To rule or not to rule
Most teachers at some point have felt that second language learning is an upward battle. It’s hard because it’s not natural. Why should our brains be interested in learning something that we already know? Why go to the bother of learning something complicated (second language) that we already can do without thinking (first language)? Searching for ways to get students to respond, we think about rewards and punishments. We set down the rules. It makes sense because language itself is rule driven. Without rules, we could not acquire a language. Without a system of mutually agreed meaning and sounds, we would not have a language. Chomsky taught us that our brains are programmed to recognize meaningful patterns and understand it as grammar. By virtue of our neurology, we have the innate ability to collect and sort so that the particulates of a language fall into grooves in the way acid etches a motherboard. Anything else will be washed away, unrecognized as language. Our brains sort the social grammars that we operate under as well. Without effort, we “know” what is appropriate to say in what situation and in what company. We are all very multilingual and can code switch our social languages depending on if we’re asking for a raise or reprimanding a subordinate. Again, we can communicate our most nuanced messages because we know the rules. Of course, everyone has the free will to run a red, but that’s only possible because of the stoplight. Since rules so effectively help humans to be competent in speaking and socializing, it’s a fair reaction for teachers to set down rules for classroom behavior. Certainly, it’s easier to teach if students are standing or sitting or wearing the same clothes. We’re trying to deliver information uniformly to a large population, so doesn’t it help if that population is as uniform as possible? Probably not when it comes to language learning. The universal grammar that Chomsky is talking about is not about policing proper language, it’s about how the brain works. If the brain selects what it thinks is useful, is it useful for teachers to pre-select what we think the brain wants? Are we that confident? If a whale eats mostly plankton, are we going to feed it with microscopic spoons or just let the whale swim? When food is pre-chewed and pre-digested before serving it on the plate, it’s unrecognizable and unpalatable. Teaching personal pronouns with charts is an example of pre-digested grammar. It’s tasteless and leaves little to love even if it is essential for speaking correctly. Is that why most students fail the fill-in-the-pronoun test? In contrast, I’ve seen how eight year-olds never make the mistake of, “I love you. You love I” when learned through actions. After one correction, they hear the mistake and think it’s hilarious, as if they have mysteriously understood the relationships of giver and receiver, lover and loved. When something sounds right in opposition to something that sounds funny, we’ve deepened our Chomsky brain grooves, even as a second language. For teachers, teaching a second language is still a challenge though we shouldn’t call it a futile battle. It’s only futile when we enforce rules for the sake of enforcing rules. If some day we are clever enough, we can figure out how the brain can do most of the work for us.
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Teaching quality, lack of resources, weak infrastructures, exhaustion of will, problems so perennial that we should make them into calendars. What if we decided we don’t need to teach and learn English anymore? How simple would life be?
The world of Star Trek is just around the corner with hand-held simultaneous translation devices. Ahead of the game is the Jibbigo application, which promises speech recognition of 40,000 words for ten languages in a smartphone app. Potentially, we could save ourselves thousands of hours of language learning and quickly be multilingual with a battery charge. Gone will be TESOL departments, private language schools and the memorizing of archaic idioms for tests. There will be a tremendous sigh of relief from the masses. There is no need to emphasize how convenient this will be. Think of how productive we will be when we have time to spend studying something else? How interconnected will commerce be when we don’t get lost in translation? What cross-cultural romances will bloom when misunderstandings are wiped away? What will change of course is the very way we communicate and we will have to think again how valuable that is. Is our communication clumsy and crude in a way that aliens laugh at us, or is our bumbling attempt at communicating the very essence of what makes us human? Would we really want multilingual romances to depend on headsets and special goggles from which love in translated into subtitles? First of all, how is it even possible? Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and Microsoft have developed prototypes, so rather than speculative science fiction, we can get information on how the technology works. Microsoft’s model uses virtual neurons to replicate what the human brain does. Neural networks weigh the value of information collaboratively, not that different from what Wikipedia does. The next fairly inscrutable thing to understand is that these neural networks are in layers through which information is sifted through, also apparently consistent with the way the brain works. Microsoft does this with nine layers. The bottom one is for processing sound and the higher levels sort information to determine the most likely intended meaning. For Google’s model, the rough edges are sanded down by crowdsourcing. Samples from smartphones are used to compare and select the most likely solution. In this way, the strongest skeptic may be proven wrong as technology finds ways to handle nuance, humor, sarcasm, contextual and cultural references, dialects, accents, slang and just about any other tool we use to communicate as language loving beings. Even for lovers, audio will most likely be able to replicate individual voiceprints, inflections, intonation and everything else needed to not only be understood but to be felt. So at the end of the day, if there are no more Luddites in the room, what can be the case to reject this technology? One might be that it will make our brains lazy if our layers of neural networks lack exercise. We might evolve out of legs too if we don’t use them anymore. Another might be that we will miss the fun of miscommunication. We won’t return home from foreign lands with amusing stories about taxi drivers and banana sellers, basically those delightful experiences when we find we can communicate through our own ingenuity, humor and magnanimity. Let’s wholeheartedly enjoy our fumbling, bu Education is a gamble. Parents spend so much money on a future that’s not guaranteed. They pay for the books, the fees and the uniforms. Then in the end, what happens if the kid is a slacker and comes back home with an open mouth to be fed? Maybe that’s why it’s better to have a dozen children. One of them has to come out OK.
