Voici "Cainntear"

My mother had a thing about bilingualism.

She met my father at teacher training college, and when they graduated she tried to get work on one of the Scottish islands for both of them so that we'd grow up speaking Scottish Gaelic. That never panned out, but in the end I heard throughout my childhood how I was "supposed to be" bilingual.

Also, her mother (my grandmother) had been a French teacher herself, and my mother had picked up on a few of her techniques. She got a friend to send LPs of kids songs over from France, and before I went to primary school I was singing in a French accent. I couldn't speak it, though. I picked up the odd word from picture books through my childhood, as well as from food packaging during childhood holidays in France.

I never learnt a language properly until high school, where I took up French in first year, then added in Italian in third year. I dropped the Italian after my Standard Grade exams, and kept French up for another year (Highers).

Throughout school I was always top of the class, or at worst second-top, but when I first started learning French, I suddenly wasn't -- I thought I'd found something I genuinely couldn't do. But very quickly I realised that the reason I wasn't doing as well as my peers was that they were memorising, whereas I was trying to learn. I relaxed, continued learning my way, and overtook the rest of the class with ease. I'd always been a bit dubious of teachers of everything, and this started my particular distrust of language teachers.

For several years after high school, I did very little with language -- the odd conversation in French here and there -- that was about it.

A couple of times I tried to pick the Italian back up again with the aid of books, but I never got anywhere, as I found the whole experience rather boring.

Finally, I got it into my head that it was time to learn Spanish, basically due to a bit of sibling rivalry.

I was very wary of books, and I was also wary of software, and I didn't know what I was going to use. I saw the blurb for Michel Thomas and initially dismissed it as marketing nonsense, until I read a few reviews that made me think it was at least worth giving it a try, which in the end I did, and I loved it.

Shortly after I'd started on Spanish, I decided it was time to give Scottish Gaelic a try. At this time I also started studying for a distance degree in languages with the Open University, starting with a course in English grammar. I was simultaneously learning Spanish directly from materials (Michel Thomas and Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses), Gaelic in an eclectic way (mixture of intensive courses, self-directed book study, and regular use of internet forums) and linguistics and grammatical concepts via English.

This put me in a good position to start analysing what was working and what wasn't when it came to teaching, and in 2007 I took my CELTA and had a brief sabbatical teaching English in the Basque Country.

Over the years since, I completed degree level study of French and Spanish, picked up a fair bit of Catalan, did a bit of basic Welsh, and tried to learn a bit of Corsican while I was teaching English at the university there. Sadly I was overworked and couldn't devote much time to it, but the basics are there.

I'm now in Sicily, teaching English again, and I've not started on Sicilian yet, in part because I've got a Russian flatmate who's also a language teacher, so it seems like a brilliant opportunity to make some headway on a language that's always been on my wishlist.

I've also been trying to develop a rather clever piece of language learning software, an early prototype of which helped my Corsican considerably, but I keep having to put it to one side for reasons of work and/or self-doubt.

But I'm determined to get back into it properly this month, so watch this space!

Glad to have you here. I think you were banned from HTLAL before I ever started posting, but I've read a bunch of your posts there, so I sort of feel like I get your "style" already.

I am happy to see you, and look forward to seeing your posts. I was very upset when you were banned.

Welcome Cainntear. Looking forward to more great posts.

One thing I missed out -- why I'm addicted to learning languages.

As an English speaker, I surprise people by speaking their language to them, and they always show a great appreciation for it. When the only language I spoke was French, meeting French people in Edinburgh was always a pretty fulfilling experience, and I wanted to keep a hold of that feeling of human warmth, and get it with more people, so I was always keen to learn more languages.

For a while, I was working on a corporate IT support contract, and at one point our front-line desk moved to India. Everyone in my team in Edinburgh was grumbling about jobs going overseas, and I knew the guys on the other end of the phone weren't stupid, so I wanted to show them some respect. I decided to learn a little bit of Kannada (the desk was in Bangalore, naturally) and a bit of Hindi, so that I could at least greet them and Exchange pleasantries in a more personal way. I ended up with a cheat sheet next to my PC of various phrases in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, and probably one other, but I can't remember which (Bengali? Panjabi?). I became something of a "go to guy" for the Indians, because I'd built a better rapport with them than anyone else.

