Omniglot - the blog

Today we have another guest post from James in Santiago, Chile.

There comes a stage in every language when you start asking yourself how good you are. Yes, it’s fun to play around learning the Basque verb system or to be able to speak enough to get by as a tourist in 10 different languages, but when you have to use a language day in and day out the question whether people can actually *really* understand what you are saying and just how “foreign” you sound does become more pressing: there is a big difference between ordering a skinny latte and teaching Kantian epistemology. People are normally very generous with foreigners who are trying to learn their language: “hablas perfecto”, “you speak amazing English” (mentally we add “for someone who has just been learning for a year and has never left Latvia”)

The truth is we rarely are able to assess ourselves correctly and tend routinely to over or underestimate how good we are. I’m an underestimator because I teach humanities at tertiary level and have a perfectionist streak, so I tend to put myself a level below what my teacher thinks. About a year ago (May or June 2007) I did a self assessment on the CEFR and thought that I was a middling C1. I got my teacher at the time (a Chilean who had been working with me for over 6 months) to assess me using the CEFR criteria and she said that she would describe me as a C2. I went to Guatemala in February 2008 to study more and placed myself at a 4 on the ILR scale. My Guatemalan teacher, who has 20 years experience and is one of the best I’ve had in my 20 years of language learning, put that I was a 5 on my language certificate (a 5.1 to be exact which is the lowest level in the highest category). I still don’t agree with him, which is irrational: he is the native speaker language professional and we had over 80 hours of 1-2-1 contact when I was feeling ill from altitude sickness (i.e. he saw me at my worst for a prolonged period) so he should know. But, without a trace of false modesty, I still think I’m an ILR 4.

Of course, at one level scales and numbers mean nothing: we all have a level at which we are happy with and what it’s called is irrelevant, for some it’s “higher”, for others not: artificial levels don’t actually tell us anything or make us feel any better. Some people couldn’t care less if the grammar or pronunciation is right as long as people get the point, others care so much that they barely open their mouths.

So do you care how “good” you are?

The Scales
CEFR (European)
ILR (USA, formerly known as FSI)

According to an article I came across today, increasing numbers of Mongolians are enrolling in Korean language classes in the hope that they will get jobs in Korea and save enough money to buy a house when they return to Mongolia. This is the so-called ‘Korean dream’. Such classes are available at all levels of education from primary schools to universities.

Already a quite a large number of Mongolians - around 33,000 - live and work in South Korea, and it seems many of the compatriots would like to follow in their footsteps. Many Mongolians also go to study in Korea, attracted in part by the relatively low study costs.

I wonder if the Mongolian find it easier to learn Korean, a language which has a similar structure to Mongolian, than other languages such as English, Russian or Chinese. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that Japanese people find Turkish easier to learn than English because of its similar structure.

Lingosmile is a new wiki-style site I heard about recently which aims to provide a free and easy way to produce translations collaboratively. The idea is that anybody can join in and translate material into their language, edit existing translations and/or add recordings. Translations on the site are divided in sections such as language learning, sciences, art & culture, fiction, song lyrics and so on, and anyone can start a new project within these sections.

The site is still in beta and I don’t think it’s been officially launched yet, but it looks like it has potential to become a useful language learning resource.

A report I found today talks about a school in Seattle called sponge which aims to teach babies and children four languages - Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese - through play, songs, stories, etc. They have teachers who are native speakers of the languages they teach and take children from as young 5 months and up to 5 years old.

This sounds like an interesting approach to language teaching and I’m sure that children will benefit from this multilingual environment. I wonder whether they’ll become fluent in all the languages though - they may not get sufficient exposure to each to acquire them fully. Perhaps that isn’t the point of the school.

When other people discover that you speak a foreign language, they sometimes ask you to say something in that language. You might want to say something complicated thinking it will impress them, but if they don’t speak the language themselves, anything you say will probably do that. But what to say?

Poems, songs, proverbs, sayings or tongue twisters are all possible choices. They will sound impressive, even if you stumble over parts of them. If that happens and you just keep going as if nothing happened, nobody will notice. Simple sentences such as “My name is ….”, “I come from …”, “Isn’t it a nice day today?” or something similar are another possibility. Or if you’re feeling flippant, you could just say the equivalent of “something” or “something in [name of language]”.

When asked to perform in this way I usually just say a few simple sentences, though afterwards I think maybe I should’ve said something along the lines of, “As you don’t speak this language I can say whatever I like and you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. So I just want to mention that my hovercraft is full of eels, as well you know!”. Unfortunately I can’t always manage to construct this kind of thing on the fly.

What do you usually say when asked to say something in a foreign language?

This post was inspired by one on Corcaighist.

Continuing yesterday’s theme of sounds that can be challenging to pronounce, today we look at the voiceless dental fricative /θ/. This sound is usually written th in English and appears in such words as three [θriː], thought [θɔːt] and thin [θɪn]. In the Spanish of Spain it’s written c (when followed by i or e), as in cien [θien], and z, as in Zaragoza [θaragoθa]. It’s also used in a number of other languages, including Greek - the Greek letter θ (Θήτα/theta) represents this sound in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

The voiced version of this sound is represented in the IPA by the letter ð (eth), which comes from Old English. This sound is written th in English and appears in the [ðə] and though [ðoʊ]. In Welsh it’s written dd; in Icelandic ð; in Albanian, Cornish and Swahili dh, and in Greek δ (Δέλτα/delta). In Spanish d can be pronounced /ð/ when it comes between two vowels, as in nada [’naða].

