Andrew Weiler, who runs the website Strategies in Language Learning is currently giving away a free ebook entitled “7 Mistakes to Avoid to successfully Learn A Foreign Language” at Language Learning Unlocked. To get a copy of the ebook, all you have to do is to fill in a questionnaire about language learning, which should only a few minutes.
Category: Language learning
Handwriting and typing Cyrillic
I finally finished learning the handwritten cursive version of the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian today – I’ve been learning it a few letters at a time, so it has taken a while. Now I can write down the Russian words and phrases I’m learning more easily – writing the printed versions of the letters seems decidedly awkward to me. I might even investigate Russian calligraphy.
Now I just need to map my fingers to the Russian keyboard layout so that I can type Russian as well, instead of picking the letters one at a time from BabelMap, as I’ve been doing. I just found an online typing tutor that helps you learn various keyboard layouts for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. There’s a similar site with even more keyboard layouts here.
After many years of trial and error, I can touch type English fairly well, and type the other Western European languages I know as well. I can also type Chinese using pinyin, and Japanese using romaji. When typing Czech though (not something I do very often), I get accented letters like ě, č, ů and ž from BabelMap.
When learning a new language, especially a new alphabet, do you usually learn how to type it?
Doxastic
I came across the word doxastic (/dɒkˈsæstɪk/) today in Being Wrong – Adventures in the Margin of Error by Katryn Schulz. It means “pertaining to beliefs” and appears in the expression used in philosophy, ‘First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation’, or as Schulz terms it ”Cuz It’s True Constraint’. It means that we have only a limited number of ways to explain why we believe what we do.
We often believe things to be self-evidently true without necessarily being explain why or to provide reasons. For example, you might be convinced that your method or system for learning languages works and anybody who doesn’t agree just needs to be convinced of this. You might have invested a lot of time and money to develop and promote your system, so it’s in your interest to believe that the system works. You might not be consciously aware of this, but such things are often obvious in methods and systems developed by others.
Doxastic comes from the Greek δοξαστικ-ός (forming opinion, conjectural), from δοξαστής (conjecturer), from δοξάζ-ειν (to conjecture) [source].
The dox part, from the Greek δόξα (opinion, glory), also appears in such words as paradox – para comes from the Greek παρά (by the side of, beside, past, beyond), so it means ‘beyond belief’, and orthodox – ortho comes from the Greek ὀρθο- (straight, right), so it means ‘right belief’.
Dox is also internet slang for personal details (name, address, etc) that are visible online.
Russian
I’ve been concentrating on Russian for a week now and am making some progress. I listen to Russian language radio in the mornings while working on Omniglot, so my attention isn’t entirely focused on what they’re saying, but even so I am becoming more familiar with the sounds and rhythyms of the language. The names of people and places, the many recognisable international words, and the other words I recognise help me to get the gist of news reports.
I learn or revise phrases in language101.com every day, and can remember many of them. The phrases I learnt so far a mostly basic ones like ‘hello’, ‘how are you?’, ‘where are you from?’ and so on, with a few longer ones like ‘Russian is a beautiful language’.
Yesterday I started practising writing Russian letters in cursive style. I have tried this before, but have since forgotten how to write quite a few of them. The cursive versions of some of the letters look quite different to their printed forms (the same is true of Latin letters), for example a cursive upper case Д (D) looks like a Latin D, while the lower case д looks like a cursive Latin g.
There are tutorials on how to write cursive style Russian here and here.
With practice I’ll get used to the printed and handwritten versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, but I think it will take quite a while before I’m able to read it as easily as I can the Latin alphabet.
Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах
A few years ago I tried to learn Russian just using Rosetta Stone Russian to test how well it worked. I chose Russian because I hadn’t studied before and because I thought it would be an interesting and useful language learn. At that time I also needed to put together web pages in Russian from time to time, so I thought being able to at least read the language a bit would be handy.
I spent over six months studying every day and in all that time I didn’t learn any phrases like Здравствуйте (Hello), Как дела? (How are you?) or Спасибо (thank you), but I did learn colours, numbers, a variety or nouns like мальчик (boy), девушка (girl), лошадь (horse), слон (elephant) and самолет (aeroplane), and ‘useful’ phrases like, Лошадь не настоящая (The horse is not real), Тигр сидит на стене (The tiger is sitting on the wall), and Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах (The camel is standing on three legs).
