Language Trainers Blog

Enjoy reading? Here are 5 of this summer’s literary festivals to look forward to!

London Literature Festival

When? Monday 20 May 2013 – Sunday 8 September 2013

Where? Southbank Centre, London

Highlights include: Launch of this years’ Poems On The Underground, Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveller’s Wife) discusses her work as an author, poetry readings from Sylvia Plath’s final manuscript, Ariel. 

Hay Festival

When?  Thursday 23 May – Sunday 2 June 2013

Where? Hay-on-Wye, Wales

Highlights include: Interview with the winner of the International Man Booker Prize 2013, lecture on illustration for the greatest chilren’s writer, Roald Dahl, by Quentin Blake; as well as a host of workshops and readings

Latitude

When?  Thursday 18 July – Sunday 21 July 2013

Where? Southwold, Suffolk

Highlights include: Poets Carol Ann Duffy and Murray Lachlan Young,  and journalist Germaine Greer and screenwriter Jeremy Dyson headline the spoken word and literary stages respectively.

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival

When?  Thursday 18 July – Sunday 21 July 2013

Where? Harrogate

Highlights include: In honour of the 60th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, 15 authors will be hosting a Bond themed murder mystery dinner; crime writer Ruth Rendell will be interviewed by Jeanette Winterson.

The Telegraph “Ways With Words” Festival

When? Friday 5 July – Monday 15 July 2013

Where? Dartington Hall, Devon

Highlights include: Author Tony Hawks will be discussing the difficulties of transforming books into films; and Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring) will be lecturing on her new historical novel, The Last Runaway, which was published earlier this year.

Click the links to find out more information and buy tickets!

Acronyms certainly make our lives easier, even if we don’t even realise we’re using them. Lots of “words” used on a day to day basis are actually abbreviated. For example, do you enjoy scuba diving? Would you enjoy explaining to people that you enjoy self contained underwater breathing apparatus diving more? What about sonar? Did you know it’s actually sound navigation and ranging?

With instant messaging and texting, using abbreviations has become more popular, and more importantly time saving. LOL, for example, is an acronym; whereas OMG is an abbreviation. An abbreviation becomes an acronym when you pronounce the initial letters as a word.

Linguistic minefields occur when we’re not really thinking about what we are saying. “Enter your pin number, please” is a phrase you hear daily (if you like shopping, as I do.)  PIN is an acronym, so you’re actually being asked for your personal identification number number! LCD display is liquid crystal display display. These are called redundant acronyms. (Click the link to check you’re not using them!)

Can you think of any not listed?

Did you know that Japanese has three different alphabets? I didn’t until today!

The first is Kanji. There are 214 Kanji characters, some of which are known as radicals. Radicals are characters which are used to form other characters.

Romaji is the way of writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet. Romaji literally means Roman. All Japanese words can be written in Romaji, making it easier for us Westerners to pronounce Japanese words, or at least know whereabouts in Japan we are!

Kana is a writing system based on syllables. There are two components to this – katakana and hiragana. They each consist of 46 characters which are basically simplified kanji. If you know this and are looking at a Japanese text, you should be able to distinguish between the more complex kanji characters and the simplified kana. Hirigana is the first text taught to Japanese children, so is a good place to start if you’d like to learn Japanese – although you must realise that in the Japanese language, hirigana is used mostly for grammatical endings of words or particles. Katakana is used mainly for words which cannot be written in kanji, such as names or places.

Confused? Unfortunately there’s no way around learning these things if you’d like to study Japanese! Luckily, Langauge Trainers offer Japanese lessons all over the UK, check the home page for details.

Lets face it
English is a stupid language.
There is no egg in the eggplant
No ham in the hamburger
And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple.
English muffins were not invented in England
French fries were not invented in France.

We sometimes take English for granted
But if we examine its paradoxes we find that
Quicksand takes you down slowly
Boxing rings are square
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

If writers write, how come fingers don’t fing.
If the plural of tooth is teeth
Shouldn’t the plural of phone booth be phone beeth
If the teacher taught,
Why didn’t the preacher praught.

