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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2910)	6/11/1999 4:47:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

Duly noted, Lather, but I've got these two bushes out there, hollerin' at me, "Plant us, dammit! We're tired of waiting!" So I'll have to get back to you later....<gg> Joan

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2910)	6/12/1999 12:01:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4711

On Labs and Language(s). Lather, I must confess I laughed my head off at this little passage of yours: I remember "language labs" - dreary cubicles with ranked tape recorders full of French lessons. The student has the singular displeasure of hearing his voice through a microphone - like a long-distance telephone echo - and it makes it so hard to deal with the task at hand. I wonder how many others have this negative association with the concatenation of "language" with "lab". Well, my own associations are overwhelmingly positive! Another proof of how different individual experiences can shape completely different attitudes to words & concepts describing them. Thereby hangs a tale, which I should like to tell. I was fascinated by foreign languages, but in my day, you learned them from grammar books, with no practice in speaking. After a stint at Bryn Mawr (now that was my idea of "dreary": all those girls knitting in Philosophy class!!), I read about an experimental new language institute, which had just been set up, in association with Georgetown University, and I gallumphed off there as fast as they would accept me. The Institute was the brain-child of one Colonel Leon Dostert, a Frenchman who had served as Eisenhower's interpreter during WW II. Well, Dostert was the man who first introduced the language lab, a revolutionary innovation at the time. The Institute, which was then housed in three nice old brownstones on Connecticut Avenue in D.C. (they have since been torn down, boo, hoo!), also offered courses in Simultaneous Interpretation, in Psychological Warfare (for the Pentagon and CIA types who were sent there to learn a language useful in the Cold War), and God knows what else. I found it such a wonderful, exciting place! There were very few regular undergraduates, and even they were not accepted until their junior year. The rest were adults, of all ages, all nationalities -- a real hodgepodge -- not there to take a degree, but to learn a specific language. Those of us who were seeking a degree had to slog over to Georgetown for academic courses; and if we were female (as I was), we could only go to courses offered at night. (!!!) (Georgetown was veryCatholic in those days. The undergraduates were all male, and the good Jesuits locked them up at night to keep them out of trouble. So they just hung out of the windows and whistled at us.) It made for a very long day, since language classes at the Institute started early in the morning. The first language I went for was Russian. None of the instructors at that time were "professionally trained' linguists, but they were "real Russians," and more fun (I thought) than a barrel of monkeys. We had fifteen hours of class time a week, and twenty hours of Lab. Since the professors were not professionals, but displaced philosophers, army officers, writers, and the like, they made us wonderful tapes to listen to: poetry, Chekhov short stories, anti-Soviet jokes, you name it. You could check out any tape you were interested in. What with the tapes, the Russian parties, the wonderful wacked-out Russian professors (and, of course, the Russian boyfriends), I had so much fun that I kept being promoted from one level to the next, finally attaining the official status of Wunderkind, in less than a year. There's a lot more to this story, of course. But you can see why the association of Language and Laboratory is a very positive one for me. :-) Joan