Language Trainers Blog

It’s that time of year again, where we’re all trying to think of fabulous Christmas gifts for family and friends. Don’t worry, I won’t be making these a regular thing all the way through December! I’ve just discovered these magnets which would make a great gift for any language student, and thought I’d share!

These little Magnetic Poetry Kits now come in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian and Swedish, and are a fun way to practice your writing skills in another language. There’s also a Hebrew alphabet kit, a sign language kit, and a Chinese for Kids kit, but these are a little harder to find.

These are available from Amazon, Eurocosm, and directly from Magnetic Poetry (this is a US site)

It seems that native speakers of certain languages are able to roll their ‘r’s more easily than others. For me, as a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, it’s very difficult to pronounce rolled ‘r’s, which is also known as the alveolar trill. For example, trying to convey the name of a Cuban bar (Barrio) was particularly difficult when trying to arrange to meet up with my Spanish friend Eva recently. Pronouncing ‘r’s in an English accent, in the English form, is a huge disadvantage to communication in Spanish.

An Italian friend tells me that some children are taught the word “rabarbaro” (rhubarb) at school to help them pronounce their ‘r’s correctly. This word is not commonly used in the Italian language otherwise. In fact, when I told my Italian flatmate this word, he didn’t know what it meant. It could have been my pronunciation of course, but I wrote it down for him as well!

Having said all of this, one of my best friends, Mairi, is Scottish, and has no problem with rolling her ‘r’s, especially as you need to roll the r in her name to pronounce it correctly. So, is it down to accent?

This led me to try and find a way to learn how to do this properly. It is all in the tongue vibration, apparently. A lot of online help assumes you have an American accent, but I know of a few tips for us Brits.

The short term solution, for emergency use whilst you practice getting your tongue around your ‘r’s, is to pronounce the r as a hard D. You have to say it really fast to get away with it, but it does work! “Barrio” becomes “baDio,” and at least Eva will now know where I want to meet up for cocktails in the near future.

It’s better to try than to risk becoming a tentative speaker, as this is something that can really damage your confidence with speaking new languages.

Of course, in the long term, the only solution is practice, practice, practice. This video tutorial really helped me work out how to position my tongue properly, which is the basic principal to getting your alveolar trill right. If you’re not a visual learner, the WikiHow article is useful too. There are tongue twisters you can use to practice, but assuming that if you’re not confident with your rolled ‘r’s just yet, your level of Spanish isn’t advanced enough for this, so I like to stick to a short list of familiar words to practice with to begin. “Ferrocarril” (railway) is the perfect word to start off.

What works best for you? Does anyone have any other tips?

I had no idea that the UK had a National Scrabble Championship, but we do, and this year was the 40^th anniversary! Wayne Kelly from Warrington beat Gary Oliver from Southampton to win his very first official Scrabble title, having entered in previous years and not reaching the final.

The contestants entered months of heats, with over 300 players battling for a place in the final. The final itself consisted of five matches, the winner being the player who won the most matches out of five. Mr Kelly used the words “caromel,” (meaning to turn into caramel) worth 69 points, and “travails,” worth 74 points, to seal his victory.

Potential contestants need to register with the ABSP (Association for British Scrabble Players) to be eligible for next year’s competition – the prize money is £2000!

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.

Well, the short answer is no.  However, it’s actually possible to learn how to read and pronounce hangul, the Korean written language, in a study session or two.

To the casual observer, hangul appears to be a pictographic script, like Chinese or ancient Egyptian. In actual fact, it’s an alphabetic language with fewer letters than English.  There are 14 consonants and 10 vowels in Korean, and they are grouped together to form written characters that represent single syllables.

There are some great resources out there for learning, and Joophas collected a few of them in this very comprehensive post.  If you go to the end of the post, there are some very useful links, as well as some beautiful script/pronunciation charts.

If you manage to associate each letter with its sound, and become familiar with how they fit together in script, you will be able to read Korean out loud in no time.  Of course, knowing what you’re saying is the next important step! 

Have you got any useful Korean language tips?

Since its beginnings, the Internet has been held mainly in the realm of languages that are able to be written in the English alphabet.  Sure, there are plenty of websites available in every language imaginable, but their domain names (or URLs, URIs) have had to be written in anglicised form.  You may not think that this small part of a site has that much impact on users, but for those who are unused to reading or writing English, even transliterations of their own language can be difficult.  Imagine seeing http://语言培训.com and trying to remember it to put into your browser.

So the big news is that the internet regulatory organisation Icann has approved a proposal to allow people to register domain names in non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.  According to Icann, over half of the 1.6 billion internet users in the world, over half use non-Latin scripts, so this change should have a significant impact on the ease of use of the internet for many people.  It may also mean that there will be many more new users of the internet, as sites become more accessible in their audience’s native languages.

