Cooking in a foreign language

I mentioned some time ago in another blog post that I was going to write a post about cooking in a foreign language. As I found myself starting to write a really long reply to this post by Colm which would touch on the same themes, I thought it was probably about time I just pulled what I was going to say over here and waste space on my own blog.

In the course of my Masters, I keep coming across a lot of great concepts that are intended for the consideration of language teachers within classroom contexts, but I find they are informing my self-instruction quite nicely. Amongst those concepts are:

• Extensive Reading: Read as much as you can in the target language, as long as you find it enjoyable and easy enough to concentrate on the message of the text rather than the language itself


• Narrow Reading: Just like Extensive Reading, only you focus on books/texts written about one particular topic, or by one particular author


• Repeated Reading: Read smaller passages of texts several times over - while listening to audio recordings for a couple of those times if you can - so that you can read those passages fluently.


• Authentic Texts: Read/listen to texts written in the target language for native speakers/readers of the target language - in other words, "real" texts, as opposed to things written specifically for pedagogical purposes


• Adapted Texts: Read/listen to texts which have been adapted, simplified or specifically written for your level of language learning...

Hmm, those last two don't agree with each other, do they? If you read some of the literature, you'd also find that the concept of Repeated Reading, which is a form of intensive reading, doesn't fit comfortably with Extensive and Narrow Reading, which are both forms of extended reading.

Still, they don't have to agree with each other to be good ideas. I think there's probably something worth doing in each, and something that can be gained from each.

I also love the suggestions for reading material that I've been finding in the literature: Children's books, comic books, magazines, popular novels, non-fiction books about mummies or mysteries...

Whether looking at Authentic Texts or Adapted Texts, the advice is to do at least one of two things - either "read light" (texts that are a quick, enjoyable, easy read) or "get hooked" (read texts in which the subject is so interesting that you're willing to ignore the language barrier to find out what happens next). If you can do both, that's even better.

My problem, at the moment, is that I don't have enough vocabulary to make the extended reading concepts work. Ideally, one should choose books that are only a little bit beyond your reading level - you'll know 95% of the words and be familiar enough with the grammar so that you can understand what is written. The rest you'll "acquire" as you go along. Well, I have to say that my vocabulary is pretty limited and rather odd. I would say I know enough words to read a few paragraphs of text with only minimal recourse to a glossary, but those paragraphs would have to be pretty darn weird and probably wouldn't occur in Authentic Texts.

At my level, the most useful book I have at my disposal is Estonian Textbook: Grammar Exercises Conversation (written by Juhan Tuldava and translated by Ain Haas). According to everything I've been reading lately, it's wrong. I should not be getting more out of this book than anything else. For one thing, it's completely pedagogical - and in the bad way. The book is written in the style of language text books that were used in language classrooms in the 40s and 50s - and they've been out of favour for at least 40 years, if not longer. Then there's all that grammar - which I should be finding irritating and boring. Oh, and all the texts are written specifically to fit with the vocabulary given in that lesson (and all the previous lessons), which is terribly out-dated and really not authentic.

Yet, it's giving me the basic vocabulary and grammatical grounding I need to try to tackle the other texts. If I could organise myself to give the dedicated time I keep meaning to give, I'd be a lot further through the book and have a lot more of a grounding.

Mind you, I've been gleaning bits and pieces from all sorts of sources, so I know more than what's in the book, but I know the book has a lot to give.

So, after all this, the title of the blog was "cooking in a foreign language", wasn't it? Well, there's a reason for that.

It seems that one of the best things you can do to help improve your reading fluency in a language is to read more (who would have thought?). This is something I've known for years - I didn't need the literature to tell me this. So, when I first set out to learn Estonian, I bought reading material. Mostly, I randomly selected children's books based on the covers. This gave me a wide range of books aimed at different levels of readers - but not a one of them has yet managed to fall into my reading ability. I've finally managed to get my hands on some comic books, which are better as I have the support of the images to carry the plot even when I can't really read the text (more on this later), but this is fairly new.

Up until this point, I've been struggling with children's books, early primary school text books... and cook books.

The cook books have been a godsend. The genre is something I'm completely familiar with. I know what sort of things the text should be telling me to do. I have a fair grasp of the vocabulary involved in the ingredients lists and the verbs are repeated so often from recipe to recipe that I've managed to "acquire" a few of them along the way.

Everything the literature tells me I'm supposed to be getting out of Extended Reading/Narrow Reading and Authentic Texts, I've been getting from cook books. I have a number of Estonian recipe books (some with side-by-side translations, but most in Estonian) and I've managed to pull off one or two recipes (had some trouble with deciphering measurements to begin with) and I'm getting better. It's not just reading the recipes, but also trying to cook them - without translating them into English first. I have the Estonian recipe in front of me, and that's what I try to cook.

It's interesting to me that I haven't encountered anything about this in the literature on Extensive/Narrow Reading. They mention non-fiction books and pictorial dictionaries, but not instructional texts like cook books and things-to-make-and-do type books. But, surely, these books should have their place. Reading and following instructions is a great way to interact with a language. I can see why people combine language courses with cooking courses.

Cooking in a foreign language. Fraught with peril, but highly recommended.