Category: Language learning

Keeping an open mind

By Simon

There’s an interesting post over on fluentin3months about the importance of keeping an open mind when in foreign countries. Benny the Irish Polyglot explains how he found Parisiens arrogant, rude and unfriendly the first time he was in Paris, and how they were discouraging about his efforts to learn French. He became convinced that all Parisiens were like this and refused to accept any evidence to the contrary for quite a few years.

When he returned to Paris recently though, he was determined to get a good impression of the Parisiens, and found that when he tuned into their ways to doing things rather than expecting them to behave as people might in other countries, he got on with them much better. They have different attitudes to service, for example – the customer isn’t always right – and getting angry with people for not doing what you believe to be their job won’t help. Taking an interest in people also helps.

Keeping an open mind is useful not just when visiting a foreign country, but also when learning foreign languages. Each language has it’s own ways of doing things and of describing the world. They may be quite different to those in your native language, and may appear unnecessarily complicated, strange, ridiculous or even wrong to you. Perhaps this is because you’re not used to them. It helps if you approach such differences with an open mind and accept them, rather than trying to fight them. It may also help if try what Benny suggests – ignore difficult aspects of the language until you’ve learnt quite a bit of it and had quite a lot of exposure to it. Then when you try to learn them, they’ll seem more familiar and less scary.

When I was learning German at school I thought the case system was difficult and found it hard to learn. I didn’t really see the point of it or understand it either – why do you need so many different words for the (der, die, das, dem, den, etc) when English manages with just one, for example? Since then I’ve studied quite a few other languages, some with noun case markings, others without, and have a better understanding of how they work.

Alphabets and Ambigrams

By Simon

The other day I came across a useful site that helps you learn various alphabets and other writing systems – Henrik Theiling’s Script Teacher. It includes tests on CJK radicals, Hiragana, Katakana, Bopomofo, Hangul, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, a number of constructed scripts, and even a Blackletter (Gothic) typeface.

Other writing-related sites I found recently include the ambigram magazine, which includes a gallery of ambigrams, an ambigram generator and other ambigram-related information; and an ambigram generator.

An ambigram is “typographical creation that presents two or more separate words within the same physical space.” (source). Some ambigrams present the same word when read both ways up, or from left to right and right to left.

Here are some examples of ambigrams:

Ambigram of thank you

This says Thank you and comes from this site.

This is a biscriptal one:

Multilingual Rotational Ambigram

It reads Sameh – سامح in the Latin and Arabic alphabets and comes from this site.

There are other examples of bilingual / biscriptal ambigrams on Chinese-English Ambigrams and on Inversions.

‘Extreme’ language exchanges

By Simon

Language exchange trips have been popular for many years, but usually involve spending only a few weeks in a foreign country. For example, I took part in a language exchange with a French lad while at school which involved me spending three weeks with his family in France, and him spending three weeks in the UK with my family. I also spent two weeks with a family in Germany, and a month with a family in Austria.

According to The Independent, the latest trend is for children between 9 and 13 to spend six months in a foreign country, staying with a family and going to a local school. Even if they don’t know the local language at all at first, they’re usually fluent in it after six months.

The exchanges discussed in the article were arranged by En Famille International, a French company set up in 1978, and are available in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain and the UK. One perennial problem they have is a lack of English-speaking families willing to participate in the exchanges.

Canis mea studia domestica devoravit

By Simon

There are plans to introduce Latin lessons to more than 60 UK primary schools, according to this report. The initiative, which started with a small number of schools in Cambridgeshire and was taken up with enthusiasm by both pupils and teachers, is designed to introduce the children to language learning, language structures, links between languages and cultures, and also history.

A number of organisations are keen for language study to be compulsory for all pupils between 7 and 11 by 2011, and they think that pupils should have opportunities to learn a range for languages, such as French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Punjabi and Latin, and that they should concentrate on one or two of these. Learning Latin helps you understand such things as word order, verb conjugations, agreement and gender, they believe.

The title of this post means ‘the dog ate my homework’, by the way.

A different kind of classroom

By Simon

A language school in Montreal has come up with an interesting way to teach languages – the students get together in local restaurants where the language they’re studying is spoken. This enables the students to learn languages, and about cultures and cuisines, in a relaxed environment where they can actually use what they’re learning. They also get discount on their restaurant bills, and the restaurants get some free advertising, as well as extra business.

Sounds like a good idea.

Do you know of any similar initiatives?

Chinese in Liberia

By Simon

China is apparently one of the largest overseas investors in Liberia and there are numerous Chinese people working there. As a result some Liberians have started learning Chinese and some of them are keen to visit China if they get the chance. Lessons are taking place in the Samuel Doe Stadium in Monrovia, and in the Confucius Institute, which opened in the University of Liberia in December 2008.

If the locals learn to read Chinese as well they will be able to understand the Chinese versions of the numerous agreements that are signed. There is even a Chinese language radio station there for the Chinese migrants and expats.

There are more than 20 Chinese language schools in Africa at the moment, according to this report.

Groupe de conversation Française

By Simon

Last night I joined a French conversation group which meets regularly in a local pub. I heard about it at a party in January and have been intending to join since then. Last night I finally tracked them down.

