November 24, 2004 - Lida Baker: Compliments in American English

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Broadcast on VOA News Now: November 24, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: compliments in American English.

Thanksgiving (observed on the fourth Thursday in November) is a day when American families traditionally get together for a festive meal. It's a good time to hear the latest family news and acknowledge who's accomplished what. So before the holiday, we asked our friend, English teacher Lida Baker, for some analysis of how Americans compliment each other.

LIDA BAKER: "I think there are a couple of structures that are very common. One of them is 'what a ... ' What-a-adjective-noun. OK? [Laughter] So like, 'what a nice hat' or 'what a beautiful table' or 'what a gorgeous necklace.' So the what-a-adjective-noun is one structure that is I think pretty common. A little bit on the formal side, though. I think in casual conversation between friends, we tend to say things like 'I like your (blank)' or even 'I love your (blank),' so 'I like your hat,' 'I like your hair,' I like your shoes.' That's a fairly common way.

"Another one would be 'that's a ... ' That's-a-adjective-noun. 'That's a beautiful flower arrangement,' 'that's a gorgeous turkey.' I mean, we're sitting down tomorrow to Thanksgiving dinner, it's traditional for everybody to compliment the hostess on -- well, that's not fair, the hostess and the host, and/or the host -- on the beautiful table, on the flowers. And everybody oohs and ahhs about the turkey, right?"

AA: "Right."

LIDA BAKER: "'What a gorgeous turkey!' So more interesting is the question of when it's appropriate to give somebody a compliment and what it's appropriate to compliment people on."

RS: "Why don't you give us some examples."

LIDA BAKER: "Well, I think that it's always appropriate to compliment a person on something that they have done well. 'You did a good job on that presentation' or 'I'm proud of what you did.' So I think that's one circumstance where we compliment people a lot in this culture. Another situation where we compliment people is, well, when we like the way that they look. But -- "

AA: "You have to be careful."

LIDA BAKER: " -- we have to be careful about how say things like, for example, about people's weight."

RS: "A college friend of mine from Africa came up to me one day, very upset, and he said to me that he had had a fight with his girlfriend and could I help him out, that he had given what he considered a compliment. He said to her, 'My, but you're looking fight.'" And that obviously --

LIDA BAKER: "Ah, yes."

RS: " -- to an American woman was not an ideal compliment."

LIDA BAKER: "Yeah, you know it's interesting you just brought up kind of a cross-cultural comparison. Another one I was very surprised to learn that there are cultures where -- well, to give a little background, in United States culture it's very common for us to compliment people on their belongings. 'I like your hat,' what a beautiful vase,' that painting is fabulous.'"

RS: "And your response would be 'thank you.'"

LIDA BAKER: "Yes, and that's a good point. The appropriate response to a compliment is 'thank you' in the United States. But in certain cultures, if you compliment people on their belongings, they will feel an obligation to give it to you."

RS: "That happened to me in Japan. I learned not to compliment everything as if I were living in the United States. In Japan, they wanted to give everything to me."

AA: "In your classroom, do you talk about compliments at all? I mean, do you see your kids having problems, your students having problems with this ever?"

RS: "Or do you have any exercises that you use in the classroom to reinforce some of the things we've been talking about?"

LIDA BAKER: "Well, anytime we want students to learn social functions, the best way to reinforce that is through role playing. Either we give them things to compliment their classmates on, or a really fun exercise that I've done with students -- and this serves as a great icebreaker too -- is to instruct students, put them in pairs and to instruct them to find something about the other person to compliment."

AA: "We'll end with a compliment for the teacher. This is an e-mail we got from a listener named Tristan in China, who's a fan of Wordmaster and he says, 'by the way, I like Lida Baker the most. She is just the right kind of teacher in my mind.'"

LIDA BAKER: "To which I would say to Tristan: Thank you very much, that really makes me feel good."

RS: "It made her day.

AA: Lida Baker writes textbooks for English learners and teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. That's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And listen to us online at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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November 17, 2004 - Proverbs in American English, Part 2

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Professor Wolfgang Mieder with some of his students." src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Wordmaster/Archive/images/uvm.edu_wolfgang_mieder_9no.jpg" width="150" border="0" height="138" hspace="0">

Professor Wolfgang Mieder with some of his students.

