Language Trainers Blog

Everybody has an individual learning style, but here are a few things that may help with retaining information and vocabulary while you are studying a new language:

• Repeat the word aloud as you write it down - this will help reinforce in both auditory and visual memories.
• Utilise flashcards and sticky notes - self-testing, playing games, placing around your study area, attaching to household items.
• Place sticky notes a little bit higher than your eyeline.  Looking up activates your visual memory.
• When memorising spelling, blink a lot while looking at the word (hold it up high, if possible!).  Each time you close your eyes, it registers once in your brain.  The more repetition, the stronger the memory.
• Use an indexed notebook to make your own personal dictionary of terms and phrases.
• Practise as often as you can!

In the news last week, an Athens court dismissed a case requesting that the word ‘lesbian’ be only used to refer to residents of the small island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea.  Three such residents requested that the word be banned from being used to refer to homosexual women.  One of the plaintiffs was photographed holding a banner that proclaimed “If you are not from Lesbos / you are not a lesbian”.

“This is a good decision for lesbians everywhere,” Vassilis Chirdaris, lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece, told Reuters. “A court in Athens could not stop people around the world from using it. It was ridiculous.”

The female poet* Sappho was famous for her love poems in ancient Greek times, and the word ‘lesbian’ was derived from her birthplace, Lesbos.  It turns out that the island has become something of a popular destination for gay women, and this has provided a boost to the local tourism industry.

It’s not unheard of for certain towns or regions to restrict the use of their name for commercial purposes, and for this reason the word ‘Cognac’ can only be used to describe brandy made in that region.  Unfortunately for the people of the village of Champagne, Switzerland, they can’t even use their own village name on local produce.  France is very proud of its Champagne wine region, and Switzerland has, for politico-economic reasons, agreed to forbid this tiny village from using the word ‘Champagne’ on their products.

Despite all the efforts of the French, ‘champagne’ has become synonymous with almost any ’sparkling white wine’ in many places in the world, despite not being technically correct.  We could use ‘methode traditionelle’, or ‘bubbly’, but it’s just not the same.  ‘Champagne’ is becoming generic, which has to be somewhat of a compliment for the region, surely?  Similarly, whatever the ruling had been in Athens, I doubt many people worldwide would restrict the use of the word ‘lesbian’ to the description of the 90,000 inhabitants of Lesbos.

*I’m not a fan of the word ‘poetess’, for some reason.  Maybe ‘poetress’ would be better?

Games are one of the best ways to become familiar with and practise the language that you’re learning.  From simple word-matching games using flashcards, to crosswords, to popular board games.

Recently I’ve come across a new product from the makers of Scrabble® (the popular lettter tile boardgame).   It’s called Scrabble® Scramble and it involves a much-smaller version of the board, 12 letter dice, and a one-minute timer.  Instead of choosing seven tiles from a bag, the special shaker rolls seven dice for you, and you have one minute to place your word.  Generally the rules are the same, but a maximum of two words remain on the board at any one time.  The advantages to this version are that it is fast (an average game will last about 20 minutes, depending on the number of players), any number of people can play (as long as they are prepared to wait their turn), it is tiny and portable, and you can use the dice to play a lot of other word games.

I’m not usually one to plug (promote) specific products, but I’ve found the letter dice to be especially helpful in my classes, and have improvised (made up/invented) quite a few ways to use them to keep my students learning in an enjoyable way.  They also seem to be fascinated by the timer, and one minute turns keep things interesting!

Variations with letter dice:

• Roll seven dice and see who can make the most words from the letters (words must be three or more letters long).
• Roll two or three dice and see who can make the most words (or who gets the first/longest word) containing all the letters.
• Use the dice to decide who will go first in games (closest to a particular letter wins).
• Use the dice to play category games (see who can name one word in each category [e.g. animals, fruit, countries] that starts with the letter rolled).

When I was teaching some lovely Korean exchange students, one of the major pronunciation issues we had to work on was the difference between /p/ and /f/.  It was very difficult for them to differentiate the two, as they don’t have a /f/ sound in Korean.

We had a lesson about food, and I asked what they normally ate for dinner in Korea.  Rice and pish, I was told.  Fish? Yes, pish.  Do you like fish?  Yes, I like pish.

