Language Trainers Blog

Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, is starting this week. The biggest celebration of the Chinese calendar, it is a time for families to get together and ring in a prosperous new year. Many of the traditions associated with the festival have grown up around words that sound like each other. The Chinese are big on wordplay, which is totally fine by me. For example, it is common to eat fish and leave some for the new year, because the Chinese word for fish, 鱼 (yu2),has the same pronunciation as the word for surplus, 余. So if you say the phrase 年年有余兔 (nian2 nian2 you3 yu2), meaning ‘may there be surpluses every year’, it sounds exactly like 年年有鱼, ‘may there be fish every year’.

There’s also been a really interesting crossover of these double meanings using English and Chinese. A couple of years ago it was the year of the ox, or 牛 (niu2, which sounds a lot like the English word ‘new’). Greetings of ‘Happy 牛 Year’ abounded. Now that it is almost the year of the rabbit (兔, or tu2), I’ve seen ‘Happy New Year 兔 you’. I think it’s very creative and linguistically interesting. I wonder what people will come up with for the other zodiac animals!

I’ve found that a lot of native English speakers, when speaking to other native English speakers, say foreign words in a blatantly Anglicised way. This seems to happen even when the speaker can speak the foreign language quite well. I don’t know if it is because they feel uncomfortable ‘trying too hard’, or for another reason. I generally try to use the correct pronunciation, or my best approximation, but many other people don’t.

A friend brought up a good point, though. For words that are commonly used in English, we use the English version. Unless you are French, saying Paris as Paree will make you look fairly pretentious to other English speakers.

There has to be a middle ground somewhere, though. Somewhere where you are not a poseur but not being offensive to speakers of the foreign language. Where do you think that line is?

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik‘s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

This isn’t going to be a post about learning /as/ a couple, where both people are learning languages. This is more of a reflection of the extra difficulties in finding time to study when you have time commitments to your spouse and/or children.

I read a blog post and a forum thread on Lingq about this, and most contributors agree that you have less time to yourself when you are part of a couple or family living under the same roof. Once you factor in work, meals, chores, quality time, going to school-related events, etc., there’s not a lot of time left for studying. A few people explained that they had more time than when they were single, because life seems more settled and the routine is clearer.

Where opinions differ, however, is in methods to increase or maintain your study time. Steve, the creator of Lingq, gave some advice along the lines of ‘learn to pretend you’re listening while listening to language material on your mp3 player’. He later said that his suggestions weren’t serious, but that was a bit unclear in his first couple of postings. Some people suggested dedicating a defined time each day for study, and some suggested adding language facets to your everyday life (like labeling household objects). Another suggestion was to get up earlier than everyone else to have some quiet time.

I have semi-recently changed my relationship status, so this is quite relevant to me. I’m not used to living with someone else, and I can definitely feel my language efforts sliding downhill. Mostly I just want to spend time in the relationship, and there is the fact that I’m easily lured into a night on the sofa when I have study to do. I need to start drawing some boundaries for myself.

Whatever you decide to do, it’s clear that it should be discussed clearly with your spouse. If they feel they are not getting enough attention because you are spending too much time on the computer (or however else you study), their feelings may be saved by explaining what you are doing.

Have you experienced a decrease in language study time when you get into a relationship? Do you think it’s possible to maintain the same level of study while paying enough attention to your family?