Language Trainers Blog

I’ve just finished reading The Word Brain by Bernd Sebastian Kamps. Its tagline is A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning. Initial caps aside, it’s a 70-page document that covers (with a single chapter each) Kamps’s advice on words, listening, reading, teachers, speaking, memory, and nailing. The latter is a term he uses to better encompass the concept of learning a word by heart.

Kamps’s methods are not for the faint of heart, and he mentions this right at the beginning of the book. He presents the total number of hours you are likely to need to reach a competent language level (being able to at least follow along with newspapers and TV news), and drums in the fact that you will need multiple hours of study multiple times a week to make good progress. I agree with this (even though it’s not always possible for people to commit this amount of time).

He puts the different skills into a logical recommended order - listening, reading, then speaking. The kicker is that Kamps suggests not attempting to speak at all until a few months into the language learning process. His reasoning behind this is sound - receiving more input first will invariably improve your understanding, accent, and pronunciation - but I can’t help but feel that this would be a nearly impossible task for a regular person. I’m not sure what he would suggest for those of us who are somewhere in the middle of our language learning process.

The book contains some useful information about spaced repetition, a good introduction to the way the brain stores information, and some very good comparisons between the way children and adults learn language. He also debunks the myth that children are better language learners than adults (and I should add that it is with hindsight that most adults think that language learning was easy when they were children). One piece of new information for me is that if you push any new information into your brain after studying (including spending time on your favourite social network), it will decrease the likelihood that you will remember what you studied later. So, after studying, do something relaxing instead.

According to Kamps, the ideal situation for a language learner would be to be young, have a lot of time, be living in a foreign language immersion situation, and to have a speaker of the language as a lover. Now, most of us will never be in this situation (sadly), but all it means is that the learning will take more time and perhaps more dedication. This book contains a lot of interesting information and suggestions, and I’d like to hear what advice you will take away from it. Let me know in the comments!

Download the full e-book, short version, and mp3 at The Word Brain.

I’m sure it’s happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you’re doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven’t noticed.

So, it turns out that accent imitation, besides being used for intentional and accidental mockery of others, can actually help you to understand the speaker’s accent. A study in the Netherlands has shown that if accented speech is repeated, it helps the listener to better understand it.

The participants in the study were first asked to listen to an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To ensure that the accent was unfamiliar to everyone, the researchers made up a new accent by doing a consistent vowel sound change. After this, the participants were asked to listen to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent. Participants were asked to respond to the sentences in different ways: some repeated the sentence aloud while trying to mimic the new accent, some repeated it in their own accent, some transcribed the sentence, and some only listened. When the sentences were tested again, those that had repeated using the unfamiliar accent did far better than the other groups.

Unfortunately, in real life, even if you know this information it’s not very polite to talk to someone while trying to imitate their speech patterns. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could always use this study as justification.

Full article: Science Daily.

I’d heard that people are more likely to believe a person who speaks with the same accent as them (meaning people will be more likely to think that foreigners are untrustworthy*), and another study has shown some interesting results when comparing listener reactions to different accents.

The study, conducted at the University of Glasgow, used fMRI scans to analyse brain activity in Scottish listeners when they heard people speaking in American, English**, and Scottish accents. Participants listened to recordings of nine different female voices: three of each of American, English, and Scottish accents. The research found that brain activity was significantly different between listening to a native accent and a foreign one (even though all were speaking the same language).

“The pattern of neural activity differed strikingly in response to their own specific accent compared with other English accents,” Bestelmeyer said. “The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that ‘in-group’ voices are processed differently from the ‘out-group.’”

My impression is that it takes a bit more work to understand a foreign accent, which would mean that people might unintentionally seek out people who speak in the same way, as it’s easier on the brain. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily related to in-group and out-group issues. It’s logical that a person finds it easier to understand the speech they have heard all their lives. What do you think?

Article: Science Daily.

*I wonder what kind of Google searches will be drawn in by this phrase.
**The article uses ‘British’, but I chose to use ‘English’, as that’s what I assume they meant (Scottish accents are also British accents).

I was just listening to a 60 Minutes podcast and there was a really interesting story about a woman who has been studying the same group of African elephants for almost two decades.  American scientist Andrea Turkalo has been studying their behaviour, and focusing particularly on the way they communicate.  She can now identify not only what different sounds mean (including greetings, sadness, anger, and all clear), but can even tell the animals apart by their voices.  Turkalo’s long years of research are leading towards a greater understanding of elephant behaviour and social interactions, and even towards a dictionary of sorts, so other people can also understand the communication between the animals.

One of the big steps that lead to a lot more understanding was realising that a lot of the noises that elephants make are actually subsonic - so low that humans can’t hear them.  These low frequencies are used to communicate and locate other elephants to a range of over 2km.  When researchers realised that these sounds existed, they began speeding up their recordings so the sounds became audible, and also examined wave forms on screen.

