I keep having this problem with foreign languages. I learned Norwegian – a little in Minnesota, a little in Oslo. Then I moved to Trondheim and discovered that nobody outside of Oslo speaks the nice standard Norwegian that you learn in class. Some of the people I worked with might as well have been speaking Icelandic, for all I understood.
Then I moved to Japan. I learned Japanese. And I rapidly discovered that there was a local dialect in Kumamoto, too, and the farther I got out of the city, the more incomprehensible it got. My Japanese is pretty good, but with an old person in the countryside? Forget about it.
Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about how we adapt to unfamiliar pronunciations and dialects. The way to do it, or at least the way they did it in this study: Watch movies with subtitles in the foreign language.
It’s always kind of annoyed me that when you buy a foreign movie on DVD in the U.S., it doesn’t come with subtitles in the language of the movie. (Unless the movie is in English, French, or Spanish.) And now I have scientific backing for my annoyance! Because I don’t think watching “The Lives of Others” with Spanish subtitles is going to help me improve my German. The German subtitles exist – they have to be written for closed-captioning – and it must cost basically nothing to include another set of subtitles on a DVD. Somebody should start a campaign.
Another thing that would be helpful: subtitles in real life. It sure would be handy if I could walk up to someone in, say, Bergen and have the words the person is saying appear in the air.
Newborn babies might seem like they don’t do anything but cry, sleep, eat, and excrete – but there’s really a lot going on as that tiny human adjusts to a whole new world. Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about a clever study in which the scientists recorded German and French newborns crying and found a difference in their cry melodies that corresponds to the differences between the languages. French babies’ cries tended to go up like French, and German babies’ cries tended to go down like German.
This is pretty crazy. These are seriously tiny babies – 2 to 5 days old. People knew that newborn babies could hear the difference between languages, and they knew that by four months or so, they’re babbling in language-appropriate ways, but to find that they’re actually producing language-appropriate sounds a few days after birth is totally new. The other scientists I showed it to were super impressed.
Here’s my story about baby cries.
Special bonus link – you must see the seriously hilarious picture on the project webpage. We would have used it with the story, but the baby is way too old. Look how happy he is – he’s all, hey! I’m a German baby! Doing science! What up!
Hey, guess what – swearing might actually be good for you. Or good for decreasing pain, anyway.
For a study that came out this weekend, a researcher in the UK had a bunch of undergrads stick their hands in buckets of ice water and say either a swear word or a neutral word over and over. The bucket of ice water is a pretty standard way to test pain tolerance. They did better while swearing.
Read my story, with funny quotes, here.
I had to ask the guy what the students’ favorite swear words were, of course. I giggled both at the list of words coming out of this perfectly polite British man’s mouth, and at the fact that he said “excuse me” after the last one, which is a word that people just don’t say in polite conversation. Or even impolite conversation. I said something about how weird this all was. He agreed. He said, “I’ve been doing interviews today when I was in sole charge of my [five-year-old] daughter and I had to sort of go to another room and tell people what the words were. ”
I haven’t hurt myself since I started working on the story last Friday, so I can’t tell you what I say in such situations. Well, that’s not true. I kind of put a table down on my toe on Saturday, which hurt a lot, but my mom was holding the other end of the table and I don’t think I am physiologically capable of swearing in front of my mom. I mostly gasped and jumped around. The researcher shares that particular inhibition. He said (possibly joking), “The paper doesn’t have any swear words in it because I wanted to be able to share it with my mother.”
