why a record, why a film
think of the language you would most like to understand, and where the wanting came from. for a lot of people it is something particular: a record, a film, one voice in one of them, with the language arriving attached. that particular thing is the best way in, better than a word list chosen for being useful. a record or a film is something you already go back to. it has a world for a line to belong to. and it offers the language at a size you can keep, one line at a time.
the thing you go back to
most contact with a language has to be scheduled. a word list waits in a drawer until you decide to open it, and much of the effort of keeping a language goes into making yourself come back.
a record you love does not wait to be scheduled. in a questionnaire answered by 12,519 finnish internet users, the psychologist lassi liikkanen found that 89.2 per cent had music replaying in their heads uninvited at least once a week, and that the more music people played and listened to, the more often it happened. the paper is about earworms, not language, and says nothing about words in a language you do not speak. what it does show is that music keeps coming round on its own, in the room and then in your head, without anyone putting it in a diary.
a film comes round less often, but a film you love has its own ways of returning: the scene you put on again, the line that gets said back to you in your own house. return is the one thing every kind of contact with a language needs, and a record or a film you care about brings it without being asked.
a world for a line to belong to
a song you know well does not arrive alone. in 2007 petr janata and his colleagues played people excerpts of popular songs from their past. on average, three in ten brought back a memory from the listener's own life, and most of the songs brought strong feelings, mostly good ones, with nostalgia among the most common. the record arrives with a year, a room, sometimes a person.
whether that makes a line from the record easier to keep, the paper does not say, and nothing here claims it. what it does describe is the luggage a record travels with, and a line taken from that world arrives with an evening you can already picture.
a film gives its lines a world you can see. driftspeak sums up each volume's world in a line, and the lines read like rooms: for before sunrise, "a train, vienna, one night of talking"; for volver, "la mancha wind, a red kitchen, mothers and daughters". a sentence from one of those places has somewhere to stand. another note here covers what a film's pictures do for listening; the point here is smaller. a line from a world you love is a line you have a reason to want.
one line at a time
a whole language is too large to want in any useful way. a line is not. records and films already cut a language into pieces of that size: a title, a refrain, a greeting at a door, a question across a train aisle. the piece is small enough to hold, and it comes with the reason you wanted it.
that is the size driftspeak works at. its lines are not the lyrics or the script. they are authored sentences, written from moments in the record or the film, and voiced a line at a time, in their language and then in yours. the record or the film is the source; the line is the part you take with you.
where the container stops
a record is not how people talk. a melody stretches some syllables and swallows others, and lyrics are compressed in ways that ordinary sentences are not. a film is scripted, edited and often heightened, and the speech in it can sit under music. the register you fall for may also be one you would never use at a bakery counter: a love song's way of saying you, a gangster's way of saying no.
and a crush gives you a reason without giving you a plan. it will get you started and keep you coming back. it will not, on its own, get you speaking, and it does not tell you what to do next. the container is the way in. what you add to it later is a separate decision.
choosing yours
three questions will tell you whether a record or a film can carry a language for you. would you go back to it if nobody asked you to? can you picture its world, a room, a city, a year? is there one line in it you already want to understand?
a record or film that passes all three is a better place to start than anything chosen for how useful it looks. one that passes none is a good record or a good film, and probably not your way in.
a greeting in la mancha
driftspeak is subtitles for your ears. vol. 13 is built around pedro almodóvar's volver: thirteen tracks of short spanish sentences from the film's world, about forty-eight minutes in all, and its first three tracks have free samples.
start where the film starts: listen to a sample of vol. 13, which opens on hola, ¿qué tal todo? ("hi, how's everything?"), a greeting written from the film's first scene, back in the village.