Babel

Radio 4 was on in the background this afternoon, as it is whenever I'm trying to pretend that I'm not doing a really boring task (though I'm not yet so old that I listen to the Archers - when I hear that theme tune the 'OFF' knob gets turned. Fiercely). There was a little piece on PM ('Tough on news, tough on the causes of news'...) which caught my ears. It was about learning languages at school (which is no longer compulsory, though I'm willing to bet that will change in the next few years); apparently the vast majority of people remember an average of just 7 words from these lessons. I'm not sure after how long away from the classroom these statistics were gathered, whether a year or a decade, but it seems a bit pants.

To see how I fared, I drew up a vocab list from memory in the three languages I studied at skool four to six years ago (French, German & Latin). German wasn't bad - 120 words (mostly nouns); French was more embarrassing with just under 60 (mostly verbs); Latin was...worse. That doesn't translate to a working reading knowledge of the languages, though - I'm better at translating Latin than either of the others (and still use it, increasingly - though need to be far more competent than I am. Something to work on), and I can read French more proficiently than German (LJJ can do my translation!). Weirdly, my grammatical understanding is fine in all three languages. So what's more important, being able to conjure words from nowhere, or being able to understand them when they're presented? I'd like to see the results of a test done to discover how many words people understand, as well as simply recall.

Wanted to write more about ML learning and teaching, but the neighbouring football club has some VERY LOUD (and dire) MUSIC playing, and it's proving too taxing to think in English let alone any other language!

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On a completely different subject, I'm listening to Newsnight at the moment and have learnt there's been an outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in Surrey (just the one farm at the moment). I feel sorry for Gordon Brown, who has only just gone on holiday with his family - he has to come back because of some cows, bless him. Wonder where the virus came from this time? After spending a chunk of the day reading about Biblical pestilence, this is a bit weird.