Education is a gamble, but the odds are still better than playing the lottery. Even so, the appeal of hitting it big keeps people spending their precious money on a ticket of chance. Sometimes the numbers come in a dream or are etched in tree bark or found at the bottom of teacup. There are enough stories of people rescued from rags and flung into riches to keep people hoping. I wish there were more stories about people who have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. When the winnings are so big, people are not afraid of debt. There are stories of people cashing in their future meals, confident that hitting the jackpot will cover their debt. In some countries, vendors hand out tickets on credit and are willing to collect when the booty comes in. They’re counting on someone hitting the lucky number. Otherwise, they too are out of luck and have to swallow their losses. That seems pretty risky to me. I don’t want to be Puritan about this pursuit because some people have fun. What is life without a few risks? It’s a diversion from drudgery and gives people a glimmer of hope. Actually, I’ve been corrected on this thought. No, it’s not fun and no, it doesn’t offer a real hope. If anything, it confirms the big game in life that only a few hit it big. It’s more about privilege than chance and every ticket bought reinforces the belief that success is only a lucky break. Can education break this cycle? Education is a gamble, but the odds are much better. It’s supposed to teach us that nothing is free. Success comes from hard work, not from chance or the cycles of karmic birth. Unfortunately, not all education is so pure. Education can institutionalize us back into those very same cycles of purgatory. The numbers on a lottery start to blur with the figures on tests and grades. The chance of winning a bit of money starts to feel like the luck of getting into a good school. The debt credited to a diploma and future job starts to look like the way people spend anticipated money long before it is delivered by some providence. Some countries are faced with the problem of graduates not paying back their student loans. The government has already bet on a chance by giving out low interest loans with the assumption that graduates will be able to pay them back. Some don’t return the money. Hoping they can slip through the cracks, some believe the system won’t catch them and many can’t catch good paying jobs or find employment at all. Many people think education is a gamble because the cash is not immediate. Who would buy a lottery ticket if the results didn’t come out until ten years later? We’d forget to even check. For me, investing in education brings golden returns. Almost every day I’m greeted by someone I’ve taught in the past. They remember me and tell me how far they’ve come in life. They’re proof that the odds can be beat and that everyone has a chance. There is no spring in Laos though in balance to the seemingly eternal summer, there is a winter. Get out your woollen hats and gloves. Use earmuffs and mufflers to protect your ears and mouth. When that hard wind blows, it’s time to hunker down and hibernate.
