RULER is the name of our approach to teaching emotional intelligence, and it’s also an acronym for the five key skills of emotional intelligence:
Recognizing emotions in oneself and others.
Understanding the causes and consequences of emotion.
Labeling emotions with precise words.
Expressing emotions taking context and culture into consideration.
Regulating emotions effectively to achieve goals and wellbeing.
2019年9月23日星期一
The 26 books that changed Will Schwalbe's life from "Books for Living"
1. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
2. Stuart Little by E.B. White
"For me it was really a tale of radical acceptance. A story [that] you could be whatever you want and your parents would still love you... as a kid I read it dozens of times. Every couple of years I go back and re-read it."
3. The Girl on The Train by Paula Hawkins
4. The Odyssey by Homer
5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
6. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
7. Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
8. Wonder by R.J. Palacio
9. Lateral Thinking: An Introduction by Edward de Bono
10. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
"When people talk about the books that changed their life, or sometimes even saved their life, it's often because for the very first time they recognise themself in a book. For me that book actually was Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. I was a young gay kid at Episcopal boarding school there had never been an out gay kid or faculty member at this school. So I sort of thought I was the only one. And reading James Baldwin's marvelous Giovanni's Room, which has this joyful scene between the young American David and his Italian boyfriend Giovanni, made me realize that I could be gay."
11. The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis
12. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
"David Copperfield made me realize that, when I think back on David Copperfield I get to choose whether I remember reading David Copperfield or whether I remembered my sorrow when it finished [the book]. And when I think back on this friend of mine [who died], I get to choose whether I remember his life or whether I remember his death. And I try to choose life."
13. The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown
14. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
15. 1984 by George Orwell
16. Epitaph of a Small Winner by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
17. Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
18. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
19. The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
"The author was a Chinese scholar and he calls it a book about the noble art of leaving things undone. And in it he presents Chinese philosophy to the west. And that type of Chinese philosophy he presents is the philosophy of relaxing, lying in bed, drinking tea, enjoying nature, spending time with friends. It's a marvelous book, very digressive,very long with all of these great asides about savouring life.One of the things that really fascinates me about it is at first you think it's this very charming book about kind of goofing off. But then you start to realize Lin Yutang was writing in the late 30s. He writes specifically about Hitler and Stalin. And he writes about a world gone mad and about greed and ambition and lust for power. And what he's really presenting is a humanist response to this. So the importance of living is about human values."
20. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
21. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
22. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
23. More, More, More Said the Baby, by Vera B. Williams
24. A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre
25. Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther
26. What The Living Do by Marie Howe
2019年9月21日星期六
属于我的一天
看着题目，挺吸引人的。我也是非常向往这么几个小时。一开始以为只有6个小时，后来延申到12个小时。
临时决定去一次Costco，因为家里的冰箱几乎空了，只有几块三文鱼和够吃一顿的牛肉。想想懒不得。明天又是一个高温的秋日，所以决定去South Brunswick的那家，马路对面就是Farmer's Market，可以顺道也把蔬菜给买了。这一去一回，挑选购买就是三个小时。到家，把买来的东西卸到家中，放到冰箱之前，把鱼，肉都处理完毕：Seabass，beef short rib, pork belly, pork rib and salmon。这道手续省不了。如果省了，那么后面烧菜做饭的也是一个繁琐的程序。所以处处要有远见。处理完毕荤菜，再处理蔬菜。各处归位，地下室的，冰箱的。
早晨出门之前用高压锅压的一锅绿豆已经好了，放到Blender里打成泥，放在锅里炒起来，快要报团的时候，加了一点绿茶粉。然后揉成20个小团，按照方子上说的盖上保鲜膜放冰箱冷藏。拆开Almond flour cracker，一如既往的喜欢。
阳光正旺，抓紧时间把三床被子拿到阳台上，晒太阳。搬了三张凳子，才折腾完毕。这个时候已经2点多了，饥肠辘辘，昨天的剩菜和剩面条热了一下，加了点菠菜。砍了南瓜。蒸了一个红薯，准备给Rixi做她的饼干。但是我今天准备收拾衣橱，再一看时间已经快要4点了。狗狗在旁边哼哼唧唧，我带她出门上了厕所。
买了透明的收纳箱，让我收拾的工作稍微方便一点。还有狗狗的玩具，放到洗衣机里洗了。还有比尔的床单和枕头套。收拾衣橱真的是一个浩大的工程，还有进行一些思想斗争，是不是要扔掉一些东西。我收拾了两包衣服，不知道普林斯顿的二手衣服店是不是可以收下。
本来不想收拾聪的房间，她已经16岁了，应该自己能够收拾。但是想到上次另一个妈妈推荐的一篇文章，说还是要帮孩子收拾一下衣服。所以我还是照做了。打扫了已经掉在地下她的画，把灰尘去掉。又是一锅衣服。洗吧。所以加上我后来洗的床单和被套，那么今天洗了四次衣服。
收拾好她和我的衣服，已经6点多了。把被子们收回来。上楼下楼，我都觉得自己强壮无比。给狗狗吃饭。然后带她出门。6：45出门，7：30回来，天色已经暗了。
第一绿豆糕压下去就失败了。脑子里都是想想不出该如何折腾。后来还是去了youtube看了30秒才能正确使用。呼啦啦地压了一下。给Rachel家送了6个去。
然后一口气喝完了一碗稀饭配一个咸鸭蛋。再好不过了。
收拾厨房，跟比尔来来回回说了说演唱会。切了西瓜，其实喝了很多水，但是还是觉得口渴。看到蚂蚁，很不舒服。
等到我上楼去洗澡的时候，已经9点半了。洗头洗澡，等到坐在电脑前，已经将近10：30了。这一天，一页书也没有看，但是做事爽气。听完了一本书，不用管烧饭。所以还是算是属于我的。
2019年9月10日星期二
The Strange Persistence of First Languages(From Others)
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-strange-persistence-of-first-languages
Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument.
