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2: THE LANGUAGE OF SQUARE DANCINGYou probably had a chance to learn a foreign language in school. Maybe you found it easy, or maybe you found it hard. But you know what's involved -- a whole new vocabulary of words and their meanings, plus a bunch of grammatical rules, along with some cultural knowledge about the way people who use that language think about the world.What if you knew that the language covered in this tutorial is really pretty small, as languages go? It only has about 100 "words"! There are only about 25 "nouns", about 60 "verbs", and a few modifiers. Of course, as with any language, these get combined into many more combinations. But compared with a language like German or Chinese, that sounds pretty easy, right? It also has a very simple grammar. There are only a few ways to combine words. There are no endings or other word variations -- such as many foreign languages have relating to tenses, gender, or number -- to worry about. So what's the catch? The catch is that you aren't just learning new ways to talk about things you already know how to say in English, like you might learn that "hund" means "dog" or that "安" means "peace". You are also learning to talk about new things. The "verbs" aren't the verbs you already know, like "climb" or "eat". Instead, they are the actions that make up square dancing. But most of those actions themselves are pretty simple. Plus, unlike a foreign language where a big obstacle for beginners can be learning about new sounds and how to distinguish them, for this language you don't need to learn anything about pronunciation at all. That's because almost all of the "words" of this language are actually made up of English words! (And the few that aren't actual English words sound like they could be.) This same set of terms, based on English words, is used all around the world wherever people gather to square dance. Ready to get started?
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