If a vegetarian eats vegetables
What on earth does a humanitarian eat!?
Why do people recite at a play
Yet play at a recital?
Park on driveways and
Drive on parkways
How can the weather be as hot as hell on one day
And as cold as hell on another

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy
Of a language where a house can burn up as
It burns down
And in which you fill in a form
By filling it out
And a bell is only heard once it goes!

English was invented by people, not computers
And it reflects the creativity of the human race
(Which of course isn’t a race at all)

That is why
When the stars are out they are visible
But when the lights are out they are invisible
And why it is that when I wind up my watch
It starts
But when I wind up this poem
It ends.

Source: Cybersalt

Exciting to see this on the BBC website this week! Hot Fingers is a BSL finger spelling competition; the main aim of which (other than fundraising!) is to set the fastest time spelling out words with your hands.

Finger spelling is a method of communicating the alphabet using hand movements. It’s used primarily to spell out names, as well as words which don’t have a sign, or words you don’t know the sign for! It’s pretty time consuming so you wouldn’t be able to hold a full conversation using just finger spelling!  Other sign languages spell the alphabet using just one hand, but in British Sign Language, we use both hands.

As the most basic form of sign language, it is also a great way to introduce yourself to British Sign Language. I learned this when I was very young, and the best tip I can give is to learn the vowels first. Why that’s the easiest thing to learn will become clear when you look at the guide below!

Next week (6 – 12th May) is National Deaf Awareness Week.

Lots of events around the country have been organised to raise awareness. In Norwich, deaf and hearing children from local schools will gather at the city’s Forum to perform songs by One Direction, amongst others, in sign language.

Norfolk also has two sign language choirs. Jenny’s Signing Angels and V-Sign will both be performing at the Forum on Wednesday 8th May between 10am-3pm.

This is Sally from the Signing Angels performing Alanis Morrisette’s Ironic in British Sign Language.

Learning Portuguese here in London? You might be interested to know that Mariza is playing at the Barbican Centre on Monday 13th May.

This is a great chance to hear fado, the popular Portuguese traditional music, live. Mariza has won awards for her music, including a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music.

This video has the lyrics in Portuguese on screen – particularly useful to check pronunciation.

The BBC have launched the first children’s television series to be translated into Manx Gaelic.

The entire series of Friends and Heroes, which consists of 13 episodes, has been distributed to every school in the Isle of Man as a teaching resource. The animated episodes are 25 minutes long and have English subtitles.

“It sends a message to the children that Manx is for us today, not just something from the past. To have such a high-quality resource as this is brilliant.”

said Julie Matthews, Head teacher of the Isle of Man’s only Manx speaking school, Bunscoill.

Do you feel like testing your grammar skills?

The Telegraph has published an ace quiz to test your knowledge. I scored a shocking 50% so have lots to learn! I have to admit, number 11 did catch me out; so it’s lucky that there’s a handy explanation of why each right answer is correct. Now I just need to teach myself the difference between adverbs which qualify adverbs, and adverbs which qualify adjectives!

Thousands of Croatians attended a demonstration in Zagreb on Sunday to protest against the return of the Cyrillic alphabet on signage in the town of Vukovar.

Vukovar, a town in eastern Croatia, was destroyed during a siege in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and was ethnically cleansed of  non-Serbs before being taken by Serb forces. The city was reintegrated into Croatia in 1998. The Croat and Serb communities in Vukovar remain divided.

According to the 2011 census, the Serbian population has reached over a third (34.8%) of the city’s population, which therefore protects the community’s right to have the Cyrillic alphabet displayed on public signs. The Croatian language uses the Latin alphabet. Croatian Minister for Public Administration, Arsen Bauk, said such signs were now necessary under a constitutional law that mandates bilingual signs in towns where a minority accounts for more than 30% of the population.

Croatia is due to join the European Union on July 1st, and protesters are testing the country’s resolve on matters of minority rights.

Source: BBC News