Language Trainers Blog

If, like me, you’re learning Spanish, then you might want to consider adding this puzzle book to your Christmas list. Wordsearches and crosswords are a great way to test your vocabulary skills. I use crosswords to practise my native English too!

This one is available from Waterstones. If you’re learning a different language, no worries…others are available in Italian, German, French, Swahili, Hindi, Japanese, Pashto, and even Hawaiian!

This week, I came across a word I hadn’t heard before in the book I was reading. That word was perambulator, which I now know to be more common these days in the diminutive form of pram. Olfactory is another word I’ve come across recently, which I didn’t know previously. Usually when I’m reading a book and come across a word I don’t know, I’ll write it down in my notebook, with the context, and find the meaning later on. It helps with my vocabulary in my native English, of course; I also thought that this might be a nice little tip for language learning. It depends on your reading level: if you’re a beginner you’d get easily frustrated because you would be writing down every other word, but for more advanced readers this may help. When you’re fluent in a language, you don’t necessarily think to learn words you think you might not need again. It seems kind of obvious, but every little helps to remind you when you’re learning.

Just wanted to share with you a site I found for language games, which is so much fun! I’ve been using it mostly to learn colours in Finnish(!) but there are a lot of languages to choose from and several games for each. If, like me, you’re interested in a certain language, but want to explore before you commit to a course, this is a great beginners tool. If you’re just starting to learn a new language, you can test your vocabulary for numbers, foods, animals and basic phrases, to name a few. Alternatively, you can use it to learn a bit of lots of languages! There are so many different options on this site – it can teach you the words (reading and listening) before testing your knowledge – there’s really no reason not to try it! Here you go: http://www.digitaldialects.com

This week I’ve learned a new trick to help with spelling and memorising whole sentences in Spanish. This will work with whichever language you’re learning, obviously you don’t have to be learning the same language as me to use it!

Write down a sentence you want to learn, maybe a line from a book you’re reading, and put it somewhere away from where you’re working. Pin it on the back of the front door, for example. (Probably best not on the fridge!) Read it over a couple of times and memorise it.

Then go back to where you were working and write it down. Compare it to the original version. If it’s not right, you’ll have to do it again. Trust me, a couple of times of walking back and forth is more than enough motivation to try your best!

This little trick not only fine tunes your spelling but is also a memory improvement technique. Good times all round!

I live with two Italians, so am always hearing Italian spoken around the house. An Italian work colleague recently taught me how to say smettila (which is “stop it” – don’t ask.)

My housemate is always amused when I come home with a new Italian word or phrase – the last one was zucchero filato (candy floss) – as he knows that I usually pick up words I can’t use in everyday conversation.

When I told my housemate my new word, he laughed a lot (apparently it’s cute to hear Italian spoken with an English accent!) and then suggested I nod my head when pronouncing the first syllable, as I had previously put the stress on the wrong syllable. I found this helped!

Apparently this is a useful trick to helping remember which syllable to stress, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Is this a trick you already know? Which words does it help you to remember?

It seems that native speakers of certain languages are able to roll their ‘r’s more easily than others. For me, as a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, it’s very difficult to pronounce rolled ‘r’s, which is also known as the alveolar trill. For example, trying to convey the name of a Cuban bar (Barrio) was particularly difficult when trying to arrange to meet up with my Spanish friend Eva recently. Pronouncing ‘r’s in an English accent, in the English form, is a huge disadvantage to communication in Spanish.

An Italian friend tells me that some children are taught the word “rabarbaro” (rhubarb) at school to help them pronounce their ‘r’s correctly. This word is not commonly used in the Italian language otherwise. In fact, when I told my Italian flatmate this word, he didn’t know what it meant. It could have been my pronunciation of course, but I wrote it down for him as well!

Having said all of this, one of my best friends, Mairi, is Scottish, and has no problem with rolling her ‘r’s, especially as you need to roll the r in her name to pronounce it correctly. So, is it down to accent?

This led me to try and find a way to learn how to do this properly. It is all in the tongue vibration, apparently. A lot of online help assumes you have an American accent, but I know of a few tips for us Brits.

The short term solution, for emergency use whilst you practice getting your tongue around your ‘r’s, is to pronounce the r as a hard D. You have to say it really fast to get away with it, but it does work! “Barrio” becomes “baDio,” and at least Eva will now know where I want to meet up for cocktails in the near future.

It’s better to try than to risk becoming a tentative speaker, as this is something that can really damage your confidence with speaking new languages.