Broadcast: November 17, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster we have part two of our look at proverbs in American English.

RS: We continue our conversation with Wolfgang Mieder, a professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, and a widely published expert on proverbs.

AA: And there are certainly lots of them, although there are also many proverbs that different cultures have in common. So is this a case where "great minds think alike"?

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "If you look back in history and you compare the proverbs let's say of Germany, England, and also including the United States, France, Russia, Italy, Spain, you'd be surprised how many absolutely identical proverbs there are. The reason why that is, is that many of our everyday proverbs actually originated in Greek and Roman antiquity.

"I'll give you an example. 'Big fish eat little fish' is a proverb that goes back, way back, into Greek antiquity, and then it was translated in Europe from language to language and it wound up in England, and of course the immigrants brought it to the United States."

RS: Professor Mieder says the Bible is the second major source for proverbs that cross national boundaries.

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "I'll give you an example: 'Man does not live by bread alone' is absolutely identical in France, it's identical in Germany, it's identical in Poland. So that's the second major group. And the third one is Medieval Latin. If you take the proverb 'strike while the iron is hot,' we know it started in the Middle Ages, in Latin, and they used proverbs at that time to teach youngsters foreign languages, in other words Latin and French or Latin and German and so on."

RS: "Speaking of learning languages, how useful are proverbs in learning American English or any other language?"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Oh, oh, extremely important. You know, those instructors who, let's say -- or students who study to become teachers of English as a second language -- are very interested in teaching some of the colloquial language like proverbs and phrases. And we are now doing studies where, through questionnaires -- thousands of questionnaires -- we have established which proverbs, let's just say in the United States, are the most popular."

AA: "And could you tell us the top five?"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Well, I will not say that these are exactly the top five, but I'll give you some examples."

AA: "OK, great."

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Well, 'strike while the iron is hot' is certainly one. 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder' is one. 'New brooms sweep clean' might be one."

AA: "Now that's an old one. I haven't heard that one in a while."

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "That's actually a Medieval Latin one that was translated into all of those languages as I mentioned. Let me give you some new American ones that one ought to know. 'It takes two to tango.' That started in 1952 with Pearl Bailey's famous song 'Takes Two to Tango.'"

MUSIC: "TAKES TWO TO TANGO"/Pearl Bailey

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "And then there is 'a picture is worth a thousand words.'"

RS: "Well, that had to start with modern photography."

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "That started in 1921 with an advertising campaign."

RS: "That was what I was going to ask you. What's the difference between a proverb and advertising jargon -- "

AA: "Or slogan."

RS: " -- or slogan? Can an advertising slogan morph it's way into becoming a proverb?"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "You're catching on beautifully. [Laughter] Yes, if an advertising slogan has a certain amount of wisdom to it or generality or truth, then advertising can become a proverb. In fact, I would say that one of the most important sources for modern proverbs is advertising."

AA: Wolfang Mieder is a professor at the University of Vermont.

RS: If you have a favorite proverb, send it to us! Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And you can visit us online at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC "Takes Two to Tango"

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November 10, 2004 - Proverbs in American English, Part 1

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Professor Wolfgang Mieder with some of his students." src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Wordmaster/Archive/images/uvm.edu_wolfgang_mieder_9no.jpg" width="150" border="0" height="138" hspace="0">

Professor Wolfgang Mieder with some of his students.

Broadcast on VOA News Now: November 10, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: proverbs in American English.

RS: It's tempting to call Wolfang Mieder the proverbial expert from out-of-town. A professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, he has dedicated his career to studying proverbs from around the world. After talking to Professor Mieder, we realized that good things really do come to those who wait.

AA: "Now you know originally I wanted to set up this interview for a couple of weeks ago."

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Yah."

AA: "But then you told me that you were out of town. And then Rosanne was out of town. So what is the proverb that I'm looking for here ... "

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "When you can't find anybody, you mean?"

AA: "Or I was thinking -- "

RS: "Or count on someone."

AA: " -- or not counting your chickens before they hatch?"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: " ... before they hatch, right. And then, of course, I could have said, 'You know, Rosanne, absence makes the heart grow fonder.' So if I'm not here, maybe you try harder to reach me. You know, that's the nice thing about proverbs; you can really find one for any situation. But you can also find one that opposes it. I just mentioned 'absence makes the heart grow fonder.' But of course you know the proverb 'out of sight, out of mind.'