These sounds are fairly rare among the world’s languages and can be tricky for speakers of languages which don’t use them. They also tend to be the last sounds acquired by native speakers of English, according to this page.

There’s an explanation of how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative here. You do the same and just let vocal folds vibrate to pronounce the voiced version.

I didn’t learn how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative properly until the age of 23, when a Taiwanese friend who was studying English at university explained it to me. Before that, I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between three and free - I pronounced both with /f/ at the beginning. I still have to make a conscious effort to pronounce this sound sometimes and tend to slip back to the /f/ sound when not concentrating.

I often pronounce the voiced dental fricative as /v/ when it’s not at the beginning of a word, for example in brother. However, since starting to learn Welsh, which makes quite a lot of use of dental fricatives, my ability to pronounce them has improved. Combinations of /ð/ and /v/ can also trip me up, as in swyddfa [sʊɨðva].

One aspect of Spanish pronunciation that can be tricky to master is the trilled or rolled r, which is also known as an alveolar trill /r/. This sound is also used in Italian and many other languages. Some people seem convinced that if you can’t already make this sound, it’s impossible to learn.

If you are having trouble with the Spanish r, this blog post might help. It breaks it down into a four step process and explains clearly what to do at each stage. There’s another explanation of how to make this sound here.

Once you’re got those r’s rolling, here’s a tongue twister to practise with:

Erre con Erre Cigarro
Erre con Erre Barril
Rápido corre el carro
Repleto do ferro en el ferrocarril

It is possible, in fact, to learn to make any sound used in any language, even the rolled r, and other tricky sounds like the clicks used in some African languages and the back-of-the-throat sounds of Arabic. It takes a lot of listening and practise. An understanding of the mechanics of how the sounds are produced can help as well.

There are online introductions to phonetics and phonology here and here, and this site shows you the relative positions of the tongue, teeth, lips, etc when pronouncing various sounds.

I can usually manage alveolar trills, though sometimes find the double rr in the middle of words such as carro a bit tricky and I have to slow down to get it right.

Here are a couple of online resources I came across today for learning Irish:

Everyday Irish - a series of Irish language lessons by Liam Ó Maonlaí, lead singer of the Hothouse Flowers, and offered for free by the Irish Independent. The lessons are in the form of mp3s with accompanying worksheets in PDF format. They are available for beginners and more advanced students.

Talk Irish - a new Irish language learning project which will offer free Irish word-a-day emails, podcasts and flashcards. At the moment only the word-a-day is available, once you’ve joined the site.

When I was at university I used flashcards quite a lot to learn Chinese characters and vocabulary in Chinese and Japanese. After I’d learnt each character, I stuck the cards on the wall and eventually they covered almost ever inch of wallspace. Since then however, I’ve rarely used flashcards. They are quite effective, if you look at them regularly, but for various reasons I thought they weren’t for me.

Recently I’ve decided to give them another chance. This time I’m using Mnemosyne, a downloadable flashcard program, rather than paper flashcards. Some flashcard programs, including Mnemosyne, have a built-in spaced repetition system which
tests you after different periods of time depending on your assessment of how well you know the word/phrase/sentence. This apparently helps you to commit the information to your long-term memory.

So far I’ve entered quite a few sentences in Irish from articles on Beo, an online Irish language magazine. I’m using sentences rather than individual words because this enables me to see how the words and grammar is used in context. I plan to add many more sentences and phrases in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and maybe other languages.

I found a useful site today, the FlashcardExchange, which provides readymade online flashcards for many languages, as well as for other subjects. You can also make your own cards and share them with your friends. Most of this is free, but a one-off fee is payable for some of the services on the site.

Do you use flashcards or flashcard programs? Do you know of any flashcard programs which you can add sound to?

I came across the term timeboxing today on this blog. When I first read it, it conjured up images of someone boxing with a clock. Now I know that it’s a technique for managing your time that’s often used for software development projects. It involves setting yourself set ‘boxes’ of time to do things, but not worrying about completing them. Instead you just do as much as you can as well as you can in the time available. Then you use as many more timeboxes as you need to complete the tasks. The aim is to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a time limit and to avoid overcommiting to a task.

The author of the blog post mentions that he finds it easier to make a start on tedious tasks because he has decided in advance that he’ll stop after a set time. Once he’s conquered the initial inertia of getting started and becomes more focused and interested in the tasks, he might spend longer than originally intended working on them.

This technique could be applied to language learning. You could set yourself a box or boxes of time each day when you’ll study, and study as much as you can manage in that/those time(s). While you might find it difficult to study a whole lesson in the time available, studying part of a lesson is still a useful thing to do.

One of the commenters on the post mentions that he rewards himself each time he completes a period of study. He finds that he rewarding himself in small doses at regular intervals helps him get a lot more done. This idea could be applied to language learning as well - the rewards could be doing something you really enjoy in the language, such as listening to or singing a song or watching a video.

More information about timeboxing.