Can any of you decipher this Tibetan inscription?
It was sent in by a visitor to Omniglot whose brother was given it at a Tibetan monastery.
Text to speech
I came across a useful site today that can read out texts in many languages and voices, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. While I’ve seen similar text-to-speech sites for languages like English, Spanish, French and German, this is the first one I’ve found that can read Arabic, Czech, Polish, etc.
This text-to-speech site can also handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and has avatars reading the text.
The quality of the speech on these sites varies – for some languages it sounds fairly natural, for others it sounds artificial. It also seems to depend on the texts you use.
Here are some samples:
すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。人間は、理性と良心を授けられてあり、互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。
모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.
Language 101
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.
Language quiz
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Accent and ego
According to a study at the University of Haifa, the strength of your accent when speaking a foreign language depends, to some extent, on how much you like and respect the person you’re talking to. Your position in relation to the other language also affects your accent, something the article calls ‘language ego’.
I’ve noticed that people who identify strongly with a particular region or country are more likely to have a strong regional or national accent. Whereas people who don’t have such strong affiliations are more likely to tone down or switch off their accent and perhaps adopt another, or least aspects of another accent, to make it easier for others to understand them. This does depend on the circumstances though – in some cases people who wouldn’t normally emphasise their accent might do so to show group solidarity, or to signal their opposition to another group.
My accent in English sort of defaults to RP, but takes on a flavours from other accents depending on who I’m talking to. Though I come from Lancashire originally, I’ve never had a strong Lancashire accent and don’t strongly identify with that area. In Welsh I have a mid-Wales accent which is gradually becoming more northern. In Irish I have a strong Ulster accent, which I tone down somewhat when talking to Irish speakers from other regions. In Mandarin I have a Taiwanese accent, though I can do a sort of Beijing one as well, and in French I had a bit of a Languedoc accent which has morphed into something else now. These accents are a result of spending time in the regions where they’re used, so you could say that I identify to some extent with all them.
Comunicamo
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.
Facial expressions
When you look at someone to try and work out what they’re feeling, do you focus on their mainly eyes, or on their whole face?
If you come from East Asia you might focus mainly on the eyes and express your emotions mainly through your eyes, whereas Westerners tend to focus on and use their whole face, at least according to an article on Science Daily.
The researchers found that facial expressions they believed to be universally recognisable were often misinterpreted by people from East Asia, who tend to focus most on the eyes when trying to decipher such expressions. They also noted the emoticons reflect this difference as well, in that Western ones use the mouth the convey emotions, e.g. 🙂 (happy) and 🙁 (sad), while East Asian ones use the eyes: ^.^ (happy) and ;_; (sad).
Cernyw
Mi orffenes i ddrafft cyntaf fy nhraethawd hir Ddydd Llun yr wythnos hon, ac ar Ddydd Mawrth mi es i i Aberfal yng Nghernyw i weld fy mrawd a fy rheini. Mae fy mrawd newydd orffen ei daith o gwmpas y byd yn ei gwch hwylio Kika, ac ro’n ni’n yn Aberfal i’w groesawu o yn ôl. Mae’r lle yn hyfryd ac mi fwynheuon ni yn fawr.
Cornwall
I finished the first draft of my dissertation on Monday of this week, and on Tuesday I went down to Falmouth in Cornwall to see my brother and my parents. My brother has just finished his circumnavigation of the world in his yacht Kika, and we were in Falmouth to welcome him back. It’s a really nice place and we had a good time there.
Language quiz
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Falmouth / Aberfal
I just got back to Bangor after spending a few days with my family down in Falmouth (Aberfal) in Cornwall (Kernow). My brother has just finished a circumnavigation of the globe in Falmouth four years after setting sail, and we went to welcome him back. His adventures are recounted on his blog.
While in Cornwall I was on the look out for any bits Cornish I could spot. There were plenty of Cornish flags and bumper stickers, some with Kernow on them, some of the leaflets about local attractions have place names in English and Cornish, and the Cornish motto, “One and all / Onan hag oll” appears in both languages on the Cornwall Council logo. One bookshop I visited had a few Cornish language courses and dictionaries, but apart from that, there was very little Cornish to be seen, and none whatsoever to be heard. There may be more Cornish around in other places, but the superficial impression I got was that Cornish is not as visible in Cornwall as Manx is in the Isle of Man.