Category: Language

Teacher shortages

By Simon

According to an article I found today, the numbers of students studying Arabic at colleges in the USA has been increasingly significantly since 9-11. At the same time, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the numbers of qualified teachers of Arabic. In some areas, potential students of Arabic have been turned away due to the lack of teachers.

Many colleges are hiring native speakers of Arabic with little or no teaching experience or qualifications. That set up sounds familiar – much of the English as a Foreign Language teaching seems to be set up along similar lines.

Elsewhere, due to popularity of Gaelic-medium education in parts of Scotland, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. There’s also a shortage of Manx-medium teachers in the Isle of Man, of Welsh-medium teachers in Wales, and of Irish-medium teachers in Ireland.

Mandarin learning – a fad?

By Simon

Is the current craze for learning Mandarin Chinese a misguided fad? An article in The Economist I found today suggests that it might be.

Mandarin is now taught at over 400 secondary schools in the UK, and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust would like to see it made part of the national curriculum. Around the world there are some 30 million people studying Mandarin at the moment, and the Chinese government expects that number to rise to 100 million by 2010.

The article argues that for most people, a knowledge of Mandarin is unlikely to result in a better career. A number of factors are put forward to support this statement: the difficultly of learning Mandarin when compared to most other languages, especially European languages, which means that very few who study Mandarin attain a high level of competence in the language. The lack of regard among British employers for languages skills is another factor. Finally the fact that the Chinese are busy learning English means that British people doing business with China are unlikely to need a knowledge of Mandarin.

The article concludes with a comment from a representative of a Beijing employment agency, who says that:

whereas the value of compensation packages for expat executives has been shrinking over the past ten years, the number of Chinese-speaking foreigners she handles has been rising. Better language skills, she reckons, are a product less of market demand than of a general enthusiasm for China. Reason enough, perhaps, to learn the language.

By the way, I don’t agree with the article myself. Learning any language is a worthwhile endeavour, even if you only acquire the basics. While a knowledge of Mandarin might not automatically lead to a job, learning it certainly isn’t a waste of your time and effort.

Sounds familiar

By Simon

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been learning the Polish version of Silent Night (Cicha Noc). While trying work out how to pronounce the Polish, I noticed that some of the the Polish consonants are similar to those found in Mandarin Chinese.

For example:

  • Polish c [ts] = Mandarin c, as in 次
  • Polish ć & c+i [ʨ] = Mandarin q, as in 七
  • Polish cz [tʂ] Mandarin ch, as in 吃
  • Polish sz [ʂ] = Mandarin sh, as in 十
  • Polish ś & s+i [ɕ] = Mandarin x, as in 西

Comparing the pronunciation of one language to another isn’t always helpful and can be misleading. In this case though, it gives me a better understanding Polish phonology.

podictionary

By Simon

podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, is a blog I came across today which provides “a word, dictionary etymology & story daily”.

The site covers one word a day and provides details of its meaning, etymology and tells a story related to the word. There is also a podcast of each post. Today’s word, for example, is vicious, and the story is about Sid Vicious and The Sex Pistols.

There are links to some other interesting word-related sites on the links page.

Word of the day – uśmiechnięta

By Simon

Today’s word, uśmiechnięta, means ‘smiling’ in Polish, and appears in the Polish version of Silent Night:

Cicha noc, święta noc,
pokój niesie ludziom wszem,
A u żłóbka Matka święta
czuwa sama uśmiechnięta,
Nad Dzieciątka snem.
Nad Dzieciątka snem.

The singing group I go to at the Hammersmith Irish Centre in London will be performing (for charity) at Hammersmith tube station a week next Monday. One of the things we’ll be singing will be Silent Night and we’ve decided to try to sing it in Polish and Irish, as well as in English.

We can cope with the Irish version as there are at least five Irish speakers, including myself, in the group, but the Polish version is proving more of a challenge. This week a Polish friend of one of the group members came along to help us with the pronunciation, so we now have a rough idea of what it sounds like. I also found a recording of the Polish version on YouTube.

We’ll probably just sing the first and last lines of the Polish and the rest in English as we’re not sufficiently confident to sing the whole of it.

I found translations of Silent Night in many different languages here, and plan to put some of them on Omniglot in my songs section. Do you have any suggestions for other multilingual songs I could include?

Concentration

By Simon

When studying a language, or anything else in fact, it’s easy to get distracted as there are often so many other things vying for your attention. If your mind isn’t focused on your studies, you don’t tend to take as much in or to remember it later.

In this interview, Tim Ferriss explains how he does his best studying while on long journeys when there is still else to do. He also suggests that you try to recreate a similar environment at home, or wherever else you study. This could be achieved be switching off televisions, radios, computers and phones, and removing/hiding anything else that you might be tempted to fiddle with or peruse.

On long journeys I tend to take a novel or two in languages I’m studying and/or textbooks for those languages. As I doubt my fellow passengers would appreciate me reading aloud from the novels or textbooks, or repeating the dialogues on the accompanying recordings, I remain silent, which I find less than ideal. I suppose I could pretend to be talking on my phone though. Reading foreign novels without dictionaries, which I don’t usually have with me on such journeys, is a good test of my understanding of the languages, and my powers of determining the meanings of words from the context, and is something I enjoy more then studying.

Do you have any ways for ignoring distractions and maintaining your concentration when studying?

Lingro

By Simon

The other day the editor of Lingro contacted me asking for comments on his site, which describes as a multilingual online dictionary and language learning site.

The dictionary part can be used to look up words in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish. You can also open a webpage, Word doc, PDF or text file within the dictionary and look up any of the words by clicking on them. This brings up a pop up with translations of the words, and definitions in some cases. Here’s an example of one of Omniglot’s pages in the English-Spanish dictionary – you can change the language combination at the bottom of the screen.

You can save the words you look up in a personal wordlist, which you can peruse later to check if you remember them. There are some virtual flashcards you can use to help you with this in the games section. You can also edit words and add definitions.