It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time.
Now my dad was shrugging at me from beyond— “You see, you’ve run out of time.”
His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue. Czech was the only language I knew until the age of 2, when my family began a migration westward, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Austria, then Italy, settling eventually in Montreal, Canada. Along the way, a clutter of languages introduced themselves into my life: German in preschool, Italian-speaking friends, the francophone streets of East Montreal. Linguistic experience congealed, though, once my siblings and I started school in English. As with many immigrants, this marked the time when English became, unofficially and over the grumbling of my parents (especially my father), our family language—the time when Czech began its slow retreat from my daily life.
Many would applaud the efficiency with which we settled into English—it’s what exemplary immigrants do. But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues—and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured. Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.
While my father was still alive, I was, like most young people, more intent on hurtling myself into my future than on tending my ancestral roots—and that included speaking the language of my new country rather than my old one. The incentives for adopting the culturally dominant language are undeniable. Proficiency offers clear financial rewards, resulting in wage increases of 15 percent for immigrants who achieve it relative to those who don’t, according to economist Barry Chiswick. A child, who rarely calculates the return on investment for her linguistic efforts, feels the currency of the dominant language in other ways: the approval of teachers and the acceptance of peers. I was mortally offended when my first-grade teacher asked me on the first day of school if I knew “a little English”—“I don’t know a little English,” was my indignant and heavily accented retort. “I know a lot of English.” In the schoolyard, I quickly learned that my Czech was seen as having little value by my friends, aside from the possibility of swearing in another language—a value I was unable to deliver, given that my parents were cursing teetotalers.
But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.
Meanwhile, the weaker language is more likely to become swamped; when resources are scarce, as they are during mental exhaustion, the disadvantaged language may become nearly impossible to summon. Over time, neglecting an earlier language makes it harder and harder for it to compete for access.
His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue.
According to a 2004 survey conducted in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, fewer than half of people belonging to Generation 1.5—immigrants who arrive before their teenage years—claimed to speak the language they were born into “very well.” A 2006 study of immigrant languages in Southern California forecast that even among Mexican Americans, the slowest group to assimilate within Southern California, new arrivals would live to hear only 5 out of every 100 of their great-grandchildren speak fluent Spanish.
When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.
Sedivy_BR
Adrian Giddings/Flickr
Psychotherapist Jennifer Schwanberg has seen this firsthand. In a 2010 paper, she describes treating a client who’d lived through a brutal childhood in Mexico before immigrating to the United States. The woman showed little emotion when talking about events from her early life, and Schwanberg at first assumed that her client had made her peace with them. But one day, the woman began the session in Spanish. The therapist followed her lead and discovered that “moving to her first language had opened a floodgate. Memories from childhood, both traumatic and nontraumatic, were recounted with depth and vividness ... It became clear that a door to the past was available to her in her first language.”
A first language remains uniquely intertwined with early memories, even for people who fully master another language. In her book The Bilingual Mind, linguist Aneta Pavlenko describes how the author Vladimir Nabokov fled the Russian revolution in 1919, arriving in the United Kingdom when he was 20. By the time he wrote his memoir Conclusive Evidence in 1951, he’d been writing in English for years, yet he struggled writing this particular text in his adopted language, complaining that his memory was tuned to the “musical key” of Russian. Soon after its publication, he translated the memoir into his native tongue. Working in his first language seems to have prodded his senses awake, leading him to insert new details into the Russian version: A simple anecdote about a stingy old housekeeper becomes perfumed with the scents of coffee and decay, the description of a laundry hamper acquires a creaking sound, the visual details of a celluloid swan and toy boat sprout as he writes about the tub in which he bathed as a child. Some of these details eventually made it into his revised English memoir, which he aptly titled Speak, Memory. Evidently, when memory speaks, it sometimes does so in a particular tongue.
Losing your native tongue unmoors you not only from your own early life but from the entire culture that shaped you. You lose access to the books, films, stories, and songs that articulate the values and norms that you’ve absorbed. You lose the embrace of an entire community or nation for whom your family’s odd quirks are not quirks all. You lose your context. This disconnection can be devastating. A 2007 study led by Darcy Hallett found that in British Columbian native communities in which fewer than half of the members could converse in their indigenous language, young people killed themselves six times more often than in communities where the majority spoke the native language. In the Midwestern U.S., psychologist Teresa LaFromboise and her colleagues found that American-Indian adolescents who were heavily involved in activities focused on their traditional language and traditions did better at school and had fewer behavior problems than kids who were less connected to their traditional cultures—in fact, cultural connectedness buffered them against adolescent problems more than having a warm and nurturing mother. Such benefits appear to span continents: In 2011, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that aboriginal youth who spoke their traditional language were less likely to binge drink or use illegal drugs.
Why is a heritage language so conducive to well-being? Michael Chandler, one of the authors of the suicide study, emphasizes that a sense of cultural continuity makes people resilient by providing them with a cohesive self-concept. Without that continuity, he warns, aboriginal youth, who have typically experienced plenty of turbulence, are in grave existential danger. They risk losing “the thread that tethers together their past, present, and future.”