All members of the group are English and/or Welsh and can speak French well, or at least can understand it even if they don’t speak it fluently. The group has been going for about eight years and is run by a teacher of English as a foreign language from Bangor University. The rule is that only French is spoken for first two hours, and we stuck to this last night. After that English is allowed, though last night we continued to speak mainly in French.

It was fun, interesting, we discussed all sorts of topics, and I found that I can still speak and understand French reasonably well even though I’ve used it very little during the past 20 years. Welsh, which is currently my dominant foreign language, kept on trying to impose itself on my French, but I managed to keep it in check most of the time. If I’d spoken the mixture of French and Welsh that was brewing in my head the Welsh-speaking members of the group would have probably understood.

One thing we talked about was how it can be difficult to understand mispronounced words, especially in unfamiliar contexts. The leader of the group told us about a student of hers who was talking about a visit to the “islands”, or at least that’s what it sounded like. The leader kept on asking “Which islands?”, but the student kept on saying “the islands”. Eventually she worked out that the student was talking about the Highlands (of Scotland). The mispronunciation may be only slight, but it’s enough to disrupt comprehension, and this can happen not just with foreign languages, but also with different dialects and accents of your native language.

When I meet people with names I’ve never heard before, sometimes I find it hard to take in their names until I’ve seen them written down.

BSL

By Simon

Yesterday I finally finished the British Sign Language (BSL) course I’ve been working on for the past year – if other things didn’t keep distracting me I would have finished it sooner. The course consists of just seven unit but manages to fit quite a lot in them, including numbers, colours, time, money, describing people, tenses, hobbies and interests, and food and drink. It also shows you how to construct sentences, and provides background information about sign language and the deaf community. I’ve found it fascinating and would like to learn more. Unfortunately there aren’t any sign language courses available in this area, but I do have a few books on BSL and a CD-ROM.

BSL is a bit simliar to Chinese languages in terms of structure – eg it’s an isolating language which uses time expressions to indicate when things happen rather than conjugating verbs. So you sign things like “Yesterday I eat cake” or “This morning I go to work”. Unlike Chinese or other spoken languages, sign languages can modify signs (words) to add nuances to their meanings. The amount of movement in a sign might be increased and/or its direction changed: for example instead of signing the equivalent of “she’s jumping high” you could sign “she’s jumping” with the sign for jump going higher than usual. Or if you’re describing someone’s hair you can modify the sign for hair to indicate whether it’s straight, curly, long or short hair.

One thing I plan to do with BSL is to link signs to words in the languages I’m learning. This will give me something extra to help me remember the words, and will help me to link words in different languages without using English. I think the physical nature of signs helps me remember them better than spoken words – my auditory memory is good, but my physical memory seems even better.

Have you studied or are you studying a sign language?

Language 101

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by David, a developer of Language 101.

Language 101 is a mostly free language learning software website that takes the proven principle of spaced repetition and makes it easy to use.

For example, if you wanted to learn French you could be studying beginner’s French phrases in a few seconds by clicking on the big “Try It” button.

After you click on the “Try It” button you will see a screen that has both a good translation and a literal word by word translation. The literal translation won’t always make sense. There also is a blank line with one underscore for every letter of the foreign phrase.

If you know the phrase, try to say it. If the phrase is new to you, you can play the audio very slowly, or click on another button to play the audio at normal speed and display the foreign language text.

After you have tried to say the phrase out loud, and played the answer, it’s time to grade yourself based on how well you said the phrase before you played the answer.

The five grading buttons range from “Beginner or Totally Forgot” to “Right I Know This Well”.

Try to take 15 seconds or less to do a screen, because it’s easy to forget the first item while you are studying the second one.

We think that if language learning is boring, it means you are doing something wrong, so we made movie lessons, song lessons, and of course we have a lot of custom made lessons too.

We want to take the best of every culture and turn it into a language lesson.

Right now there are a lot of lessons in Spanish, French, Russian and German with a few lessons in Danish and Irish.

Come give it a try and see if it works for you.

Comunicamo

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Anna, the author of Comunicamo

Practicing languages via chat rooms or with pen-pals may be very helpful but for many of us it is often hard to choose an appropriate discussion topic.

Comunicamo is a free website that allows you to practice foreign language by commenting on current news stories and events without pondering over conversation topics and without personal introductions.

Commenting on the news can be very interesting, especially when there’s a hot topic. Sometimes you can draw somebody who turns out to have totally different opinion. That is even better as it makes discussion more ardent and you finally forget that the language you are writing in is not your native tongue.

Here is how it works:

  • After clicking “compose new message” choose the language you want to practice.
  • A random recipient will be assigned.
  • Choose one of the proposed news items (don’t hesitate to choose something controversial or funny).
  • Write your opinion or comment about the news.
  • Your message will be sent to the previously selected recipient and the conversation starts.

You can also log in and wait until somebody draws you.

After exchanging some messages you can start another discussion with the same person or draw another one.

Remember: the website is dedicated for those who study foreign language for some time and want to practice it in real conversations.

If you are a beginner, don’t worry. Users can choose the level of randomly selected conversation partners. After some messages you will be able to see if people understand you.

If you study Spanish then imagine yourself on a street of Madrid. There will be no teacher helping you.

I would be grateful for your comments about the idea.