Language Trainers Blog

One of the exercises my teacher likes to do with me is to get me to tell her about my day, or my weekend, or what I want to do in the near future.  It helps me practice speaking and writing (i.e., creating output) about things that are relevant and familiar to me, as well as focusing on useful language and grammar.

Talking about what you did on the weekend helps with past tenses, next week is for future, current habits practice present continuous.  You can use the subjunctive (if… situations) by imagining what you would have done if you had made a different choice or if something else happened (e.g. if I missed the bus this morning, I would have…).

If you don’t have a person to give you feedback, there are plenty of websites where other users will correct your work (e.g. LiveMocha, Lang-8), and you can correct theirs.  Alternatively, you could start a blog of your diary entries and invite readers to give you some advice about improving your writing and/or speaking.  You could also write about your language learning experiences.

What kind of output exercises do you like to do?

In my last post I wrote about native speakers not knowing that language learners are not fluent.  I’ve experienced it many times when I have learned basic phrases in a language to be polite, and then have found myself apologising for not actually being able to speak the language.

So, is it beneficial for beginners to speak with a strong accent?  It gives the listener an instant clue that the speaker is not a native, and they can then (hopefully) modulate their language to suit the speaker’s level.  This saves you from having to explain that you are a student or that you don’t understand.

I’ve spoken to a few people about this, and opinions differ.  Speaking slowly or with a strong accent may benefit the learner in that the listener will modify their speech, but you can’t speak too haltingly, or ‘incorrectly’, or you may not be understood at all.  Most people don’t think that learners should actually try to speak with a strong accent (though some kind of accent is inevitable).

What do you think?

At the beginning of a conversation with a native speaker, it’s not always apparent to them that you are a learner.  If your pronunciation is good, then they may not know from the basic greetings that you won’t understand what they have to say next.  So, if they launch into something that’s too long or too complicated for you to process, ask them to repeat it.

This way, they will probably rephrase or repeat more slowly so you will have more time to process what they said and formulate your answer.  I often have that ‘ohhh’ moment right after I’ve asked people to repeat themselves (I guess my brain just needs that extra couple of seconds to think things through), but by then I can start thinking about how I am going to reply.

Learn a polite way to ask people to repeat what they said (such as the equivalent of pardon?), or even ask them to speak a little more slowly.  People tend to appreciate your effort, and you will get better results than if you try to make them speak in English or another language.  You might even get better service or information!

Language learning can be challenging at the best of times, but what about learning a third language in your second language?

I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who are doing this very thing, and they have my utmost respect.  Living in China, they are learning Chinese in English, even though their native languages are French, German, Spanish, and others.  Some Chinese language teachers speak Japanese, French, and a few other languages, but they the minority (and their English is usually better than the third and fourth languages).

This works out fine if both parties have a good grasp of English, but when they don’t, it can be confusing.  Also, not all concepts exist in all cultures, so sometimes it can be difficult to understand explanations, or express what it is you need to know.

How can this process be made easier?  Well, for beginners, it’s not such a big deal, as a lot of the language is easy to directly translate.  It may take a little longer for the learner to translate through a third party language, and a couple of dictionaries may be necessary, but it is manageable.  For learners at more advanced levels, I would recommend ditching the third language as much as possible.  Try to carry out all explanations in the target language, even if you have to use very simple words and structures.  It will give you more practice as well!

As an added bonus, though, a friend has reported that while she has been learning Chinese in English, her English skills have also improved because of it!

I have a lot of embarrassing things happen to me when I’m trying to speak in other languages.  Thankfully, I haven’t yet had any permanent damage (like accidentally asking for the wrong haircut), and I find that sharing these stories with other learners can help ease the embarrassment a little bit.

So, let me tell you a story.  I was in a cafe one day, and wanted to know what the wifi password was.  I knew the word for password, and I had just learned the word for wireless internet from a podcast I was listening to.  I was all set.  I called the waitress over and asked her what the password was.  Success.  Until she said something so quickly that I had no clue what she was talking about.  I asked her to repeat it.  She said something that sounded longer, and was slightly slower.  I still had no idea.  So I offered her my pen and asked her to write it down.  The password was, wait for it… 0123456789.  I had thought I was progressing fairly well by that point, so to realise that I couldn’t understand basic numbers was somewhat humbling.  In my defence, she initially used a short form (like 0 to 9 instead of the full list), but I still couldn’t look her in the eye afterwards.

