Well, another typhoon has been and gone. Must be September.
September is right in the middle of typhoon season for Japan; we typically get about 30 storms big enough to be called typhoons every year and #13, aka, Typhoon Yun-yeung made landfall last Friday and Saturday. Fortunately by then, it had spent a lot of its worst fury and stalled out before it could do any lasting damage1.
And, since we're in the middle of typhoon season, lots of weather words are being brought up in lessons. In addition to all the words you might expect to hear when discussing typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones2 like windspeed and storm surge, we talk about forecasting and predicting.
In ESL teaching, weather is one of the great frustrations because to teach it, you have to teach the associated skill of making predictions. And that just isn't easy. Because the way we predict future events is so intrinsically tied to how a culture thinks that the very concept, much less the grammar, is unique to each language and that can make for a very difficult transfer of skills. Here's what I mean:
As an English speaker you're no doubt well aware of the difference between "It'll rain tomorrow" and "It might rain tomorrow." But, when teaching this grammar and the associated skill of using it to make predictions, it's important to assign actual value to each modal - will is very strong and indicates confidence in one's prediction, might is less certain and indicates that the speaker feels that the predicted event is equally likely and unlikely to happen. Or to put it more simply, we use will when we're 100% sure and we use might when we think it's about 50/50.
In Japanese these two sentences have approximately the same level of differentiation. But what if we add a third modal? Let's add "could." In your mind, do the sentences, "it might rain tomorrow" and "it could rain tomorrow" feel different? Do they express different nuances? Do they create different expectations on the part of the receiver? Now, whether you answer yes or no doesn't matter, for this example, as much as the fact that they are both rendered as, 「明日は雨が降るかもしれない。」3 Different cultures predict the future very differently.
So, when we talk about the weather in English, we're often actually talking about the future and making predictions about it. And to teach that concept, we talk about the weather forecast.
Now, another important skill for ESL learners is being able to breakdown new words and discern meaning from their component pieces. Which is a fancy way of saying, they need to be able to guess what a big word means from the smaller words (or pieces of words) that make it. For example, forecast. Seems simple enough, right?
Fore is the same as before, as in, in front of and cast is to throw something in front of you like cast a net4. So far, so good. Students don't really need to take the component words all the way back to the Old Norse and Germanic roots of the words, they just need to have a solid sense of how these two small words combine, Voltron style5, to form something of a gestalt.
The problem is when we try to teach all this vocabulary under the heading Forecasting and the skill under Predicting. Because, you're an English speaker, break down predict for me. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Most of you probably already knew that pre- is considered a standard prefix in English and it means, uhm, before. You might also already know that the reason we have two words for "in front" is because fore is from Germanic roots and pre- is from Latin roots. If so, well done, you get an extra gold star. But how did you do with dict?
Dict, as it turns out, has roots way back in PIE and means “to show.” It shows up in a whole host of words ranging from benediction to dictionary to paradigm. Give yourself another gold star if you knew that.
Not quite so easy. But, we teach it anyway and once students have the idea of small words forming big words it’s a simple step from small words to the parts of words and understanding the different parts leads to bigger and better vocabularies. As to whether a larger vocabulary is strictly necessary in English as a Second Language, well that’s a whole other tempest.
The Pitch
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What We’re Listening To
I don’t have a book recommendation this week. What I do have is a song recommendation. It even features a prediction.
Warren Zevon's Desperadoes Under the Eaves6:
"If California falls into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will,
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill."
Not to say there was no damage, every typhoon leaves its mark. Just that there was not significant, ongoing damage.
Yes, they are all the same thing. No, neither the rotation nor the ocean determines the name; which word is used depends largely on the bureaucratic body reporting the storm.
Obviously, there are different ways of translating both sentences. The greater point that different cultures predict the future very differently still stands.
At which point, some wag always chimes in with "castanet?" Bonus points if they make a Flamenco pose while doing so.
If you don't understand this reference, chances are good you're too young and we can't be friends anymore.
If you had "writes an entire essay just so he can quote one of his favorite songs," on your Learned Bingo Card, congratulations, you get to fill in the center square.