"So you have to keep in mind that proverbs are not a logical system, but rather that they are based on life's observations, generalizations and experiences, and they are as contradictory as life itself."

RS: "Now what is a proverb and how did proverbs come about?"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "I think a nice definition would be a proverb is a concise or short statement of an apparent truth which has currency among the people. And I want to stress the 'apparent' truth, because, you know, proverbs are not in every situation true.

But anyhow, proverbs came about because people, especially in times when there was no writing, people observed things and realized that this seems to be recurring all the time -- let's just say the proverb 'look before you leap,' it seems to make sense that you ought to check out things before you jump ahead.

And in order to transmit that experienced wisdom, people couched them into metaphors or images with some nice forms like alliteration and rhyme and parallelism. And then they could be memorized and handed down from grandfather and grandmother to grandchild, and from generation to generation."

RS: "German is your first language -- "

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "That's right."

RS: "English is your second language -- "

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Right."

RS: " -- what role did proverbs play for you when you came to the United States to learn American English."

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "Well, I remember I used to have trouble with 'it is six of one or half-dozen of the other.' I had a friend who made me practice it because I could never quite say it right. The proverbs that give you problems are those that are specifically cultural bound. Let me give you a modern American one. When I first came to America in 1960, among the African American population of Detroit and other urban areas of the United States, there was the proverb 'different strokes for different folks.' And, you know, that became very popular then through a rock-and-roll song by Sly and the Family Stone. You might recall that."

MUSIC: "Everyday People"/Sly & the Family Stone, 1968

"We got to live together

"There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one

"That won't accept the red one that won't accept the white one

"And different strokes for different folks

"And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee"

WOLFGANG MIEDER: "'Different strokes for different folks' happens to be my favorite American proverb by now. Now 'different strokes for different folks' is, in my opinion, a proverb that has to have grown on American soil, because it tells you and me that whomever we deal with ought to give us a chance to be our own person. In other words, to let us do the things that we would like to do and not always, at least, force onto us rules and regulations that you might like."

AA: We'll hear more from University of Vermont Professor Wolfgang Mieder next week on VOA News Now. In the meantime, if you'd like to send us e-mail, write to word@voanews.com.

RS: Internet users can find all of our segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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THIS IS AMERICA - Elections of 2004

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Broadcast: November 8, 2004

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Barack Obama " src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Archive/images/pool_Barack%20Obama_dem_convention_eng_150_27jul04.jpg" width="150" border="0" height="150" hspace="0">

Barack Obama

VOICE ONE:

Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember. Coming up ... results from the state and national elections of two thousand four.

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(SOUND)

VOICE ONE:

That was Senator John Kerry last Wednesday, telling his supporters that he had lost the presidential election.

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President George W. Bush begins his second and final term January twentieth. But first there is the Electoral College tradition. Electors in each state have to meet next month to make the vote official.

VOICE TWO:

More than fifty-nine million people voted for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. That was fifty-one percent. And that was three and one-half million more than voted for John Kerry and his vice presidential candidate, Senator John Edwards. The Democrats had forty-eight percent.

George Walker Bush is America's forty-third president. But he is the first in sixteen years to win a majority of the popular vote. The last one was his father, in nineteen eighty-eight.

VOICE ONE:

On colored maps on election-night television, red states meant Republican victories. Blue states meant Democratic victories. In the end, the map looked very much like the map in the two thousand election.

Mister Kerry won all three states on the West Coast -- California, Oregon and Washington state -- as well as Hawaii. He also won the Northeast including New Hampshire, which last time voted for Mister Bush. And Mister Kerry won states in the upper Midwest including Minnesota and Wisconsin. But most of the country was red.

The election was decided when a victory for Mister Bush became clear in Ohio, a large state in the Midwest. There was a long night of waiting. But this election was not as close as many people had expected.

Four years ago, when Mister Bush faced Al Gore, Americans had to wait more than a month to know their president.

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VOICE TWO:

Republicans also increased their strength in Congress in the general elections last Tuesday. Most notably, former Congressman John Thune defeated Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Mister Daschle is the Democratic minority leader in the Senate. Fifty years have passed since a Senate leader of either party was voted out of office.