As my siblings and I distanced ourselves from the Czech language in our youth, a space widened between us and our parents—especially my father, who never wore English with any comfort. Memories of our early family life, along with its small rituals and lessons imparted, receded into a past that drifted ever further out of reach. It was as if my parents’ life in their home country, and the values that defined that life, didn’t translate credibly into another language; it was much easier to rebel against them in English. Even the English names for our parents encouraged dissent: The Czech words we’d used—Maminka, Tatinek—so laden with esteem and affection, impossible to pronounce with contempt, had no corresponding forms. In English, the sweet but childish Mommy and Daddy are soon abandoned for Mom and Dad—words that, we discovered, lend themselves perfectly well to adolescent snark.
I watched as my father grew more and more frustrated at his powerlessness to pass on to his children the legacy he most longed to leave: a burning religious piety, the nurturing of family ties, pleasure in the music and traditions of his region, and an abiding respect for ancestors. All of these became diluted by the steady flow of new memories narrated in English, laced with Anglophone aspiration and individualism. As we entered adulthood and dispersed all over North America into our self-reliant lives, my father gave up. He moved back home.
For the next two decades, I lived my adult life, fully absorbed into the English-speaking universe, even adding American citizenship to my Canadian one. My dad was the only person with whom I regularly spoke Czech—if phone calls every few months can be described as “regularly,” and if my clumsy sentences patched together with abundant English can be called “speaking Czech.” My Czech heritage began to feel more and more like a vestigial organ.
You lose the embrace of an entire community. You lose your context.
Then my father died. Loss inevitably reveals that which is gone. It was as if the string section of the orchestra had fallen silent—not carrying the melody, it had gone unnoticed, but its absence announced how much depth and texture it had supplied, how its rhythms had lent coherence to the music. In grieving my father, I became aware of how much I also mourned the silencing of Czech in my life. There was a part of me, I realized, that only Czech could speak to, a way of being that was hard to settle into, even with my own siblings and mother when we spoke in English.
After my father’s death, my siblings and I inherited a sweet little apartment in a large compound that has been occupied by the Sedivy family since the 1600s, and where my uncle still lives with his sprawling family. This past spring, I finally cleared two months of my schedule and went for a long visit, sleeping on the very same bed where my father and his brothers had been born.
I discovered that, while I may have run out of time to visit my father in his homeland, there was still time for me to reunite with my native tongue. On my first day there, the long drive with my uncle between the airport and our place in the countryside was accompanied by a conversation that lurched along awkwardly, filled with dead ends and misunderstandings. Over the next few days, I had trouble excavating everyday words like stamp and fork, and I made grammar mistakes that would (and did) cause a 4-year-old to snicker. But within weeks, fluency began to unspool. Words that I’m sure I hadn’t used in decades leapt out of my mouth, astounding me. (Often they were correct. Sometimes not: I startled a man who asked about my occupation by claiming to be a savior—spasitelka. Sadly, I am a mere writer—spisovatelka.) The complicated inflections of Czech, described as “character-building” by an acquaintance who’d learned the language in college, began to assemble into somewhat orderly rows in my mind, and I quickly ventured onto more and more adventurous grammatical terrain. Just a few weeks into my visit, I briefly passed as a real Czech speaker in a conversation with a stranger. Relearning Czech so quickly felt like having linguistic superpowers.
Surprised by the speed of my progress, I began to look for studies of heritage speakers relearning childhood languages that had fallen into disuse. A number of scientific papers reported evidence of cognitive remnants of “forgotten” languages, remnants that were visible mostly in the process of relearning. In some cases, even when initial testing hinted at language decay, people who’d been exposed to the language earlier in life showed accelerated relearning of grammar, vocabulary, and most of all, of control over the sounds of the language.
One of the most remarkable examples involved a group of Indian adoptees who’d been raised from a young age (starting between 6 and 60 months) in English-speaking families, having no significant contact with their language of origin. The psychologist Leher Singh tested the children when they were between the ages of 8 and 16. Initially, neither group could hear the difference between dental and retroflex consonants, a distinction that’s exploited by many Indian languages. After listening to the contrasting sounds over a period of mere minutes, the adoptees, but not the American-born children, were able to discriminate between the two classes of consonants.
This is revealing because a language’s phonology, or sound structure, is one of the greatest challenges for people who start learning a language in adulthood. Long after they’ve mastered its syntax and vocabulary, a lifelong accent may mark them as latecomers to the language. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the star of many American movies and the governor of the country’s biggest state, but his Austrian accent is a constant reminder that he could never run for president. The crucial timing of exposure for native-like speech is evident in my own family: I can pronounce the notoriously difficult “ř” sound in Czech—as in the name of the composer Dvořák—but my brother, born three years after me, in Vienna, cannot.
Phonology’s resistance to both attrition and later learning may be due to the fact that the sound structure of a language is fixed in a child’s mind very early. Before 6 months of age, infants can distinguish most subtle differences in speech sounds, whether their language makes use of those distinctions or not. But over the second half of their first year, they gradually tune their perception to just the sounds of the language they hear around them. Children who hear only English lose the ability to distinguish between dental and retroflex sounds. Children learning Japanese begin to hear “r” and “l” as variants of the same sound. Linguist Pat Kuhl, who has studied this phenomenon for decades, describes the process as one of perceptual narrowing and increasing neural commitment, eventually excluding native-like perception of other languages.