The range of different ‘expressions’ that elephants use is huge, and the research is fascinating.

For more information, read the transcript, or listen to the podcast (episode released 04 July, ‘The Secret Language of Elephants’ starts around 14:00).

In the kind of news story that you wouldn’t even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines.

She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below).  Unfortunately there’s no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like.

Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the perceived accent change.  As she mentions in the video, she is unsure how long it will last for.  Apparently some people who suffer this kind of change recover after some time.

It’s nice that her mental capacity seems unchanged, although I think it would frustrate me no end to have people think I was a bit simple because of the way I spoke!

Source: Sky News.

It may be a last resort to some people, but hand gestures and miming go a long way towards getting your point across.  Looking like a bit of a fool for a few seconds may save you a lot of time spent searching for vocabulary.  And you may not even look so silly; many people are ‘hand talkers’ and use gestures to go along with everyday speech.

Especially when you’re a beginner, and in a foreign country, gesturing and pointing can be a great help when you don’t know specific vocabulary.  I did have a friend who had to mime some unfortunate bodily functions at a hospital once, but hopefully your experience won’t be as traumatic.  If you’re lucky, the person you’re trying to communicate with will provide you with the vocabulary you need (”ah…tomato!”) once they finally understand your meaning.

If you need any other impetus to start moving your hands, this study has shown that gestures, languages and symbols are all processed in the same regions of the brain, and it may be a carry-over from before humans had speech.  So, waving your arms around could be considered more valid than speaking.  Just remember that some gestures aren’t always polite!

We’ve all had that experience where we know we know a word, but we just can’t recall it.

An American study set out to reproduce this phenomenon to see if there was any difference between monolingual and bilingual speakers’ chances of having a ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ moment.

It has already been documented that people who only speak one language have fewer instances of words on the tips of their tongues, but researchers wanted to know if it was because people are sounding out words in their heads (and bilinguals have around twice as many words in their heads as monolinguals).

To study this, the researchers asked participants to name dozens of different objects (often with rarely-used names, like metronome and gyroscope), and counted the number of tip-of-the-tongue experiences (but only for those instances where the participant actually knew the word).  They found that monolingual participants had fewer occurrences, but that English-Spanish speakers had around the same number of tip-of-the-tongue moments as English-ASL (American Sign Language) speakers.

This led the researchers to believe that we’re not sounding things out in our heads at all (as ASL does not have sounds), but looking through a catalogue of rarely-used words.

Full article: New Scientist.

It seems like it’s human nature to try to find the easiest and fastest way to do things, and this is especially true for things we find difficult or don’t understand.  Language learning seems to be one of the things that people are constantly trying to find a shortcut for.  Are there quick fixes and magic solutions?

There are many websites that claim that it is possible for people to learn a foreign language easily and quickly, and you can get it done simply by being asleep.  One website even tells this fantastic story, of a student who achieved great success using their methods:

In Budapest, Hungary, a student wanted to learn English quickly enough to win a BBC contest. Using the sleep-learning method , he memorized one thousand and twenty-six English words in six weeks and won first prize!

Sounds easy, right?  Well, an EFL teacher thought he would ask some people who had tried similar methods.  Not only did he find out that there was a lot more work involved than just listening to audio while you sleep, but that the students who had tried it didn’t feel like they were learning about grammar and sentence structures.  They did report that they became more familiar with speech sounds of English, and improved their pronunciation, though.  The teacher also proposed that doing about 15 minutes of study right before sleeping, and right after waking up (as was instructed in the sleep learning courses) could be beneficial to all students.  Read his full post here.

Has anyone else had experience of learning or enhancing their learning by listening to things while they sleep?

Speaking of swearing, a study published last month has shown that it might actually be good for us.

Although swearing is looked down upon in polite company, researchers have begun to investigate why it’s such a common response to hurting ourselves.  A study that asked college students to hold their hands in icy cold water found that those who were told to repeat an expletive of their choice could withstand the pain longer than those who chanted a neutral word.

One suggested reason for this is that swearing is related to a ‘fight or flight‘ reflex triggered deep in the brain, and may be associated with startling or attempting to intimidate an attacker.

But cursing is more than just aggression, explains Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has studied our use of profanities for the past 35 years. “It allows us to vent or express anger, joy, surprise, happiness,” he remarks. “It’s like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it’s built into you.”

In extreme cases, the hotline to the brain’s emotional system can make swearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence. But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain.

I am quite fond of the car horn analogy.  A personal theory, too, is that we need to get attention when we’re injured.  At the very least, letting people know you’ve just stubbed your toe might get a sympathetic ‘awww’, which always makes you feel a little better.

A caveat mentioned in the article is that the more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.

Full article from Scientific American.