Omniglot - the blog

A recent commenter on my post about learning Latin, Ancient Greek and other ancient/dead languages has suggested an interesting reason for learning such languages - it’s the closest thing we have to time travel. A knowledge of these languages enables you to explore ancient civilisations and gain insights into the thoughts and lives of people who lived thousands of years ago.

If you want to learn an ancient/dead language, do you think it’s better to learn its modern descendants first, or to jump straight in with the ancient language?

I suspect it’s probably easier to learn the modern languages first.

Here are a couple of useful language-related websites I came across recently:

Language Podcast Survey
Discussion about and links to podcasts for learning a variety of languages.

Free language
A guide to free online resources for learning languages, such as online lessons, podcasts and so on. Includes details and reviews of resources for learning Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Whoever is behind this site is apparently planing to put any profits they make into a Free Language Foundation which, they hope, “will eventually become wealthy enough to open a physical school and offer scholarships to students from around the world”. Interesting idea. Maybe I could do something similar with Omniglot.

According to an article I came across today in Today’s Zaman, the number of Germans learning Turkish has been increasing recently. A Turkish graduate of a German university who was interviewed for the article mentions that he has been teaching Turkish in German schools for nine years, but that an ad he posted online seven years ago looking for people interested in learning Turkish received no response. He now receives around ten enquiries a month from a similar ad.

At the same time, according to an article in the Spiegel Online, Turkey has criticized a German draft immigration law which stipulates that if spouses wish to join their partners in Germany they have to possess a basic proficiency in the German language.

Today I came across the term sushi-go-round for the first time. I’d been discussing Japanese restaurants with a Japanese friend and mentioned that I didn’t know what to call those sushi places where you sit a the counter and the dishes come round on a conveyor belt. He found the term sushi-go-round in a Japanese-English dictionary. The Japanese name for such restaurants is 回転ずし (kaiten zushi) - lit. ‘rotating/revolving sushi’.

Have you heard of the term sushi-go-round before?

In some Chinese restaurants the tables have a bit in the middle that rotates so that you can a reach dishes without stretching across the table. Sort of similar to the sushi-go-round, but on a smaller scale. I think this is called a lazy susan in English. Does anybody know what it’s called in Chinese? Or do you have any other names for it in English?

Here’s a photo from another mystery city. Can you identify the city and tell us which languages are spoken there?

This city is apparently one of the oldest in Central Asia.

Today’s quiz question is a bit different - can you identify the city in the photo below? Which languages would you be likely to hear spoken in this city?

Today I found an interesting piece about the differences between speaking your own language and speaking a second or foreign language by Dragan Todorovic, a Serbian writer and artist who lives in Canada. He tells us that:

…my biggest problem was the sound of my English. Language is acquired with its sound, and the sounds I had picked from records and movies were harsh, aggressive, and presented me in a very different light from who I was and am. Suddenly I realized that somewhere in the process of acquiring the tone of modern English I had lost my identity. It was painful to realize that in my language I was smart, but I sounded stupid in English.

Have you had similar experiences? Do you think you’re a different person when you speak a foreign language?

According to an article in the Guardian, the new national obsession in the UK is wilfing, or surfing the web without any particular purpose. The word wilf comes from the phrase “what was I looking for?” and in a survey of 2400 British internet users, more than two thirds admitted that they wilf from time to time.

I quite often find myself wilfing. How about you?

There are many interesting ideas about the origins of language being discussed on a blog I discovered recently called Babel’s Dawn. One recent post puts forward the idea that some short expressions we use, such as “What me worry?”, might be fossils of an early stage in the evolution of speech before the development of complex grammar.

Another post suggests that babbling might have developed before speech, perhaps among Homo Habilis, as a way for babies and children to bond with their parents, and this probably increased their chances of surviving into adulthood. In fact parental instincts in humans extend not just to our own offspring and other children, but also to other species. This is not the cases for other apes, or usually for other animals.

Anyway, if you are interested in the origins of speech, I highly recommend this blog.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with using rhymes to memorise vocabulary. To learn things like days of the weeks, months, numbers, etc, I find that repeating them rhythmically, usually in twos or threes is quite a effective way to memorise them. I also try to make up little rhymes and stories using the words to put them in context. As I say the words, I also visualise what they represent and label my mental pictures with the words.

When learning the words of songs, I learn the words in conjunction with the tune. As a result, the words and tune become strongly linked in my mind and I find that I can’t speak the words on their own easily.

Do you similar methods to learn vocabulary?