Last night at ukulele club there was a new member from Spain, and I talked a bit with her in Spanish. It’s a long time since I’ve studied any Spanish, and I rarely use it these days, so I thought I’d forgotten most of it, but I found that I can still have a basic conversation, even if I make mistakes. I had similar experiences with German in Berlin last year and the year before at the Polyglot Gathering – I could understand quite a bit and found that when I tried to speak it I could at least make myself understood.
At the moment I have no real need to awaken my Spanish or German, but if I do need them, I’ll try to find ways to bring them back.
How do you brush up, bring back, awaken or revive languages you have forgotten or not used for a long time?
Learning a new language is one of the more typical New Year’s resolutions we see and often, one of the most flippant. Though the desire to learn a new language is genuine actually getting motivated to do something about it is another thing entirely. If you are seriously considering learning a new language in 2016 then you should think about focusing your New Year’s resolutions on this. To help get you started, here are some of the top New Year’s resolutions for language learners in 2016:
1. One of the most difficult things to do when learning a new language is knowing where to start. Signing up to an online learning course or downloading a learning app will help you to structure your learning and give you an idea where is a good place to begin, while also giving you an introduction into the new language.
2. Schedule in some time every day when you can focus on your language learning, even if it is only 15 or 20 minutes this will keep the new language fresh in your mind. If possible try to fit two short learning lessons into your day, or one longer period where you can really focus.
3. Make use of online tools and mobile phone and tablet/iPad apps. Firstly, you can download and use productivity hacks designed to help you to become focused and work more efficiently, this will help you to organise your time and set deadlines to help ensure your learning progresses. Secondly, there are plenty of language teaching apps, vocabulary testing tools and dictionaries etc. that can prove invaluable aids in learning a new language.
4. When you start to learn a new language, speak it as much as you can, practice at home and to yourself or speak with other people you know who also speak the language. This will not only help you to feel less self-conscious and more confident, but it will also help you to remember the vocabulary and refine your pronunciation.
5. Your long term goal is to learn a new language, but starting out this can seem like a massive and overwhelming task. Instead of focusing on the long term goal, break it down into a series of short term, manageable goals and aim to reach these instead.
6. Consider saving some money and taking a trip abroad so that you can communicate native speakers of the language you are learning. This will really help you with your pronunciation and will highlight where there are differences in the language used in practice and in accents and dialects of native speakers.
7. Allow yourself to enjoy your accomplishments and the progress you have made. It is easy to reach a short term goal and immediately move onto accomplishing the next, keeping in mind you still have a bigger, long term goal to achieve, but try not to do this. Instead enjoy reaching your goals, show off your new skills to your loved ones and give yourself a pat on the back, encourage your own learning.
8. Know your limitations and don’t expect too much of yourself. You may see websites that claim to teach you a language within three months, but this does not necessarily apply to everyone and you may not be able to replicate the same results. If you are limited in time, you have a shorter attention span or you have more pressing things to do, keep this in mind when you set yourself goals and deadlines. If you expect too much of yourself you set yourself up for failure which can end up demotivating you.
Follow these resolutions and you should find it much easier to start and enjoy your language learning process.
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Do you have any language-related resolutions for this year?
I plan to continue learning Russian, and would like to learn more Czech, and some Greek.
A lot of language learning approaches I’ve read and heard about focus on learning as much vocabulary as possible, and not worrying too much about grammar, at least at first. For example you might focus on learning the most commonly-used phrases and words, and on using them at every opportunity. Later on you might learn a bit of grammar.
In the Russian lesson I listened to today, the tip of the day is to focus on learning a relatively small amount of vocabulary and learning how to use it in a variety of contexts, rather than learning a lot of vocabulary, and then not being able to use it very well. Once you can use the words you know grammatically, it’s not so difficult to add more vocabulary.
In another lesson in this course the presenter suggests that learning grammar from books and tables isn’t very effective, and that it’s best to learn it from lots of examples and exercises which focus on real colloquial language.
I’m finding the course very useful and like this approach. It introduces various aspects of Russian grammar gradually and gives you plenty of opportunities to practise using them.
A few months ago, I learned Spanish to a B1 conversational level in a month while living in Medellín, Colombia. If you want to see the whole story and see how to learn Spanish fast, like I did, watch the documentary here.
But all Spanish is not the same, and I learned a specific breed – “paisa” Spanish. Paisa refers to people from Antioquia, the region where Medellín is.
So, below I will explain how some things are said differently here. These are trends I’ve noticed, and by no means is the definite “how things are” – which doesn’t really exist.
