Language Trainers Blog

Is it easier to learn additional foreign languages if they’re similar to the one(s) you already know?  For example, if you already speak Spanish as a second language, will it help you learn Italian?  In my experience, knowing a similar language already can be both a help and a hindrance.

I grew up around Cantonese, and spoke it to an elementary-sort-of level, and best when I was living in Hong Kong.  Since moving to the mainland, I have been around, and studied, Mandarin instead.  The Cantonese helped in a lot of ways, as the grammar structures are similar, and some of the words were similar or the same.  Unfortunately, knowing that a word is similar to one you already know doesn’t necessarily remind you what the new word is.  Now that my Mandarin level is higher than my Cantonese level, and I have been away from Cantonese speakers, I find it difficult to switch languages.

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I spent the flight reminding myself of all the ways the languages are different, and all of the phrases I could remember in Cantonese*.  I didn’t do too badly,  but I was far from being able to switch between three languages fluidly.

Do you know more than one foreign language?  What are your methods for preventing getting rusty in a language you don’t use very often?

*Flights are a great opportunity to cram important language terms before arriving in a foreign language location!  Don’t forget to put a phrase book or flashcards in your carry-on bag to look over before you land.

I’m sure you’ve considered a day when you would be interacting with humanoid robots on a daily basis, right?  Well, that day is coming up soon in South Korea.  The government will spend about 45 million USD on an “R-Learning” program that will put English-speaking robot teachers into preschools and kindergartens nationwide by next year.

Of course, the kids won’t be supervised entirely by these bots, but they will be involved with duties like singing songs and telling stories.  As with many non-English speaking countries, there just aren’t enough qualified English language teachers (let alone native speakers to interact with students), so this easily-standardised method is definitely a viable option.  Most of us wouldn’t be comfortable speaking to a robot, but if kids are acclimatised early, this could lead the way to further robo-education.

With all the advances in computer and robot technology, do  you think that there will soon be a replacement for real live teachers?

Source: Crave blog. Image: ocularinvasion.

A quick search for visualisation and success brings up nearly four million results about how to improve your life just by visualising yourself doing something successfully.  It’s a common topic in self-help seminars, but using this method can also help in your language learning.

You don’t need to be sitting in the lotus position with your eyes closed for this to work, either.  You can use visualisation to imagine yourself having an upcoming conversation, or successfully getting through a day speaking only your target language.

The more long-term visualisations are things like imagining yourself speaking a new language fluently, conversing on your favourite specialist subjects with ease.  I prefer the more day-to-day stuff.

Sometimes if I’m waiting in a queue to buy something, I will imagine what the clerk is likely to say to me, and what I will reply.  Going through a conversation like this will bring up necessary vocabulary (which will make it easier for you to find the words when you do actually need them), and running through the sentence structures in your head beforehand will make your speech more fluent.  Think of it as your practice run before the real thing.

Even if you aren’t living in a place where you can practice in daily life, you can use a similar method.  Run through everyday conversations in your head, like giving directions to a taxi driver, or buying a newspaper.  This will help you to think in your target language, and familiarise you with the vocabulary.

What goes on in your head?  Is any of it in the language you’re learning?

Image: Torley from Flickr Creative Commons. Click the link for some inspiration!

I had quite a strange dream this morning, part of which involved being made to write my signature in a jellylike substance with a knife (I have no idea why - new technology?).  This was difficult and unwieldy and led to something that didn’t match what I had on my ID at all.  I have one of those signatures that no longer looks anything like my name, and often when I’m stopped in the middle of it (someone interrupts me, or my pen stops working), I have no idea what the next part is.  The action has become fluid and unconscious, and now, when I think about it too hard, I don’t know what all the pieces are any more.

This is the kind of thing we should be aiming for in language learning.  Of course, learning vocabulary is a key area to focus on, but when you want to communicate with others, learn whole sentences or meaningful phrases as one single ‘chunk’.  Practice listening to and saying whole sentences, and you will begin to get the feel for how the language flows, and native speakers will be able to understand you much more easily.

Especially in tonal languages (e.g. Thai, Chinese), if you say a few syllables slowly, it will take a long time for people to put them together, even if you got all the tones correct.  A lot of meaning is gained from the combination of sounds, rather than the individual sounds, so learning phrases will get your point across much easier than knowing how to put the individual words together (if - you - get - my - meaning).

If you get used to the sound and structure of whole sentences, it will be much easier for you to then substitute the nouns and verbs and use the same sentence patterns in many different conversations.

Good luck!

I’ve just read an article about the often difficult practices of apologising in Japan.  The article itself is focussed mainly on corporate responsibility-taking, but it talks about some interesting facets of Japanese apologies, which are of many different degrees, including the depth of bow accompanying them.

The art of apology is an intrinsic part of Japanese culture. When you ask a shopkeeper for help, or when you bump into someone on the inevitably crowded trains, you say “sumimasen.” A direct translation of this phrase is “excuse me,” but a more a more accurate rendition is “I am so sorry to bother you.”

Apologizing is as common as saying please and thank you. It is a way of maintaining harmony in social situations. If you are the first to leave work in a Japanese office, you say “Osaki ni sitsuree simasu,” which means “I commit the great rudeness of leaving first.”

