Memorial Day Prayer

Memorial Day Prayer

Offered at Veterans of Foreign Wars Memorial Service
Prospect Hill Cemetery, Millis, Massachusetts
May 28, 2012

By Siri Karm Singh Khalsa, 
Minister of Sikh Dharma 
President, The Boston Language Institute  

Let us pray.

Father, Mother, God:

We, your children, come before you on this day of sacred memory standing together, brothers and sisters, on hallowed ground.

While we may worship you in different ways, our souls shine even more brightly as we pray together.

Some of us are soldiers who bravely fought in our nation’s wars and who come before you today filled with love for comrades who live in our hearts and gratitude for the nobility of their sacrifice. Some of us are family members who mourn loved ones now held in your loving arms. Some of us are citizens who honor heroes we’ve never met.

We pray that the examples set by the men and women who selflessly served in our country’s wars, as well as those who courageously and lovingly maintained the home front, ever live in our hearts and inform our actions.

We pray that we will always have the courage to answer the call of our country in need, as did the heroes we honor today, both your brave sons and daughters who stand with us on this hallowed ground and shine their light upon us still and those who have completed their earthly mission and shine upon us in the light of sacred memory. May their souls be blessed; may their families be blessed from generation to generation.

We pray that our leaders have the wisdom and courage to issue the call to arms only when there is truly no other recourse.

In that spirit, we pray, too, for the heroic peace makers that their voices may be heeded in the councils of government.

We pray that, those who answer their country’s call always be welcomed home into the open arms of a grateful nation.

We fervently pray that, just as our brave soldiers receive basic training for war, they receive the basic training for peace upon their return.

We ask that they be given the healthcare they need and deserve and the educational benefits that they have earned, educational benefits that will expand the horizons and prosperity of these men and women, of their communities and of our nation as a whole.

We pray for our enemies, for they, too, are your children. If we cannot see your light in all, we cannot see your light at all.

Where there is war, let there be peace.
Where there is sickness, let there be healing.
Where there is anger and hatred, let there be love and compassion.
And may it begin with each of us.

Amen/Sat Nam

Some Words Just Don’t Translate

If you are a native English speaker who speaks or who has tried to speak in another language, you may have found that certain English words don’t have precise equivalents and require long explanations in translation. Awe turns into “overwhelming feeling of admiration, but also a reverential fear”, foliage becomes something like “phenomenon of leaves changing color in the fall, most notably among maple trees,” and bromance probably isn’t even worth the effort it would take to explain it.

Native speakers of foreign languages often have the same problem when speaking English.  In English we have water weight and pregnancy weight, fat-weight and muscle-weight, but a speaker of German may be disappointed to find that we don’t have “grief bacon”, the literal translation of Kummerspeck, which nominates the excess weight gained from emotional overeating.

Have you ever called someone but let the phone ring just once and then hung up? In some countries this type of call is not a prank but a way of communicating “I’m just thinking of you” or “OK, I’m on board with what you said in that last text message”, or “Call me back!”, all without spending a single dime. In the Czech and Slovak languages this kind of hit-and-run call is a Prozvonit and in Italian it is a Squillo.

Do you know any people who engage in Tingo? That is- people who come into possession of items which they desire by borrowing them from the house of a friend? These people would feel at home among the speakers of the Pascuense language on Easter Island. Furthermore, if you have any friends who are experts in the art of the Jayus- the joke told so poorly that you just can’t help but laugh- send them to Indonesia where their jokes have a name!

Some foreign words hit the mark so well that it is worth absorbing them into the English language as they are. Many Yiddish words have made this trip: Schtick, schmuck, and chutzpah are just a few examples. The German word Schadenfreude has become a common way to refer to taking pleasure in the suffering of others. French and Italian words such as à la mode and al dente abound in culinary language. The Japanese sent their kamikazes to Pearl Harbor during World War II and left the word in our language.

The existence of untranslatable words is just one more reason to learn foreign languages. We can find all of Dostoyevsky’s masterpieces in excellent English translations and with Google translate we can read Russian newspaper articles without ever having to look at the Cyrillic alphabet; however certain nuances of Mother Russia will always be lost in translation. As Vladimir Nabokov writes with regard to the word toska:  “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

The parts of the Greek Orthodox Mass said or sung in Greek are steeped in an ancient sacredness which no translation into any language could do justice, and Islamic prayers are surely much more powerful in Arabic than in translation. Seeing Roberto Benigni act in Italian or Penelope Cruz in Spanish, reading authors such as Goethe, Cervantes, or Hugo in their original language: these are all reasons to learn foreign languages. Arguably, the greatest reward of knowledge of a foreign language is not the ability to express ourselves, but the ability to understand new things which in our own language seemed not to exist. That is to say, excess weight gained from emotional overeating surely doesn’t exist only in Germany, but having a name for it makes it much easier to talk about!