Some dedicated pronunciation drills followed.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if ‘pish’ wasn’t a common slang word in the UK and Ireland.  It is a somewhat polite version of ‘piss’, which, as well as meaning ‘urine’, is often used to talk about alcohol (usually beer).  In Australia, it’s quite common to ’sink some piss’ (drink some beer), and to be ‘pissed’ is to be drunk (but to be ‘pissed’ in the USA means to be ‘pissed off’ or ‘annoyed’).

So, in some places you can buy pish, drink pish, and get downright pished.   It does quite a good job of imitating a drunken (pished) slur, too.

‘Pish’ or ‘pish posh’ can also be a statement, meaning ‘rubbish!’ or ‘nonsense!’.

One last thing on numbers, for now.

Forget about base 10 and counting in lots of 10,000.  Think back to when you were a child.  One of the first things you were taught was probably how to count from 1 to 10.  It’s always one of the first things I learn in a foreign language as well.  The concept of numbers and counting seems to be essential to most cultures.

In 2004, a team from MIT discovered that an Amazonian tribe had no words for specific numbers.  What they thought were words meaning ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘many’, have recently been shown to mean something else.  This time, instead of asking the Piraha tribespeople to count objects as they were added (one, two, three…), they were asked to count backwards as objects were removed from the group.  It seems that the words thought to mean ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘many’ were general terms, and had more to do with relative amounts. What they thought was ‘two’ could actually mean as many as five or six (and obviously sometimes two), ‘one’ was anything less than ‘two’, and ‘many’ was anything more.

Even though the Piraha don’t even have a number to describe ‘one’, they could still match identical-sized groups.  However, in memory-matching games, they didn’t do so well.   So apparently humans don’t need cardinal numbers (we do have an innate concept of ‘amount’), but it does really help us with keeping track of groups of things over time.  It’s a little easier than checking your bank account and finding out that you have ‘less money than you did yesterday’.  Although either way is still not very comforting.

The other day I was talking about the misunderstanding that arose between a culture that counted in thousands, and a culture that counted in tens of thousands.  Does it make it even more difficult when people use a different base system than we’re used to?

Most cultures these days count in a base 10 system, most likely because we have five digits on each hand to keep track of the world with.   This means we count up to ten, remember that we have one lot of ten, keep counting to twenty, remember we have two lots of ten, etc.  Do you think you’d have trouble with bases 2, 5, 8, 12, 20, or even 60?  You might surprise yourself.

Base 2 (binary) is used primarily in computer-related fields, and relates to switches that can only be in the on or off position (1 or 0).

Base 5 has been used in many cultures (probably because we have five digits on one hand), and can be used as a sub-base for base 10, 20, or 60.

Base 8 is a counting system based on the gaps between fingers, and is used by the Yuki tribe of northern California (who also use 4 as a sub-base).  There is a theory that the Proto-Indo Europeans in the Bronze age used a counting system based on eights.  The word for nine, ‘newm’, is thought to have derived from ‘new’, and suggests to some linguists that nine and ten were, at some point, new numbers.

Base 12 is thought to have been related to the number of knuckles on one hand (not counting the thumb).  We still have words for twelve (one dozen) and twelve twelves (one gross).  We have two lots of twelve hours in a day, and twelve months in a year.  Twelve is not quite as easy to multiply, but simpler to divide in than base 10.

Base 20 is possibly based on the number of human fingers and toes, and was used by the Mayan civilisation and others in South America, and in some parts of Africa.  In English we still have the word ’score’ (twenty), and in French there is ‘vingt’.  Eighty in French is ‘quatre-vingt’ (four twenties).  There is also evidence of base 20 in Irish and Danish counting systems.

Base 60 is thought to have been a combination of bases 10 and 12, and was used by ancient Mesopotamian cultures, as well as the Chinese.  As a result of the Sumerian usage, we still use base 60 to measure time and angles, with 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.  The Chinese calendar has 6 cycles of 60 days in one year, and the Chinese Zodiac has four cycles of 12 (lasting 60 years).

Thorn, or þorn (upper case Þ, lower case þ), is a letter in the Icelandic alphabet, pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative (’th’ as in the English ‘thin’).

In Old English, the letter thorn was used to represent either the voiceless or voiced dental fricative (’th’ as in the English ‘that’).  Its use continued through most of the Middle English period, but it started to be replaced by ‘th’ in the 14th century.  The shape of thorn also began to change around this time, and in some cases became indistinguishable from the letter Y.  ‘Th’ had almost completely taken over by this point, and thorn remained only in some abbreviations, such as thorn with a superscript ‘e’, as a short form for ‘the’.  The arrival of the printing press essentially erased any old form of thorn, and it was thereafter represented by ‘Y’.  This resulted in the printed form ‘ye’, and we still see the use of ‘Ye Olde…’ to imply antiquity.  I imagine few people owners of Ye Olde Tea Shoppes know that ‘ye’ should still be pronounced ‘the’, not /ji:/ (’yee’).

