Hi Whizzes!
So, this blog is about how-why I quit my beloved (no joke) job, and a wondrous linguistic phenomenon called bootstrapping, without which IMMERSION is useless—ya might as well be surrounded by whales and their song (more pleasant), cuz ain’t nothin’ gonna happen unless you can bootstrap yourself into a sentence.
But first...I QUIT!!!! So, I quit in January—specifically on the day of 🤴🎅👼Tres Reyes—Three Kings (growing up in the most catholic continent does have its effects, folks). I hadn’t even launched Input Wand (that’s this business right here) yet. I also didn’t and don’t have a penny to my name. Why? Simple. I’ve spent every dollar I’ve ever made on
🐰Paying off college debt (which of course brown, moneyless people get cursed with on a disproportionate level compared to people who got the bucks)
🦊Bettering my health at all levels
🐻My professional-intellectual-etc development.
So, what could drive such a RASH decision? An internal knowing. Endless witchy signs that this 11th year of teaching needed to be my last, at least in that iteration—because I do love teaching and know it will be part of my life fo-eh-va. Through doing nothing else except work…and then more work, I managed to both teach my students (pretty well)🐦, chair the department (not bad)🦄 and launch Input Wand (epic)🐛…also known as being Penguin Random House🦋 🐌 🐞, all by my lonesome. It’s been the most intensely focused🔥🔥🔥 time of my existence, these last two years, and has brought many rewards, but life (or lack thereof) cannot go on this way, folks (THIS is the word of THIS day! Ah! Found you!). Something’s gotta give. I’m so busy that even when my mom shares potentially worrisome news about her health, it literally goes in one ear and out the other.
SAY WHAAAAAT?!!!
Yup. She told me a friend of hers picked her up in a playful manner the other day and almost broke her ribs. A few days later we were chatting and she said:
“Oh, my back is doing so much better.”
I said:
“What? What are you talking about?”
She said:
“You don’t remember, I told you about that guy who…”
I said:
“Right….I remember now…that you’re telling me again.”
O seaaaa…..yeah. No. Between Input Wand and FountKor (the OTHER publishing house…the one for Transformational Women’s and LGBTQ+ creations that I’m about to launch this summer, I have somewhere around 27 books to publish. Realistically, I’ll be able to publish 7 of them this Summer—Fall. The Novice Mid Brujas Trilogy in Spanish and French (that’s 6, folks), and Book 1 in my mother’s incredibly awesome Women’s Fiction trilogy based on her own life (that’s 1).
6+1=7
Weheeee….I’m not ONLY gifted at languages…I can do math too!🐷 🐽
The long and short of it is that I’m actually a responsible person. I’ve got enough pennies to last me a few months beyond August (my last paycheck), and if I need to get another job I will…DUH. But for now, it's Input Wand all the way. I’m committed to publishing language acquisition materials that can help transform World Language Classrooms at all levels from the TOMBS of UNRESEARCH 🦇🦇🦇that they are into…the wonderland they could easily become!🪲🪲🪲 This cannot happen without compelling, comprehensible and communication-enhancing materials. No se le puede pedir peras al olmo. Such a gorgeous saying in Spanish—one cannot ask pears of an elm tree.
Well that’s that. Now, onto bootstrapping.
What better way to start than with an anecdote?
I did an exchange program at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Fashion and Textiles my junior year of college. In short, I lived there.
So, I’m a film buff, and I just finished watching the Infernal Affairs Trilogy. The first one was mind-blowingly good (Also, major TONY LEUNG CRUSH!). The second one was ok. The third one was like…WHAT THE… It made no sense, I spent the entire movie wondering who some people were and why they mattered. When a human gets a story right (movie one), I tend to think…THEY GOT IT…they UNDERSTAND story-telling! And then bam…reality bites. Hey…it happened with The Matrix too…and I’ve seen it happen with countless other movie series. But, I way digress on the point. The point is BOOTSTRAPPING.
CANTONESE.
I lived in Hong Kong, and I watch movies from there pretty regularly. Essentially…I have had multiple experiences of being IMMERSED in Cantonese. I speak and understand maybe three words. Why? Because Lexicon (vocabulary) and Prosody (stress, rhythm, intonation) are the keys to Bootstrapping.
Ok. What in Goddess’s name is Bootstrapping?
It is when you listen to a sentence in a non-native tongue and can recognize one, two, three words, and THEREFORE deduce (me loves deduction!) what the other words mean. You can isolate meaning from a speech stream and bootstrap yourself into a system, thus actually building a mental representation, or neural pathways, in your brain.
Unless you can bootstrap yourself into the speech stream, you will not only not be able to derive meaning from the speech stream, you will also not be able to bracket—know the boundaries between words. Indeed, folks, Cantonese to me just sounds like a bunch of peculiar noise.
My Peruvian friend who’s been in a relationship with a United States man for almost a decade said to me:
“And he still can’t understand me.”
She sounded frustrated. Yeah, I get it. It’s been ten years, she talks Spanish to somebody around him almost constantly…you’d think he should have the DECENCY to understand her by now, ey? Nope. She’s not a language facilitator, but a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases, and to him, her speech sounds like Cantonese does to me…a bunch of sound. They could go on for decades like this, ️ 🆎 🆑 🅾️ 🆘 ❌ ⭕️ 🛑 ⛔️ 📛 and her husband would still be clueless. It happens ALL the time. The only saving grace for me is that if I do ever want to learn Cantonese at least now I know what I gotta do, and what others would have to do for me.
And, now we go on to the blessing of Written Input. Acquiring a language while READING it helps learners bracket—distinguish the boundaries between words. But—another point of caution is that just because learners have learned a word does not mean they can isolate it in a speech stream. This is in fact probably what is happening to my friend’s husband. He in fact has learned plenty of Spanish vocab, but…as we know (OR WILL WHEN YOU’VE READ A FEW MORE OF THESE BLOGS), learning random loose words or phrases AIN’T GONNA DO TOO MUCH FOR YA, so he probably cannot isolate those words from my friend’s speech stream.
I love saying and typing speech stream. It makes me feel smart in a buddhist kind of way.
There you have it, folks.
Constanza Ontaneda
your own personal Language Acquisition Witch