One of the most striking examples of the brain’s attunement to native sounds is apparent in languages such as Mandarin, where varying the tone of an utterance can produce entirely different words. (For instance, the syllable ma can mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “scold,” depending on the pitch contour you lay over it.) When Mandarin speakers hear nonsense syllables that are identical except for their tones, they show heightened activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, where people normally process sounds that signal differences in meaning—like the difference between the syllables “pa” and “ba.” But speakers of non-tonal languages like English have more activity in the right hemisphere, showing that the brain doesn’t treat tone as relevant for distinguishing words. A recent study found that Chinese-born babies adopted into French homes showed brain activity that matched Chinese speakers and was clearly distinct from monolingual French speakers—even after being separated from their birth language for more than 12 years.
The brain’s devotion to a childhood language reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson:
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—
Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—
At her low Gate—
Unmoved—an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat—
I’ve known her—from an ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of her attention—
Like Stone—
Those of us who received more than one language before the valves of our attention closed may find, to our surprise, that our earliest language lingers on in our soul’s select society, long after we thought it had faded.
I’ve become aware of the deep sense in which I belong to the Czech language, as well as the extent to which my formative memories are tinged by its “musical key.” For me, the English phrase “pork with cabbage and dumplings” refers to a concept, the national dish of the Czechs. But hearing the Czech phrase vepřo-knedlo-zelo evokes the fragrance of roasting meat, pillowy dumpling loaves being pulled steaming out of a tall pot and sliced with sewing thread, and the clink of the nice china as the table is dressed for Sunday dinner, the fulcrum of every week.
Since coming back from the Czech Republic, I’ve insisted on speaking Czech with my mother. Even though it’s more effortful for both of us than speaking in English, our conversation feels softer, more tender this way. English was the language in which I forged my independence, the language of my individuation—but it was in Czech that I was nurtured, comforted, and sung to.
It has also gotten easier to hear the timbre of my father’s voice in my mind’s ear, especially when working in my garden. It’s no accident that many of my conversations with him, and more recently with my uncle, have been on the subject of horticulture. My father’s family has lived for centuries in the fertile wine and orchard region of Moravia, and on my recent visit, I saw my relatives gaze out at their land with an expression usually reserved for a beloved spouse or child. Throughout my own life, I’ve given in to the compulsion to fasten myself to whatever patch of land I happened to be living on by growing things on it, an impulse that has often conflicted with the upwardly and physically mobile trajectory of my life. It’s an impulse I submit to once again, living now in the lee of the Rocky Mountains; neither grapes nor apricots will thrive in the brittle mountain air, but I raise sour cherries and saskatoons, small fruits native to western Canada. As I mulch and weed and prune, I sometimes find myself murmuring to my plants in Czech as my father did, and the Moravian homestead doesn’t seem very far away.
My newly vocal native tongue, and along with it, the heightened memory of my father’s voice, does more than connect me to my past: It is proving to be an unexpected guide in my present work. I’ve recently left my job as an academic linguist to devote more time to writing, and I often find myself these days conjuring my father’s voice by reading a passage in Czech. Like many Czechs I’ve met, my father treated his language like a lovely object to be turned over, admired, stroked with a fingertip, deserving of deliberate and leisurely attention. He spoke less often than most people, but was more often eloquent. I may never regain enough of my first language to write anything in it worth reading, but when I struggle to write prose that not only informs but transcends, I find myself steering my inner monologue toward Czech. It reminds me of what it feels like to sink into language, to be startled by the aptness of a word or the twist of a phrase, to be delighted by arrangements of its sounds, and lulled by its rhythms. I’ve discovered that my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time.
Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You and more recently, the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.
Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument.
It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time.
Now my dad was shrugging at me from beyond— “You see, you’ve run out of time.”
His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue. Czech was the only language I knew until the age of 2, when my family began a migration westward, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Austria, then Italy, settling eventually in Montreal, Canada. Along the way, a clutter of languages introduced themselves into my life: German in preschool, Italian-speaking friends, the francophone streets of East Montreal. Linguistic experience congealed, though, once my siblings and I started school in English. As with many immigrants, this marked the time when English became, unofficially and over the grumbling of my parents (especially my father), our family language—the time when Czech began its slow retreat from my daily life.
Many would applaud the efficiency with which we settled into English—it’s what exemplary immigrants do. But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues—and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured. Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.
While my father was still alive, I was, like most young people, more intent on hurtling myself into my future than on tending my ancestral roots—and that included speaking the language of my new country rather than my old one. The incentives for adopting the culturally dominant language are undeniable. Proficiency offers clear financial rewards, resulting in wage increases of 15 percent for immigrants who achieve it relative to those who don’t, according to economist Barry Chiswick. A child, who rarely calculates the return on investment for her linguistic efforts, feels the currency of the dominant language in other ways: the approval of teachers and the acceptance of peers. I was mortally offended when my first-grade teacher asked me on the first day of school if I knew “a little English”—“I don’t know a little English,” was my indignant and heavily accented retort. “I know a lot of English.” In the schoolyard, I quickly learned that my Czech was seen as having little value by my friends, aside from the possibility of swearing in another language—a value I was unable to deliver, given that my parents were cursing teetotalers.
But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.
Meanwhile, the weaker language is more likely to become swamped; when resources are scarce, as they are during mental exhaustion, the disadvantaged language may become nearly impossible to summon. Over time, neglecting an earlier language makes it harder and harder for it to compete for access.
His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue.
According to a 2004 survey conducted in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, fewer than half of people belonging to Generation 1.5—immigrants who arrive before their teenage years—claimed to speak the language they were born into “very well.” A 2006 study of immigrant languages in Southern California forecast that even among Mexican Americans, the slowest group to assimilate within Southern California, new arrivals would live to hear only 5 out of every 100 of their great-grandchildren speak fluent Spanish.
