Language and travel plans

12 January 2015 By Simon

I’ve been thinking about my language and travel plans for this year and have decided to spend a few weeks in Russia – probably in July – at a Russian language school. Every year for the past ten years I’ve gone to Ireland to do courses in Irish language, singing and music in July, but this year I fancy a change. I plan to learn as much Russian as I can before going to Russia and to focus mainly on Russian throughout this year, while keeping my other languages ticking over.

Apart from the trip to Russia, I’m going to the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin at the beginning of May, and on a choir trip to Oloron Sainte Marie in the south west of France at the end of May. I also plan to do a course in Scottish Gaelic song in Scotland in August and will probably go to the Polyglot Conference in New York in October.

Can any of you recommend a Russian language school?

When is the best time of year to visit Russia?

What are you language/travel plans for this year?

Language quiz

11 January 2015 By Simon

Here’s a recording in a mystery language.

Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?

What makes a word “real”?

8 January 2015 By Simon

I came across an interesting TED talk today about how words become real. Are they only real when they start appearing in dictionaries, or are they real if they are widely used, even if they don’t feature in dictionaries? The speaker, Professor Anne Curzan, looks at who makes dictionaries and how they decide which words to include.

She says that words are chosen for inclusion in dictionaries because we use it, and the more we use a word, the more likely it will make it into dictionaries. So words are real because we use them.

Elvish linguistics learning tool

6 January 2015 By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Juan Sandoval.

Recently a few Tolkien linguists – inclining David Salo, the primary linguist from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films – came together and thought of a way to make Elvish a more accessible, learnable language to the many fans who strive but fail to understand its many inherent nuances. While it’s easier to use intuitive software like Rosetta Stone to learn existing languages, currently fictional languages need to be learned through hard years of linguistic research since there is no established population or culture to immerse oneself in.

They’ve addressed this problem by launching a campaign to build a language decryption tool, which will be open-source, available to all language enthusiasts and customizable to any other language. Essentially, the tool packs together a translator, a dictionary, an IPA, the language’s grammar rules, audio, and much more into the very page you’re reading. As you follow along with your finger (or mouse) the phrase is instantly broken down in real-time, allowing you to see what the surrounding context is doing to influence each word. You can see a live prototype here of some of this tool’s functionality.

An ideal mix between structured learning and immersion learning…
As you use this tool, you don’t have to go anywhere else; all the information needed to read the sentence is provided right there. This eliminates the “stumped” factor, and allows the reader to get familiar with the flow of the sentences the more they read content without blockades. This accelerates the process of learning. As we continue reading and looking at the translations side by side with the grammar explained, the decryptions become more vaguely ‘familiar’ to us — so that even if we start out completely new to the language – we quickly develop an intuitive sense of how it all flows. The reader may soon find themselves anticipating what the grammatical breakdown will be, and can check with a simple mouse-hover to see if they’re right. Eventually the reader won’t need to hover over the words at all.

This approach presents a perfect blend between structured learning and immersive learning. All the information of a structured approach is there for you so there is no need to stop and look-up words, or apply algorithms. This makes the reading process itself non-mechanical and visceral, which is how language has been shown to stick better. You learn grammar rules as they come up in situations, much like in natural language.

It takes a teacher …
The text documents you read with this tool are created by someone who knows the language, so essentially this is also a teacher’s toolkit. It is a way for a teacher to be able to compose documents in such a way that the intended meaning & reasons for those meanings are embedded into each word. The software has a custom user interface for inputting grammar rules as you make entries, and seamlessly adds all the right information onto the submitted post.

Help bring this tool to life …
The campaign is close to its goal (90%) and needs just a little more to bring it to life. Please feel free to contribute or spread the word about this tool, to help make learning languages much easier.

Pretending to speak a language

5 January 2015 By Simon

In E. F. Benson’s book, Queen Lucia, two of the characters, Lucia and Georgie, speak bits of Italian to each other, which leads their friends to believe that they speak the language fluently, and impresses them, which is the point. When an Italian gentleman visits their village it soon emerges that Lucia and Georgie are unable to engage in conversation in Italian beyond a few phrases.

A similar story appears in the recent TV adaptation on the BBC – in this version Lucia pretends to be ill, and Georgie spends a few days away from the village in order to avoid meeting the visiting Italian speaker, the English wife of an Italian who admits that her knowledge of Italian is also limited, even though she has lived in Italy for 10 years. So Lucia and Georgie’s secret remains undiscovered.

Have you ever pretended to be able to speak a language, or exaggerated your knowledge of a language? Has you subterfuge been revealed?