Language Trainers Blog

The World Shakespeare Festival takes place next year in locations around the UK, starting from 23^rd April. As part of this event, the Globe Theatre in London will be taking on one of its most ambitious projects yet. The project, entitled Globe to Globe, encompasses 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, each performed in a different language. This will run for 6 weeks only, from 21^st April – 9^th June 2012.

If you’d like to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Korean, Macbeth in Polish, Hamlet in Lithuanian, or Richard II in Palestinian Arabic, tickets start at £5 and are available here.

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 things I find fascinating about languages is connotations. Even if some languages (or even cities or countries) share the same words, the common meanings may be completely different.

Today I learned that in China, you can use the term 爱人 (àiren, literally love person) to mean your husband, wife, partner, sweetheart. A man can introduce his wife to people as his àiren, and the wife can do the same. I find this quite sweet and, as a person who severely dislikes most terms for ’significant other’ in English (including partner, other half, better half), I think it does the job quite well. There’s also the added bonus of not having to define your relationship to strangers (yes, there’s a stigma about not being married in a lot of places).

Unfortunately, the same phrase in Japan translates to the English meaning of lover. This conveys a somewhat illicit meaning, a mistress, affair, or some other kind of secret relationship. Imagine the staid Japanese coming to China and seeing people introducing their lovers in such a casual way!

Do you know of any other interesting differences in connotation?

In the ongoing debate between language prescriptionists and descriptionists, I generally sit somewhere in the middle (but a little to the side of the people who believe there is a right and a wrong way to say something). With English as fluid as it is, there’s no real point in telling people that they’re doing something wrong, and besides, the fact that the language grows and changes so fast is one of the best things about it.

However, I recently read a blog post on Wordnik that made me stop and think. In updates of dictionaries, definitions of words are sometimes edited for length, modified, or added to (reflecting the changing use of language, of course). However, what happens when an integral part of the definition is removed altogether?

In the latest update of the OED, the definition for orthoepy was changed slightly, from “correct, accepted, or customary pronunciation” to “accepted or customary pronunciation” (draft edition September 2010). It may not seem a big change, but I feel that the missing word ‘correct’ is crucial. How are we supposed to have a standard if we only know what is commonly used? I know that in many cases the popularly-believed concept becomes somewhat acceptable, but where do we draw the line? How will I prove I’m right when I’m having an argument with someone who pronounces ‘pronunciation’ ‘pronounciation’?

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!

Although in theory the English that you use (whether American or British) shouldn’t matter too much these days - there is a lot of crossover, and in general the dialects are mutually intelligible - there are still debates about which is ‘better’ to use. Individuals, organisations, and even countries have their preferences, which may or may not be politically based.

I think, in general, the trend is moving from a preference for the British form, and now people seem to be leaning towards Americanised English in non-English speaking countries. This is unsurprising, as American media is internationally pervasive, via Internet, print, and film.

Living in China, I have seen that the more traditional texts, more common in smaller towns and cities, are based on British English. New books often focus on American English. Perhaps American English is being associated with being more modern (it’s certainly sometimes simpler).

From a post by Harold Raley in the Galveston Daily News:

Decades earlier, while toying with the idea of teaching English in Spain, the Spanish let me know, politely to be sure, that they — and most Europeans — preferred the British variety. Now, however, I was told it didn’t matter. Either version was fine with them. English was English.

It took many years for American English to achieve parity, and in certain regions — Africa, for instance — it still has a long way to go. But in certain ways it appears to be on the way to becoming the favored version.

In my work as an editor, a number of writers — from Canada and India — have asked me to “Americanize” their British expressions and spelling in their book manuscripts. Unlike the English language schools in Spain that rejected my application decades ago, some now actively recruit Americans.

Native speakers almost always choose the way they were brought up as ‘right’, but, if you are a non-native speaker of English: which English do you prefer?

Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds taught us all the important lesson that the wrong hand signal could well get you killed (if you were pretending to be a Nazi in the wrong place and time).  In the film, someone gets gunned down because he uses the wrong hand signal for the number three.