When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.
Sedivy_BR
Adrian Giddings/Flickr
Psychotherapist Jennifer Schwanberg has seen this firsthand. In a 2010 paper, she describes treating a client who’d lived through a brutal childhood in Mexico before immigrating to the United States. The woman showed little emotion when talking about events from her early life, and Schwanberg at first assumed that her client had made her peace with them. But one day, the woman began the session in Spanish. The therapist followed her lead and discovered that “moving to her first language had opened a floodgate. Memories from childhood, both traumatic and nontraumatic, were recounted with depth and vividness ... It became clear that a door to the past was available to her in her first language.”
A first language remains uniquely intertwined with early memories, even for people who fully master another language. In her book The Bilingual Mind, linguist Aneta Pavlenko describes how the author Vladimir Nabokov fled the Russian revolution in 1919, arriving in the United Kingdom when he was 20. By the time he wrote his memoir Conclusive Evidence in 1951, he’d been writing in English for years, yet he struggled writing this particular text in his adopted language, complaining that his memory was tuned to the “musical key” of Russian. Soon after its publication, he translated the memoir into his native tongue. Working in his first language seems to have prodded his senses awake, leading him to insert new details into the Russian version: A simple anecdote about a stingy old housekeeper becomes perfumed with the scents of coffee and decay, the description of a laundry hamper acquires a creaking sound, the visual details of a celluloid swan and toy boat sprout as he writes about the tub in which he bathed as a child. Some of these details eventually made it into his revised English memoir, which he aptly titled Speak, Memory. Evidently, when memory speaks, it sometimes does so in a particular tongue.
Losing your native tongue unmoors you not only from your own early life but from the entire culture that shaped you. You lose access to the books, films, stories, and songs that articulate the values and norms that you’ve absorbed. You lose the embrace of an entire community or nation for whom your family’s odd quirks are not quirks all. You lose your context. This disconnection can be devastating. A 2007 study led by Darcy Hallett found that in British Columbian native communities in which fewer than half of the members could converse in their indigenous language, young people killed themselves six times more often than in communities where the majority spoke the native language. In the Midwestern U.S., psychologist Teresa LaFromboise and her colleagues found that American-Indian adolescents who were heavily involved in activities focused on their traditional language and traditions did better at school and had fewer behavior problems than kids who were less connected to their traditional cultures—in fact, cultural connectedness buffered them against adolescent problems more than having a warm and nurturing mother. Such benefits appear to span continents: In 2011, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that aboriginal youth who spoke their traditional language were less likely to binge drink or use illegal drugs.
Why is a heritage language so conducive to well-being? Michael Chandler, one of the authors of the suicide study, emphasizes that a sense of cultural continuity makes people resilient by providing them with a cohesive self-concept. Without that continuity, he warns, aboriginal youth, who have typically experienced plenty of turbulence, are in grave existential danger. They risk losing “the thread that tethers together their past, present, and future.”
As my siblings and I distanced ourselves from the Czech language in our youth, a space widened between us and our parents—especially my father, who never wore English with any comfort. Memories of our early family life, along with its small rituals and lessons imparted, receded into a past that drifted ever further out of reach. It was as if my parents’ life in their home country, and the values that defined that life, didn’t translate credibly into another language; it was much easier to rebel against them in English. Even the English names for our parents encouraged dissent: The Czech words we’d used—Maminka, Tatinek—so laden with esteem and affection, impossible to pronounce with contempt, had no corresponding forms. In English, the sweet but childish Mommy and Daddy are soon abandoned for Mom and Dad—words that, we discovered, lend themselves perfectly well to adolescent snark.
I watched as my father grew more and more frustrated at his powerlessness to pass on to his children the legacy he most longed to leave: a burning religious piety, the nurturing of family ties, pleasure in the music and traditions of his region, and an abiding respect for ancestors. All of these became diluted by the steady flow of new memories narrated in English, laced with Anglophone aspiration and individualism. As we entered adulthood and dispersed all over North America into our self-reliant lives, my father gave up. He moved back home.
For the next two decades, I lived my adult life, fully absorbed into the English-speaking universe, even adding American citizenship to my Canadian one. My dad was the only person with whom I regularly spoke Czech—if phone calls every few months can be described as “regularly,” and if my clumsy sentences patched together with abundant English can be called “speaking Czech.” My Czech heritage began to feel more and more like a vestigial organ.
You lose the embrace of an entire community. You lose your context.
Then my father died. Loss inevitably reveals that which is gone. It was as if the string section of the orchestra had fallen silent—not carrying the melody, it had gone unnoticed, but its absence announced how much depth and texture it had supplied, how its rhythms had lent coherence to the music. In grieving my father, I became aware of how much I also mourned the silencing of Czech in my life. There was a part of me, I realized, that only Czech could speak to, a way of being that was hard to settle into, even with my own siblings and mother when we spoke in English.
After my father’s death, my siblings and I inherited a sweet little apartment in a large compound that has been occupied by the Sedivy family since the 1600s, and where my uncle still lives with his sprawling family. This past spring, I finally cleared two months of my schedule and went for a long visit, sleeping on the very same bed where my father and his brothers had been born.
