Language Trainers Blog

As a Spanish language teacher I have learnt to value the ever-valiant attempts made by students in their effort to speak their new language. It is clear that, when using a foreign language, the sound of their speech will be slightly, if not totally different from the one of the natives. This means they are never free from making “mistakes”; though this is far from being an obstacle, instead being is a great way to improve.

Nonetheless, one of the most frequent kinds of mistakes heard in the classroom represents a good clue in appreciating the gradual learning process of new grammar: the error of ‘regularization’.

In a way, second language students take the role of young children acquiring their mother tongue. There are wide differences from a psycholinguistics point of view, as children do not have a previous grammar to hinder the internalization of a new one (that is why we ‘acquire’ our first language when we are young, but ‘learn’ a second one when adults).

Once we have made a distinction between adult students and children, I would like to mention one of the coincidences I found: there is a clear tendency make words regular. For instance, it is not unusual that a student says “no sabo” in order to say “I don’t know”, which does not exist in Spanish, and is a mistake for sure (“no sé” is the correct form). However, more important than the specific inaccuracy, is the fact they have shown that they are not just learning a list of words by heart, but learning a new grammar. They have learnt the rule that says ‘take the ending off the infinitive and add ‘o’ to get the form for the present indicative first person singular’. In this case, it didn’t work because for irregular verbs there are no general rules. However, this student has shown themselves to be capable of conjugating most Spanish verbs correctly, even if it is the first time they’ve come across them - but now it’s time for them to memorise the exceptions!

While studying Japanese at university, I was looking forward not only to learning my first non-European language (having studied French, German, Latin & Greek at school and university), but also making a stab at an entirely new alphabet (or as our sensei told us to call it, writing system). It was only after our first lesson that I became a little more apprehensive, when I learnt that they employ three separate writing systems simultaneously.

First of all there are two phonetic writing systems: hiragana, which is used to ’spell out’ Japanese words in short phonetic units (for example, sensei (せんせい), meaning ‘teacher’, consists of four hiraganas: se (せ), n (ん), se (せ) & i (い).

The other phonetic system follows the same rules as hiragana, but is used to spell out ‘loan words’ (Japanese words borrowed from English or other languages) or to emphasise Japanese words (for example, in signs outside shops and bars). This writing system is called katakana, and while it follows the same pattern of phonetic sounds, the characters look different, consisting more of straight lines when compared with the more curvaceous hiragana. For example, the Japanese word for ‘icon’ is the same word, but transliterated into the more limited Japanese phonemes to match the sound of the original term as closely as possible - in this case, aikon (アイコン).

These two writing systems were manageable for a gaijin (’foreigner’) such as myself: regular practice reading and writing the characters and recognition exercises coupled with my own enthusiasm helped me become fairly proficient in both writing systems in only a couple of weeks, but it was the third writing system that bamboozled me - kanji.

Kanji are characters of Chinese origin, first imported to Japanese shores by articles from China. These characters are far more complex and intricate than the kana systems, many requiring upwards of 20 individual strokes to draw, and are used primarily for nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, replacing what would otherwise be phonetic characters. Most kanji have several different ‘readings’, which can subtly alter their meaning, as well as usually completely changing the way you say them. The main drawback when learning kanji, however, is that you don’t know how to pronounce them unless you either have the furigana form of the character, or have been briefed in advance of the different readings. To add insult to injury, there are over 50,000 kanji in existence; although only around 2,000 are in daily use.

While the Chinese students in my class had very little difficulty recognising the root meanings of many kanjis, as well as being able to write them with amazing speed and accuracy, every facet of every kanji exercise was a huge challenge for somebody with my background, trained purely on Roman and Greek alphabets with very little talent for drawing complex shapes.

For those starting out in Japanese reading and writing, the only advice I can offer for unlocking the mysteries of kanji would be the same advice given to me by my sensei - gambatte!

Unlike French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, English is not always able to express through personal pronouns the importance or respect we consider our interlocutor deserves. The English language provides us with only two second person pronouns, whose forms are identical for singular or plural: you. Arabic makes a similar distinction to Romance languages: whilst anta stands for ‘you’ singular, antum means ‘you’ plural. Addressing an important person with anta rather than antum would be considered impolite.

In Vietnam there are at least eighteen words for ‘you’, the usage of which depends on whom you are addressing, depending on whether they are a child, adult or senior citizen, and whether you are referring to them formally or informally. In the Western Australian Aboriginal language of Jiwali there are four words for ‘we’: ngali means ‘both of us including you’; ngaliju means ‘both of us excluding you’; nganthurru means ‘all of us including you’; and nganthurraju means ‘all of us excluding you’.