Plants don’t have sweaters so they react in protective ways like dropping their leaves. Evident by their rings, trees have cycles of growth and retrenchment with bursts of creative energy in spring and a hardened bark in winter. It’s natural for their development to leap forward, then freeze into dormancy for a period of time. Animals have legs or wings so they have the ability to flee the cold. When things get inhospitable, they pack up in search of more fertile grounds. Some animals stick it out by slowing down their metabolism to hibernate. Either way, nature knows when the environment is not conducive for basic functions so they either give it up or cool down the blood. Us humans in contrast, like to defy nature and find ways to survive under any circumstances, no matter how intolerable. As creatures of habit, we’re also able do deceive ourselves and find comfort in the familiar. Spurts of growth and development don’t happen seasonally so we take for granted the master cycle beginning with the exponential growth as an embryo, the significant change as an adolescent and the slow replacements of cells at a senior age. One spring is not going to change our lives or so we think. Our development does not depend on it. Cold makes it hard for young people who want to learn, especially for those in the mountains. Fingers will freeze when we try to write and it’s better to keep lips sealed since they’ll chap if we speak. It reminds me of my college year in Connecticut when trying to save money, our student household did without fuel. We typed our papers in our sleeping bags but our fingers still threatened to stick to the keys. We wanted to just wait until spring, but that would not have been possible. The cold made us fearful, just thinking of an icy shower. I’m sure many people in the countryside can relate to this. Just the thought makes one want to hide. The cold made us immobile and we used more energy to shiver than to take any significant action. It was seasonal procrastination with the wish for our problems to simply disappear, but of course nothing just disappears. Lao people in general are hardier and more patient. They can wait it out without complaining. If it doesn’t get warmer tomorrow, it will in a few weeks or months. But almost as if warmth is assumed, spring is hardly given a calendar day. As if it happens overnight, it’s suddenly uncomfortably hot as we wonder if spring was just a label or a metaphor. We learn that there is shivering and sweating and nothing in between. Or maybe a youthful spring is something that keeps the insides of young people warm enough to sit by the light of a lamp and read from a book in prayer for the future. A hope for a non-existent spring can keep one going for yet another day. It’s cold in mountaintops of Sam Neua, Phongsali and Xieng Khouang. For all of you struggling to keep your candle lit, please stay warm and in good health. Stick to your books and hone your mind. If you persevere, you will see the day in which your efforts will bloom without restraint. Many people like to tell me that the Lao language is easy, whereas English is difficult. I don’t know how they can compare since one is their mother tongue and the other a foreign language. If they’re simply saying that a foreign language is harder to learn than one’s first language, of course I agree.
Hidden in this assertion is the fact that many people in Laos are learning Lao as a second language if not a foreign language. Many ethnic minority children don’t use Lao until they start school and learning to read and write in Lao can’t be that easy. Nobody has ever told me directly that they have trouble with Lao. It’s probably a source of shame. Those who are proficiently bilingual are ones who have spent time in the cities and are not representative of what is happening in the countryside. It may seem like hair splitting to make the distinction, but if these rural ethnic minority students are classified as learners of a foreign, not second language, there would be more sympathy. A second language by definition is a national or official language used in a country so it means that once you leave your door, you have the chance to learn by immersion. You will be expected to speak that language and it will be everywhere. Lao is the national and official language, but in a remote ethnic village, you can walk out your door and never know it. Most villages don’t have street signs, billboards or even shop signs not to mention books and newspapers. Many villages can source radio and TV in their own local language or if they have a taste for TV dramas, will more often tune into Thai than Lao. Daily life can be conducted without Lao. People learn second languages out of necessity, but study foreign languages because they are language nerds, hobbyists or frequent fliers. A foreign language is harder to learn because there is less language contact on a daily basis, but for this very reason, those interested in learning are willing to spend money for it. It’s not only big business, but academic studies and international organizations rally around the cause. When paying customers go to foreign language schools, they can expect to get properly trained in articulation, grammar and cultural norms. Bilingual teachers act as bridges or at least the texts are translated into a customer’s first language. Second language learners rarely get these services. There are the assumptions that once immersed, students will simply learn how to swim. Unfortunately, learning Lao as a foreign language hasn’t emerged as a big cause. I’ve never seen a book, “Learning Lao for ethnic minorities” or seen Lao language learning programs on TV. Language acquisition is just supposed to happen on its own or through immersion in the schools and it ends up being either sink or swim. I’ve seen how many elementary school students learn to swim. They follow the crowd when they don’t understand. They lip sync when they’re not confident and share answers when they don’t have any clues themselves. If these swimming techniques work, many can complete school, but when they’re required to truly be able to read and write, they sink. Much of what has been learned about teaching English as a foreign language can be used for helping speakers of ethnic minority languages when they learn Lao. The biggest shift is to question the premise that students will learn naturally through immersion. Can’t we find a way to help them read and write? It’s worth a try. We could see more students swimming. After a long day, it’s nice to sit in a coffee shop and get good service. A smile, a cup well positioned on the saucer and a well-wiped table. The attention to detail is what can make or break an experience. In contrast, I’ve had teatime ruined by surly service that doesn’t have a clue as to what a customer wants. I once asked for the table to be wiped of crumbs before my order was put on the table and the waitress brushed them off with a random receipt. In the end, I had to go to the kitchen to get a towel.