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Learn a Language and Exercise Your Brain

To keep our muscles strong as we age, doctors recommend that we practice sport or do exercises with weights at the gym. To keep our heart and lungs in working order we get breathing by running or swimming. Staying in muscular and cardiovascular shape as we get older is important in order to prevent ailments of our joints, hearts, and lungs; so it should come as no surprise that staying in mental shape is important for preventing deteriorating mental diseases. To keep our brain working, doctors recommend the use of more than one language.

Linguistic researchers work on the assumption that speaking two languages creates a type of internal competition between the two languages; managing this situation enhances our brain’s executive control functions - a system of command that directs our attention process in tasks such as planning and problem solving, as well as other types of mentally-demanding activities. Have you ever stopped to ask someone for directions while driving and then had to repeat to yourself like a mantra “Left at the third stoplight. Right after McDonald’s, then first left” until you arrived at your destination in order to make sure that the directions didn’t slip away from your mind? You are consciously employing your executive function to keep your attention focused and ignore distractions.

Speaking more than one language keeps this kind of executive control in constant activity, and so it seems that bilingualism may mitigate cognitive decline in old age and even postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been shown that while aging has little effect on vocabulary levels, general world knowledge, and language use, older adults show difficulty in ignoring irrelevant stimuli and attending selectively to important aspects of the environment during perceptual processing. This is where bilingualism steps in- it strengthens and develops precisely those control functions which are apt to weaken as we age.

Furthermore, it appears that the more languages spoken, the better. A study by the Public Research Center for Health (CRP-Santé) in Luxembourg has indicated that speaking more languages has a positive benefit on memory in aging. The study, involving 230 men and women with an average age of 73 who had spoken or currently spoke two to seven languages, showed that “speaking more than two languages has a protective effect on memory in seniors who practice foreign languages over their lifetime or at the time of the study,” according to the author of the study, Magali Perquin, PhD.

We achieve the greatest benefits to our overall health when we enact fundamental changes in our lifestyle. Pumping weights is a great way to keep our muscles working, but when we sit up straight in our chairs every day, walk with broad shoulders and a straight back, and properly flex our legs every time we have to bend down, we engage our muscles correctly over a longer periods of time and thus multiply the benefits of our gym workout exponentially. Learning to speak another language or rather- learning to think in another language- creates a process within us which is in operation even when we aren’t aware of it. To a certain extent bilinguals even have to switch between their languages when they dream! There is no better way to prepare our brains for the challenges of aging than by teaching it to work in another language.

If you’re interested in learning a foreign language, please learn about The Boston Language Institute’s foreign language programs.

TEFL Graduate Teaching in Saudi Arabia

Joel Sanderson graduated from The Boston Language Institute’s English Teacher Training Program in April 2011 and is now teaching English in Saudi Arabia.

We recently had the pleasure of hearing from Joel directly:  “I’ve been in Saudi Arabia for eight months now and am enjoying my time here. Clearly, the change in culture has been the most interesting part of my experience so far. The people I have met here, though, have been very welcoming and supportive. If you are able to adjust to a very different culture and lifestyle, (and enjoy warm weather!), KSA is a good place to teach.“

Language Barriers in Business

In the collective imagination of globalized business, buyers, suppliers and manufacturers communicate across borders at the speed of ethernet and are just as much at ease working with a company across the globe as with one down the block; however, business executives who deal with international transactions every day see things in a different way. According to a report  sponsored by EF Education First and carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, almost half (49%) of 572 senior executives from private and public sector organizations worldwide believe that communication misunderstandings and messages lost in translation have inhibited major international business deals and resulted in significant losses for their company.

The efforts to increase the flow of international business have focused on political and legal situations, but now that many of these barriers have been knocked down, the exchange has taken on a more of a human nature. Almost two-thirds (64%) of the executives interviewed believe that cultural and linguistic barriers have inhibited access to foreign markets and almost all agree that profits (89%), revenue (89%) and market share (86%) would increase significantly if cross-border communication were to improve at their company. At the same time, 49% of the executives do not believe that their companies are doing enough in the way of training the linguistic and communication skills of their employees, and 40% say that the recruitment of people with the skills necessary to work in a cross-cultural environment is not prioritized as it should be.

The current focus is on English- 68% of the executives think that their employees will need to learn the English language in order to see growth outside of their home market. Multilingual approaches are often ignored as they are “inefficient and can prevent important interactions from taking place and get in the way of achieving key goals,” according to Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley. The English-only approach is being adopted all across the globe, from Northern European countries which for many years have embraced English in a variety of contexts to other countries such as Japan and Italy which have traditionally resisted the Anglo-invasion. In 2010, the CEO of Japanese company Rakuten announced that all 7,100 employees of the multi-national retailer would have to become proficient in English within two years or risk demotion while the Polytechnic University of Milan decreed this year that by 2014 all post-graduate courses will be offered only in English (two-thirds of these courses are currently in Italian).