That’s far from my most embarrassing story, but it’s the first one that springs to mind.  Do you have any embarrassing language stories?

Image: partie traumatic.

One of my Chinese teacher’s favourite things to tell me is that you have to ‘lose your face’ if you want to progress with any kind language learning.  You need to try to express yourself, even if you aren’t 100% sure, and even if there is a chance that someone will correct you (and/or have a pretty good laugh at your expense).

Face is a very important concept in China, more so than in most places in the world.  There are a lot of ways that people can lose it, and a lot of things are done in order to maintain it.  Things which you and I might not find embarrassing could be mortifying for a Chinese person, but yet I find that most Chinese people I meet are willing to try to speak English with me.  I have a great deal of respect for them in this, because I am one of those people who needs to be 100% sure.  It has taken me a long time to just get out there and try to use what I know.

It goes without saying that we will improve more the more we try to speak.  It’s just that sometimes it’s difficult to do so.  I’m not saying that we should aim to embarrass ourselves every time we speak in a foreign language, but we need to try things out, despite any potential embarrassing consequences.

One way to do this is to consider the alternatives - is it worse to try to say a sentence or to have to try to write it down?  Is it more embarrassing to mispronounce a word, or to have to mime entire sentences?  Or you can make it clear that you know your weaknesses by using comical aids such as the iLingual app that I talked about last time.

Do you have a trick to help you speak more often?

Image: Melle_Oh.

I was booking some tickets for a trip to Europe recently when I stumbled across a hilarious yet useful free service provided by the airline Emirates.  Their iLingual iPhone application not only provides you with lots of useful phrases in French, Arabic, and German, but it lets you do it with your own mouth.

Hilariously, the first thing you need to do is take a picture of your own mouth, and calibrate it.  You can choose between male and female voices, and even change the pitch to make it sound higher or lower.  Then, you simply select the phrase you want, and hold your phone in front of your mouth, and iLingual makes it seem like you are speaking in another language.

It’s not just for laughs, either.  The full versions have over 400 travel-related sentences, and the lite versions can be downloaded directly to your iPhone.  That’s a pretty solid phrasebook, if you ask me.

Also, with most electronic phrasebooks (which usually only have a few phrases anyway), you select your phrase, and then you and the listener both have to sort of just stare at your phone and wait for it to make a noise.  With iLingual, you can laugh at yourself a little bit, and show the person you’re speaking to that you are not so arrogant as to expect them to communicate wholly in your native language.  I’d definitely expect a few stares, though!

Has anyone tried this app yet?  What are your thoughts?

As a student of Mandarin Chinese, I use the romanisation system pinyin to ’spell out’ the sound of Chinese characters, including their tones.  Each tone marking shows what sound you should make for the vowels.  For a long time, I have been looking for an input engine that would allow me to type tones directly, instead of having to use letters and numbers, or go through a complicated special symbol input.  I wanted to be able to type something like e3 and come up with ě on the screen.  Until recently, my only options were to use the input engine NJStar (which works really well, except that the full version is really expensive), copy and paste special characters each time I wanted to use them, or create complicated macros which would only work in certain programs.

A while back, I thought I could use Texter, which is a tiny yet powerful text replacement program from Lifehacker.  Unfortunately it doesn’t support Unicode characters, which are the ones I wanted (although give it a go if you type the same things a lot and want shortcuts that work in all your programs).  I couldn’t find many other alternatives online, although I found a few other people online who had the same (pinyin writing) issues as me.

Then I found a link to PhraseExpress, another text replacement program, and I thought I’d give it a go.  Well, lo and behold, it works perfectly!  All you have to do is add your desired characters (e.g. ā) and the key combination you want to associate it with.  You can even add whole pages of text instead of just special characters, and export your shortcuts so you can use them on different computers.

I did have to fiddle a bit with the format of the shortcuts (you obviously have to use something which you don’t use anywhere else), but finally decided on using .[letter][tone number] as my template.  So now if I type “.i2,” I get “í”.  Magic!

If you have been wanting to type special characters in any language simply and quickly, I highly recommend downloading the PhraseExpress software.  It’s completely free for personal use.

If anyone has any additional comments or recommendations, that’s what the comments box is for!