It also gives some extreme examples of historical corporate apologies:

Japan has a long history of corporate personal apology in Japan. In 1985, following the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123, the president of JAL Yasumoto Tagaki assumed full responsibility for the accident, the worst single-airplane incident in aviation history. Of the 524 passengers only four survived.  Takagi went to the extraordinary length of personally visiting the families of the victims. It was only after he had fulfilled this obligation and offered one last public apology that he resigned. Another JAL employee, a maintenance manager apologized in a more extreme manner: he committed suicide.

Some apologies don’t actually apologise, either.  Sometimes they include remorse and regret, and sometimes even compensation, without ever actually taking responsibility and giving apology.  Do you think these are valid apologies?

Some parts of culture are so deeply ingrained in countries that it becomes very difficult for outsiders to get a grip on them.  How is apologising different in your country?

Source: MSNBC.

In the same way that I’m fascinated by westerners getting terrible Asian character tattoos, I am deeply interested in the reasons that Chinese people pick their English names (or anyone who chooses a name in another language, actually).  Of course, not everybody has an English name, but it’s rare that you find a younger person who does not.

Unsurprisingly, young Chinese people take this as an opportunity to express their individuality.  In a country of well over a billion people, there are only a hundred or so popular last names, and similar first names are common.  This means that it’s not uncommon for people to meet, go to school with, or work with someone with exactly the same name (I even met another Wendy Wong recently!).  Choosing an a name that reflects some of their personality can be quite important to some, which leads to some interesting choices.  Adjectives and nouns are also quite common names in Chinese, but they can sound odd to English speakers.

Interestingly, English names can also go back in the other direction, as Chinese people call their friends by a ‘Chinesified’ version of their English name.  I had a colleague called Echo, but everyone called her Ai-ke when speaking in Chinese.

I recently found out that another colleague, Gills, intended to call himself Giggs (after footballer Ryan Giggs), but something went wrong along the way.  I’m not quite sure what.  Some other fantastic names I’ve come across in China and Hong Kong have been Paper, Mars, Forrest Gump, Chocolate, Ocean King, and Person.

For some further reading, check out In China My Name Is by Valerie Blanco and Ellen Feberwee.  It’s a book dedicated entirely to Chinese people and the stories behind their English names.

Oh, and happy Chinese New Year!

I was looking over some things at work today, and realised that the word 画 (huà) had been used as the translation for both draw and paint.  I brought it up with the author of the document, and she said that there was no difference in Chinese, and asked if there was a difference in English.  I told her it was quite a big difference (draw being associated with pens, pencils, crayons, etc., and paint being done with, well, paint).  She discussed this with another colleague for a while, and I looked up 画 in the dictionary.

It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means several different things, with the meaning usually worked out from the context or the other characters around it.  In this case, the meaning, to Chinese people, is the same.  It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as traditional Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush, not a pen.

In the end, as I did want to distinguish the difference between the two English words, we compromised with 画 (油画), where the first character (yóu) is the noun paint, and 画 means…paint. And draw.

I’ve just done this quiz on Sporcle.com, and gotten a fairly sad 12/20.  Granted, I didn’t know that it included dialects (so now you know), although I don’t think that would have helped me much.

A couple of these languages I hadn’t even heard of prior to doing this quiz, so perhaps that should be my impetus to get out and learn a bit more about the world.  I was pretty glad to see that Language Trainers covers most of the widely-known ones, though!

How did you do?

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

It sounds like a normal-enough story: a 3-year-old born to Chinese parents in America is brought back to China and so needs a Chinese teacher because she only understands English. The odd part? The ‘child’ is a giant panda.

Because of an agreement between China and several other countries, any pandas (and their offspring) sent out of China to foreign zoos are only on loan for study purposes, and must eventually return to their homeland.

Mei Lan, a panda born in Atlanta, Georgia, is due to move to a breeding centre in Sichuan province in China this week.  As part of her welcome and orientation, the centre is arranging for a Chinese language tutor to teach her some basic phrases, as she has only ever heard English.  She will be also be weaned off the biscuits she was used to in the US, and moved on to a Chinese recipe supplemented by fresh bamboo.

I’m not sure how fast pandas can learn commands, though.  If their general behaviour is anything to go by, it will be a slow process!

Source: LA Times.

Punctuation is important. It can change the meaning of simple phrases, and is especially important these days, when so many more people are communicating via text, whether it be SMS, email, online forums, or blogs.  A famous example is the difference between “a woman without her man is nothing” and “a woman: without her, man is nothing“.

I do have an affection for the combination question and exclamation mark, the interrobang (‽), and I’ve already talked about outdated (but useful) characters like the thorn (Þ).  People are frequently using combinations of punctuation to form emoticons to express the intention of their messages, so maybe there is a need for new symbols to clarify meaning.

So, what would you pay for a revolutionary piece of punctuation?  What is the use of a single punctuation mark worth?  According to the people at SarcMark, it’s worth about 2 US dollars.  They have developed a new mark to indicate sarcasm (see above), and want to charge people to use it.  I can understand that this might actually be useful in this day and age, but the fact that you would then have to explain it to everybody you sent it to, and that they wouldn’t be able to use it until they’d purchased it, makes it seem a little too much effort for not much reward.

I think I may be too skeptical for the SarcMark.  How about you?

Thanks to Dave at Languagetrainers.com for the link.