I was listening to Catalan radio the other day (long story: short version, I’m thinking of whether to live in Spain and if I can be bothered with learning Catalan or whether it would just get mixed up in my Spanish).
They had interviews with people about the Madrid Spanair crash, and the people were talking in Spanish. No big deal really, as all Catalan speakers in Spain will know Spanish too. However , I’ve just been listening to Radio España 5, and they had clips of untranslated Italian, which assumes mutual intelligibility in all listeners. That reminded me of one time on Colombian Radio Caracol, when they had untranslated (Brazilian) Portuguese in an interview with a footballer. Again, they assumed that all listeners would be able to understand the Portuguese.

Do others have examples of bilingual radio, which assumes mutual intelligibility at a general level?

(I have strange half memories of listening to Italian radio and hearing an interview when one person spoke in French, and the other in Italian, but I may be hallucinating.)

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I’ve heard people on Irish language radio (Raidió na Gaeltachta) speaking Scottish Gaelic without translation.

Thomas believed that “there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher” and that with the right teaching method, anybody can learn a language quickly and easily. However was very reluctant to explain his teaching methods with others. He believed that people would only take parts of his ideas if he shared them, which would dilute them and make them much less effective. It was only in the 1990s that Thomas was persuaded to record language lessons by Hodder Education.

In a new book, The Language Revolution, by Jonathan Solity, an educational psychologist, discusses how Thomas taught languages and the psychological prinples that underpin his methods. Solity believes that if such methods were adopted in schools, they could made a huge difference.

The article mentions some of Thomas’ methods, which include breaking down languages and explaining how they work in easy-to-understand ways; teaching relatively small amounts of material at any one time; and going over things until the students really understand them and can use them. There is also a link to a BBC documentary about Michel Thomas on YouTube.

Have you tried any Michel Thomas language courses? How effective have they been?

I haven’t tried any yet, but am thinking of having a go at the Russian course.

They are looking for Voice Actors, Voice Coaches and Audio Reviewers who are native speakers of, or have native-level fluency in Vietnamese, Turkish and Tagalog. They are also keen to find people who speak Latin well or who have a good knowledge of the language.

If you’re interested, please contact:
TagalogAudition@RosettaStone.com
TurkishAudition@RosettaStone.com
VietnameseAudition@RosettaStone.com
or LatinAudition@RosettaStone.com

Ideal Voice Talent and Audio Reviewer candidates have prior experience in audio reviewing, voice acting, voiceover, dubbing, broadcast, theatre, film or a closely related field.

Here’s a PDF with more details.

According to a report on canada.com, researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy have done studies of newborn babies in Canada and Italy using brain scans to discover which parts of the babies brains are active when they hear words, and whether they react differently to different words. They found the part of babies’ brains that responds most to language is the same part, the temporal lobes, used for language processing in adults, and that babies react most to words with repeated syllables, such as mama, dada and banana.

One of the researchers, Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, believes that rudimentary language structures already in place from birth, and that it’s easy for a baby to attach meaning to the words like mama and dada.

Analysis and reconstruction of the auditory bones in skills of Homo heidelbergensis dating from 530,000 years ago have demonstrated that their hearing was probably similar to that of modern humans. They could hear best between 2 khz and 4 khz, the frequency range within which much of the sound of speech is transmitted, and researchers believe that such an ability must have been used, as maintaining such sensory systems is neurologically very expensive and they are unlikely to evolve and not be used. Whether they were connected with speech or something else is not known.

Such systems are already available in Japan and parts of Europe.

Do any of you use sign language on your mobile/cell phone, or do you know anyone who does?

This type of story is called macaronic, a word coined in the 16th century by Teofilo Folengo, an Italian poet, to refer to a type of verse he invented in which he mixed Italian and Latin for comic effect. He based the name on macaroni, which he described in Latin as pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum (a savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic).

The word was first used in English the following century and was used to refer to any type of verse which mixes two or more languages together.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-wei1.htm.

Here are links to a few examples of Macaronic songs in English and Irish:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/macaronic.htm

I did better with the native speakers than the non-natives, but got quite a few of the former wrong as well. I’d probably do better if the videos were longer.

Do you know of any similar websites?