Language Trainers Blog

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?

I stumbled across yet another online dictionary service the other day, but this one offers a little bit more than the standard single word definition service.  MyDictionary.net offers dictionaries in twelve different languages, as well as translating words and phrases between these.  It also has a foreign language keyboard display, which is handy, though quite tiny.

My favourite feature has to be the recent search display.  The main page displays the last 20 or 50 searches completed, and I find it fascinating to see what words and phrases people are looking up.

Here are some of the recent searches I’ve seen so far:

The ordinary or predictable:
¡buena suerte! (Spanish) - good luck!/God speed! (English)
mon petit (French) - my little (English)
saladier (French) - bowl (English)

The technical:
βραδυσεισμός (Greek) - bradyseism (English - a geological term)

The oddly specific:
a prueba de humedad (Spanish) - damp-proof (English)
sordid merchant (English) - 市侩 / shi4kuai4(Chinese - according to the two translators I use, this means ‘Philistine’ and ‘money grubber’)

The obscure idiom:
tip (somebody) the wink (English) - информация: давать частную информацию, намекнуть, знак: делать знак украдкой, подмигивать (Russian)

What were the last things you needed translations for?

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.

A Chinese student from Sichuan province failed his gaokao (final examinations) essay because it was written in ancient characters, some of which were from thousands of years ago.  From Shanghaiist:

The script, called “甲骨 Jia Gu” (oracle bone script) is from the Bronze Age and is usually found on ox bones or turtle shells. Professors who translated the essay into modern Chinese found that 19-year-old Huang Ling’s character use was largely correct, but his essay was awarded an 8 out of 80 (later lowered to 6).

The student’s score would normally mean that he would not be accepted into university, as Chinese requirements are usually very strict.  However, examiners were impressed by his knowledge, and correct usage, of the so-called Oracle Bone script, and he may be accepted into Sichuan University after all.

Although I applaud his risky performance, I wonder if the results would be as positive if a British student wrote an essay in Middle English, or a French student in Gaulish.  I kind of like to hope so.

In just the last week, I’ve been involved in two separate mix-ups using the words food and foot.

In the first instance, my friend and I were heading to a bar she recommended. On the list of positives about the place was what I heard as baby food. When I obviously had no idea what she was talking about, or why you would want baby food in a bar, we discussed it further, which included some amusing miming. It turns out that baby-foot is what they call table football, or foosball, in France (and other places). I learned something new.

In the second instance, I taught a Business English class where I introduced the phrase to eat your own dog food. This is predominantly used in the IT industry, and is used when a company uses its own product in-house, before the latest version is released to the public. The practice of dogfooding has its benefits and drawbacks. Anyway, after the class, which told the story of the dog food company whose advertising campaign led to the phrase, I received some homework which repeatedly used the term dogfooting. I can’t work out what she thinks eating your own dog foot involves, but it doesn’t sound fun. Maybe it’s putting your foot in your mouth, but even worse?

I’m not sure whether the problem is with the interchangeable /d/ and /t/ sounds, the long and short versions of oo, or some combination of the two. I know with the first example, it was probably a combination of mispronunciation and my trying to hear a phrase that sounded familiar (but didn’t make sense). Just looking at the two words, you would think they would rhyme, but they don’t. It’s no wonder non-native speakers get confused.

You’d think that the word ‘billion’ would mean the same to all English speakers, but, in fact, the two different meanings of the word are vastly different - 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand million and one million million).  The first is the current ‘global’ understanding of the word (using the short scale, sometimes known as American usage), and the second, much larger number, uses the long scale or British usage.  As the numbers get bigger, the difference between them gets larger, as the short scale increases by thousands (e.g. a trillion is a thousand billions, or 10¹²), and the long scale increases by millions (e.g. a trillion is a million (long scale) billions, or 10¹⁸).

Most countries use the short scale, these days, but many still use the long scale.  Some countries, such as France and England, have used both scales at different times in history, so it’s important to check sources if you ever come across billion, trillion, etc in older publications.

The French word billion, German Billion; Dutch biljoen; Swedish biljon; Finnish biljoona; Danish billion; Spanish billón and the Portuguese word bilião all refer to 10¹², being long scale terms. Therefore, each of these words translates to the modern English word: “trillion” (10¹² in the short scale), and not “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).

On the other hand, the Brazilian Portuguese word bilhão (note the alternate spelling to the European Portuguese variant) and the Welsh word biliwn both refer to 10⁹, being short scale terms. Each of these words translates to the English word “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).  [Wikipedia.]

I think the best thing to do if you have to communicate in such large numbers is just to use the numerals instead of the words!