Rosetta Stone is designed to teach you entirely through the language you’re learning using photos and recordings. It’s not always clear exactly what the photos are supposed to represent, and when you’re asked to match photos to written or spoken words and phrases, it’s possible to do so without really understanding the words and phrases. The choice of phrases may seem somewhat strange, though many language courses, especially older ones, use similar kinds of phrases to teach you vocabulary and to illustrate various grammatical constructions.
Last week I started learning Russian again using Language101.com, which provides online courses in French, German, Danish, Spanish, Irish, Canadian French and Russian. It uses a spaced repetition system (SRS) with recordings, and contains thousands of phrases for each language. Over the past few days I’ve learnt more practical and useful Russian phrases than I did in six months with Rosetta Stone, and I’ll be writing a review of the site soon.
I plan to focus mainly on Russian for the next two months using such courses as Language101.com, WikiTranslate.org, A Spoonful of Russian and Language Bridge. I’ll also listen Russian language radio every day (at the moment I’m listening to Радио Голос России).
One word I recognised while listening to Russian radio yesterday was верблюд (camel) – I think they were talking about camels in Tajikistan. I remembered it because of the phrase from Rosetta Stone. This got me thinking that while you would rarely use phrases like верблюд стоит на трёх ногах, unless you happened to live in a camel-infested Russian-speaking region, such as Tajikistan, that phrase is very memorable because it’s unusual and funny.
Perhaps that’s the point – learning phrases like this helps you to remember ordinary words like stand, three and legs, as well as camel, and it shows you how to put them together. The more unusual and funny or silly the phrase, the more likely you are to remember it. It works for me at least. So I plan to try constructing similarly unusual, funny, silly and ridiculous sentences in Russian and other languages to help me remember vocabulary and grammatical patterns. I might even make some videos like the ones on my YouTube channel featuring these phrases.
Do you have any suggestions for suitably silly phrases?
[Addendum] Here’s my Language101.com review.
Cvičení dělá mistra / Practice makes perfect
When learning a language I usually spend a lot of time listening to and reading it, and as a result become at least reasonably proficient at understanding it in speech and writing. In most cases though, I don’t spend as much time speaking and writing it, so my speaking and writing abilities tend to lag behind my reading and listening skills.
For example, I can remember quite a few of the phrases and even whole chunks of dialogue from my language courses, and can recognise and understand them when I hear them or read them, and perhaps also use them in speech and writing, if the context permits. When I try to talk about things not covered by the courses though, I quickly find that my vocabulary runs out and I struggle to construct my own sentences.
Of course I can look up any words I don’t know in a dictionary, or ask a native speaker, if one is available, and this is fine for isolating languages like Mandarin as you can just stick the words in the appropriate place in your sentence, as long as you know that place. In synthetic languages like Czech and Russian though, you have to apply the appropriate inflections to the words, at least you do if you want to speak and write them correctly and to be understood, as I do.
So I think I need to do a lot more practise making my own sentences in the languages I’m working on – currently Czech and Breton. I could start with simple sentences from my language courses and other sources and change and/or add bits. For example, a simple sentence from my Czech course (Colloquial Czech) is Jsem student (I’m a student). I could change the person of the verb: Jsi student (You are a student), the number: Jsme studenti (We are students), or the tense: Byli jsme studenti (We were students). I could change the noun: Jsem lingvista (I’m a linguist), and add over words to the sentence: Jsem líný lingvista (I’m a lazy linguist), Jsem líný lingvista z Anglie (I’m a lazy linguist from England).
I can check these sentences by searching for them in Google to see if anyone else has used them, or something similar. That’s also a good way to find texts related to what you’re writing / talking about.
It’s probably best to start with simple sentences, and once I can construct them fairly well, I could try linking them together. Another exercise that might be useful is to take a paragraph in one of the languages I’m learning and to focus on one particularly type of word – nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. I could just try to identify each type, or change things – for example, the tense of the verbs.
Do you do anything similar when learning languages?
This post was inspired by a video on the FluentCzech channel on YouTube which discusses a similar way to learn languages – constructing simple sentences in your L2, translating them to your L1, then back to your L2.
Chinese app
A new application for Android devices that teaches you how to read and write the 100 most widely-used Chinese characters was launched today.
It shows you how to write each character with animations, and also has recordings in Mandarin Chinese and English, as well as pinyin transcription and English translations for each character,
It was developed by Adam Beaumont of Leafcutter Studios with Mandarin Chinese recordings by a Chinese friend of mine, Helen Zhang (张丹), and English recordings by me.