Republicans gained a majority in both houses ten years ago. In the next Congress, they will control fifty-five of the one hundred seats in the Senate. They will control more than two hundred thirty of the four hundred thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives.

VOICE ONE:

Democrats did score a few victories. A new star in the party, Illinois state Senator Barack Obama, was easily elected to the United States Senate.

Mister Obama gave a major speech this summer at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from the United States.

Only two other African Americans have been elected to the Senate since the rebuilding after the Civil War in the eighteen-sixties.

VOICE TWO:

In Colorado, Democrat Ken Salazar, the state attorney general, defeated Republican businessman Pete Coors in a race for the United States Senate. But in Florida, Republican Mel Martinez defeated Democrat Betty Castor, a former state education chief, to replace retiring Senator Bob Graham. Mister Martinez was born in Cuba. He served President Bush as housing secretary.

Eleven states had to elect governors last week. Here, voters were about as likely to choose Democrats as Republicans.

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VOICE ONE:

On the morning of Election Day, long lines formed at schools, community centers and other voting places. And this was not just in the so-called battleground states. Democrats and Republicans had both signed up millions of new voters, many of them young.

Curtis Gans is director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a research group. He says about one hundred twenty million Americans voted. By his estimate, the turnout was the highest since nineteen sixty-eight, at almost sixty percent of possible voters.

Most political experts had suggested that higher numbers of voters would be better for John Kerry. This was not the case.

VOICE TWO:

We get some sense of who voted from the questioning of voters for exit polls. Fifty-four percent were women. Women have outnumbered men in voting for president for the past twenty years. More women chose Senator Kerry. But women were more likely to choose President Bush as four years ago.

Thirty-seven percent of voters said they were Democrats. Thirty-seven percent said they were Republicans. Independents were divided almost evenly between Senator Kerry and President Bush.

Election-day reports said that young people represented the same share of voters as four years ago. But University of Maryland researchers disputed the idea that young voters stayed away. They noted that all age groups increased their voting.

The researchers say the percentage of young people who voted reached about half for the first time in years. In fact, they were the only age group strongly for the Democrats.

VOICE ONE:

Even if not as many young voters showed up as some people had hoped, conservative white Christians did show up. The Republican Party targeted this base of support throughout the campaign. Exit polls found that they made up about one-fourth of all voters. Many experts believe they were the deciding voice.

Terrorism and the economy were major issues to voters. But a national exit poll found that even more people said they cared most about "moral values." These include issues like same-sex marriage and the ending of unwanted pregnancies.

VOICE TWO:

Elections in the United States are organized by local officials. They choose the voting equipment and ballot designs. Four years ago people had many problems voting, especially in Florida.

This year the major parties sent thousands of lawyers to voting places to prepare for anything. By the end of Election Day, however, most of the problems seemed minor.

VOICE ONE:

Spending for federal campaigns this year reached an estimated four thousand million dollars. The Center for Responsive Politics says this is a thirty percent increase from four years ago. The research group says more than one thousand million dollars was spent in the presidential race.

The elections were the first under a new political finance law, known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. This law bans unlimited money, usually from businesses or unions, in federal campaigns. Instead, the law increases the limit on how much individuals can give in direct support of candidates.

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VOICE TWO:

Americans also had many state issues to decide. Eleven states asked voters if marriage should be defined as being between a man and a woman. Voters in all eleven states agreed. They approved amendments to their state constitutions to ban same-sex marriages.

In California, a ballot measure to pay for stem cell research passed by fifty-nine percent. The state is to spend three thousand million dollars over ten years. Scientists will investigate possible uses for stem cells from embryos for medical treatments.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, supported the measure. President Bush has restricted federal financing of studies on embryonic stem cells. Opponents say such research destroys life.

VOICE ONE:

In Arizona, voters agreed to require people to prove their American citizenship before they can sign up to vote. The initiative also requires state employees to report illegal immigrants who request public aid. Initiatives are a way for citizens to bypass a state legislature and put a measure to a popular vote.

The Democratic and Republican parties both opposed the measure. But many people in the state say more needs to be done about illegal immigration. Arizona borders Mexico.

In Colorado, voters rejected a proposal to change the way that state awards its nine electoral votes. Almost all states, including Colorado, have a winner-takes-all system.

