Category: Language learning

Thinking sdrawkcab

By Simon

Here are the words of a song we’ve been learning recently at the Bangor Community Choir:

When there is light in the soul, there is beauty in the person.
When there is beauty in the person, there is harmony in the home.
When there is harmony in the home, there is honour in the nation.
When there is honour in the nation, there is peace in the world.

We were told that it’s based on a Chinese proverb, so of course I searched for that proverb and found the following:

明明德於天下者，先治其國。(míngmíng dé yú tiānxià zhĕ, xiān zhì qí guó)
欲治其國者，先齊其家。(yù zhì qí guó zhĕ, xiān qí qí jiā)
欲齊其家者，先修其身。(yù qí qí jiā zhĕ, xiān xiū qí shēn)
欲修其身者，先正其心。(yù xiū qí shēn zhĕ, xiān zhēng qí xīn)

This expresses more of less same sentiments, though they are the opposite way round: it starts taking about the world, then the nation, the home, etc.

Here’s a rough translation:

Those who wish to bring light and virtue to the world, must first govern the nation.
Those who wish to govern the nation, must first organise the home.
Those who wish to organise the home, must first cultivate themselves.
Those who wish to cultivate themselves, must first correct their heart.

Does anybody know where this proverb comes from, by the way?

The way things are arranged in Chinese often seems backwards from the point of view of English speakers. For example, surnames come before personal names, and addresses start from the country or province, rather than with the name.

When speaking (Mandarin) Chinese I try to think in Chinese, but words sometimes come out in English, Welsh or French order, which doesn’t necessarily work very well. This is mainly because I haven’t been using Chinese as much as I used to, so am not as practised at constructing Chinese sentences. I can still communicate effectively in Chinese, but have to rearrange some of the utterances either in my head or after I’ve said them. More practise should help to eliminate this problem.

Study Abroad is Essential For Language Majors

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Lindsey Wright.

Nearly everyone will take a language course in college. For some students, the course simply fills a general education requirement by giving them basic knowledge of a language, while others plan to study a language extensively in college. However, for people to truly grasp a language, it is necessary to spend time among those who speak it. Therefore, ideally, every language study course should require a student to participate in a study abroad program. Yet this is not the case for most schools. This could be due to the fact that there aren’t enough students interested in the program or that the universities simply do not have the funding. However, if you take a moment to think consider all the reasons why language students should study abroad, the case is quite compelling.

Perhaps the biggest reason to require a study abroad program is how much it can help you learn a language. There is no better way to learn a language than be immersed in it. When you travel to another country, you constantly hear the language you are studying. Before long, you will start understanding what people are saying with ease. In many situations, you will be forced to speak that language in order to get something you need. Thus, when you are studying abroad, your speaking and listening skills will improve rapidly. In addition, you experience that language in the proper cultural context. You will get a feel for the way people talk and the slang terms they use. If you are going to be a language expert, these are things you need to understand.

Another huge benefit of studying abroad is that you have the opportunity to understand a different culture. While learning slang and mannerisms is a part of experiencing another culture, there is much more to it than that. By traveling abroad, you will get an idea of every aspect of that culture. You will learn what words and motions are appropriate and which ones aren’t. You will learn how loud or soft people talk in various situations. You can’t fully grasp these things unless you spend time in that country. Learning the little things will go a long way in your career. If nothing else, understanding the culture will make your travel experience a lot easier.

Studying abroad also gets you out of the classroom, which is crucial. You can only learn so much from lectures and books. However, participating in a study abroad program will allow you to learn everything first hand. By doing so, you may find a specific aspect of the language or culture you love, that could help you figure out a career path. On the flip side, you may find that learning the language isn’t for you. Either way you are teaching yourself, which in itself will prove invaluable, as it is a different experience entirely from learning in a classroom.

By traveling abroad, you increase your chances of networking with people in that culture, which could prove handy if you enter a career in business. The more connections you have, the better your career prospects will be. You may even meet someone who can offer you a job right out of college. American companies are becoming increasingly global, and having experience in a different culture is a huge plus on your resume. If you aren’t interested in business, you will still be satisfied with making connections in a social context. No matter what you want to do in life, building relationships is essential. Making friends or contacts from another country will expand your horizons.

When you study abroad, you also enhance your education. While abroad, you will have the opportunity to take classes that aren’t offered on your regular campus. Not only is this a great way to learn something you never thought you would, but it will also look good on your transcript. One of the best ways to find unique classes is to participate in a study abroad program.

