Category: Language learning

7000 Languages Project

By Simon

I heard about an interesting project today: 7000 Languages Project – the goal of the project is to create web- and mobile-delivered learning materials for the 7,000 languages beyond the top 100 or so that attract significant commercial support.

The 7000 Languages Project involves creating Langscape, an online portal for learning about languages worldwide, that combines an interactive language map with links to an expanding range of resources on thousands of languages. Langscape is intended to serve multiple communities, including language teachers and learners, researchers, K-12 educators, government and NGOs, and public outreach.

Muddling through

By Simon

to muddle through
– “to succeed in some undertaking in spite of lack of organization” [source]
– “to succeed in doing something despite having no clear plan, method, or suitable equipment” [source]
– “to cope more or less satisfactorily despite lack of expertise, planning, or equipment.”
synonyms: to cope, manage, get by/along, scrape by/along, make do, make the best of a bad job [source]

When learning a language, or other things, are you someone who can set goals, make plans and stick to them?

I do sometimes set myself language learning goals, and often make plans, and even manage to stick to them for a while. However my goals tend to be fuzzy, my plans half-baked, and my sticking-to-it abilities somewhat sporadic. Generally I tend to learn bits and pieces of languages as the fancy takes me, and try a variety of courses and methods, at least until I get bored or find alternatives, and just muddle through as best I can.

When people ask me for advice about learning languages, as they often do, I have plenty of suggestions, but the only one I stick to is to do a lot of listening. So I don’t really practise what I preach. Is my advice less valuable as a result? Perhaps it is.

Do you advise people to try learning techniques you don’t use or rarely use yourself?

Does the concept of muddling through exist in other languages?

Reverse psychology and language learning

By Simon

Yesterday I met Aran Jones, the guy behind the website SaySomethingin.com, and we had a very interesting chat, in Welsh, about language learning. His site started as a Welsh language course, and now also offers courses in Cornish, Dutch, Latin and Spanish. You can learn all these languages through English or Welsh, and you can also learn English and Welsh through Spanish, and he plans to offer more languages in the future. The courses are designed to get you speaking in a relatively short time.

One interesting point we discussed was the way language learning is presented. Many courses claim that you can learn a language quickly and with little or no effort. All you have to do is listen and repeat – don’t worry about learning grammar or vocabulary! Moreover people who encourage others to learn languages tend to emphasize that it is possible, anybody can do it, that you don’t have to have a special language gene/gift/talent, and that it isn’t all that difficult. Just jump in and start speaking! Don’t worry about mistakes!

An alternative approach is to say that language learning is really hard, takes a lot of work, and that relatively few people succeed, and to discourage people from trying it. By presenting it as a real challenge like this you might encourage more people to try. When they find it isn’t as difficult as they expected and that they can succeed, they will have a greater sense of achievement. In other words, a kind of reverse psychology. On the other hand, many people already believe this and are convinced that they can’t learn a language, so it wouldn’t work for everyone.

Another thing we discussed was improving your listening comprehension, especially if you find speech at normal speed difficult to understand. Slowing down your recordings, or asking people to speak more slowly, is a way to deal with this, and can work well. An alternative is to speed up the audio – in some SaySomethingin lessons the audio is at twice the usual speed, for example, and if you listen to it quite a few times you will eventually understand it. Then when you listen to it at normal speed it will be much easier to follow.

Here’s an example of recording in Spanish at normal speed (which sounds fast to me).

Here’s this recording at twice the normal speed.

I do something similar when learning to play classical pieces on the guitar and piano – if I’m struggling with a piece I might try something even more challenging. Then the original piece seems easier when I go back to it. Or I try playing folk tunes as fast as I can, then slow then down to a more normal speed, and they seem much easier.

Back in Bangor

By Simon

Polyglot Conference delegates in Novi Sad

Yesterday morning I shared a taxi to Belgrade airport with two other conference participants. We had some lunch while waiting for our flights, and came across quite a few other polyglots. I flew via Zurich and had a short connection time there – only 20 minutes. There was a bit longer to wait for my train from Manchester airport, so I had something to eat.

It was warm and sunny for the whole time I was in Serbia, but it was cold, wet and windy back in the UK. In fact we were flying over solid cloud cover across most of France and England. Fortunately there were some good views for the rest of the flights.

The announcements on the planes were in Swiss German, English and Serbian. I also heard a number of other languages on the journey, including Hindi, Italian, Spanish and possibly Yiddish.

Polyglottery

By Simon

Novi Sad Catholic Cathedral

Yesterday morning I met up with other conference participants and after a bit of a wander around the city, we had lunch then went to the opening ceremony a reception. In the after we had a little guided tour of Novi Sad seeing some interesting buildings, including the Catholic or Orthodox Cathedrals, and the fortress. There are some rather attractive buildings here, wide, pedestrianised café-lined streets, some nice parks and generally a relaxed kind of atmosphere.

In the evening we all went to a restaurant about 4 or 5km from the city centre for dinner. I walked there with a few others, and the rest went by bus or taxi. We had a nice dinner with lots of polyglot chat, then some people started dancing, and others carried on chatting.

Novi Sad town hall

Today there were lectures and talks on a variety of topics including sound symbolism, the magic of metaphors, language coaching, and acting and humour in a foreign language.