The Basics
You will almost never hear “de nada” or “adios” – instead, your welcome is “con gusto” or “con mucho gusto“, or literally, with pleasure. This is also how you say nice to meet you. “Adios” is only really used for long periods of time – at least a few weeks. Instead, people use “ciao“, mostly, or “hasta luego“.
The phrase “es que” is used a lot – literally meaning “it’s that…”, it starts most explanations.
It’s common to exchange several greetings before ever saying anything of real meaning. “Como estas” is still extremely common, but the “paisa” way is “bien o no”, or, “bien o que”, which literally means “good or not?”, “good or what?”.
Between friends, another common greeting is “¿que mas?“, which means “what more” – and outside of a greeting, it still means that – but as a greeting, it means “what’s up?”. “¿Que tal?“, which is used elsewhere as well, is also used.
If you bump into someone, need to excuse yourself in a crowd, make an error, or otherwise do something that would render an “sorry, excuse me” or a “oh! sorry”, use “que pena“, which literally means “what shame”. If something makes you embarrased, you’d use “me da pena“.
Affirmatives
If you come to Medellín and want to sound local, drop the “si“, and use one of three main affirmatives:
Claro = of course. This is used a LOT. Cierto = right/yes Eso = literally means “that”, but it’s used as a general affirmative, in a wide variety of situations.
Common filler words
Anyone who has done some research on Paisa Spanish has probably heard of the heavy use of the word “pues“.
“Pues” literally means, “well”, and it’s still used as such, but it’s also used as a filler. You could add it to almost any part of any sentence and it would make sense – it’s almost meaningless. It’s like an “uhhhm”.
“O que” is another common one – it’s added to the end of lots of sentences to form a question. This is almost as common as pues.
Paisas are also fond of throwing a “que” in front of adjectives to express a feeling. So instead of “chevere” (cool), they will say “que chevere” (how cool/ a stronger “cool”). This is part of the culture of everything being great, and the common exaggeration of everything, good or bad. Speaking in a bland “it was kinda cool”, has the potential to leave Paisas bored.
Local slang
Something (generally) uneducated young women will do is transform many words to end in “is“. For example, instead of “hola“, they will say, “holis“, and instead of “raro“, they will say “raris“. It’s very improper and actually quite annoying to hear, but if you hear it, that’s whats going on.
“Amigo” is rarely used between friends. Instead, people use “parce / parcero“, which basically means “dude/mate/bro” (use this and you’re instantly better friends with any guy, trust me). If you’re good friends, you’ll even use “guevon“, which is offensive if you don’t know someone. Worse than guevon, there is “marica“, which basically means fag, which is definitely offensive if you don’t know someone, but is sort of teasing if you’re good friends.
There are few ways to say “awesome” – the most common would be “bacano“. If something is REALLY awesome, you use “brutal“, which is the equivalent of “sick” in American English.
This should get you sounding paisa when you come to the amazing city of Medellín. Click here to see the documentary I made while learning Spanish in a month here.
If you’re a polyglot who learns languages for fun, you might choose languages from a particular family or region, or languages that have contributed to your mother tongue. Or you might choose ones that are completely unrelated to one another in order to challenge yourself. These are possible pathways a polyglot might pursue.
Another possible polyglot pathway that I came up with the other day is especially for dog lovers: learning languages from regions associated with breeds of dog. For example, if you have an Alsatian, you could learn the Alsatian (Ëlsässisch) and speak to your dog in that tongue. Or if you have a Bernese mountain dog you could learn Béarnese, and chihuahua owners could learn one or more of the languages of Chihuahua state in Mexico, where their dogs originate. The most widely-spoken of these is Tarahumara (Rarámuri ra’ícha).
Do the languages you study have a particular theme or connection?
Yesterday I did an interview over Skype with Chapman Woodriff, who runs FreeLanguage.org, which provides a variety of language-learning material and advice. Chapman made the interview into a podcast in which I explain how I got into languages, how I started Omniglot and how people can use Omniglot to learn languages.
Recently I have acquired quite a few new language courses: as a sponsor of the Polyglot Conference in New York I received 10 new Colloquial language courses in Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian. I also bought a Glossika Russian course with the special offer given to conference participants, and bought a Basque course from Assimil with affiliate commission from Amazon France.
I learnt a little Hungarian many years ago, and am currently working on Czech and Russian, but haven’t studied any of the other languages before. I’d love to know at least the basics of all of them, though have no particular need or desire to learn them at the moment. Also, I already have courses in a number of languages that I have only glanced at so far – Arabic, Norwegian, Swedish, Scots and Cornish.
Do you sometimes get carried away with acquiring language courses and other materials?