When I first heard the song It’s All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and friends, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about.  This was back in 1997, though, when American slang wasn’t quite as widespread as it is now.  These days, I’m quite aware that benjamin* refers to a US $100 note, because of the portrait of former president and inventor Benjamin Franklin.  It’s more commonly used in hip-hop circles than everyday English, and has been mentioned on film (2002 film All About the Benjamins) and TV.  Puff Daddy (aka P Diddy, aka Sean Combs) has been credited with the first use of this term.  He even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary:

The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line “My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins.” (from A.Word.A.Day.)

Benjamin* has also been used for many years in some European cultures to mean the youngest person in a family or group.  “The benjamin of the family”, “le benjamin de la famille” (French), “el benjamin de la familia” (Spanish), and “der Benjamin der Familie” (German) all mean the youngest child of a family.  It’s an older term that refers to the biblical Benjamin, who was the youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons.

*A word that is derived from the name of a particular person is called an eponym.

FreeRice is an excellent website that combines education and charity.  The concept is simple: answer a question correctly and the UN World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry family somewhere in the world.

FreeRice started out as an English vocabulary game.  They would show you a word and then give four possible definitions or synonyms.  Since then, they have added English grammar, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and several other subject areas like mathematics, chemistry, and geography.

The difficulty level automatically adjusts depending on whether you get the question right or wrong, so the more questions you get right, the harder it becomes.  A great feature is that it will tell you the correct answers to the questions you miss, and repeats them later on in the game - an excellent revision method.

The  highest English vocabulary level they use is 60.  I’ve gotten to a maximum of 50 the last few times I’ve played.  The most memorable word I’ve learned today is jalousie, which is a type of window blind.  I actually guessed the answer correctly, even though it looks like a terrible attempt at spelling ‘jealousy’.

There’s no minimum or maximum number of questions, so there’s no excuse for having no time to feed people in need.  See if you can get to the highest level in your area of expertise, or even better, in the language you’re studying.

They say that nothing is free, but the cost of this is hardly worth mentioning, and the benefits far outweigh the effort of pointing and clicking!

I’ve been working on an English pronunciation project recently, and we came up against the age-old (well, not really) question of American (AmE*) vs British (BrE*) English pronunciation. This particular project is required to use BrE, and the standard UK IPA symbols. I realised that if and when I need to create an AmE version, I will need to use a different set of phonetic symbols (notably for vowels), and teach some words in completely different ways. For example, AmE doesn’t really use the sound /ɔ:/ (the first syllable in the British ‘water’), but pronounces a whole lot more r’s than its British counterpart.

This led me to the question of choosing an accent. When you’re about to learn a new language, do you consider which dialect or accent you will be picking up, and will it matter in the future? Can the complete beginner even tell the difference? If you are learning English, should you pick a North American, European, or even Australasian accent? Apparently Canadian is the easiest to understand. If you’re learning French, do you want to speak like a Parisian or a Montrealer?

I know that when I was trying to improve my Cantonese, I preferred a Hong Kong accent to a country accent, and similarly I would rather have a Beijing or Shanghai accent than that of a small town that nobody’s ever heard of.

Of course this may sound like snobbery, but it basically boils down to increasing your chances of being understood. If you do your best to emulate a standard accent, people will be much more likely to understand you. I don’t think it matters if you choose American or British English, or American or European Spanish, as long as you try to learn a dialect that is commonly understood. If you go to a village an learn their particular accent and dialect, not only will you be an anomaly, but it will be much less likely that you will achieve the goal of learning a language - communication.

So if you’re making this sort of decision - just pick an accent and run with it.

*To prevent confusion, I am using American English to mean the standard or General American (GA) accent, and British English to mean a standard accent from England, sometimes referred to as BBC English or Received Pronunciation (RP). Not many people actually speak with either of these accents, but they are taken as a frame of reference. Please don’t leave me angry comments about how I should just call it English. English English is too confusing a term to use. As is Spanish Spanish.

My apologies for the long absence.  Things have been fairly crazy with the lead up to the ’silly season’ and I have admittedly been listening to more Christmas music than is probably healthy.  However, this time only comes once a year, so I hope it’s permissible.

I thought it would be a nice idea to wish you all a belated but very Merry Christmas in a few different languages.  Although there are a lot of countries and cultures that don’t celebrate the birth of Christ, a lot of them still have a celebration at this time of year, or a greeting to encapsulate the goodwill of the season.  From a quick glance at the internet, though, it seems like a lot of the lists are directly copied from one another, without any sort of individual research for confirmation of the translations.  So, I will just use a few that I know from personal or anecdotal experience to be fairly accurate.

So, from all of us at LT, we hope you had a very Happy Christmas (UK), 圣诞快乐 Shèng dàn kuài lè (Mandarin Chinese), Joyeux Noël (French), Feliz Navidad (Spanish), Feliz Natal (Portuguese), and the wonderful transliterations Meri Kirihimete (NZ Maori), Mele Kalikimaka (Hawaiian), and Merii Kurisumasu (Japanese).

Happy New Year, and all the best for 2009!