English enjoys an interesting advantage over all other major European languages, having adopted natural in place of grammatical gender. In studying other European languages, students labour under the heavy burden of memorizing not just the meaning of each and every noun, but the gender, too.

In the Romance languages, for example, there are two genders, thus all nouns which would otherwise be neuter are either masculine or feminine. Some help in these languages is afforded by distinctive endings, which generally characterise the two classes. But even this aid is lacking in Germanic languages, where the distribution of these three genders appears to an English speaker to be mostly arbitrary.

Thus in German, Sonne (sun) is feminine, Mond (moon) is masculine, but Kind (child), Mädchen (maiden), and Weib (wife) are neuter. This distinction must be kept in mind constantly, since it affects not only the reference of pronouns, but also determines the rules of inflection and the agreement of adjectives.

In the English language, all of this was stripped away during the Middle English period.

Gender in modern English is determined by meaning. All nouns referring to living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other forms are seemingly neuter - though with indeclinable definite and indefinite articles and single-termination adjectives, our only clues are the pronouns.

The evolution of language is a story of progressive simplification: that is to say, the further back we go in the study of languages that are most closely related to English, the more complex the linguistic structure seems to be. Latin, for example, has inflections (multiple word endings depending on the word’s context) of nouns, pronouns, verbs, as well as adjectives.

In this process of simplification, English has come further than any other European language. Inflections of nouns have been reduced to a single letter sign for the plural and a punctuation mark to form the possessive case. Pronouns, which in Latin could be understood from the verb ending as well as a wide array of declining pronouns, have their own possessive forms in English but rarely change according to the word’s role in the sentence. The elaborate Teutonic inflection of adjectives has been entirely eliminated, except for the simple indication of the comparative and superlative degrees by ‘-er’ and ‘-est’ suffixes. Verbs have been simplified by the loss of practically all the personal endings, the near-complete abandonment of any distinction between singular and plural, and the gradual obsoleting of the subjunctive mood.

So while English vocabulary has expanded exponentially, the actual form of the language from its many derivative roots has essentially been simplified - although that still doesn’t help us with the often baffling rules of spelling and pronunciation!

“False friends” (a word in another language that closely resembles a word in somebody’s first language, but means something different) are practical proof for the fact that seemingly different languages have at one point been strongly connected: the form remains identical, or at least recognizable, but the meaning has subtly shifted in one or both languages from its original definition.

So, with that in mind, can you translate these Spanish words into English without using a dictionary? Hover your mouse pointer over the box to the right to reveal the correct answer, and the answer a native English speaker might have been expecting.

Adepto :: follower, supporter (NOT adept)

América :: the Americas (NOT America specifically)

Embarazada :: pregnant (NOT embarrassed)

Librería :: bookstore (NOT library)

Parientes :: relatives (NOT parents)

Sensible :: sensitive (NOT sensible)

Soportar :: tolerate, deal with (NOT support)

Do you know other false friends? Many linguists have at least one amusing anecdote involving these tricky words. For example, the famous song “Sympathy for the Devil” is known in Spanish as “Simpatía por el demonio” which actually means “Affection for the Devil”. The correct translation should have been “Compasión por el demonio”.

Spanish, Castilian, what’s the difference?

Spanish students will often express their confusion in regard to these two words. Some tend to believe that Castellano implies a regional dialect, while Español refers to the standard usage of the language.

In actual fact, the difference lies in politics rather than linguistics. The term Castellano derives from the Castilla area in Spain, where this ‘language’ was first spoken, just like Catalán, Vasco or Gallego in different parts of the country. However, unlike these other languages, Castellano extended over the rest of the peninsula. The reason was simply the socio-economic importance given to the term by the region in which it was first spoken. Thus Castellano isn’t merely a dialect, but another word for what non-native speakers would collectively refer to as Spanish.

Usually, speakers of Catalán, Vasco or Gallego are unwilling to accept the name Español for their mother tongue, as to them it would imply they were undermining their own language. Nevertheless, as the language has since become an extremely well-represented international language, in countries outside Spain and Latin America the language is mostly referred to as Spanish.

If you’re still confused, Wikipedia attempts to explain the phenomenon thusly:

To understand how two terms can refer to the same language, imagine that the English language were sometimes called English after the historical nation whose language it is, but also sometimes British after the modern state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK), of which it is the official language. To add to the complexity, former British colonies such as British North America had to choose a name for the language, as did the speakers of Welsh and other non-English languages in the United Kingdom. This resembles the situation with Spain and its historical centre, Castile.