Language Trainers Blog

I had a few issues when checking in to my accommodation in China, as the booking had been made via far too many channels, and there were typically Asian misunderstandings at various points along the way.  I was told I needed to check in before 6pm, but apparently reception expected me before 4 (16:00, instead of 6pm), so had already sold my room.  Neither could they find my booking, as it had been booked under my boss’s Chinese name, and then changed to my Chinese name, but using the Mandarin transliteration instead of the Cantonese one that I use.

I showed up and told them my English name, but they were expecting the Mandarin version of my Chinese name.  The pronunciation is noticeably different, and even my initials have changed, from WJW (English) or WHS (Cantonese) to HHX (Mandarin).  The difference between looking like a bookshop and looking like an airport abbreviation.

I’m still unsure as to whether I’m supposed to introduce myself with my Mandarin name, but I suppose I do.  It’s a bit strange having to think about changing something that feels such a natural part of me, but when in Rome, I guess …

I’m sitting on another plane, about to embark on a new Asian adventure, and I’m quite glad that I’m much more excited than apprehensive.  For the first time, I will not only be teaching a language, I will also be learning a new one.  I’ve dabbled in several languages before, mostly for pleasure and general interest, as well as to get along a little easier in non-English speaking countries.  This time, as well as all of the aforementioned reasons, my learning will be professionally motivated and sponsored, so there’s a lot of added pressure to perform well and learn fast.  I’m hoping that I will be able to impress my new colleagues as well as surprise myself.

Because I am an accuracy-based language learner, I find it difficult to just ‘give it a go’, and I have a strong desire to get things just right before I say them.  I find it a little bit stressful to be in situations where I need to ‘wing it’ (make it up as I go along) with a new language.  This isn’t exactly conducive to getting a lot of practice and learning more quickly, so I am going to make a concerted effort to just jump straight in, and not worry too much about being completely correct all the time.  Our harshest judges are often ourselves, so I think I will just give myself a break for a while, not think too hard about the small mistakes, and really appreciate those moments of clear communication (which will hopefully happen more often as time goes by!).

On my delayed flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong early on Sunday morning, I heard both the senior purser and the safety procedure recording pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘fastened’ (“please ensure your seat belt is securely fast-end”).

I’m not sure if they were taught this pronunciation, or were just being overly cautious with a word they were unsure of (it seemed a bit rude to ask), but it’s just one of many examples where a sound can be elided (or missed) when two syllables (or words) come together.  If we have to pronounce several similar sounds in rapid succession, it’s often easier just to skip one or more of them.

Elision can form either regional or global pronunciation standards, and ‘fasten’, ‘listen’, ‘moisten’, and ‘whistle’ are all examples of the ‘t’ sound being elided between the ‘s’ and the final consonant sound.  The standard pronunciation in every English-speaking country ignores the middle ‘t’ sound, although ‘fast’, ‘list’, and ‘moist’ usually have a clear ‘t’ at the end.

A non-standard elision, which was fairly common in the UK, but brought to the world by Ali G (the Sacha Baron Cohen character), is ‘innit’ in place of ‘isn’t it’.  Perhaps in time it will become the standard pronunciation, but currently it is still quite informal, and definitely inappropriate for high tea with the Queen.  Speaking of the Queen (ERII), she pronounces ‘often’ as ‘awf’n', whereas the common pronunciations are ‘off-ten’ and ‘off-en’. Thankfully, these are all acceptable variations, unlike ‘fast-en’.

Well, the last two weeks or so have been a sporting spectacular as over two hundred countries competed in the Olympic Games in Beijing.  What an opportunity for countries to learn a little bit about each other, and build cross-border relationships under the uniting forces of sportsmanship and human achievement.

China has remained somewhat of a mystery to many countries in the west, and when its doors were finally opened to the world, it was with a lot of fanfare, fireworks, and possibly the best opening and closing ceremonies anyone has ever seen.