Unfortunately (in my mind) the most likely place you will see thorn in English these days would be as part of a cheeky emoticon (smiley).  :-Þ is a person with their tongue sticking out.

Now if someone asks if you’ve done anything interesting today, you can tell them you were looking at þorn on the internet.

We all know that hand gestures aren’t always universal, but what about head movements?  Surely a nod always means yes?

Even our most basic head gestures (nodding ‘yes’ and shaking ‘no’) don’t always translate across cultures.  In some cases, what is quite polite and normal in one place would seem outright rude in another.

When I was in Turkey, it took me a little while to understand it meant a simple ‘no’ when someone jerked his head upward and backward once, while clicking his tongue against the top of his mouth.  To me, it seemed dismissive and impatient, but this is the standard gesture in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Nodding means ‘yes’ in most countries, but signals ‘no’ in places as divergent as Bulgaria and Sri Lanka.

Head shaking means ‘no’ in a lot of places, but ‘yes’ in Saudi Arabia.  In Turkey, it means ‘I don’t know’ in much the same way as a shrugging of the shoulders.

A head bobble (a repeated tilting of the head to the left and right) can mean disapproval (such as in some East Slavic cultures), but means ‘OK’ in India.

A single nod can be used as a greeting or acknowledgement in most places.

A chin jerk can be used to point out a direction, or in some places, such as the USA or New Zealand, can be used as a greeting or acknowledgement.  It signals ‘no’ in Iran.

A bent head with eyes facing down can be a sign of submission, respect, acknowledgement, greeting, or confirmation.  Usually other cues need to be taken into account to interpret this one.

In Greece, to signal ‘yes’, tilt your head to the left and right.  For ‘no’, slightly nod your head upwards, or lift your eyebrows.

I recently watched an exchange between a native English speaker and a small town Cantonese woman.

The English speaker wanted to express how much a piece of property in her home country was ($180,000), and said “yāt baak baat sahp chīn mān” (one hundred eighty thousand dollars).  The Chinese woman didn’t understand this at all, even after several repetitions (with reasonable pronunciation).

The English speaker didn’t realise that in Cantonese, after you reach 10,000 (yāt maahn), you begin counting in lots of ten thousand.  Thus, the price of the house should have been “sahp baat maahn mān” (eighteen ten thousand dollars).

There is no singular term for ‘million’, and the Cantonese count in units of ten thousand until they get to 100 million, which is called “yīk”.

1 = yāt
10 = yāt sahp
100 = yāt baak
1,000 = yāt chīn
10,000 = yāt maahn
100,000 = sahp maahn (ten ten thousand)
1,000,000 = yāt baak maahn (one hundred ten thousand)
10,000,000 = yāt chīn maahn (one thousand ten thousand)
100,000,000 = yāt yīk (one ten million)

It’s not too confusing once you know how it works, but it is still yet another thing to get your head around when you’re in a new culture.

More on counting later…

After a year of providing us with an entertaining and informative language miscellany, Nacho has been sent to work on other projects, and I am lucky enough to be taking his place.

I am a widely-travelled New Zealander who is interested in languages, psychology, and several of the sciences. My family background is Chinese; I speak English and a smattering of Cantonese and Turkish; and thank travel, friends and TV for my scant knowledge of quite a few other languages.  I have studied linguistics and am a qualified English Language teacher.

I am particularly interested in the importance of language in culture, and how it defines us in our communities and those that we visit. I have the utmost respect for multilingual people, and am keen to see how the world’s languages and cultures will affect each other as mass communication and international travel continue to reduce the size of this global village.

Presently I am experiencing life as a partial outsider, teaching English to young children in Hong Kong. We have just had Handover Day (the 1st of July), commemorating the United Kingdom’s return of Hong Kong to China. The exposure to the British way of life here is still quite evident, even as China regains its hold and begins to exercise power over the languages and lifestyle of the Hong Kong people. Putonghua (Mandarin or Standard Chinese) and English struggle to become the dominant second language, and the native Cantonese may eventually be pushed out of schools altogether. It is an interesting time to be here!

Wendy