If you are interested in studying a language, you should definitely participate in a study abroad program. In the short term, the experience will enhance your college experience and education. In the long term, it will prove beneficial when it comes to pursuing a career. Given all the benefits, every language student should study abroad.

Ear training

By Simon

Most days I listen to online radio stations in a variety of languages – at the moment I listen mainly to Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, and also to French and Czech, and occasionally to Mandarin and Cantonese. This keeps these languages ticking over in my head, and helps me learn more of them. With the exception of Czech and Cantonese, I can understand them all well, or at least fairly well, and can often guess the meanings of unknown words from the context. Even with Czech and Cantonese, which I don’t know as well, I have a basic idea of what they’re talking about.

Yesterday I decided to listen to some Japanese and fired up the radio player on NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster. To my surprise what came out of the speakers was first Spanish, then Indonesian, Vietnamese and Burmese. I checked the website and discovered that they cycle through 17 different languages in their international broadcasts. In each language they have news from Japan and around the world, and it’s possible to get some idea of the stories they’re covering even in completely unfamiliar languages from the names of places, people, countries.

So if you feel in need of a good linguistic workout, have a listen to NHK World or a similar multilingual radio station. Also, after listening to languages you haven’t got round to learning yet, the ones you’re studying will seem much easier to understand.

Learning a New Language – How Easy (or Difficult) is It?

By Simon

Today with have a guest post by Abby Nelson

I have a friend who can speak four different languages; and he’s not the kind who gets by with a few strategic words and sentences, he’s fluent in them too. If at all I envy anything in him, it is this multilingual ability which I know I can never emulate. Now while eternal optimists would tell me to never say never, and offer additional advice that anything is possible if you set your mind to it, those who are more realistic understand that learning a new language involves many different variables. For example:

– Popular belief has it that children pick up a new tongue faster than adults; but that’s not really true. What’s true is that kids who learn a new language before they reach puberty speak the tongue without the accent that makes it easy to identify non-native speakers. Adults and children are equally good at picking up new languages when exposed to it on a prolonged basis.

– Learning a new language is fastest when you try your hand at the spoken lingo, and the easiest way to do this is to spend time around native speakers who don’t speak any other language. This is why most of us pick up a new tongue within a few months of settling down in a foreign country where the local language is different from the one you speak. Necessity is the biggest motivator when it comes to picking up a new language – your survival instincts kick in and you initially pick up the basics necessary for communication; and with the passage of time, you learn more of the tongue and become more fluent in the language.

– When you learn a new language by listening to and speaking it, you pick up the vernacular slang and not the grammatical version of the tongue. So while you may be a proficient speaker after a while, you may not understand other aspects of the language.

– It takes effort to learn how to read and write the native script of a language. Some languages are easier than others if you already have the foundation laid to facilitate learning the script. For example, if you know how to read and write English, it’s easier to learn how to read and write languages that use the same script. You may have some difficulty with the pronunciation, but with a fair amount of practice, you can soon pick up this aspect of the language as well. Languages with complex scripts are the hardest to master to read and write.

So in conclusion, I think it’s safe to say that the ease or difficulty with which you master a language depends on personal necessity and motivation to learn the new tongue; so what’s a breeze for you may end up becoming an uphill climb for me and vice versa.

About the writer
Abby Nelson writes on the topic of Masters in Counseling. She welcomes your comments at her email id: abby.85nelson< @>gmail< .>com

How to Learn a Foreign Language While Living Overseas

By Simon

This is a guest post by Kenji Crosland, a writer for TeachStreet. TeachStreet is a website that provides online and local classes including Foreign Language Lessons in languages like Japanese, Spanish and many others.

When I moved to Tokyo five years ago I expected to learn the language quickly. After all, it’s often been said that the best way to learn a foreign language is to live in a country where they speak it. What I didn’t realize, however, was despite the fact that you’re surrounded by the language every day, you could live in a foreign country for ten years and not learn much more than the most rudimentary phrases. Living there certainly helps, but unless you put forth the effort to study, speak and practice you won’t get very far.

Crutches that keep Expats From Learning the Language

As an expat in Tokyo, I’ve found that learning the language will make life much easier and much more interesting than if I only knew a few words out of a guidebook. Despite this, however, I found that there were many crutches which expats rely upon to get by without learning anything. If you want to get anywhere with your language study abroad, be sure to be wary of these crutches:

The Internet
The Internet can be a huge crutch for expats who want to learn a foreign language. Instead of trying to understand local television or visiting websites in a foreign language, you’ll probably spend most of the time browsing English language sites or downloading English TV shows.

