Interview of the Week: Vincent Pace
May 5th, 2010 | By Andrea | Category: English, Interviews
1. What was the first word you learned in a foreign language and how did you pick it up?
I can’t say that I’m completely sure, but a good guess would be “mamma” in Italian, as part of the phrase “Mamma mia!”, which was regularly thrown around in my Italian-American family. Close runners up would have been the numbers from one to ten in Spanish and “Mi casa es su casa” (“My home is your home”, also in Spanish), both courtesy of Sesame Street.
2. What are your personal top three tricks and tips when learning languages?
Without doubt my number one tip is to maximize exposure to the language. Pretty much all my other tips just feed into that. But to get you the three tips the question is seeking, I’d also recommend using an ad hoc spaced-repetition system for learning grammar and free, online tools in a single workflow for reading, listening, writing, and speaking.
3. Which word do you always have trouble spelling?
Definitely “accommodate” in English. I can never remember if it’s two Cs, two Ms, or two of both (and the reason I can never remember is probably because Microsoft Word always fixes my errors for me).
4. Which word is missing in your language and how would you spell it?
A shorter word for “convenience store”, like konbini in Japanese. Japanese also has the longer konbiniensu stoa, a direct transliteration of the English term, but everyone just uses the short form konbini. Likewise, people rarely use “convenience store” in English. “Hey, you wanna go to the convenience store and grab some food?” sounds a little odd to me. Normally we’d say the name of the store: “Hey, you wanna go to 7-11 and grab some food?” The Japanese short form is so convenient that lots of foreigners in Japan use it when speaking English, myself included. Rather than adopt the Japanese term, I’d opt for just shortening they English term, similar to what has been done in Japanese: “conveni” (pronounced con-vee-nee).
5. Which language teaching product / service / method / gadget … has impressed you the most and why?
I would have to say the iPhone (or smartphones generally). With iAnki or another similar program, dictionaries and various other language-learning websites and apps, smartphones can greatly increase your ability to be productive in language learning. With my iPhone always at hand, even a 20-second elevator ride will often mean a number of SRS reviews for me, whereas before that would have just been dead time. And all those little stolen seconds add up!
About the author:
Vincent Pace is the blogger behind Street-Smart Language Learning™ and, together with his wife, Akiko, is writing a book of the same name. Vincent speaks eight languages to varying degrees of fluency, and has dabbled in several more. His blog can be found at www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com and you can follow him on Twitter @ streetsmartlang.
+1 agree with smartphones for using up dead time. Although my preference is for AnkiMini (only for jailbroken iPhones, and I’m actually looking to replace my Apple device with an Android one anyway). I talked with Damien, the Anki developer, and he’s producing a specific app for the iPhone, so I’m sure it’ll be worth checking out.
In Ireland we’d actually say “corner shop” rather than convenience store (same number of syllables as konbini). “Shop” could easily replace it though for us, can’t you just say “store”?
Also agree on usefulness of SRS and importance of a huge amount of exposure and production of the language, and everything working to improve on that.
Great to see Vince included in the interviews!
I think we’d say “corner store” as opposed to “corner shop”, but in either case we’d only say that if it were actually on a corner. Does it work in Ireland when it’s not on the corner? And when you say “corner store”, it sounds like a mom-and-pop store. I don’t think you could call a chain convenience store like 7-11 a “corner store”. And if you say “I’m going to the store”, that’s an abbreviation of “grocery store”, so it sounds like you’re going to the supermarket. If you say “I’m going to the shop”, it sounds like you’re going to pick up your car from the mechanic’s shop.
I’m very much looking forward to Damien’s Anki iPhone app. As I wrote in my review of iAnki, it gets the job done, but it’s something of a pain. I’m hoping a native iPhone app can get the job done without the pain.
American English “store” = European English “shop”. To me, store is a verb
We don’t really have so many chains in Ireland – only perhaps Spar for example, but most of us would treat it the same regardless of chain or not. Corner shops simply tend to be on corners for strategic purposes in medium sized towns like mine where such a position would not be as expensive as cities and worth their while building there. To me a supermarket isn’t actually necessarily a shop, I’d call a relatively small one a supermarket if it was for grocery shopping. So maybe store != shop after all.
To me a non-jailbroken iPhone is way more of a pain than the 20 minutes involved in making it more useful and open to install non-Apple-restricted apps
I’m quite enjoying AnkiMini – it’s got most of the features I need. Although I’m sure the extra benefits will make the native iPhone app definitely worth it.