Language Trainers Blog

LOTS of language events to look forward in the coming weeks and months around the UK! Here’s a round up…

• Kinoteka Polish Film Festival runs from 7th – 17th March.

Venues include the Tate Modern, Riverside Studios and the Barbican Cinema in London, FACT in Liverpool, the Filmhouse in Edinburgh and the Queens’ Film Theatre in Belfast.

The 11th annual festival will host not only films but Q&As with directors, free kid’s animation workshops and interactive cinema workshops for budding writers and directors.

• Trafalgar Square once again hosts the Maslenitsa Russian Festival, this year on 16th March.

This is a free folk festival which marks the beginning of Spring as well as being a Russian Orthodox celebration. The festivities are to include music and theatre performances and a bazaar with an assortment of handicrafts. As always you can sample a variety of Russian dishes and maybe even some vodka!

Waterstones in Piccadilly will also be holding a Russian literary event, including a poetry reading and a competition to win Russian books, on 13th March.

• The London Asian Film Festival also runs from 7th – 17th March and is this year hosted by multiple venues, including the BFI Southbank and the House of Commons!

• A heads up for the Shubbak Festival which runs from 22nd June – 6th July.

A biennial event, Shubbak is a celebration of Arabic culture from all 22 Arabic speaking countries.  The festival encompasses architecture, dance, film, literature, music, poetry, theatre and visual arts.

From biennial to bi-annual, Hyper Japan is back at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre this July, from 26th – 28th. It’s always packed so if you’re interested, book now! My good friend Emily is the food/drink photographer for the event; you can see her pictures on her blog here and get a taste of what it’s all about!

These events are a great way to further immerse yourself in the culture of the language you’re studying so I recommend you take the opportunity to visit if you can!

Ed Manley and James Cheshire from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), were busy this summer. The two researchers collected data from 3.3 million tweets during the London 2012 Games, using Twitter’s API.  They then created an impressive looking map of all of the locations of those tweets. Not only that, but the map is colour coded for each language. The grey parts of the map were tweets in English, which makes up the majority of it. There are pockets of colour elsewhere though, in descending order representing Spanish (white), French (red), Turkish (blue), Arabic (green), Portuguese (purple), German (orange), Italian (yellow), Malay (cyan), and Russian (violet). There were 66 languages used, identified and recorded. The languages tweeted least were Georgian, Belarusian, Telugu and Armenian.

Ed Manley explains that Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines, was excluded from the data as “many of these classifications included just uses of English terms such as ‘hahahahaha’, ‘ahhhhhhh’ and ‘lololololol’.” It was initially the 7th most tweeted language.

They are quick to point out that the work absolutely isn’t a true representation of the diverse demographic of London. A lot of tweets are located on main roads and along train lines. Also, they have only included tweeters who have a good GPS location and are connected to the internet.

Click here to see the map.

Want to learn a new language in London? Try our German courses, Italian lessons, or even learn English!

I saw mention in a language learning blog post about using a bilingual bible to help study English. To be honest, as a non-believer, this had never crossed my mind, but it makes  a lot of sense. If you read content that is both important to you and familiar to you in your own language, mastering the translation should work pretty well. Provided the translation is done well, of course. I guess the main problem I can think of is that some of the vocabulary and phrasing might not exactly be what you will use in real life, but at the same time, meaningful content will stick better in your mind, and any language practice is a good thing!

On the flip side, if you are interested in other faiths, using a translation in your own language might be a good introduction to reading, say, the Koran (or Qur’an) in its original Arabic, or traditional texts in their original languages.

Have you tried reading the bible or other traditional material in a different language?

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?

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.

I’ve talked previously about learning language through other personal interests or hobbies, but how about through other academic subjects, or through general knowledge?  Imagine being able to play Trivial Pursuit in your new language!

One way to boost your vocabulary is to learn what countries, cities, and people are called in your adopted language. You might even learn a few things about each place on the way.

Nations Online is a fascinating website with all sorts of information about the world on it.  Their Country Lists page has links to lists of countries in eight different languages, as well as the local names for places.  It also has lists of countries sorted by the mega languages they speak (Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, and French).

If you are learning one of these languages, it could be an interesting place to start research into geography, culture, traditions, and even local dialects of your chosen language.

Curt Smothers has developed an interesting exercise for Spanish learners based around Spanish-speaking country names, the names for their nationalities, and fun facts about the places.  This exercise could easily be adapted for any language, and is interesting for children and adults alike.

Some fun facts:

• Belize is the only non-Spanish speaking country in Central America.  Its official language is English.
• Papua New Guinea is a small country in the Pacific, and is the most linguistically-complex country in the world.  Over 800 languages are spoken there.
• The most widely-spoken languages in the world are (from most speakers to least): Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, and Arabic.
• Africa is the continent with the most living languages, at over 2,000.
• There are nearly 7,000 living languages in the world.

Go to en.bab.la to order a full-size poster of the map above.

