Language Trainers Blog

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!

So I guess I don’t have my finger on the pulse, because March 4th was National Grammar Day, and I had no idea it was happening until it already had*.  The day, a chance to celebrate grammar and language in general, was started in 2008 by the founder of SPOGG (Society for the Protection of Good Grammar), and hosted by Mignon Fogarty (also known as Grammar Girl, who brings us the brilliant Quick and Dirty Tips).

Check out the National Grammar Day site for ways to celebrate and find out more about grammar and language, including links to some great cartoons, resources, e-cards and t-shirts. Let that grammar slacker in your life know it’s important to you (well, if it is, of course).

From the site, 10 grammar myths exposed:

1. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence.
2. You shouldn’t start a sentence with the word “however.”
3. “Irregardless” is not a word.
4. There is only one way to write the possessive form of a word that ends in “s.”
5. Passive voice is always wrong.
6. “I.e.” and “e.g.” mean the same thing.
7. You use “a” before words that start with consonants and “an” before words that start with vowels.
8. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.”
9. You shouldn’t split infinitives.
10. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.

(Click here for more information about the list above.)

Did you celebrate the occasion? Do you think grammar deserves its own day?

*I think this is a failing of people who start ‘national’ days.  They should really go big and go international. Grammar is important everywhere!

I’m sure you’ve considered a day when you would be interacting with humanoid robots on a daily basis, right?  Well, that day is coming up soon in South Korea.  The government will spend about 45 million USD on an “R-Learning” program that will put English-speaking robot teachers into preschools and kindergartens nationwide by next year.

Of course, the kids won’t be supervised entirely by these bots, but they will be involved with duties like singing songs and telling stories.  As with many non-English speaking countries, there just aren’t enough qualified English language teachers (let alone native speakers to interact with students), so this easily-standardised method is definitely a viable option.  Most of us wouldn’t be comfortable speaking to a robot, but if kids are acclimatised early, this could lead the way to further robo-education.

With all the advances in computer and robot technology, do  you think that there will soon be a replacement for real live teachers?

Source: Crave blog. Image: ocularinvasion.

It sounds like a normal-enough story: a 3-year-old born to Chinese parents in America is brought back to China and so needs a Chinese teacher because she only understands English. The odd part? The ‘child’ is a giant panda.

Because of an agreement between China and several other countries, any pandas (and their offspring) sent out of China to foreign zoos are only on loan for study purposes, and must eventually return to their homeland.

Mei Lan, a panda born in Atlanta, Georgia, is due to move to a breeding centre in Sichuan province in China this week.  As part of her welcome and orientation, the centre is arranging for a Chinese language tutor to teach her some basic phrases, as she has only ever heard English.  She will be also be weaned off the biscuits she was used to in the US, and moved on to a Chinese recipe supplemented by fresh bamboo.

I’m not sure how fast pandas can learn commands, though.  If their general behaviour is anything to go by, it will be a slow process!

Source: LA Times.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary in the UK, has said that every secondary school student should have the opportunity to learn Mandarin, and other ‘up and coming’ languages.

With mandatory language study for seven-to-11-year-olds coming into effect next year, this recommendation will no doubt spread to primary schools.

Even though students will by no means be forced to study Chinese (any language will do), there have been a lot of arguments against attempting to make the language accessible to every student.  For a start, where will these teachers come from?  There are very few students studying Mandarin at present, and most teachers would come from that demographic.  It has been suggested that there would be specialist language centres that students would go to in order to study, but is this a practical solution?  Another major argument is that Chinese is only the predicted most-useful foreign language for kids of this generation (although other recommendations are Russian, Polish, and even Indonesian).  When I was growing up, Japanese was the next big thing, and it wasn’t so long ago that people thought everyone would need to speak Russian. Will Chinese ever be useful to the everyman in the UK?

I think that the focus should be taken of the specific languages being recommended, and put on the fact that kids will need to do second language study.  Although I was quick to drop languages when I was younger, I did enjoy them, and wish I had continued for longer.  If we can instil a love for language learning in the next generations, regardless of the language they choose, it will never be a bad thing.

Which language do you think will be essential in the next 10 or 15 years?

Source: Telegraph.

Once again, President Obama and his wife (sometimes dubbed Mobama) have led the way in terms of most-used words of this year.  They were only eclipsed by Twitter, and nearly by King of Pop Michael Jackson.  I guess it’s unsurprising that other top words of 2009 were H1N1 (or swine flu), and stimulus, but I am a bit sad that vampire came in at number 5.  I can only assume that it was related to the popularity of recent films from the Twilight franchise.

Click for the top words of 2009, and, if you’re interested, the top words of the decade (including Global Warming, 9/11, Obama).

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.

Some people love it, some people hate it, a lot of people need it, and for many, it’s all they have.  But how many people celebrate the diversity that is the English language?  A staggering 2 billion people speak it to some degree, and the minority are native speakers.  It’s often claimed that it’s a difficult language that cannibalises words from everywhere, but to many, this is a sign of progress and something to be glad of.

The English Project has taken it upon themselves to designate October 13 English Language Day.  Because October 13 (in 1362) was the first time an English speech was used to open parliament in the UK, the theme of the first English Language Day is the often-confusing topic of legal language.  As even native speakers can find legalese difficult, it puts native and non-native speakers on more of an even playing field.

Check out the Ideas page to get some inspiration for how to celebrate.  Even if you’re not in the UK, you can participate by logging onto the website and filling in the survey.

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.

Many people choose a name in their adopted language, in order to communicate more easily with people who are native speakers.  If you decide to choose a new alias, it will show people you are eager to involve yourself in their language and culture.  It also helps conversation move more smoothly, as saying names in foreign languages and accents interrupts the flow of native speech.

I’m sure we’ve all seen a few adopted names that have made us giggle to ourselves.  So how do you choose a name that won’t be old-fashioned, odd, meaningless, or inappropriate?

Choose something similar to your existing name. This is not necessary, and sometimes not possible, but it will help both you and others remember what it is.

Get a second opinion. Talk to a native speaker you trust (more than one, if possible), and who can explain the name to you (or give you some more options).

Ask if your name “sounds right” - that is, it’s not obsolete or weird.  I was listening to a female friend choosing a Chinese name, and a Chinese guy remarked that he would never marry a girl who was called one of the options.  A name may sound fine to you, but it may be for the opposite gender.  Typically, only native speakers know this kind of thing.

Check for other meanings or connotations. Make sure you’re aware of any other meanings, or words that sound similar.  When my father was choosing an English name, he rejected several names because they sounded like unpleasant nouns in English.  In the end he decided not to have an English name at all, which of course he had every right to do.

Go with something you like! Whether it be unconventional or unusual, if it means something special to you, go for it.

Have you had to choose a foreign name?  How did you choose it, and were you happy with your decision?