In a country where you’re unsure of the customs, the language, and the culture, it’s always a good idea to err on the side of caution.  The New Zealand delegation were even issued handbooks which outlined some of the big dos and don’ts, introduced some basic language, and covered some of the cultural history and common customs.  At the other end of the spectrum, members of the Spanish basketball and tennis teams were photographed making ‘slitty-eyed’ gestures before their departure for Beijing.  According to The Guardian, no offence was intended by the athletes, and “No one involved in the advert [featuring the men's basketball team] appears to have considered it inappropriate nor contemplated the manner in which it could be interpreted in China and elsewhere.”

It still boggles the mind that the people involved in the Spanish publicity shots didn’t even consider that they might possibly insult their host country, especially when Spain has been under fire for incidents of racial abuse targeting footballers Thierry Henry, Ashley Cole, and Shaun Wright-Phillips, as well as Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton.

As we’ve discussed before, it may just be best to keep your mind open, a smile on your face, and your hands in your pockets.

I was a little dismayed to discover that the ability of an adult to learn a second language may be pre-determined (i.e. there’s not a heck of a lot I can do about it at this point).  Researchers in the USA have found that, based solely on the size of a small auditory brain structure, they can quite accurately predict an adult’s performance in a language-learning exercise.  The structure being examined is called Heschl’s Gyrus (HG) and accounts for only about 0.2% of the average adult’s brain mass.  The HG is associated with recognising changes in pitch and tone, so it is relatively unsurprising that a well-developed HG will help when learning tonal languages.  The team in the USA discovered that people with larger HGs (often related to experience with musical training at a young age) did far better at differentiating and recognising 18 invented words involving three different tones.

So, it seems that adults who studied music in childhood have a physically-measurable advantage when it comes to learning a second language.

This doesn’t mean that the musically-disinclined among us should give up on our language studies.  There’s no reason that you won’t become just as proficient as if you had a bigger HG, it will just take a little bit more work.  Also, this study used an invented tonal language, and the study participants were all American citizens with no former exposure to tonal languages (which makes me wonder if people who speak tonal languages have bigger HGs than those who don’t).  Tonal languages account for only half of the languages in the world, so there are plenty more to choose from if you feel intimidated.

Besides, not all of us have a natural ability to excel at the things we enjoy, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying, or stop enjoying them!

Full article available on Eurekalert.

I was on a plane from Hong Kong to Bangkok this afternoon, and despite having a delayed take-off, a bit of turbulence and truly mediocre food, it was not really that bad.  While they were rolling the trolleys down the aisle, I noticed that the flight crew were (as is usually the case with Asian airlines) quite adept at switching languages to suit the passengers.  A bit of racial profiling probably comes in handy for them, as they pick a language to start with, and if they are mistaken, change almost seamlessly to a more suitable tongue after absorbing voice cues from the passenger.  Cantonese is the default for this Hong Kong-based airline, and as I look as if I speak it, I usually end up speaking some sort of Canto-English to get my order across.  This crew was particularly good at remembering which language was required for each passenger, and flipped back and forth between Cantonese for in-crew discussions, and English, Thai, or Mandarin for the paying customers.  I saw some very admirable high-altitude, high-speed language switching today.

The only problems they seem to come across are when the announcements have to be made in triplicate (English, Cantonese, Thai), and it can be a long time before some people realise they are being told to sit down until the plane has finished taxiing down the runway.  Eventually one of the stewardesses just came out and started waving her hands in a ‘sit down!’ motion.  Sometimes language barriers do just need to be jumped over.

…and you could only take one word with you, what word would it be?

Obviously this is a ridiculous, hypothetical situation, but we’ve all seen The Little Mermaid, right?  What if she’d been given a single word that she could say to Prince Eric?

In English, all of our salutation words and phrases are different.  Hello, hi, good morning, how are you, fine, goodbye, bye, toodle-oo.

In more than a few other languages, the same word can be used for both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’.  In French, it is ‘salut‘; in Thai it is ‘sawasdee‘; and in Italian it is ‘ciao‘.

Similarly, in French you can use ‘ça va‘ to mean both ‘how are you?’ (informal) and ‘fine’ (or, ‘it goes’).

In Laos and Hawaii, there are even more flexible words.  ‘Sabai di‘ (Lao) and ‘aloha‘ (Hawaiian) can be used to mean ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘welcome’, ‘fine’ (in response to ‘how are you?’), and many other things.  It’s difficult to establish exactly how many ways they can be used by their local people.