Sing me a song
Recently I’ve noticed that my motivation to study languages is low. I listen to online radio stations in various language every day; I’m reading literature in Welsh, Irish, French and Manx at the moment; and I speak my languages with myself and with others when the opportunity arises. Occasionally I’ll listen to and/or read a lesson in one of the languages I’m dabbling with at the moment (mainly Czech, Russian and Breton), however I’m not strongly motivated to learn the languages and don’t study them everyday.
I’ve been thinking about other ways to study and practise using my languages that will interest me more and have realised that what I really enjoy is singing. So maybe I could try learning songs in the languages I want to study and practise. I already know quite a few songs in English, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and in the Bangor Community Choir and other groups I’ve sang with, we’ve learnt songs in various other languages, including Bulgarian, Corsican, Croatian, Georgian, Greek, Sindebele, Spanish, Xhosa, Yoruba and Zulu.
What I’d like to learn is songs that most people in a particular country or who speak a particular language know. The kind of songs you might learn at home and/or at school, including children’s songs, which can be good for learning basic vocabulary. So any suggestions are welcome, including words, translations, recordings and so on.
I’m particularly interested in songs in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Breton, Cornish, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Japanese. I’ll also share them with you in the songs section of Omniglot.
Do it because it’s fun
The title of this post is a song writing tips from Kate Rowe’s website – she’s an Australian singer/song writer who support the Spooky Men’s Chorale on their recent UK tour. I saw them in Caernarfon and found the website after that, saw the tips and thought that could apply, with some adaptations to language learning.
Here they are:
• Do it because it’s fun, not because you want to achieve something.
• Write a lot, often, to get used to your own voice and trains of thought.
• Rather than “coming up with” ideas, relax and let images start appearing in your mind.
• Let your mind tell you a story, and write or record exactly what you see and hear.
• Write fast, without editing. Get all the ideas down, even if they seem ridiculous.
• Later, take the most interesting bits. It might only be a sentence! Just keep writing.
Even without changes, these apply to writing in a language you’re learning.
I think it’s better to learn a language because it’s fun, it’s something you enjoy doing, and it’s a language/culture you really like, rather than because you feel you should, or you think the language might be useful one day. I sometimes learn languages to try out different language courses, and unless I fall in love with the languages or the cultures of people who speak them, or the countries where they’re spoken, I find my motivation for them tends to diminish and disappear after a while.
It helps to practise all language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing, and indeed typing, as often as you can.
The third tip isn’t perhaps directly relevant to language learning, but when you’re reading or listening the your L2, it can help to relax and let it flow into your eyes and ears without worrying about things you don’t understand. The meanings of unknown words that come up frequently is likely to become clear from the context.
Stories are useful for language learning – reading and listening to them, and making them up yourself just for fun, and/or to practise using particular grammatical structures and vocabulary.
When writing in a foreign language it might help to write fast, not worry about mistakes, and to edit later.
Komz a rez brezhoneg? / Wyt ti’n siarad Llydaweg?
I decided to have a go at learning Breton today and listened to some of Le Breton sans peine. I just listened without looking at the book to see if I could understand anything – one of my friends is convinced that Breton has more similarities with Welsh than with Cornish, but I thought that Breton is closer to Cornish, so I decided to test this.
I speak Welsh more or less fluently, and do know a few Breton words already, including degemer mat (welcome), trugarez (thank you = trugaredd, ‘mercy / compassion’, in Welsh), pelc’h emañ …? (where is …? = pa le, ‘which place?’, in Welsh), and I was able to guess the means of some words that sound similar to their Welsh equivalents: mor (sea – môr in Welsh), ti (house – tŷ in Welsh), glas (blue/green – glas in Welsh). I could also understand some of the numbers and some French loanwords, apart from that though, I had no idea, or only the vaguest idea, what they were talking about most of the time.
This is just my own impression, but it seems that mutual intelligibility between Welsh and Breton is very limited. The stories of Breton onion sellers in Wales being able to talk to the local Welsh speakers in Breton and be understood are perhaps exaggerated. Or perhaps the onion sellers, known as Sioni Wynwns (Johnny Onions) in Welsh, learnt enough Welsh to have basic conversations with Welsh speakers.
While I was in the Isle of Man earlier this year I heard some Cornish and was able to make some sense of it, but the Breton I heard there made very little sense to me.