A lot of people use the middle three fingers to denote the number three, though some use other combinations.  In the town in Germany mentioned in Inglourious Basterds, people use the thumb and first two fingers.  In China, many people use the last three fingers (similar to the A-OK hand signal).  I found myself using the latter yesterday when buying three bananas.  It used to feel wholly unnatural to me, but it suddenly doesn’t feel so weird any more.  Strange.

Which signal do you use for three?

*Out of interest, you can also use ‘finger’ as a measure of alcohol.  If you hold your finger horizontally against the bottom of the glass and fill it to the depth of the top of your finger, that’s ‘one finger’.  So, three fingers would be a pretty strong drink!

I was looking over some things at work today, and realised that the word 画 (huà) had been used as the translation for both draw and paint.  I brought it up with the author of the document, and she said that there was no difference in Chinese, and asked if there was a difference in English.  I told her it was quite a big difference (draw being associated with pens, pencils, crayons, etc., and paint being done with, well, paint).  She discussed this with another colleague for a while, and I looked up 画 in the dictionary.

It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means several different things, with the meaning usually worked out from the context or the other characters around it.  In this case, the meaning, to Chinese people, is the same.  It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as traditional Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush, not a pen.

In the end, as I did want to distinguish the difference between the two English words, we compromised with 画 (油画), where the first character (yóu) is the noun paint, and 画 means…paint. And draw.

I’m currently in a situation where I speak a dialect to a moderate level, but the main language to a lower level (Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively).  I understand more Mandarin than I would otherwise, because some words and structures are very similar.  But listening comprehension doesn’t always mean oral proficiency, and it can be difficult to reproduce the unfamiliar words, especially in tonal languages.  I know that the pronunciation is different, but I don’t often know how it’s different.  I haven’t come across too many false friends yet (where a foreign word is similar to a word in your native language, but it means a totally different thing), but I’m sure they will arise.

One way to bridge the gap is to try the word in your own language, and sometimes the native speaker will understand you.  My Cantonese-speaking friend has had mixed success with this method in Mandarin-speaking cities, but it seems to work for quite a few food items, which is the important thing!

Do you speak two languages that have similarities (e.g. Spanish and Italian)?  I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for successful communication in both.

In my last post, I talked about the usefulness of dictionaries, and how they will inevitably struggle to keep up with changing languages.  No language resource will ever be completely current, as, by their nature, they are describing what has already happened, words that have already been used.

I read a great post on Confessions of a Language Addict, that discussed this very issue, along with giving some interesting advice about dealing with differences between spoken and documented language, whether the language is natural or created.

When you’re learning a language, real or made-up, one of the struggles you’re going to face is that no resource is going to be completely accurate, at least not for the time you’re learning it. Study French and you’ll think that “I don’t know” is je ne sais pas, pronounced “zhuh nuh say pah.” But you’re more likely to hear “shay pas.” Orthography hasn’t caught up to speech - and probably won’t. That’s because of the strange byplay between orthography and speech: People will still say “zhuh nuh say pah” for emphasis because when you’re carefully sounding something out, you sound it out as it is written, not as it is transcribed. Likewise in English, “I’m gonna go ta New York tamara” turns into “I am going to go to New York to-morrow” if you’re asked to repeat yourself. So writing isn’t always great for everyday speech, but it’s marvelous if you want to talk to someone as if he is half deaf.

So what can we do?  Well, if you are determined to use a formal version of your target language, I think you’ll be fine to use written resources as they are.  But what if you want to learn to talk to real people?  To be understood by them and speak, as much as possible, as native speakers do?

Don’t take written material as gospel.  Embrace the fact that there will be differences between what you read and what you hear and experience.  Trust that maybe your ears aren’t deceiving you!

Learning from a native speaker is always a great direction to take.  He or she will be able to answer any questions you have about the differences between textbooks and real speech.  In order to really see language at work, though, you have to be able to hear real people speak to each other.  Beginners will often need slower versions of conversations, or breakdowns of examples.  Podcasts are a great way to go, especially if they have some written material to go along with them.  If you can’t get out into an environment where people speak your native language, try audio books or internet radio.  Repeat what you hear.

Dialects and regional usage mean that nobody will ever speak the imaginary ‘real’ language.  This should encourage you!  Listen, repeat what you hear, speak the language, and revel in the fact that people begin to understand you on their terms.