So far I’ve had conversations in about 10 languages and spoken bits and pieces of maybe 10 others. In some cases this was only a few words (all I know), in others it was a bit more. There are even two guys here who are learning Scottish Gaelic, one of whom also speaks a bit of Manx, and another who is learning Irish.

Polyglot Conference

By Simon

Polyglot Conference logo

Tomorrow I’m off to a polyglot conference in Novi Sad in Serbia. It will be my first visit to Serbia, and my first opportunity to speak Serbian – I’ve been learning a bit more or less every day for the past month or so, but have yet to use it, so it’ll be interesting to find out how much I can say and understand. I’ll get to speak many other languages as well, and am really looking forward to it.

Are any of you going to the conference?

Social Media Helps Threatened Language Threatened by Social Media

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Alissa Stern of BASAbali.org

On the eve of the Balinese holy day of knowledge, learning, and wisdom (Saraswati Day), a free innovative multi-media Balinese-Indonesian-English wiki dictionary was just made available to people in Bali and throughout the world.

The wiki uses social media to save Balinese, a language threatened by, among other things, social media.

In recent years, Balinese has dwindled down to use by only about a quarter of native Balinese, the result of globalization, nationalization, and social media taking its usual toll on a minority language. With Balinese, where speakers rely on who they are, who they are speaking to, and what they are speaking about to choose the right level of words, the faceless internet presents a serious problem, encouraging Balinese posters to use the national – and status neutral – Indonesian rather than make a mistake with Balinese.

But with the new Wiki, social media is being use to re-energize Balinese by promoting pride in the language through an international web presence and by providing a tool for anyone with internet access – which these days is large portions of the island – to contribute to its well being and benefit from its information.

Nala Antara, Chair of the Linguist team from Badan Pembina Bahasa Aksara dan Sastra, Universitas Udayana, Universitats Pendidikan Ganesha and other universities within and outside of Bali who will oversee and edit the Wiki explains: “Technology will be our bridge to the future. The wiki Balinese-English-Indonesian dictionary will help everyone in Bali learn and speak Balinese alongside Indonesian, so that we two strong languages co-existing: the language of our people and the language of our nation. The wiki allows the people of Bali to actively take part in this project to take pride in their participation.”

Ayu Mandala from BASAbali which is working to connect the Linguist team with the Balinese public says “with this wiki, we can make the Balinese language well known throughout Bali and throughout the world. Wiki technology gives free access to everyone and provides an opportunity for the public to be part of the action.”

A small firm called TinyMighty, based in a remote part of Spain, which also has a threatened language, created the wiki interface. It is being supported by a Kickstarter campaign, using the same crowdsourcing for funding as the wiki uses crowdsourcing for knowledge. The wiki is particularly unique in being able to handle the different registers of Balinese – something unique to the Balinese language – but it also gives real life examples of word usage from Balinese literature, newspapers and other media, and handle the old – the endangered Balinese script – and the new – youtube videos of native speakers.

Alissa Stern of BASAbali“>BASAbali hopes that the Wiki will not only inspire people to learn and use Balinese, but that Balinese can be a model how other threatened languages in the rest of the world might benefit from a collaboration of expert linguists and the general public.

Patterns

By Simon

Recently I’ve been learning Serbian, Russian and Czech with free apps produced by Hallberg Ryman, who make them for quite a variety of languages for Andriod and iPhone/iPad. They are working well for me and I would definitely recommend them.

They use a flashcard/SRS-based system to teach you vocabulary arranged into categories such as numbers, colours, clothing, food, etc. Within each category you learn individual words, and then see them in various sentences, which you’re tested on by filling in blanks, or by assembling sentences from a bunch of random words.

One blank filling exercise involves typing the missing words – in the other you just select the words – and I find this the most difficult, especially for Russian. It is also the most useful because I have to think about spelling and the grammar.

The other day I was doing a lesson on colours in Czech and in the typing exercise was having trouble remembering the endings for each word. I tried to memorise them for each sentence, but found this tricky, then I thought that there must be a pattern to them. I soon realised that they were agreeing with the gender of the nouns they accompanied. Once I spotted the pattern, it was easy to remember and apply it. I’m sure this aspect of Czech grammar has come up before in my Czech studies, but I hadn’t internalised it. Now that I’ve worked it out for myself through observation and experiment, I won’t forget it.

When learning grammar, are you able to take it in and remember it just from grammatical descriptions, or do you need to see lots of examples?

српски (Serbian)

By Simon

Last week I started learning Serbian (српски) in preparation for the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad in Serbia in October. Whenever I visit a country whose language I don’t already speak I learn at least the basics of their language, so I couldn’t go to Serbia without learning some Serbian.

I’m using online materials, such as Serbian Lessons and an app I download to my web tablet – any suggestions for other online resources would be welcome. I am listening to online Serbian radio most days as well.

I’ll be trying some of the language learning methods discussed in Gabriel Wyner’s book, Fluent Forever, which I started reading recently.

I will also be making little videos using the Serbian I’m learning. Here’s the first one:

If you speak Serbian and spot any mistakes in the dialogue or subtitles, please let me know.