I discovered that, while I may have run out of time to visit my father in his homeland, there was still time for me to reunite with my native tongue. On my first day there, the long drive with my uncle between the airport and our place in the countryside was accompanied by a conversation that lurched along awkwardly, filled with dead ends and misunderstandings. Over the next few days, I had trouble excavating everyday words like stamp and fork, and I made grammar mistakes that would (and did) cause a 4-year-old to snicker. But within weeks, fluency began to unspool. Words that I’m sure I hadn’t used in decades leapt out of my mouth, astounding me. (Often they were correct. Sometimes not: I startled a man who asked about my occupation by claiming to be a savior—spasitelka. Sadly, I am a mere writer—spisovatelka.) The complicated inflections of Czech, described as “character-building” by an acquaintance who’d learned the language in college, began to assemble into somewhat orderly rows in my mind, and I quickly ventured onto more and more adventurous grammatical terrain. Just a few weeks into my visit, I briefly passed as a real Czech speaker in a conversation with a stranger. Relearning Czech so quickly felt like having linguistic superpowers.
Surprised by the speed of my progress, I began to look for studies of heritage speakers relearning childhood languages that had fallen into disuse. A number of scientific papers reported evidence of cognitive remnants of “forgotten” languages, remnants that were visible mostly in the process of relearning. In some cases, even when initial testing hinted at language decay, people who’d been exposed to the language earlier in life showed accelerated relearning of grammar, vocabulary, and most of all, of control over the sounds of the language.
One of the most remarkable examples involved a group of Indian adoptees who’d been raised from a young age (starting between 6 and 60 months) in English-speaking families, having no significant contact with their language of origin. The psychologist Leher Singh tested the children when they were between the ages of 8 and 16. Initially, neither group could hear the difference between dental and retroflex consonants, a distinction that’s exploited by many Indian languages. After listening to the contrasting sounds over a period of mere minutes, the adoptees, but not the American-born children, were able to discriminate between the two classes of consonants.
This is revealing because a language’s phonology, or sound structure, is one of the greatest challenges for people who start learning a language in adulthood. Long after they’ve mastered its syntax and vocabulary, a lifelong accent may mark them as latecomers to the language. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the star of many American movies and the governor of the country’s biggest state, but his Austrian accent is a constant reminder that he could never run for president. The crucial timing of exposure for native-like speech is evident in my own family: I can pronounce the notoriously difficult “ř” sound in Czech—as in the name of the composer Dvořák—but my brother, born three years after me, in Vienna, cannot.
Phonology’s resistance to both attrition and later learning may be due to the fact that the sound structure of a language is fixed in a child’s mind very early. Before 6 months of age, infants can distinguish most subtle differences in speech sounds, whether their language makes use of those distinctions or not. But over the second half of their first year, they gradually tune their perception to just the sounds of the language they hear around them. Children who hear only English lose the ability to distinguish between dental and retroflex sounds. Children learning Japanese begin to hear “r” and “l” as variants of the same sound. Linguist Pat Kuhl, who has studied this phenomenon for decades, describes the process as one of perceptual narrowing and increasing neural commitment, eventually excluding native-like perception of other languages.
One of the most striking examples of the brain’s attunement to native sounds is apparent in languages such as Mandarin, where varying the tone of an utterance can produce entirely different words. (For instance, the syllable ma can mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “scold,” depending on the pitch contour you lay over it.) When Mandarin speakers hear nonsense syllables that are identical except for their tones, they show heightened activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, where people normally process sounds that signal differences in meaning—like the difference between the syllables “pa” and “ba.” But speakers of non-tonal languages like English have more activity in the right hemisphere, showing that the brain doesn’t treat tone as relevant for distinguishing words. A recent study found that Chinese-born babies adopted into French homes showed brain activity that matched Chinese speakers and was clearly distinct from monolingual French speakers—even after being separated from their birth language for more than 12 years.
The brain’s devotion to a childhood language reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson:
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—
Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—
At her low Gate—
Unmoved—an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat—
I’ve known her—from an ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of her attention—
Like Stone—
Those of us who received more than one language before the valves of our attention closed may find, to our surprise, that our earliest language lingers on in our soul’s select society, long after we thought it had faded.
I’ve become aware of the deep sense in which I belong to the Czech language, as well as the extent to which my formative memories are tinged by its “musical key.” For me, the English phrase “pork with cabbage and dumplings” refers to a concept, the national dish of the Czechs. But hearing the Czech phrase vepřo-knedlo-zelo evokes the fragrance of roasting meat, pillowy dumpling loaves being pulled steaming out of a tall pot and sliced with sewing thread, and the clink of the nice china as the table is dressed for Sunday dinner, the fulcrum of every week.
Since coming back from the Czech Republic, I’ve insisted on speaking Czech with my mother. Even though it’s more effortful for both of us than speaking in English, our conversation feels softer, more tender this way. English was the language in which I forged my independence, the language of my individuation—but it was in Czech that I was nurtured, comforted, and sung to.
It has also gotten easier to hear the timbre of my father’s voice in my mind’s ear, especially when working in my garden. It’s no accident that many of my conversations with him, and more recently with my uncle, have been on the subject of horticulture. My father’s family has lived for centuries in the fertile wine and orchard region of Moravia, and on my recent visit, I saw my relatives gaze out at their land with an expression usually reserved for a beloved spouse or child. Throughout my own life, I’ve given in to the compulsion to fasten myself to whatever patch of land I happened to be living on by growing things on it, an impulse that has often conflicted with the upwardly and physically mobile trajectory of my life. It’s an impulse I submit to once again, living now in the lee of the Rocky Mountains; neither grapes nor apricots will thrive in the brittle mountain air, but I raise sour cherries and saskatoons, small fruits native to western Canada. As I mulch and weed and prune, I sometimes find myself murmuring to my plants in Czech as my father did, and the Moravian homestead doesn’t seem very far away.