These moves have not come without opposition, both practical and theoretical. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has encountered resistance to his plan among the workforce and has had to seek ways to help his employees buy in to the switch and achieve the language skills they will need. Says Emilio Matricciani, professor in the Department of Electronics at the Polytechnic- “The risk is that we will impoverish teaching; language is not an article of clothing that we put on. Thought depends on language and nuances will be lost.” Neeley, while recommending the English-only approach, recognizes the difficulties and potential downsides inherent to it. She points out that in a monolingual environment the self-confidence of non-native speakers may be eroded and performance may suffer as they may feel less inclined to participate in group work.  She notes that “once participation ebbs, processes fall apart. Companies miss out on new ideas that might have been generated in meetings. People don’t report costly errors or offer observations about mistakes or questionable decisions.”

While philosophical objections to the exclusive use of English in business all across the world may be raised, one thing is clear-the ability of an employee to communicate is paramount to his or her worth to a business in any field, from retail to electronics to research. Companies like Rakuten have found that providing language training to their employees and considering time spent on learning as work time is necessary to the success of their mission. Linguistic skills are increasingly more important in a world with more permeable borders and corporate language training should be a fundamental part of the activities of any business working around the globe.

TEFL Graduate Traveling to China

Sue Shenkman, a 2011 TEFL graduate will be traveling this summer to China with SABEH (Sino-American Bridge for Education and Health, Inc.), an organization that places American teachers in various cities and towns in China to teach English and American culture.  Sue will be going to the ancient city of Xi’an and the town of Hanyin.

Forget Perfecting Your Accent and Achieve Second Language Fluency

How many of us remember being tortured in high school Spanish class by our inability to say “Costa Rica” with that long, trilling Spanish R? Or maybe we felt like complete failures in French class because we couldn’t seem to pronounce anything with a convincing French accent? Achieving native pronunciation in a language is the focus of many language courses and the inability to modify our mouths to perfectly pronounce every vowel and consonant in a foreign language is often equated to an inability to speak the language. The good news for those who feel like their mouths were just not made to make extremely foreign sounds is that research has shown that an excessive focus on the pronunciation of individual language elements actually leads to reduced fluency with respect to teaching approaches which keep in mind a more global picture of the language’s sounds.

Canadian linguistics professors Tracey Derwing (University of Alberta) and Murray Munro (Simon Fraser University) have carried out significant research on how accent interferes with intelligibility in second language learning.  In a 1998 study, they divided students learning English as a second language into three groups with different teaching approaches: instruction with no focus on pronunciation, instruction with a focus on the pronunciation of individual language segments, and general speaking instruction including prosodic factors (“Prosody” is how linguists define the use of pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm in speech to convey meaning). The students receiving some kind of pronunciation instruction (the second and third groups) showed improvement in comprehensibility and “accentedness,” but only the group receiving the more general instruction (the third group) showed significant improvement in “fluency.” The elusive “fluency” which language learners seek might be something other than an immaculate pronunciation!

Upon further reflection, it should come as no surprise that comprehensibility and fluency in a language should be independent of the ability to correctly pronounce every single vowel and consonant sound. Children missing their front teeth are unable to make the “th” sound in English and yet we understand them perfectly. Many Americans pronounce “pin” and “pen” in exactly the same way, say “milk” as if it were “melk” and call “Bill” “bell” but are comprehensible nonetheless. A great number of Italians are physically unable to make the trilling “r” (similar to the Spanish “r”) and a smaller number cannot make the “gl” sound (like the “lli” in “million”) which is so common in the language, and yet these people are fully-fledged fluent speakers of their native language, often becoming politicians, actors, and other types of personalities who speak publicly for a living.

Furthermore, the American entertainment scene offers us a rich panorama of public personalities with foreign accents who are not inhibited in their work by the peculiarity of their speech. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Banderas, and Heidi Klum are all wildly successful communicators despite their accented speech.  Out of sight of the public eye, instruction at America’s best universities, especially in science and engineering departments, is often carried out by professors speaking with strong Russian, Chinese, and Arabic accents, among others.

All of this should cause us to reflect on our goals when we are learning a foreign language. Do we want to learn to speak precisely like a native speaker or do we want to learn to communicate with the greatest fluency possible? Pronunciation is important, but it is restrictive to focus only on the pronunciation of certain vowel and consonant sounds ignoring broader scale patterns such as intonation, volume, and meter. At the end of the day, it is possible to learn to speak communicative, fluent Spanish without ever properly trilling an “R.”