If you are learning a language with a cyrillic or pictorial script, this may represent a new challenge for you!  After International Domain Names (IDNs) are introduced sometime next year, it could make search engine experiences a lot more interesting.  Good luck with finding the information you want in the language you want!

Source: Guardian. Image: aljazeera.net.

German clothing and perfume producer Joop! has tried and failed to trademark a punctuation mark.  The company attempted to claim the exclamation mark as their own, and were denied by the European Court of First Instance.  The ruling claimed that people would not automatically associate the punctuation mark with the company.  The company tried to register the symbol both on its own and in a box, and applications were declined both times.

I’m not sure what I would think about having to worry about copyright rules when using a single symbol, so I’m quite happy to hear that punctuational freedom continues!

Source: EU court rejects “!” as JOOP! trademark - CNBC.com

I was watching a new TV series the other night (I’m not going to name it but anyone who knows anything about it will know what I’m talking about), and some of the characters are named after the NATO phonetic alphabet that’s been adopted by many military and civilian organisations around the world. That’s the Alpha Bravo Charlie one, if you weren’t sure.

Quite a few years ago I memorised this alphabet, partially because I worked for a mail carrier, and partially out of my own interest. For some reason I like to be able to spell things using it “Yes, that’s Wendy - Whisky Echo November Delta Yankee” (I am a giant dork).  If, for whatever reason, you need to be able to spell something using the phonetic alphabet, but you can’t remember it, you can use this handy tool.  I’m sure someone can think of some valid use for it.

After a little bit of investigation, I found this page, which is fairly old, but very comprehensive. It contains information about systems used in other languages as well. This wiki is more succinct, and the table is easier to look at. I like how the Royal Navy used Xerxes during WWI, and I giggle to myself when I imagine big burly military men spelling words out using Duff, Nancy, Pup, Pudding, Queenie, Quack, and Willie. I guess words had different connotations back then.

Interestingly, the current system was developed with international speakers in mind, and the words that caused the most confusion in different accents (Coca, Metro, Nectar, Union, and Extra) were replaced by less ambiguous ones (Charlie, Mike, November, Uniform, and X-Ray).

I think the makers of the TV show tweaked things a little bit, though, as Sierra and Echo are better names for characters than, say, Uniform, Kilo and Hotel. I imagine that if the main characters were called Sugar and Easy (as in the 1941-1956 US and RAF phonetic alphabets), it might’ve been quite a different show.

If you’ve ever had to type a handful of words in a foreign language, but don’t use that foreign language enough to warrant adding it to your computer’s language bar, then TypeIt.org may be what you’re looking for.

It has pages for twelve different languages, including a one that lets you type the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for English pronunciation. Unfortunately the keyboard shortcuts only work for Internet Explorer, but even without them, it’s a simple type/click, copy, paste scenario.

If you’re worried about getting your diacritics right, and don’t want to bother with using a character map, inserting a symbol, or changing your keyboard input language (and having to remember where the right keys are in the different layout), then check it out. It has character sets for Czech, French, German, Hungarian, IPA (English), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

A recent study by a Hong Kong research team has shown that developmental dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains, depending on whether they read Chinese or English.

When a child learns to read, it is somewhat of a major change in the development of a young brain, which is not surprising, as reading isn’t really a natural skill to learn.  Up until very recently, experts thought that the difference between pictographic languages (e.g. Chinese) and alphabetic languages (e.g. English) was that they used different neural pathways in the brain.  The study by Tan et al (published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) has discovered that not only different neural paths, but entirely different brain structures are the focus for the different styles of writing.

English is a somewhat phonemic language, in that when people learn to read it, they learn which letters correspond to which sounds, and then use these to build up words.  When people learn how to read Chinese, they memorize hundreds, and then thousands, of symbols, which represent both words and sounds.  Becoming a skilled reader changes the brain, and becoming a skilled reader of English seems to change entirely different parts of the brain than does becoming a skilled reader of Chinese.

The implication of the study is that not all methods of therapy will work for all sufferers of dyslexia.  Suggested methods to help Chinese readers involve more memory-focussed exercises, whereas English readers are given more letter-to-sound based activities.

It also means that it is very possible for one person to be dyslexic in one language but perfectly capable in another.

It can also help to explain why it is so difficult for adults to begin learning a language that has a writing style completely different to one’s native language.  If you grew up learning an alphabetic language, mapping out another alphabet probably won’t be too difficult, but getting your head around Chinese characters is a completely different story.  Our brains haven’t had the practise.  Knowing that our brains are still somewhat flexible, though, means that, as usual, we can be successful if we just keep on trying!