My newly vocal native tongue, and along with it, the heightened memory of my father’s voice, does more than connect me to my past: It is proving to be an unexpected guide in my present work. I’ve recently left my job as an academic linguist to devote more time to writing, and I often find myself these days conjuring my father’s voice by reading a passage in Czech. Like many Czechs I’ve met, my father treated his language like a lovely object to be turned over, admired, stroked with a fingertip, deserving of deliberate and leisurely attention. He spoke less often than most people, but was more often eloquent. I may never regain enough of my first language to write anything in it worth reading, but when I struggle to write prose that not only informs but transcends, I find myself steering my inner monologue toward Czech. It reminds me of what it feels like to sink into language, to be startled by the aptness of a word or the twist of a phrase, to be delighted by arrangements of its sounds, and lulled by its rhythms. I’ve discovered that my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time.
Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You and more recently, the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.
2019年9月2日星期一
SAT考试的一天
选了一个暑假的周六考SAT，主要是为给她打一个底，如果一枪能够命中，那就省去了学业繁重的Junior的繁忙，如果不理想，那么还可以再次进攻。
把她送到考场后，我和比尔就去滨州的一个公园了，因为是在是不想再Trenton呆着。我们快到的时候，我看到了摘桃的农场的牌子，才意识到这个公园去年来摘桃的时候带狗狗也来过。先去公园，跟上次一样，走错了门，只能到达公园的很小一块。于是从公园外面绕过去，才进入公园的湖的区域。本来想带Rixi下水库去游玩的，但是想着还是去流水的小溪里比较干净，就暂时没有让她下水。没有想到这么一错过，就等到了Burlington Vermont才让她好好地玩了一通水。
在Playground上，他去玩Money Bar，碰到一个曾经也是有狗的人，说到她的狗因为总是咬她，只得把狗狗送到Shelter去，结果后来把狗狗领走的人也被狗咬了之后，就被put down了。她说得很伤心，说自从狗狗走了以后，很久没有到这个公园来了，因为以前总是过来遛狗。但是现在又想养狗了，只是她老公不同意，因为心中愧疚，觉得原来的那只狗就是因为他们surrender以后才造成狗狗的死亡。
是的，很难的。沟通是最难的 。
走完公园后，我们商量着就去旁边的桃园摘桃吧，正好也可以是带上狗狗的。结果她就和去年一样，紧紧地趴在拖车上，好在我们都在旁边，所以还是放心不少。
很快，我们发现在树梢的桃子又大又甜，我们就共同协力，摘下了好几个看上去水灵灵的大桃子，两个桶很快就被装满了。
回去的路上还摘了两个zukini，他不觉得好吃，但是做饼聪喜欢呀。
再回到Trenton，本来想下来转转的，看到满街不是属于我们同类的人，想了像还是放弃了。到学校的时候是12点15分的样子，比尔进门去上厕所，顺便问了一下考试什么时候结束。被告知是1点15分。想着还有一个小时，我去上完厕所，他已经找好了下一个目的地，就是Trenton的Farmers' Market。想着我千年不用管一回。
跑去看，热闹非凡，说是室内的，其实就是支了一个大棚。我们再门口看了半天也没有看到能否带宠物进门的标志，就带她进去了，直到她大吼几声之后，才被一个在中间的摊贩告知说是不能带宠物的，我们于是就离开了。本来想着在里面买点吃的，也是有点扫兴而归。但是出门的时候，看到有人在门口卖的西红柿和小西瓜，10美元都不到就可以买三个西瓜，一小盆番茄，就很痛快地完成了交易。这个时候再往学校开去，我已经心里很着急了。
等到1点20分后，我再进门去询问，结果被告知是2点才出来。幸亏我带了一本漫画书，在夏末的午后，我在车里看这漫画书，他看着手机。一起等着聪的出现。熬到2点多以后，我还是沉不住气了，让比尔再次去询问。结果他短信我说2：20收卷子了。我们一直等到2点40，才看到聪的身影。我的第一个想法就是，她一定饿坏了。
可是她上来就先把监考老师狠狠地批评了一通。说智商几乎是负值。如果一句话没有说清楚，她一定要重新再把那句话重头再次缓慢地说一遍。算时间也都没有这个智商能够算得清楚。而且让学生不许说话，尽管学生之间是想解释监考老师解释不了得问题。原本8点30分就应该开始的考试，一直拖延到9点30才慢慢开始。原本她担心的food coma早就被扫得一干二净。于是我们决定不去宾州的州立公园了，狗狗也跟那条小溪暂时告别的缘分。一路回家，快到小河边的时候，看到独木舟，聪想划，就下去看，没有想到运河治理，所以只有周日才有划船。倒是沿着运河走了走。我是回家心切，还想着把新鲜的桃子给Rachel家送去点，这样他们明天帮我们照顾Rixi的话，心里也好受一点。