Adding in a question syllable (‘baw‘), an entire conversation can be carried out in Laos thus:

A: Sabai di! (Hello!)
B: Sabai di! (Hello!)
A: Sabai di baw? (How are you?)
B: Sabai di. Sabai di baw? (Fine. How are you?)
B: Sabai di! (Fine!)

Added to this, both the Lao and the Hawaiian peoples are renowned for their friendly nature and hospitality, so maybe they’re onto something.

Perhaps, given the awful hypothetical choice, I’d pick ‘aloha’!

I’ve known for quite a while that ‘congratulations’ (with a ‘T’ in the middle) is one of the more commonly misspelt words.  Today, though, I saw ‘congradulations’ AND ‘congrads’, written by two different people, and began to ponder.

It’s become cheesily common for people to make what they think is a witty pun by merging ‘congratulations’ and ‘graduation’ into ‘congradulations’ (I’m sure it was funny the first time it happened).  It has been appearing on banners, greeting cards, and even wine labels (this one is spelled ‘congraduations’) ever since, welcoming recent graduates into a new era of their lives.

I wonder how often people actually see this word written down.  If a child or teenager sees it predominantly at school functions where it has been mangled on purpose, will they think that this is the way that it’s supposed to look?  Will future generations increasingly spell this word incorrectly?

Doing a quick Google search, ‘congradulations’ turns up about 1.4 million hits, which is discouraging. I am slightly comforted by the fact that this compares with 72.4 million hits for the correct spelling.

‘D’s and ‘T’s are sometimes indistinguishable in speech, so I am sure that the spelling confusion is quite easily explained away.  It does pay to know how to spell words correctly, though, so you don’t fall for things like this American lottery scam.

I sometimes find it quite difficult to explain the difference between words that are almost synonymous, but not quite.  As a native speaker, sometimes you just feel the difference between words, and it’s a challenge to put that difference into words, especially in a way that will be meaningful to your listener, especially if they are a learner of the language.

Today I was discussing ‘whine’ and ‘whinge’ with an American*, who thought that these two words meant exactly the same thing (they both mean ‘complain’, but have slightly different meanings).  Even now I’m finding them challenging to describe.  In these cases, it’s always good to have a dictionary handy, and lucky there are plenty of them online**.  I found these definitions in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

whinge

Brit. informal

• verb (whingeing) complain persistently and peevishly.

• noun an act of whingeing.

— DERIVATIVES whinger noun.

— ORIGIN Old English.

whine

• noun 1 a long, high-pitched complaining cry. 2 a long, high-pitched unpleasant sound. 3 a feeble or petulant complaint.

• verb 1 give or make a whine. 2 complain in a feeble or petulant way.

— DERIVATIVES whiner noun whiny adjective.

— ORIGIN Old English, whistle through the air; related to WHINGE.

I couldn’t quite convey that they were just different forms of complaint, and they were annoying in different ways.

*It just goes to show that even native speakers of the same language interpret words in different ways.
**Sticklers for language usually have a favoured dictionary that they swear by, whether it be the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), Dictionary.com, or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  I think as long as you cite your sources, nobody can really complain (unless you frequently get your information from Urban Dictionary).

It hasn’t even officially been launched (just try to find a link on our homepage), but already the Accent Game has proved a huge success among those with a finger on the virtual pulse.

The makers of the game asked native and non-native speakers of English to read two lines of a poem, and now it’s up to you, the player, to determine where the speaker is from.  If the excerpt was read by a native speaker, you also get the chance to earn bonus points by picking the city they come from.

Do you have a lot of friends from all over the world?  Do you think you have what it takes to pinpoint an accent’s origin?  The concept is deceptively simple, but the challenge itself can be a lot more difficult than you’d think.  I got just over half of the countries the first time I played.

Give it a try, and then challenge your friends to do better!

If you enjoyed playing the game, think you have an interesting accent, and have a desire to participate in the next one (and potentially be world-famous!), upload a short video or audio file here, and we will let you know if you make the cut!