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)

Language journal has published a study by three linguists at the University of Lyon, showing that certain languages are more or less equally efficient.

The study compared the efficiency of conveying information in spoken German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Researchers took a sample group of 59 people, who each read a sample text in their native language. The recordings were then edited to remove the pauses, and syllables were tallied in order to draw conclusions regarding the density of information communicated in each language.

Japanese was found to be the fastest spoken language, with 7.84 syllables spoken per second. Mandarin Chinese was the slowest, with the average syllabic speech rate at 5.18. However, the researchers note that in ‘faster’ languages, the individual parts of words are shorter, meaning there are more syllables. They concluded that a higher rate of syllables by no means implies that content can be transmitted more quickly.

A more comprehensive study, carried out by University of Klagenfurt linguistics professor Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon in 2010, reached similar conclusions. In this case, 51 different languages were recorded, with Indian language Tegulu found to be the fastest, and Thai the slowest.

The latest study, in more detailed form, can be found here.

One of the many things I find fascinating about living in China is seeing how the foreigners deal with the language. For many people, the only Chinese they know will get them home in a taxi and maybe to a drink at the pub. There are some Chinese words, though, that become part of daily usage for non-native speakers regardless of their language level. Sometimes they are simply Chinese words for things we don’t have in other countries (mostly region-specific foods and dishes). Sometimes they are an interesting reflection of the way life is here.

One of the words in the ‘interesting’ category is 麻烦 (máfan). It basically means trouble. You can also say máfan nǐ, which means ‘Can I trouble you?’ Most foreigners, however, can be heard to say that something is too much máfan, e.g. “I don’t travel in China because it is too much máfan.” There’s something in the Chinese phrase that encapsulates the frustration along with the trouble.

Another common thing to do is to use Chinese verbs in an English way, by adding suffixes like -ing and -ed. The other day, a friend was talking about how Shanghai has been 发展-ing (fāzhǎn-ing) really fast lately. Fāzhǎn means development, or to develop. “There’s been a lot of fāzhǎn around here lately.”

What’s your favourite foreign word that’s made it into your everyday vocabulary?

Chinese is one of those languages where just getting a tone wrong can result in something completely different from what you’d intended, although every language has certain words that are very easy to mix up. The worst is when you are absolutely convinced that you are using the correct word, but it turns out that you just asked for something ridiculous.

The other day, I was telling my teacher that it was OK to eat steak rare, as long as it’s fresh (鲜, xian with a high tone). Unfortunately, it sounded like I was saying 咸 (xian with a rising tone, meaning ’salty’). Obviously, it’s easy to be misunderstood in these situations (and I need to be more careful with my pronunciation).

My teacher then told me a story (I think to make me feel better about my slip up) about a mistake that one of her other students had made. Apparently he was convinced that the word for aubergine (茄子 qié zi) was 孩子 (hái zi, meaning child). So, when he went in to a restaurant and asked for fried child with his rice, the proprietors were so freaked out about a big foreigner asking for something barbaric that they told him they were closed and pushed him out the door. It wasn’t until he wondered why my teacher had been playing with an aubergine (when it was really a child) that he realised his error.

What was your most hilarious (or embarrassing) mix up?

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 usually don’t have a problem getting around in taxis and having basic conversations in Chinese. Apparently my pronunciation is generally pretty good, even though I sometimes still have problems with differentiating the tones. So I was kind of surprised to find a street name that taxi drivers almost never understand when I tell them. It’s not a small street, and it even has a subway station with the same name. It also happens to be the street that I now live on.

I said the street name over and over again in my head, looked up the tones to make sure I was getting them right, but no matter how much I practised (in my head and out loud), as soon as I say it to a taxi driver, he has no idea what I’m talking about, and I get really flustered. Maybe I’ve just started saying it with a sort of hopeful lift at the end, which is definitely not the tone I’m going for. Even worse, they understand it when my boyfriend clarifies, and he barely speaks two words of Chinese.

I know I’m just going to have to keep at it until I get over the mental block I’ve now put in front of the words, but in the meantime, it’s a bit of a struggle to get home. Maybe I’ll just have to start taking the bus.

China isn’t well known for its free speech policies, but occasionally there are big enough issues that the people have to say something.  The most recent uproar in southern China was over language.  Over a thousand outraged protesters came together to oppose a local politician’s push to ban the Cantonese language on a major television network in favour of broadcasting solely in the national language Mandarin.

Cantonese is widely spoken as a first language in Hong Kong, Guangdong province, and in many expat Chinese communities around the world.  Hong Kong’s considerable film and pop music industries are also predominantly in Cantonese.

There have been more than a few controversial incidents where governing bodies have tried to suppress regional dialects within China and surrounding areas, and this is no exception.  News of the protest rally was suppressed on Chinese news networks.  Hopefully this anti-Cantonese proposal will remain just a proposal.

Full article: New York Times.

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.

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!

With the script technology available these days, it’s uncommon for language learners to focus so much on the writing of languages like Japanese and Chinese.  All you need to do is recognise a character, and know what it sounds like, to be able to write it on a computer.  Even in my own study, I am trying to focus more on reading, listening, and speaking, as it seems like it will take a long time to rote learn individual characters.

On the flip side, learning how to write characters yourself helps make them more concrete in your mind, and can really help you understand them and their relationships to other words and characters.  A useful tool I’ve found to help you write Japanese or Chinese (on the computer, no less!) is Skritter.  With Skritter, you can practice writing characters on the screen, and the program can help you with stroke order as well as giving useful information about the characters and radicals.  It also provides a tracking service so you can see your progress, and focus more on characters that you are having trouble with.

They provide a two week full service trial for learners of Japanese and Chinese (both traditional and simplified), so if you want to improve your writing skills, check it out!