The purpose is not to just rag about bad service, but to remind us how difficult and important good customer service is. After all, the golden rule is that the customer is always right. This is not just based on the principle that a person who pays is always correct, but that the essence of service is to put another person’s needs before one’s own. Couldn’t this be applied to the idea of good teaching? Of course, a good teacher serving their students cannot mean that the student is always right. The job of the teacher is to direct the student when they are wrong. On the other hand, the student should have the right to be wrong without the fear of punishment or humiliation. The student has the right to be ignorant since admitting that is the first step to getting educated. The student has the right to receive good teaching service. That should be the bottom line. They’re usually paying for it. I always sigh when I talk to students so desperate to get an education. More than often, they feel an education is the ability to speak English and they complain that they can’t do so because they don’t have the money to study in a private school. Why can’t they learn it at school? They’re usually enrolled in a large institution that already has an English program, but they’re not being served. What would we do if we bought a cup of coffee that never came? Or for that matter cold coffee in a chipped cup or one with grounds in it or one from discarded beans? People working in the service industry might sometimes wonder why they have to always smile for so little in return. People opening doors might feel more like doormats. Those in customer service have to be trained to endure abuse. In that respect, teachers with the right heart are by far better off. The gratitude and love from students is often beautifully expressed. When I was teaching in a university, teenagers would ask for advice. Many times the problems were personal and complicated so I would just assure them that they should believe in themselves and do what they think is best. With this kind of advice, things would often just work out on their own and students would gush appreciation for my advice. The returns of good customer service are especially strong when a teacher is truly sincere. It is not be a popularity contest, but one teacher complained that his students never contacted him after they graduated. He obviously didn’t leave much of an impression on them. Then, there are teachers with devoted students who pay them visits and remember them well into adulthood. It’s not because they’ve told their students they are always right, but they’ve communicated to them through their service that that student is special and deserving of the best. A good teacher who goes the extra mile for their students will enjoy the gracious adoration of extended families, children and grandchildren if they live that long. It lasts longer than a cup of coffee. I am surprised to see that Jane Goodall is still alive and writing. I remember this famous British primatologist from the 60s when she made groundbreaking discoveries about animal behavior. She observed wild chimpanzees teasing termites out of holes with modified twigs. With that insight, she broke our complacent beliefs that only humans make tools. Though a bit humbled, we still convince ourselves that we are rather clever.
These days we have some mighty fancy tools. Like chimpanzees, we have opposable thumbs and this comes in handy when swiping or texting. Chimpanzees have hands made for swinging through trees. Our thumbs have evolved to Instagram our swinging. We cannot do without, but we’re not so sure these days if we’re using a tool or a toy. Nor are we so sure that our inventiveness is born from necessity. Maybe we are simply programmed now to manufacture more needs. We should relent and admit that most of our waking life is about manufacturing, be it commodities or consent. Throughout the world, we agree that a good education means a good career track, which means an early advantage over one’s neighbor. One score higher, one school better, one rank higher in a chain of command. All this effort is to be a slightly bigger cog so that we can turn smaller cogs in this big mean machine. Information is power, or so they say, so it’s easy to continue stoking the engines in our educational institutions. It’s not that hard. Cogs usually move in one direction and for one purpose. If we look into our crystal balls, we can see a future turned inside out. What if manufacturing doesn’t require an assembly line anymore? What if there is no need for mass production or mass marketing? What if we care less about a brand? If this were to happen, the chapter of industrial revolution would close. More startling is that it could all happen with a little desktop printer. At present, 3D printers are too slow to take the place of assembly lines, but costs of the printers themselves have come way down. A cottage industry 3D business will cut costs in design, labor, management, advertising, distribution and just about every other cog that makes an assembly line run. No more indentured labor. No more sweatshops. The competitive edge will not come from something made faster, cheaper or smaller. In the way that a recipe has no monopoly over who cooks and eats it, competition will only be for the better design and the more creative idea. In this new world, what will be the strongest tool? If we don’t quite get it yet, we’ll say the strongest tool is the computer. Or some will have a case for saying it’s the gun, but without a doubt the most powerful tool is the brain itself. Granted, it depends on how it’s used; as an obedient grey lump or as a creator of things never conceived of before. Institutions can’t treat our brains like magnetic tape anymore, cannot keep the gates or dictate who is smart or not. Hammering at our brains, we’ve been holding the wrong end. The new education must help us move from cogs to creativity, from consumers to creators. Information is power, but almost everyone has access now. If creativity is the true power, how can we cultivate it? If Jane Goodall can live another twenty years, maybe she can figure it out. We know that primates use tools, but how do we develop our brains to invent, and can it happen in a school? The other day, I witnessed something that was unprecedented in my many years in Laos. It was a historic moment. I am still awe-struck. A whole elementary school started on time. All the teachers were present and teaching at the moment the clock struck 2. They were not asking the students for the day of the week, not writing it on the board, not asking what the lesson was for the day and not looking in their books to think about what to teach. They were up and teaching.