That said, I don’t want to discount the Internet altogether. Because I was lucky to make many Japanese friends while I was living there, I did spend a lot of my time on mixi.jp , which is basically the MySpace of Japan and the country’s most popular social networking site. On mixi most of my friends were Japanese, and I spent a lot of time reading their mini-blog entries and writing some of my own. Also, I attended many parties and events through mixi where I was able to meet many new Japanese friends and also practice my Japanese with them.

Expat Friends
Believe it or not, many expats I had known in Tokyo had more non-Japanese friends than Japanese friends. And the Japanese people they befriended often spoke English so well that whenever these groups went on some social outing, the predominant language spoken was English. Even if the native Japanese people outnumbered the English speakers, the former mostly spoke English for the latter’s benefit.

It’s always nice to make expat friends, as it can help stave off homesickness, but if your goal is to learn the language, you should take the time to make friends with people who speak no English whatsoever. In Japan, I’ve found one of the best places to make new friends is in an Izakaya, (a Japanese version of a pub). Unlike an expat bar, an Izakaya will probably have very few English speakers. If you’re sheepish about going into the Izakaya alone, ask one of your Japanese friends to take you and introduce you to some of the locals.

The language “comfort zone”
If you avoid spending too much time on English web sites and endeavor to make more non-expat friends, you’ll eventually reach a level of comfort with the language. At this level you’ll probably be good at small talk and you’ll probably have no problem ordering in a restaurant or asking for directions. If you want to have a lively, in-depth conversation that goes beyond simple topics like food and the weather, however, you might find yourself at a loss for words.

Most people feel comfortable at this level because they have learned all the practical aspects of the language and may not feel motivated to learn more. When you reach this point, I highly recommend taking formal lessons. I personally had taken formal Japanese lessons once a week from a volunteer at the community center. For each lesson, we read a difficult article or essay in Japanese, wrote an essay about it in Japanese, and then we discussed it in the class. When I left the class, I often discussed what I was learning with my Japanese friends, which was excellent practice for me. By my fourth year in Tokyo, I was able to watch films, read comics, magazines and some novels, and talk about basically anything I wanted in Japanese.

If I had made the mistakes of spending too much time on the Internet, and too much time with English speaking friends, however, I probably wouldn’t have learned much more than when I had arrived in the country.

So remember, just moving to another country doesn’t magically make you proficient in the language. It certainly is a great help, but you must make the effort to learn while you are there.

Double dutch and lost dragons

By Simon

I’ve been playing with Xtranormal today and have made a couple of new films:

Double Dutch (in Dutch and English)

Where’s my dragon? (In Mandarin and English)

When you use Mandarin the system refuses to accept some of the characters you type in, including some common ones like 谢 (thanks). I tried substituting pinyin for the problematic characters, but found that this only works in some cases. Then I came up with the idea of substituting other characters with the same sounds, and it works well. For example 谢谢 becomes 泄泄 (泄 [xiè = to leak) and 话 (huà) – language, becomes 画 (huà) – picture. It’s not ideal, but it works and I’ve learnt some new characters, or re-learnt ones I should already know.

If I can work out how to add subtitles, I might do so, but it should be possible to work out most of the non-English bits from the English bits.

I’ve also posted these films on YouTube.

Xtranormal

By Simon

Today I came across an interesting-looking site called Xtranormal that use text-to-speech and other clever stuff – they call it ‘text-to-movie’ – to make animated films.

You just choose your characters and setting, and then type in the dialogue. You can also play with the cameras, animate the characters, and add other effects.

What interests me particularly about this program is that you can choose voices in a variety of languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Dutch, and I think this could be a useful language learning and teaching tool.

Here’s a short bilingual (English and Mandarin) film I put together:

[Update] It didn’t accept quite a few of the Chinese characters I tried to use, so you can only use very simple phrases. Here’s another short film in French and English:

Effortlessness

By Simon

When you listen to someone speaking a foreign language, whether it’s yourself of someone else, you may notice that some aspects of the pronunciation and intonation are more exaggerated and seem to be quite effortful, especially if you compare them to a native speaker of the same language.

This struck me particularly when listening to the new recordings of Greenlandic phrases, which were made by a learner of Greenlandic from the Czech Republic, and then listening to a Greenlandic news broadcast on YouTube. The native speaker pronunciation seems to flow effortlessly, while the learner’s pronunciation seems more effortful. Having said that though, the uvular plosive /q/ and doubled consonants of Greenlandic do seem to interrupt the smooth flow somewhat, even in the native speakers.