I’m not really a fan of acronyms like LOL (laugh[ing] out loud), so I tend to stick with the written representations of laughing sounds, and the ones I usually use are hahaha (that’s funny!), hehehe (that’s kind of mean!), and hee (cute! squee!).

I’ve always thought the Spanish versions – jajaja, jejeje, jijiji – were really cute, but I have a tendency to read jajaja in a German accent, so it says ‘yes yes yes’.

Here are a few more ways* to show your humour in other languages:

Chinese
哈哈 / ha ha
嘿嘿 / hei hei
呵呵 / he he

Russian
ха-ха-ха (hahaha)
хи-хи (heehee)

Malaysian
kahkahkah (hahaha from comic books)

Turkish

eki eki (used in comics, as the older way of laughing)
muhaha (evil laughter)
nihaha (evil laughter)
puhaha, uhaha, zuhaha (used if something’s really funny)

German
hnhnhn, hmhmhm, chrchrchr (giggle)

My favourite at the moment is a Chinese coworker’s use of hohoho.  I don’t think she really means to sound like Santa Claus, but it brightens my day.

*Many of these examples are from WordReference Forums.

From a recent article (Google translates into Welsh as ‘No’):

IT’S just the latest in a long line of tools designed by one of the world’s best-known internet companies to make our lives that little bit easier.

But users of Google Translate – which has followed in the footsteps of the firm’s maps, images and news functions – have spotted one significant flaw: it won’t translate into Welsh.

Well, I use Google Translate via (Mozilla add-on) Ubiquity all the time, but I’d never noticed the lack of Welsh, to be honest.

Bethan Williams, chair of the Language Act Group – Cymdeithas yr Iaith, said: “For a multi-national company like Google failing to consider the Welsh language with translating tools is disgraceful.

“They offer translation services in Arabic, Hindi, Maltese and a host of other languages so why not Welsh?

Google Translate is currently available to work between 42 languages, and the Google search page is already available in Welsh.  Now, before any angry Welsh language speakers email me about my insensitivity, I’d just like to point out that not only would it take an awful lot of man hours to add more languages to an already quite comprehensive and free translation service, but that other languages may have a more pressing need.

According to a 2004 survey, there are approximately 600,000 Welsh speakers living in Wales, while another survey indicated about 130,000 living in England.  Very, very few of these speakers are monoglots (only speak one language, i.e. Welsh).  Therefore, any translation services would likely only be needed by non-Welsh speakers, and not the other way around.

By comparison, over half a billion people speak Arabic, which has multiple dialects and a completely different script to English, and even Galician, which I’d never heard of, has over 3 million speakers in Spain and Portugal.

Now, I’m not telling Welsh language campaigners to get over it, but maybe just to be patient.  Who’s to say which of the thousands of languages spoken in the world gets priority over any of the other ones?

I have found this curious list of English names meanings when they are written in other languages:

Adam (Arabic) skin

Alan (Indonesian) comedian

Alf (Arabic) thousand, millennium

Anna (Arabic) moans and groans

Calista (Portuguese) chiropodist

Camilla (Spanish) stretcher

Cilla (Zarma, Nigeria) basket

Doris (Bajan, Barbados) police van

Eliza (Basque) church

Eve (Rapa Nui, Easter Island) buttocks

Fay (Zarma, Nigeria) divorce

Fred (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) peace

Jim (Korean) baggage

Kim (Ainu, Japan) mountain

Kylie (Dharug, Australia) boomerang

Laura (Greek) groups of monks’ huts

Luke (Chinese) traveller

Marianna (Italian) accomplice who tells a gambler the cards held by other players

Sara (Hausa, Nigeria) snakebite

Sid (Arabic) plaster

Susan (Thai) cemetery

Vera (Italian) wedding ring

Words don’t necessarily keep the same meaning. Simple descriptive words such as ‘rain’ or ‘water’ are clear and necessary enough to be unlikely to change. Other more complex words have often come on quite a journey since they were first coined:

Al-kuhul (Arabic) originally, powder to darken the eyelids; then taken up by alchemists to refer to any fine powder; then applied in chemistry to any refined liquid obtained by distillation or purification, especially to alcohol of wine, which then was shortened to alcohol.

Chauffer (French) to heat; then meant the driver or fan early steam-powered car; subsequently growing to chauffeur.

Hashhashin (Arabic) one who smokes hashish; came to mean assassin.

Manu operare (Latin) to work by hand; then narrowed to the act of cultivating; then to the dressing that was added to the soil, manure.

Prestige (French) conjuror’s trick; the sense of illusion gave way to that of glamour which was then interpreted more narrowly as social standing or wealth.

Sine nobilitate (Latin) without nobility; originally referred to any member of the lower classes; then to somebody who despised their own class and aspired to membership of a higher one; thus snob.

Theriake (Greek) an antidote against a poisonous bite; came to mean the practice of living medicine in sugar syrup to disguise its taste; thus treacle.