Category: Language

Medical dictionaries

By Simon

A useful site I heard about recently is Practicing Spanish, which focuses on medical Spanish for healthcare providers. It includes daily dialogues, with audio, useful phrases for different medical situations, anatomical terminology, basic vocabulary, notes on culture and information about Spanish-speaking countries, as well as a number of folk songs. The author of the site is a Spanish teacher in the USA with training in medical interpreting.

A similar site I found today contains a glossary of medical terms in nine European languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).

There’s another mutilingual medical dictionary at: http://www.super55.com.

eduFire

By Simon

eduFire, a language learning site I heard about recently. It’s designed to bring together language learners and tutors via the web using what they call ‘live video language learning’. Tutors can set their own fees, a small proportion of which is retained by the eduFire people as service charge, and students can try sample video lessons and talk to other students before deciding on a tutor. The most popular languages are Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

eduFire are giving away free one-hour tutoring sessions for readers of this blog. The first ten people to email freetutoring@edufire.com will receive a coupon code that allows their session to be complimentary.

Don’t forget the My favourite kanji competition, by the way. I said that the closing date for entries is today, but as I’ve only received two entries so far, I’ll extend that to the end of July.

Apologies for the lack of language quiz yesterday. This was due to server problems. As I know you enjoy these quizzes … here’s a recording in a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?

The face fits

By Simon

Yesterday I was talking to a former colleague who grew up in the UK speaking Cantonese and English and whose family comes from Hong Kong. He told me that when he meets Mandarin-speaking Chinese people, they tend to assume from his appearance he will understand them when they speak to him in Mandarin. He doesn’t. Sometimes Japanese people assume he’s Japanese as well.

I’ve seen similar situations in Taiwan and China involving Overseas Chinese who don’t speak Mandarin, or only speak it a little bit, being talked at in Mandarin by people who find it hard to accept that people who look Chinese don’t understand or speak Mandarin. At the same time, it can sometimes be difficult for Chinese people to accept that a Westerner such as myself can speak Mandarin.

Have you had experiences like this with Mandarin or other languages?

Play and learn

By Simon

A professor at Michigan State University has created a free online role-playing game that teaches you Mandarin Chinese, as well as introducing you to Chinese culture, according to this report.

Within the game you inhabit a virtual version of China where you can visit markets, read newspapers, watch television, chat and trade with other players and even get a job, and there are plenty of help with the language the culture. Players start out as tourists and can become residents or even citizens of the virtual China.

This sounds like a good idea that might appeal to quite a lot of people.

Do you know of games that teach other languages? Have you tried any of them?

Bangor

By Simon

I’m currently in Bangor, Gwynedd in search of a new place to live – I plan to move here soon and will be starting an MA in Linguistics at Bangor University in September.

Bangor is one of the smallest cities in the UK and is an attractive place with views across the Menai Strait to Anglesey (Ynys Môn) and along the North Wales coast. Students make up a significant proportion of the population, at least during term time, and at least half of the permanent population speak Welsh as their first language, which is one of the reasons why I chose the course in Bangor.

Welsh has now ousted Mandarin as the dominant language (apart from English) in my head. Mandarin dominated for many years, even after I left Taiwan. Now when I try to say things in languages other than Welsh, they come out partly in Welsh, or with Welsh word order, which tends to confuse people. There aren’t many people around, as far as I know who can follow a Mandarin/Welsh mixed conversation. Well, I do know one person who could.

On the train on the way here today I heard some people talking in an unfamiliar language. As I usually do, I tried to work out which language it was. At first I assumed it was Spanish or Portuguese as I saw Iberia Airlines tags on their bags and they looked Hispanic. When I listened more closely, I realised it wasn’t either of those languages, though there did seem to be a few Spanish loanwords, which made me suspect it was maybe Quechua or one of the other indigenous languages of Latin America. Unfortunately I didn’t have a recording device to hand, otherwise I could have posted a recording here to see if any of you recognised the language. I suppose I could have asked the people what language it was, but where’s the challenge in that?!

Language quiz

By Simon

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?

Clue: this is a Native American language.

By the way, I’m trying to find a solution to the problems on the forum, but have yet to find anything that works. Suggestions are welcome.

Worldle

By Simon

The other day I heard about on interesting site called Worldle, which creates word clouds out of any text you enter into it. After creating your word cloud, you can tweak the layout, colour and font settings. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to handle text in alphabets other than Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. It isn’t really language or writing-related, but is quite fun to play with and you could use it to see which words are most frequently used in a text.

Here are a couple of word clouds I made with text from Omniglot:

Worldle word cloud created using words from the Omniglot homepage

Worldle word cloud created using translations of the phrase 'one language is never enough'

This word cloud is made from text in Welsh and Irish from my other blog:

Worldle word cloud created using text from a post on my blog, Rywsut-rywmodd