Do you think you will get round to learn all those languages one day?
People who make language learning apps, online language courses and similar sometimes contact me asking me to review their apps/courses, and to link to them / promote them on Omniglot. This is often in exchange for free use of their courses for a certain period. This is exactly the kind of thing I hoped might happen when I set up Omniglot. Well, actually I hoped that language schools might offer me free or reduced rate courses in other countries – back in 1998 there weren’t so many online courses about, and no language learning apps – and I thought that one day I would be going from country to country learning languages, at least part of the time.
In the course descriptions for these apps/courses they say that they will teach you the real language that you need to know, and often promise that the course won’t bore you with complex grammar or befuddle you with grammatical terms. They also might say that their courses provide new, innovative, never-before-seen ways to learn languages quickly and easily.
I’ve tried quite a few of these apps and courses, and generally they are variations on the same basic model: you learn a bunch of phrases, often travel-related, maybe with pictures, and are tested on them, often using some kind of spaced repetition system. Some courses give you a chance to make sentences using the words you’ve learnt. Some include a bit of grammar as well, but not too much, as that’s boring and might scare the horses.
I’m not trying to belittle all the work that goes into these courses, and the people who make them do seem to believe that their courses are truely innovative. However I rarely find anything genuinely new in them.
One app I heard about recently is Smigin, which is free and available for iOS and Android. It teaches you basic travel-related phrases, and has a neat feature that you can construct your own phrases and hear them spoken. The recordings give you an idea of pronounciation, but as each part is recorded separately they do not give you the best model for how to pronounce the whole phrase. The people at Smigin are also planning to create an app to teach you more language beyond the travel phrases – Smigin Pro, which looks like it will be an expanded version of the travel app, with a few extra features, like a way to practise conversations virtually, and videos. Most importantly it is “without the hassle of grammar rules.”
After trying Smigin Travel I starting thinking about how a similar system might be used to teach you those dreaded grammar rules. I’m not sure exactly how, but have a few ideas.
Last week I started learning Toki Pona, the language consisting of just 120 words created by Sonja Lang in 2001. I’ve been thinking about giving it a try since the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin last year, when I went to talk about the language and met people who speak it, and Sonja herself.
It’s an interesting language, and as the vocabulary is so small, most words have multiple meanings, and you have to think creatively to express things not in the vocabulary. The structure is also interesting – it’s an isolating language with grammatical particles somewhat like Japanese, and word order is the most important thing, as words do not conjugate or decline or change in any way.
I have also discovered that there’s a signed version of Toki Pona http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/signlanguage.php, which is the first constructed sign language I’ve come across, though you may know of others.
Do you speak toki pona, or have you dabbled with it? What are your experiences?
By the way, the title of this post means “Do you speak Toki Pona?” (literally, “you talk not talk [direct object particle] toki pona?”)
Last week I went to a concert that featuring a jazz pianist and an artist. While the pianist played, the artist painted on her iPad, which was connected to a projector and projected on a big screen. The artist created pictures based on the music, and I think the pianist also created some tunes based on the art. It was all very abstract, especially the art. During the concert I was looking for patterns, shapes or anything in the art that looked like something familiar. I didn’t find much, but enjoyed the experience anyway.
Afterwards I got thinking about patterns and familiarity and came to the conclusion that we tend to feel most comfortable with the familiar – familiar people, things, places, sounds, etc – i.e our comfort zone. When we encounter the unfamiliar we try to find anything in it we can make sense of. We look for patterns, and anything else we can recognise. If we cannot find such things we may decide that the unfamiliar is not for us.
Abstract art and some forms of music, for example, are sometimes said to be “challenging”, and I think this is because there is little in them that is familiar, and this is why it takes longer to appreciate them – we need longer to find any patterns they may contain and for them to become familiar.
When we first encounter a foreign language everything is unfamiliar, and this can put a lot of people off. However a language that has a lot in common with your mother tongue can be easier to learn than one that has little or nothing in common with it as you will find more that is already familiar, and probably feel more comfortable with it.
To become familiar with the patterns, sounds, words and structures of a foreign language we need to get a lot of exposure to it – i.e. listen, read, and watch films and TV programmes. Doing these things alone is not enough to learn a language – you need to speak it and maybe write it as well – but they will make it more familiar to you.
The more you learn of a language, the more patterns you will spot within it, and the easier it will be to spot those patterns. The patterns might be how words are put together to form sentences, how grammatical changes are applied to words, how words can mean different things in different contexts, how speakers interact with one another, what topics are appropriate to different situations, and so on.
So you may need to get outside your comfort zone at first, but over time your comfort zone will expand to include the new language.