The students should have been as awe-struck as I was, but rather than dazed, they were engaged, responsive, sitting with backs straight and acting like model students. How long had they been waiting for this day? How starved were they to have a teacher earnestly spend time with them? I was not only amazed with the teacher, but amazed at how normal this was for the students. Despite everything acting to the contrary, these students knew, understood and recognized what a normal classroom should look and feel like, almost as if it was an unalienable right granted at birth. Maybe it was because I was watching, but the teacher continued full steam with all-out enthusiasm throughout the full two hours. If she was acting, she was doing a masterful job because her eyes were bright as she showed delight in the students’ responses. She carefully reviewed to make sure every student understood. It was a beautiful sight. She was confident and appeared in all ways to enjoy what she was doing. Some report that this dramatic change in behavior was because of a big important meeting with teachers about improving their practice. Some say that they saw how the successful teachers were being awarded with bonuses and pay raises. It was also reported that someone would be coming the next week to observe and review their abilities so this day was their dress rehearsal. The thing is, it all appeared so normal, I hope it’s not a monstrous dream to wish it to happen every day of the week and every week of the school year. It should happen every day, because momentum brings about significant progress. The students begin to trust the teacher and they begin to trust their own abilities. They see a consistency and logical progression in their studies and they start to look forward to the next day. When school is on their minds, they go home every day and review their lessons. Teachers can pride themselves in their students’ progress. Schools get credit. Things move upwards. Most dramatic pipe dreams burst at the seams all too early, but we can look at two reasonable targets for teachers. One is for them to be present in the classroom for every minute allotted as class time. The second is to be engaged with the students in any form throughout that time. This discounts writing on the board for 20 minutes, waiting for students to copy it all down in their notebooks, answering phones and stepping outside for a bite or a smoke. Without the common time killing tricks, the teacher will be so bored with themselves that they’ll start lesson planning and thinking how to use the time. They might have fun. I suspect teachers, in their boredom, are tying their own hands behind their backs. Yes, their job is to follow the schedule, finish the book and submit the reports, but nobody is forbidding them from innovating a bit, creating a good lesson plan or trying something a little different. In fact, they are being begged to do so for the sake of education and the children. It’s another unfortunately unprecedented world record, but in all my time spent in schools in this country, I have yet to see a teacher do something that I could honestly describe as innovative. I’m still rooting for Laos. I think this country should set records. It should shine beyond all odds and make neighboring heads turn. Laos deserves this. I remember when my primary school teacher praised me for being able to read. “Martin can probably read the Wall Street Journal”. After that, nobody ever helped me read the Wall Street Journal. Praise is empty without good follow up.