在家稍作停顿，收拾一下摘下来的桃子之后，就准备出发去吃寿司自助餐了。一天就吃了两顿。晚餐的种类聪菜单上要比午餐多一些，但是实在没有觉得值这份钱。
Coney Island，Prospect Park一日游
在考SAT之前就许愿她考完之后去Coney Island游玩，这个沙滩之所有有名，因为一年一度的吃热狗大赛，还有那令人生畏的过山车。周日，开车很顺利，而Coney Island又是在Brooklyn的最南边，所以等于一进纽约市，就到了。
比尔根本就是无心寻找趴车的地方，只是想早点把车停下就可以去玩了。枉费了我对停车做的research。不过我现在尽量按照他的方法来，这样大家都减少一点冲突，没有必要处处都按照我的行事。再说，他也没有说过让我寻找趴车的地方，所以不要觉得自己做了，别人就得待见。
周日游乐场都是11点开门，所以，我们等于到的时候，刚开门，人还不是很多。买票的时候决定过了买100元（价值140元）的可充值卡，因为一人一个套环的话，就觉得就先想把钱挣回来，然后就不停地玩。
她最先看上的就是第一张图里最刺激的，叫弹弓，需要使用的灵活票是22张，这么一来44张一下子就没有了。即使有当天的手环，也是只能做一次的。几乎没有人排队，所以很快就做上了。这么快的速度上了这样的高度，还是很刺激的。只可惜时间太短。我在给他们录像的时候，太阳光直射眼睛，所以几乎啥都看不见。这样的项目当然是会有录像的，15美刀，大家都嫌贵，就没有要。但是看了看那个录像，还是觉得挺好的。两个人都笑得那么开心。接下来就是大钟摆。在最高点上来回徘徊得时候是最开心的。那样的高度。
谁知道感觉还是蛮刺激的，因为毕竟是急速的转弯。对于高速，我实在也是不能有自己的兴趣。但是因为毕竟自己不用负责，多多少少还是比较放心。
我们也陪着笑笑。
然后她又玩了一个项目。充值卡在玩完卡丁车后还给了我，但是因为我和手机放在了一起，在拿手机的时候不小心滑出来了。幸亏我警觉，发现得早，顺着原来的路回去，很快就从地上捡到了。
看着她坐上面。我和比尔就坐在凳子上看着她。不判断，不评论，就这么心平气和地坐着，聊着天，这样的感觉真是久违了。
我们走上升入海里的高木板地，看看再最远的地方人们在做什么？
都在钓鱼。
远远地看到这个最高级别的过山车。
难得有的一家三口的自拍。
我们决定坐地铁去布鲁克林的Prospect Park。比尔和我都去过，但是聪没有去过，正好https://www.smorgasburg.com/的周日的小吃市场在这个公园里，所以决定带聪去看公园，但比尔去看小吃市场。
从公园里绕过去，慢慢地找到了这个小吃市场的所在之处。我们都已经有点饿了。所以上来就给比尔买了一个Ramen Burger，使用的不是面包的bun，而是用方便面的面饼做成的。
接下来吃了墨鱼大考。她要吃刨冰，我不想一上来就把肚子填个冰凉，何况她还在来例假呢。然后买了一个Taco，每个人咬了几口。比尔要了巴西的煎饺子，更确切的说应该是炸饺子。买了意大利的鸡肉串，真是不觉得好吃，等了好长时间。我和聪买了日本的炸鸡。好吃的太多。幸亏三人一同去，可以尝试更加多的食物。
制作刨冰和ice cream roll的录像。
最后还是要了刨冰。等了好尝时间。等的时候，她去买棒冰，5美元一只的棒冰也真舍得买。我想我是把她给宠坏了。
后来看甜点的时候，还是买了这个美丽拼盘的冰激淋。
而我和比尔沿着湖绕了半圈，随便说说也都觉得很好。看到傻瓜喂大雁，那些大雁啊，穷凶极恶的，根本就不是能够被善待的动物。
比尔想想自己没有跟孩子一起去骑车是多么英明的一个决定，因为车速实在是太慢了。而如果他骑了一辆速度还是比较快的自行车，那么相比聪一定会要求跟他换。那他就变成一个傻瓜了。
我和比尔到马路对面的椅子上去，我看右边，他看左边，看她是从哪里回来的，结果看到一堆恋人吵架，而聪从他们中间穿梭过去。
我看到聪，不知道怎么的就没有好气地说，You asked for it，在她表示了这是一次非常缓慢的行驶之后。
再坐地铁回Coney Island，继续战斗。看到了著名的wonder wheel。有一个美丽的故事，一个推着hot dog stand的小伙子爱上了一个女孩，发誓有一天要把这个大转盘买下来给她。结果他还真的做到了，所以在大转盘上，有了很多的求婚的故事。看到高空飞椅，她抑制不住心中的激动。这个时候等待的人已经多了起来，好不容易快要排到了，结果被告知风太大，暂停操作。
她就只能再去排另外一个看得上的大锤子。
这个时候夕阳已经再云层后慢慢照过来。
同样是游乐园，常州恐龙园的，花了整整一天的时间，我还代替排队，只玩了4个项目。二且还气呼呼的。这个游乐场，项目多，人多，但是不觉得排队是很痛苦的一件事情。大家几乎都是很有秩序地在游玩。
看到飞椅又开放了，终于如愿以偿 。
看着天空中飞翔的椅子，看着可真自由。
华灯初上。
终于等到他们开卡丁车了，她看上还是比较紧张的。开下来之后就说是最紧张的一个娱乐项目。
结果很意外地发现她穿的长袖是有反光功能的，所以在黑暗中，只要有点亮光，就能看到非常不一般的场景。最后在停车场上看到了wonder wheel的正面，给这个美好的一天画上了一个完美的句号。
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佛罗里达是美国大陆最火的冬季度假胜地之一，每年有大量朋友从美东自驾到佛州。在圣诞节期间，我去过佛州3次，基本玩遍了佛州东岸西岸和中部的所有景点：St Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami, Key West, Orlando的Disney 4个园子，Unive...
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Different people have different ideas about what it means to sign an email “XOXO,” what you should use Facebook for, and how long you can wa...
