of shifting media dominance from typography, via the telegraph and photography to television gives us a framework to think about the internet, the new medium which is well on its way to incorporate all others.

It helps us to ask more intelligent questions. Instead of asking what we should do with the internet, how we should regulate etc., we need to ask what it has already done to us, to our understanding of ourselves and what we perceive to be true. What is the epistemology of the internet? Has it just continued the trends already apparent with television, for example?

Is the credibility of the teller still the measure of truth? Is entertainment still the dominant “supra ideology”? On a deeper level, the book raises questions about the nature of human insight and understanding. How does human insight differ from machine cognition? What is the role of intuition and innate ideas?

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a terrific book and it has aged well. It’s beautifully written and far more than a boring, pessimistic diatribe about modern life. I recommend it to everybody who wants to understand how the media we use to define the way we perceive ourselves and the world we live in.

 

Links

Neil Postman Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death Part I

Amusing Ourselves to Death Part II

Neil Postman on Cyberspace

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 1 v 3

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 2 v 3

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 3 v 3

My fellow citizens, when we come together to inaugurate a president, we come together to confirm the power and the beauty of the idea our great republic is founded on.  We come together to celebrate the power of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. The promise that everybody on this earth is created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights. Not only is this the true creed of our time, the world has been looking to America to see this promise fulfilled for more than 200 years. It is this creed that binds this nation together. And from our shores, it has spread all across the globe.

We have received this precious gift from our founding fathers and we bear the responsibility to keep this promise alive. However, I will not allow my gratitude and my humility to cloud my vision. I will not shirk from the responsibility I shoulder when I accept this precious inheritance and I urge you, my fellow Americans, to do the same. Our founding fathers were merely human and they were flawed. They murdered Native Americans and stole their lands. They kept slaves and condemned innocent women, children and men to unspeakable misery for generations. We still feel the reverberations of their deeds today.

With that in our minds, we won’t judge the past by the standards of the present, but we also won’t allow our gratitude and the love for our country to disregard the unnecessary human suffering caused in our nation’s past. Only by daring to acknowledge our painful truths and continuing our journey to bridge the meaning of the words in the Declaration with the realities of our time, we can prove ourselves to be worthy heirs of the promise made at the founding of our republic.

I take my oath of office at a time of great danger for our nation. But I’m not just speaking of the pandemic, which has killed far too many of our citizens. I am certain that we will win this battle, once again guided by reason, competence and responsibility for the lives of all Americans.  I‘ m not speaking of Russia, China  or Iran, either. No other nation poses the greatest danger to the survival of our republic. What I’m speaking of is our unwillingness to see ourselves, our almost childlike inability to face the truth about who we are and what we have done.

Our founding fathers, for all their flaws, would be appalled by our conduct. We have become blind to our dark side. Our flag has become the wool over our eyes. We have become addicted to war and violence. We have all but forgotten our noble tradition of providing refuge to the poor and the persecuted. We have kept immigrants in cages and ripped their families apart.  We have turned our weapons against ourselves, brutally repressing protests demanding justice and persecuting journalists for uncovering war crimes.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East have perished and we are no closer to ending the war on terror.  On the contrary, our violent acts ensure that the children of our victims hate us with ever greater passion. We are spawning new terrorists every day. Our founding fathers fought heroically to free themselves from imperial rule. My fellow Americans, ask yourselves: how would our founding fathers judge us? What would they say to the American Empire?

We maintain military bases in every corner of the world. Our war machine is the most fearsome and expensive in the history of the world yet victory remains elusive. We profess the love for our soldiers, but these proclamations ring hollow. While we thank them for their service and glorify their sacrifice, we continue to send our sons and daughters to kill and be killed in senseless, unwinnable wars.

Are we a nation of deluded infants? Has it come to that?  I believe we are better than this. I believe we are worthy of the great inheritance before us. We can find the courage to see ourselves, we can face up to our truth: yes, we have built an empire.  We have built an empire in the belief that we needed to in defence of our freedom.

We have alienated many other nations because instead of shouldering the imperial responsibility and leading an empire of reason and civilization, we have allowed ourselves to fall far short of our ideals.  We have preached human rights, but we have supported violent coups and unjust regimes.  We were attacked and we didn’t seek justice. We sought revenge. We have abducted, tortured, and killed innocent people all over the world.  People created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights.

The United States, like any other nation, has the right to act in its national interest and to safeguard its national security. However, our national interest no longer is the common good, the well-being of all Americans. Our national interest has become captured by a small, corrupt elite who serve nobody but their own monetary interest. Many in our elite have fallen prey to the oldest temptation: idolatry.

They have bowed down to idols and betrayed their better nature, they have chosen the route of self-enslavement. Their appetites have shaped themselves as gods and these false gods have taken command. It would be too easy to just blame the elites, however. Our whole culture has been infected by a slavish admiration of wealth and power. The money changers have taken the high seats in the temple of our civilization.

Today, we say ‘Enough is enough! We will bear it no longer!’ Today, we begin to restore that temple to the ancient truth, the ancient truth inscribed in the heart of every human being. We will relearn to discipline our appetites, we will build an economy that serves the people.  We will no longer be enslaved by our fears and our appetites.

We will no longer be enslaved by the illusion that we live to serve the economy. We will no longer slavishly admire the money hoarders while our brothers and sisters are begging in the streets.  Trump is gone, a new day has come. We will extend Medicare to every American. We will make sure that freedom for is more than empty word for the majority of Americans.  As long as we live in fear of becoming sick and ending up in bankruptcy, we’re not free.

Now that we have found the courage to face the dark side of our magnificent achievements, we are  finally ready to take on the challenge of climate change. The world has grown weary of American leadership and we have turned inwards, fighting futile culture wars. But America is back!  My administration will work tirelessly to regain the trust of the world’s nations.

This work will start here in America. To achieve our goals as individuals and as a society, we must move forward as a disciplined and loyal army willing to make sacrifices for the common good.  Without such discipline no progress is made and no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. Here at home, this larger good will take the form of the Green New Deal.

We will renew and rebuild our power stations, our airports, our highways, our schools, our roads and bridges.  Our greatest primary task is to put our national house in order and to put our people to work. In large part, we will accomplish this through direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war. We will turn our war machine into the greatest power for reform and renewal the world has ever seen. We will deploy the skill, excellence and bravery of our people to serve this higher purpose.

We will once again become the shining city upon a hill and set an example for the world. The time of wasting blood and treasure in senseless wars is over.  Now is not the time for the human family to fight each other. Now is the time for all us to stand together against a common enemy. The climate crisis has given us the greatest gift, if only we are willing to accept it. Our human hearts seek the bond and certainty of belonging to a group and all too often our groups have faced each other off in battle.

Let us face this greatest danger our species has ever encountered together as one human family. Let us stand together to preserve the fathomless beauty of our home in this vast, inhospitable universe. We have a larger battle to fight, it’s the battle for the survival of mankind and America is once again offering its leadership to the peoples of the world. In this dedication of my nation’s task, I humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one in our great human family.  May He guide me in the days to come.

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