Category: Language learning

Maintaining multiple languages

By Simon

A recent post on The Linguist discusses an interesting idea for maintaining one’s abilities in various languages. The idea is that you load up your mp3 player with audio files for the languages you want to maintain and/or improve, then you set it to randomly repeat them. The files could be language lessons, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else you have to hand. This method ensures that you don’t get tired of listening to one particular language, and should help you to switch between languages.

I think I’ll give this a try. I already have quite a few language courses loaded onto my mp3 player and will set up a playlist for the ones I’m working on at the moment. I’ll add more lessons and chapters from my audiobooks to the playlist once I’ve read through them. This will enable me to revise material I’ve already covered. I might add some podcasts in languages such as French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.

Why you no understand?

By Simon

Although I’m very used to hearing English spoken by non-native speakers, I do sometimes have difficultly understanding some of what they say. This is often because of mispronunciation and/or misplacement of word stress. Sometimes people have to repeat a word several times before I work out what they’re trying to say.

The same happens to me when I’m speaking other languages. I do my best to get the pronunciation and intonation correct, but am not always successful, which leads to confusion in the minds of those I’m talking to.

Sometimes it’s not the pronunciation, word stress or intonation that lets me down, but the way I put my sentences together and/or the words I use. I may get the words in the wrong order, or use words that are unusual or obscure. Fortunately in some languages you can get away with mixing the words up, as the word order is flexible.

I was talking about this with a Japanese colleague this morning. She told me that at a party she went to recently, where there was a mixture of English and Japanese people, the English people were all speaking English slowly and clearly to make sure that Japanese could understand them. Later she overheard the English people talking amongst themselves and found it quite difficult to understand them as they were speaking at normal speed and using lots of slang.

Regular contact with non-native speakers of your language can help to accustom you to a variety of foreign accents and ways of speaking. In the cases of languages few people study, their native speakers are perhaps less likely to have heard foreigners attempting to speak their language and might be less tolerant of mispronunciation and grammatical errors. I’ve read that this might be true for Czech. Does anybody know if this is the case?

Slavic similiarities

By Simon

While talking with a Bulgarian contact today, we were discussing the conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ in Bulgarian, as you do, and I was struck by how similar Bulgarian verb endings are to Czech ones. Below is the present tense of this verb with the Bulgarian on the left and the Czech on the right.

  • жонглирам (žongliram) / žonglovam – I juggle
  • жонглираш (žongliraš) / žonglovaš – you juggle
  • жонглира (žonglira) / žonglova – he/she/it juggles
  • жонглираmе (žonglirame) / žonglovame – we juggle
  • жонглирате (žonglirate) / žonglovate – you (pl) juggle
  • жонглират (žonglirat) / žonglovají – they juggle

The more I learn about the Slavic languages, the more similarities I see between them. So far my knowledge is limited to a smattering of Russian, a little Czech, and a few Bulgarian words, so my impressions and thoughts may change as I learn more. One encouraging factoid I’ve discovered is that Czech only has about seven irregular verbs.

I also came across an interesting site today which contains useful words and phrases in a number of Slavic languages, with translations in English and Japanese.

Correction: the Czech conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ is actually:

  • žongluji – I juggle
  • žongluješ – you juggle
  • žongluje – he/she/it juggles
  • žonglujeme – we juggle
  • žonglujete – you (pl) juggle
  • žonglují – they juggle

There are Czech verbs with endings similar to the Bulgarian ones above, but not ‘to juggle’, unfortunately.

Practice makes perfect

By Simon

I’ve been chatting with a number of people in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Japanese today. After many years of neglect, my command of these languages is gradually improving.

My Mandarin is more or less fluent, though there are many gaps in my vocabulary, which I’m doing my best to fill. Some of the people I’ve been talking to told me that they thought I was a native Mandarin speaker, which is encouraging.

I only have a limited knowledge of Taiwanese, but that should improve with practice. I can understand the language to some extent thanks to many years of hearing it while in Taiwan, and when I hear people speaking it, it brings back lots of memories.

My Japanese is also gradually coming back to me. I can’t speak it particularly well at the moment, but can understand quite a lot. When talking to my Japanese contacts today, I was pleased to realise that I could actually follow most of what they said in Japanese. One problem I have is that I often find myself at loss for appropriate verbs when I get to the end of my Japanese sentences.

Word of the day – výslovnost

By Simon

Výslovnost is the Czech word for pronunciation, and appears in this week’s Czech lesson. I’m currently working my way quite slowly and thoroughly through Colloquial Czech and am spending a week or two on each lesson. I don’t move on to the next lesson until I’m familiar with all the slovníček (vocabulary), mluvnice / gramatika (grammar) and výslovnost.

Some people advise you to listen to a language a lot before you try to speak it. Listening to the languages you’re learning as much as possible is very useful and beneficial, but I don’t know if you should put off trying to speak the language until you’ve listening to it for several weeks or months.