Of course, in the long term, the only solution is practice, practice, practice. This video tutorial really helped me work out how to position my tongue properly, which is the basic principal to getting your alveolar trill right. If you’re not a visual learner, the WikiHow article is useful too. There are tongue twisters you can use to practice, but assuming that if you’re not confident with your rolled ‘r’s just yet, your level of Spanish isn’t advanced enough for this, so I like to stick to a short list of familiar words to practice with to begin. “Ferrocarril” (railway) is the perfect word to start off.

What works best for you? Does anyone have any other tips?

Ensuring you get the correct spelling, in any written language, is paramount. You can get away with slight mispronunciations is most cases, verbally, but on paper you can and will appear not to have an appropriate attention to detail. The consequences can range from implying something you didn’t intend, to not getting a job because you have misspelled a single word on your CV.

Oh, the irony.

Using spell check sometimes just won’t cut it. Some words which sound the same when vocalised are often used incorrectly in the written form. These can be spelled correctly but often misused. There/their/they’re, two/to/too, and your/you’re are all commonly used incorrectly.

You wouldn’t think to submit an essay or letter without proof reading first in your own language. The best spell check you can use when recording text in another language is someone who is a native speaker of the language which you are writing.

Memrise is a new vocabulary-learning website that I’m already a bit addicted to. It takes the standard spaced repetition method (you see the same word at increasing intervals until you know it consistently), but adds a cute theme. After you choose a word list to learn from, each new word is seen as a seed that gets planted when you first view it. After you ‘plant’ it, you ‘water’ it by answering multiple choice questions. Eventually you will know it well enough to ‘harvest’ it, so it moves from your greenhouse to your garden. In your virtual garden you can see all the words you know, growing happily. The system allows you to plant new words or take care of your wilting ones (the ones you haven’t seen in a while, or that you didn’t know the last time you looked at them). It’s a cute way to keep track of your vocabulary progress, and email reminders nudge you towards regular ‘watering’.

The best part about the site, in my opinion, is that it includes user-generated mnemonics to help you remember words, meanings, and pronunciations. A lot of them are very silly, but the silliest mnemonics are the ones that are the easiest to remember. Some of them are animations, showing how a picture forms a word (very useful for Chinese characters), and some of them are just ways of relating the English word to the target word. You can vote mnemonics up or down, and the most popular ones are the ones that you see first.

At the moment, the featured languages are Mandarin Chinese and SAT English, but there are a lot of other languages in Beta (using the system, but all user-generated content). If you don’t find a word list that you like, you can create your own.

It still has some bugs to sort out, but I can’t wait to see new features. Hopefully it will work on my phone eventually, so I can take care of my little word plants from wherever I am. Give it a try, and see if you like word gardening!

At the beginning of your language learning, trying to learn a lot of vocabulary might not be that helpful or easy. If you can’t actually use this language in real sentences and constructions, it will be even more difficult to remember. But at some point in your language learning career, you are likely to feel that you don’t have enough vocabulary. You will have enough sentence structures to want to fill them in with useful (and/or random) words. This is when the word lists and the flashcards will come in handy.

It may feel like you’re back in primary school, but reviewing flashcards is a good way to get more exposure to your words and help you remember them. If you go the old fashioned route and make them yourself, the actual process of making them will help reinforce the knowledge. Try to keep a pile of flashcards with you at all times, so if you have a few minutes to spare, you can go over them.

If you are doing electronic flashcards, again try to keep them mobile. If you can put them on your mobile or other portable device, all the better. Just remember to keep looking at them!

Supposedly if you see and use a word 9 separate times, you will have no problem remembering it forever. See how much of your spare time you can use adding extra views to your vocabulary lists!

I am fortunate enough to hang around with friends who are all at different levels of learning the same foreign language, and who are all fairly keen to speak it to each other. The people who are at a lower level learn a lot from the people who speak it really well. Me being somewhere in the middle, I am able to both learn and teach and it’s very satisfying. I find that when I listen to a non-native person speaking a foreign language, I understand more readily than when a native speaker is speaking it (provided, of course, that they have a certain level of language knowledge). I think it’s a combination of them speaking slower and more clearly, and being more likely to choose words that I know. Even when foreigners have very good language skills and speak quite quickly, I understand a lot more than when native speakers are talking.

I have a friend who also uses some foreign verbs in English ways (e.g. adding -ing, -ed), which is done in a joking way, but has also helped me learn some new words!

I know that ideally you would be talking to the most native of native speakers, but sometimes speed, accents, contractions, and slang get in the way. Especially for elementary and intermediate students, it might be advantageous to speak with more advanced non-native speakers. It’s a good way to consolidate your existing knowledge, as well as pick up a few new language along the way.

Have you found that speaking to other non-native speakers helps you?