When I first started learning Mandarin Chinese I was taught to pronounce each syllable clearly and separately with exaggerated tones. About five years later I was more of less fluent and didn’t distinguish the tones as much, except in careful, formal speech, and tended to run syllables together a bit, though perhaps not as much as native speakers.

With a lot of careful listening and practise, you can acquire good pronunciation in a foreign language. It does take time though, unless you’re a very good mimic.

Even in your native language there may be certain sounds that trip you up. For example the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in three) did not exist in my original idiolect – a sort of modified RP with Lancastrian influences – and I didn’t know there was a difference in pronunciation between three and free until I learnt some phonetics at university. These days I tend to use /θ/, though it sometimes still requires conscious effort.

3 Unique Ways to Learn Spanish

By Simon

Today we have a guest post from Ian at Fluently Spanish:

If you’re like most people who want to learn Spanish, you are sick of the boring methods used by old-fashioned school and college lecturers. All that hope, promise and excitement of learning Spanish can only last so long if you are stuck reading books or having conversations in Spanish that you would never use in real life.

This is why so many people give up before they’ve even learned a second language. Hopefully, with the help of this article you will be able to inject some fun into your Spanish learning and start on your journey to becoming conversationally fluent! Below are three unique, fun and interesting ways to learn Spanish without boring yourself to tears or upping sticks and heading to Barçelona or México.

  1. Post It! everything!
    Spanish structure can be learned easily in a book or audio course. What you actually need to learn Spanish and be confident in conversations is words. Label everything in your home with Post It notes and you’ll always be thinking in Spanish. Include sample sentences or phrases using that word every time you use it or look at it. Pick one Post It a day and take it with you to work or school. Use it in conversation with people or freak out the old lady on the bus by spouting off in Spanish. Get out of your comfort zone and start embarrassing yourself. That way, you won’t worry about forgetting words when you are speaking Spanish.

  2. Date a Spanish person
    It doesn’t matter where in the world you live, there will always be someone who speaks Spanish. With Facebook, MeetUp.com and many other sites you can find Spanish speakers in your local area. If you have a partner already, just meet up with people to talk with and learn Spanish over a coffee or four. For the singles out there, it’s a whole lot more fun! By dating Spanish speakers you not only get to try and woo them in Spanish, you get to order meals at Spanish restaurants, flirt with them in Spanish via text message and try to be cool and mysterious in a different language! If nothing else, the challenge will again build your confidence in speaking to people in Spanish.

  3. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
    The above two points also do this, but it’s a point worth making again. The best way to keep Spanish learning fun, interesting and unique is to get as far out of your comfort zone as possible. Go to Spanish or Mexican restaurants, drink cervezas in Spanish bars and order it in Spanish, phone Spanish companies or speak with Spanish people on Skype. Whatever you do, train yourself to not worry about making mistakes. Get used to asking ¿Cómo se dice ‘English word here’ en español?/How do you say ‘word’ in Spanish? If you need to refer to a dictionary for a word or phrase, you can just say Momentito… while you look it up!

One of the worst things you can do when learning Spanish is panic and then revert back to English, saying that you only speak a little. Persevere using unique ways of putting yourself under pressure, get out of the classroom and start learning Spanish the right way and I guarantee you’ll enjoy the process and the journey a heck of a lot more!

What unique way will you discover to learn Spanish?

You can learn more about how to speak Spanish fluently by visiting my website and signing up for my free Spanish online classes.

Preserving immigrant languages

By Simon

I found an interesting article on the BBC News website about Asian languages in the UK which discusses how some UK families of South Asian origin are trying to encourage their children to continue speaking their native languages, such as Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati. The children are taught in English at school, but some also attend complementary and weekend schools run by local communities where they are taught in their native languages. Such schools are run by volunteers and receive no government funding, and are helping to maintain bilingualism among their pupils, and perhaps because of this, those pupils are also achieving good results in their mainstream schools.

It seems to be common among immigrant families that native languages last only two or three generations, unless community efforts are made to maintain their languages. The situation can be similar for minority languages such as Maori and Irish. Another article I came across today is not very hopeful about the future of the Maori language and predicts it will die out in 50 years or so. In spite of initiatives to promote the language, the young generation is increasingly turning to English, even those who attend the Maori-medium schools. In the schools they speak Maori, but elsewhere many speak only English.