What are your thoughts on this?

Learning by reading

By Simon

Today I came across another interesting language learning method on Language learning tips, which was used by the 19th-century German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), who excavated Troy. In order to learn Greek he read a Greek translation of one of his favourite books, and compared the translation word by word and line by line with the original text. This enabled him to learn a lot of vocabulary and grammar in context without having to refer to dictionaries or grammar books all the time. Here’s some more information about Schliemann’s language learning methods, which enabled him to acquire eighteen languages quite quickly and successfully.

The reading method would be even better if you had an audiobook version of the translation and/or a native speaker to help you with pronunciation. Moreover, if you choose a book that includes a lot of colloquial dialogues, you can learn everyday conversational words and phrases as well.

Grammar books and vocabulary lists are useful, but I find that if I discover a grammatical pattern or the meaning of a word on my own, I’m more likely to remember it.

Newyddion o Gymru / News from Wales

By Simon

Fe ffeindiais i dwy straeon diddorol o Gymru heddiw:

Pwyleg yn Wrecsam
Mae plismon o Wrecsam yn dysgu Pwyleg oherwydd fod tuag 10,000 o fewnfudwyr o’r Wlad Pwyl yn byw yno, a fe wnaeth e ddod yn ail yng Ngwobrau Blynyddol i Swyddogion Cymunedol.

Selsig ddraig
Oherwydd does dim cig draig yn y selsig gydag enw ‘selsig y Ddraig Gymreig’ (a wneir gyda chig moch, cennin a chilli), mae rhaid i gwmni o Grug Hywel newid yr enw, yn ôl Gwasanaeth Safonau Masnach.

Two news stories from Wales caught my eye today:

Polish in Wrexham
A policeman from Wrexham is learning Polish in order to communicate with the numerous Polish immigrants who live there, and he came second in the Jane’s Police Review Community Police Officer of the Year Award.

Dragon sausages
A Welsh company may face legal action because of the potentially misleading name of one of its products: Welsh Dragon Sausages. After analysing the sausages, the fine people at from Trading Standards determined that not one trace of dragon meat was to be found in them, so are advising the company to change the name. The sausages actually contain pork, leek and chilli.

Building vocabulary

By Simon

There’s some useful advice on a site I found today called Language Learning Tips. One of the tips for building vocabulary is that you try to learn three new words in the language(s) you’re studying every day, and that you write them down in a diary or blog. After a year, you’ll have a vocabulary of over a thousand words.

I think this technique could be expanded by trying to use the new words in sentences, and maybe even building up a story with them.

I tried to learn five new words a day in seven languages for several months with some success. Though I think maybe I was a bit overly ambitious. Maybe three words a day in five languages would be more achievable. The trouble is, which languages? Definitely Welsh, Irish and Spanish, and perhaps Japanese and Czech.

Have you used this technique or something similar?

Art and aliens

By Simon

It struck me today that the Irish word for artists, ealaíontóirí, sounds like ‘alien tory’. I hadn’t really noticed this before. When I hear or read the word, it usually brings to mind artists and art, though hearing it out of context triggered the thoughts of extraterrestrial members of the Conservative Party.

I try to think in the languages I’m studying as much as possible, and to picture in my mind the things and actions I hear or read about. Sometimes I only notice that a foreign word sounds funny to English speakers when someone who doesn’t speak the language points this out to me, or if my brain is in English mode.

Climbing mountains

By Simon

My studies of Czech are progressing slowly. So far I’ve only really got to grips with the first lesson of Colloquial Czech, and am working on lesson 2. Yesterday I had a quick look at the later lessons and wondered whether I’ll ever get that far. I know I shouldn’t let this put me off, but it a bit disheartening to see how far I have to go.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but learning languages has quite a lot in common with climbing mountains. You start off in the foothills where the going is relatively easy, as long as you are physically fit / your language learning skills are up to scratch, otherwise you might find even this stage a struggle. Past the foothills there will be some difficult climbs and some long, hard slogs up slopes of varying steepness.

You might come up against some seemingly unscaleable obstacles, though with time and effort you probably find a way over or round them, perhaps with the assistance of a guide/teacher. When you think you’re not making much upward progress, or are even going downhill, it might help to turn round to admire the view and to see how far you’ve come.

Even when you reach the summit, you’ll probably see further summits to scale. You might also look over at neighbouring moutains (related languages) or distant ones (unrelated languages) and think that it would be interesting to climb/learn them.

As you’re climbing, you might look up at the mountain every now and then and think it looks steep and difficult to climb. This might inspire you to try harder, or to stop and enjoy the view / put what you’ve learnt to good use. If you decide to give up and do something else, then come back to your climbing/learning, you’ll probably find the going easier the second time, as you’ve already been that way before.

With Czech I’m pootling around in the foothills at the moment. When I look up towards the summit, I wonder whether this is a mountain I really want to climb, or whether I should stick to more familiar mountains.