This sense of showing respect and building rapport grew with every language, and at the time I was becoming fluent in Spanish, and my social life rapidly changed to revolve around the Spanish immigrant community in Edinburgh. Eventually I found myself more and more in the presence of Catalans who would end up switching from speaking Catalan among themselves to speaking Spanish for my sake. I didn't like this, and Catalan had always been an "I should learn this" language for me, so I jumped into it head-first and learned it surprisingly quickly. The warmth I got from Spanish people for speaking Spanish was nothing like the warmth from Catalans for speaking Catalan.

Whether it's Gaelic in the Scottish islands, Catalan in Barcelona or Corsican on Corsica, speaking a less-studied language has always made it easy to be accepted by strangers and has led to a lot of unearned hospitality.

For me, learning a language has always been a joy, not a chore; but learning a minority language is even more: it's not an "achievement", it's a privilege.

Cainntear, I agree wholeheartedly with you about learning a minority language, and I have had the same experience with Catalan and also last year with Romansh when I went to Graubünden/Grischun in Switzerland. Unfortunately I have also had some rather negative feedback from non-Catalan Spaniards who can't see why on earth a foreigner should bother learning Catalan - but I am afraid that has more to do with internal politics in Spain than any considered reflection around the Catalan language itself.

Anyway, welcome to this forum - I don't really know the story about you being banned from HTLAL, and I don't really care. I look forward to reading your posts.

Welcome to the forum!

I'd been pushing my luck for years -- it was always going to happen sooner or later.

I constantly try to mine a few flecks of gold from the HTLAL archives, lest they one day disappear. And low and behold came across a nugget today, in the thread Don't spread nonsense, wherein Cainntear defends his posting style and with a real good turn of phrase:

"jumped-up, argumentative little shit" Now that is a nice piece of word-smithing!

Of all the things I ever said on HTLAL, the one thing you think deserves preserved for posterity is tye fact that I'm a jumped-up,argumentative little shit?
I'm glad to have had a lasting effect on your world view!!!!!

Actually a lot of your postings there deserve to be preserved, but they are generally longer reasoned arguments. But that was a nice little sound-bite. And this was actually the first time I remember reading it.

Cainntear took a lot, an awful lot as you know, of flack over there for saying unpopular things and poking holes in the balloons of windbags who like to enthuse at length over every little seemingly novel idea, method or sage that comes along. The fanboys, i.e. the gullible and ignorant, simply will not tolerate it when their idols with feet of clay are exposed for what they are. And being the clueless majority, they often succeed in various internet venues in getting those who rely on facts and logic booted in the name of harmony.

Cain didn't say he viewed himself as a jumped-up, argumentative little-shit, but rather that others might find him so, others who don't value truth-telling or can't recognize the bad effects for learners of latching on to poorly reasoned and researched ideas. While I don't always agree with Cainntear, he is never unreasonable in his views. It is confusing enough I imagine for new language learners to see competing viewpoints that are reasonable, without having the unreasonable and outright stupid assertions thrown unmasked into the mix as well.

Since I am giving such a serious and long reply here, I will further add that much of the research we rely is not focused specifically or even generally on adult self-learners. So we have to interpolate as best we can and place more value than otherwise would be advisable on anecdotal evidence of those whose opinions we value, whereas the language grifters ply their self-interest driven trade solely based on anecdotal evidence along with a large dollop of smoke and mirrors and rosy assertions. Thus it is particularly important that we be able to thoroughly flesh out ideas which often can come across as being needlessly critical when it is not. Happily polydog is place where that can be done without the burden of excessive and suffocating demands for decorum. I'll the take the rude and logical truth any day over the nice and appealing error or outright fraud.