We should catch ourselves every time we pick out a student and say, “Oh, what a smart child.” Natural abilities don’t always continue to develop on their own. It takes a bit of cultivating. The bigger danger is the child, being told they’re smart, ending up with more attitude than skills. The point is that we are all too quick to pick out the quick students. For teachers and program developers, these are the students that make us look good. They give us the scores and justify our work. Our real work, however, are with those for which learning is not easy. After all, we’re educators. Quick students are survivors. They can jump through hoops and over obstacles that the average learner stumbles on. The system often acts as a lid and only those with the strongest heads can pop off the top. The rest will suffocate under the pressure. Recently, I was able to observe how many children calculate. Calculating is something that happens in the head, but deaf kids use their fingers so it was easy to see what was happening. To calculate 8 subtracted from 9, they counted off each finger until only one was left, giving them the answer. This took around 12 seconds whereas it should take one. Nobody had shown them another way. When calculations get bigger, they’ll only get slower and more trapped. We used pebbles from the yard. The game was to name a number and quickly pull the pebbles from the pile. After pulling nine stones into their personal piles, they quickly learned to subtract eight if the next number called was one. Again, the physical manipulation of stones showed us what they were doing in their heads. It was one of the simplest but most triumphant advances achieved in 10 minutes. Children learn from understanding consistencies in patterns. It’s obvious with math, but the same case with language. There’s a consistency found when spelling “cat” and “bat”. There are inconsistencies when spelling “fish” and “physics”, but these are still rule bound. What is not consistent is when a teacher misspells words on the board. I’ve seen the quicker students jump over these inconsistencies with confidence, but the emerging learner gets confused. Slack teachers become slacker when they depend on the quick students to sort out their inconsistencies. Teachers depend on students who can answer a question. Otherwise, they’re exposed. If there is no answer from a class of 80, it is clear that by majority rule, the teacher hasn’t done his or her job. Just one answer from the smarty gives justification to dismiss the rest of the students as ignorant. The heavy dependence on choral drilling works in the same way. If we had technology to record individual students’ responses through audio processing, we’d probably find out that 10% are saying “physics” while 90% are saying “pisssh” but in a choral response, an aural illusion makes us believe everyone can respond and we are doing an awesome job as a teacher. We will always need the quicker students. Not because they will help us believe we’re all actually teaching, but because the 10% of the 10% of the 10% might question if there might be a better way so that the 90% of their classmates can learn with confidence. Someday, I hope they’ll be teachers or better yet, educators. Example sentences from English grammar texts tend to orbit in outer space. For example, how often would you say, “The leg was bitten by a dog.” It is not necessarily incorrect, but it is also not anything you’d expect someone to say. Granted, we can work from the abstract and figure out the specifics, but if our species originated on this earth, it’s not a bad thing to start where our once amphibious feet hit the ground. With that in mind, let’s find ways to tether odd sentences to our somewhat everyday lives.
In textbook dialogues, someone is always earnestly asking about this and that. “What is this? What is that? This is a pencil case. That is a pencil case.” If it puzzles you why someone needs to ask and be told, be reminded that it is a conversation with a visually impaired customer in a stationary store. Likewise, the disabled participate in the conversation, Where’s the bed? It’s in the bedroom,” though I think the answer is insensitive. If someone can’t find the bed, why would they know where the bedroom is? Some examples are for creepy situations. “What’s this? It’s an eye.” This is a dialogue used in a bad restaurant when foreign objects are found in the stew. “It’s an eye,” can also be used when playing guessing games in a dark morgue. “What are these? They are hands.” Say it with disinterested inflections for best results. For the present continuous we have, “What are you wearing? I am wearing a white shirt.” This conversation existed before Skype, though the answer wouldn’t be very titillating. It could be stretched with prepositions to the effect of, “What are you wearing under your white shirt?” but why bother at that point? The conversation probably requires the proper inflection of, “What are you WEARing?” followed by, “We’re at the beach,” and ending with, “What were you thinking?” That would be a fun lesson. Practicing prepositions is a textbook favorite, so we have questions asking if the stove is in the kitchen, if the TV is on the chair and if the washing machine is between the buckets. The stove sentence works in Laos because a hibachi is something that can be picked up and taken out to the back yard. This sentence expresses relief when someone finds that the stove is where it should be. For the washing machine, the buckets need to be as big as the washing machine if the explanation is to be useful enough to really help someone find the missing washer. Asking about daily habits is very earthbound, but I’ve never met a Lao person precise enough to have to ask, “What time do you feed the chickens?” The one asking is either the manager at a large poultry farm or a member of a busy household that that operates without Google calendars. Conjunctions are de rigueur for basic grammar so we have, “I like papaya salad but I don’t like fried eggs,” but who could possibly not like fried eggs if they like papaya salad? This one would make an alien linguist think twice. We have categories and contrasts for a reason. “I like seafood, but I don’t like squid,” makes more sense to me. No matter how hard we try to use gravitational force to root our language lessons, the quintessential questions of, “What’s this? What’s that?” are by default most useful for the visiting ET, but as visitors makes repeat visits, it’s up to us to offer good service and learn their language. English is gravity bound. |