Tomorrow I’m off to Cuba for a two-week holiday, so there probably won’t be any more posts on this blog until I get back next year. I’m going on a tour with a small group and will be travelling all over the island and visiting such places as Havana, Trinidad, Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba, where I’ll be on Christmas Day.
¡Hasta luego!
A recent post on The Linguist discusses an interesting idea for maintaining one’s abilities in various languages. The idea is that you load up your mp3 player with audio files for the languages you want to maintain and/or improve, then you set it to randomly repeat them. The files could be language lessons, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else you have to hand. This method ensures that you don’t get tired of listening to one particular language, and should help you to switch between languages.
I think I’ll give this a try. I already have quite a few language courses loaded onto my mp3 player and will set up a playlist for the ones I’m working on at the moment. I’ll add more lessons and chapters from my audiobooks to the playlist once I’ve read through them. This will enable me to revise material I’ve already covered. I might add some podcasts in languages such as French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.
Although I’m very used to hearing English spoken by non-native speakers, I do sometimes have difficultly understanding some of what they say. This is often because of mispronunciation and/or misplacement of word stress. Sometimes people have to repeat a word several times before I work out what they’re trying to say.
The same happens to me when I’m speaking other languages. I do my best to get the pronunciation and intonation correct, but am not always successful, which leads to confusion in the minds of those I’m talking to.
Sometimes it’s not the pronunciation, word stress or intonation that lets me down, but the way I put my sentences together and/or the words I use. I may get the words in the wrong order, or use words that are unusual or obscure. Fortunately in some languages you can get away with mixing the words up, as the word order is flexible.
I was talking about this with a Japanese colleague this morning. She told me that at a party she went to recently, where there was a mixture of English and Japanese people, the English people were all speaking English slowly and clearly to make sure that Japanese could understand them. Later she overheard the English people talking amongst themselves and found it quite difficult to understand them as they were speaking at normal speed and using lots of slang.
Regular contact with non-native speakers of your language can help to accustom you to a variety of foreign accents and ways of speaking. In the cases of languages few people study, their native speakers are perhaps less likely to have heard foreigners attempting to speak their language and might be less tolerant of mispronunciation and grammatical errors. I’ve read that this might be true for Czech. Does anybody know if this is the case?
While talking with a Bulgarian contact today, we were discussing the conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ in Bulgarian, as you do, and I was struck by how similar Bulgarian verb endings are to Czech ones. Below is the present tense of this verb with the Bulgarian on the left and the Czech on the right.
The more I learn about the Slavic languages, the more similarities I see between them. So far my knowledge is limited to a smattering of Russian, a little Czech, and a few Bulgarian words, so my impressions and thoughts may change as I learn more. One encouraging factoid I’ve discovered is that Czech only has about seven irregular verbs.
I also came across an interesting site today which contains useful words and phrases in a number of Slavic languages, with translations in English and Japanese.
Correction: the Czech conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ is actually:
There are Czech verbs with endings similar to the Bulgarian ones above, but not ‘to juggle’, unfortunately.
I’ve been chatting with a number of people in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Japanese today. After many years of neglect, my command of these languages is gradually improving.
My Mandarin is more or less fluent, though there are many gaps in my vocabulary, which I’m doing my best to fill. Some of the people I’ve been talking to told me that they thought I was a native Mandarin speaker, which is encouraging.
I only have a limited knowledge of Taiwanese, but that should improve with practice. I can understand the language to some extent thanks to many years of hearing it while in Taiwan, and when I hear people speaking it, it brings back lots of memories.
My Japanese is also gradually coming back to me. I can’t speak it particularly well at the moment, but can understand quite a lot. When talking to my Japanese contacts today, I was pleased to realise that I could actually follow most of what they said in Japanese. One problem I have is that I often find myself at loss for appropriate verbs when I get to the end of my Japanese sentences.
In which country might you hear these languages?
These are both minority languages in this country, one of them is indigenous, the other was first brought to the country by immigrants in the 17th
Here’s a recording of a news report in a mystery language. Can you identify the language?
Hint – this language is spoken by a relavtively small number of people in a number of European countries.
A new series of BBC Radio 4’s fascinating programme about language, Word of Mouth, started this week. One of the things they discussed was Hinglish, a blend of English, Hindi, Punjabi and other South Asian languages spoken in India and by people of Indian origin in the UK, and elsewhere.
In the UK, British Indians pepper their English with Hindi and Punjabi words and expressions, such as yaar (a friend), javaani (youth), ganja (bald), chamcha (a spoon, a lackey, or a sycophant). While in India, many people mix English words and phrases with their native languages, for example time kya hua hai? (what time is it?).
Can any of you work out what language they’re talking and singing in this clip? This is isn’t exactly a quiz, as I don’t know the answer myself. Someone just sent me this clip and asked me if I knew this language, but unfortunately I don’t, so I was wondering if any of you can help.
Výslovnost is the Czech word for pronunciation, and appears in this week’s Czech lesson. I’m currently working my way quite slowly and thoroughly through Colloquial Czech and am spending a week or two on each lesson. I don’t move on to the next lesson until I’m familiar with all the slovníček (vocabulary), mluvnice / gramatika (grammar) and výslovnost.
Some people advise you to listen to a language a lot before you try to speak it. Listening to the languages you’re learning as much as possible is very useful and beneficial, but I don’t know if you should put off trying to speak the language until you’ve listening to it for several weeks or months.
What are your thoughts on this?