VOICE TWO:

Voters, however, did agree to require Colorado to get at least ten percent of its electricity from the wind and sun by two thousand fifteen.

(MUSIC)

Our program was written by Jerilyn Watson, Jill Moss and Caty Weaver, who was also our producer. This is Steve Ember.

VOICE ONE:

And this is Faith Lapidus. To send us e-mail, write to special@voanews.com. And join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA, in VOA Special English.

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Correction: An earlier version of this report said 13 states now have constitutional bans against same-sex marriage. The correct number is 17.

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November 3, 2004 - English Classes for Hmong Immigrants in Minnesota

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November 3, 2004

English language classes are bursting at the seams across Minnesota. The northern state has absorbed English language classes are bursting at the seams across Minnesota. The northern state has absorbed nearly 50,000 immigrants just since the year 2000. As Toni Randolph reports, these new arrivals to the United States have been packing the classes, eager to learn the primary language of their new homeland.

TONI RANDOLPH: At Lao Family English in St. Paul, Minnesota, the beginner class has 39 students -- that's about three times the normal size. It's so big that computer stations were taken out so that more tables and chairs could be put in. And, there's a waiting list with more than 50 names. Jean Hanslin is the instructional coordinator for the English education program.

JEAN HANSLIN: "We knew we'd be getting new learners, especially those who've just arrived from Thailand, but we didn't know how many and we didn't know how soon."

TEXT: About one third of the students in the most basic English class are newly resettled Hmong refugees. Some of them are among the record-setting 1,400 refugees who arrived in Minnesota in September. More than 5,000 new Hmong are expected in the state over the next two months.

Su Xiong moved to St. Paul in June, with the first group to arrive. Speaking through interpreter Plia Vang, he says knowing English is essential.

SU XIONG (IN HMONG) AND PLIA VANG: "I feel that there's a need to learn a little bit of English, writing, reading before getting a good job."

Plus, Mr. Xiong says he wants to be able to have conversations with Americans.

But the overcrowded classrooms are making it hard on the students and teachers. Lao Family English Coordinator Jean Hanslin says one of her teachers was laid off earlier this year because of funding cutbacks.

JEAN HANSLIN: "We have a tremendous staff with experience in just these types of new Americans, but we have less money than we've ever had before. We have fewer staff people than we've had for a long time. And we're dealing with more learners than we have for a long, long time."

Ms. Hanslin does not foresee an immediate improvement in the situation, since funding for these programs is based on the number of learners in the previous year. St. Paul literacy activist Tom Cytron-Hysom says he fears the overcrowded and understaffed classrooms may lead to poorer quality instruction.

TOM CYTRON-HYSOM: "Learning English is a pretty labor intensive task and students need to be able to practice their pronunciation and have a lot of time with the teacher to correct their mistakes and so on. So when you have twice as many students as the optimum level, it really does, over time, effect the quality of instruction the students are receiving."

Mr. Cytron-Hysom has been recruiting volunteers to help but says there aren't enough to meet demand. What's happening in St. Paul is being repeated across Minnesota, according to Barry Shafer, the state director of Adult Basic Education, which includes English as a Second Language. Mr. Shaffer says the only relief would be more resources, but funding for adult basic education has stayed the same for the past few years. He says increasing funding, though, would make economic sense.

BARRY SHAFER: "If we can, as quickly as possible, get our new Minnesotans into the job market through the English language training, they'll be off public assistance, they will not be using other social services, they will be independent and self-sufficient."

Barry Shaffer says for every dollar spent on English language training, the state gets a $5 to $7 payoff.

Back at Lao Family English, Tong Her attends language classes every day. He was in the first group of Hmong to arrive in the St. Paul area from Thailand earlier this year. Speaking through interpreter Plia Vang, Mr. Her says learning the language will help him get a better job than the temporary one he has now, vacuuming an office.

TONY HER (IN HMONG) AND PLIA VANG: "As time goes by and I'm learning more English, it will help me better. I want to get a job that's permanent and full-time."

But Mr. Her's dream may be delayed. The classes at Lao Family English are so full that students who are ready to advance are sometimes kept in lower level classes, because there's no room for them to move up. For Wordmaster, I'm Toni Randolph in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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