Language Trainers Blog

I generally speak pretty good English. (As far as I know,) I make few mistakes, and those that I do make, I am aware of. It doesn’t really excuse me, but I know when I say The Ukraine, it should just be Ukraine (although they used to use the article, so…partial credit?). Then there’s the none is versus none are argument, but I stand firm that none are is OK.

So imagine my delight when I came across a comprehensive list of common errors in English Usage by Paul Brians, Emeritus Professor of English at Washington State University. It has an easily navigable list, with each link leading to a simple explanation of what is correct and what should be steered clear of (no in depth grammar lectures here). Of course, it is not an exhaustive list, but I guess that depends on your definition of common. The list covers some of my pet peeves (e.g. could of, would of, should of; accept/except; affect/effect), as well as some that I didn’t even know were issues, like pre-Madonna instead of prima donna. Did you know that the original phrase is “you’ve got another think coming”, not “you’ve got another thing coming”?

So, if you want to have a bit of a laugh at the people who make some ridiculous mistakes, or just check you’re not about to make one yourself, check out the list. Did anything surprise you?

Edit: After checking, it appears there is no entry for the often misspelled Valentimes Day. Happy St Valentine’s Day! Have some good Valen-Times!

This isn’t foreign language related, but might be of interest to people who like typography. Wordmark will show you your chosen text in every font installed on  your computer, in one webpage. You can then change the size, choose white on black or the opposite, and select your favourites and filter them out to compare them next to each other.

For those people, like me, who have changed a font over and over again in a word processor before deciding which one is best, this is brilliant. You can put in a long or short string of text, but the shorter the text is, the more fonts you will be able to compare on one screen.

If you are a designer of any kind, or just want a fancy heading for a document, this tool will save you time and make sure you get the look you want.

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik’s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

This isn’t going to be a post about learning /as/ a couple, where both people are learning languages. This is more of a reflection of the extra difficulties in finding time to study when you have time commitments to your spouse and/or children.

I read a blog post and a forum thread on Lingq about this, and most contributors agree that you have less time to yourself when you are part of a couple or family living under the same roof. Once you factor in work, meals, chores, quality time, going to school-related events, etc., there’s not a lot of time left for studying. A few people explained that they had more time than when they were single, because life seems more settled and the routine is clearer.

Where opinions differ, however, is in methods to increase or maintain your study time. Steve, the creator of Lingq, gave some advice along the lines of ‘learn to pretend you’re listening while listening to language material on your mp3 player’. He later said that his suggestions weren’t serious, but that was a bit unclear in his first couple of postings. Some people suggested dedicating a defined time each day for study, and some suggested adding language facets to your everyday life (like labeling household objects). Another suggestion was to get up earlier than everyone else to have some quiet time.

I have semi-recently changed my relationship status, so this is quite relevant to me. I’m not used to living with someone else, and I can definitely feel my language efforts sliding downhill. Mostly I just want to spend time in the relationship, and there is the fact that I’m easily lured into a night on the sofa when I have study to do. I need to start drawing some boundaries for myself.

Whatever you decide to do, it’s clear that it should be discussed clearly with your spouse. If they feel they are not getting enough attention because you are spending too much time on the computer (or however else you study), their feelings may be saved by explaining what you are doing.

Have you experienced a decrease in language study time when you get into a relationship? Do you think it’s possible to maintain the same level of study while paying enough attention to your family?

I’ve just finished reading The Word Brain by Bernd Sebastian Kamps. Its tagline is A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning. Initial caps aside, it’s a 70-page document that covers (with a single chapter each) Kamps’s advice on words, listening, reading, teachers, speaking, memory, and nailing. The latter is a term he uses to better encompass the concept of learning a word by heart.

Kamps’s methods are not for the faint of heart, and he mentions this right at the beginning of the book. He presents the total number of hours you are likely to need to reach a competent language level (being able to at least follow along with newspapers and TV news), and drums in the fact that you will need multiple hours of study multiple times a week to make good progress. I agree with this (even though it’s not always possible for people to commit this amount of time).

He puts the different skills into a logical recommended order - listening, reading, then speaking. The kicker is that Kamps suggests not attempting to speak at all until a few months into the language learning process. His reasoning behind this is sound - receiving more input first will invariably improve your understanding, accent, and pronunciation - but I can’t help but feel that this would be a nearly impossible task for a regular person. I’m not sure what he would suggest for those of us who are somewhere in the middle of our language learning process.

The book contains some useful information about spaced repetition, a good introduction to the way the brain stores information, and some very good comparisons between the way children and adults learn language. He also debunks the myth that children are better language learners than adults (and I should add that it is with hindsight that most adults think that language learning was easy when they were children). One piece of new information for me is that if you push any new information into your brain after studying (including spending time on your favourite social network), it will decrease the likelihood that you will remember what you studied later. So, after studying, do something relaxing instead.

According to Kamps, the ideal situation for a language learner would be to be young, have a lot of time, be living in a foreign language immersion situation, and to have a speaker of the language as a lover. Now, most of us will never be in this situation (sadly), but all it means is that the learning will take more time and perhaps more dedication. This book contains a lot of interesting information and suggestions, and I’d like to hear what advice you will take away from it. Let me know in the comments!

Download the full e-book, short version, and mp3 at The Word Brain.

I saw mention in a language learning blog post about using a bilingual bible to help study English. To be honest, as a non-believer, this had never crossed my mind, but it makes  a lot of sense. If you read content that is both important to you and familiar to you in your own language, mastering the translation should work pretty well. Provided the translation is done well, of course. I guess the main problem I can think of is that some of the vocabulary and phrasing might not exactly be what you will use in real life, but at the same time, meaningful content will stick better in your mind, and any language practice is a good thing!

On the flip side, if you are interested in other faiths, using a translation in your own language might be a good introduction to reading, say, the Koran (or Qur’an) in its original Arabic, or traditional texts in their original languages.

Have you tried reading the bible or other traditional material in a different language?

I’ve just started one-on-one lessons again after a really busy summer, when I admittedly did little in the way of language study (besides learning a few words essential to getting delicious treats on my European holiday). I’m lucky enough to have a personal tutor who is more than happy to focus on the things I need, rather than prescribing a course to me.

I decided to start formal lessons again because I am awful at motivating myself and, obviously, it’s great to have someone to correct my work and pronunciation in a live setting. I also really need to improve my language skills, because often none of my meetings are held in English, and I either have to struggle through them and rely on the presentations for information, or have someone translate for me. It’s especially frustrating that I can’t properly articulate myself (and I can be very opinionated sometimes).

So, I told my tutor that I wanted to focus on business language, but I really wanted it to be focused on one field, and predominantly so I can get by in meetings. Many business language courses focus on so many areas that aren’t useful for me (interviews, chairing meetings, foreign trade, HR issues), and my tutor is more than happy for me to just learn what I need.

In order to find out exactly what I need to learn, I’m going to gather my own materials in realia form - meeting minutes, documents, presentations, recordings from meetings. It’s a bit difficult to know exactly when you need to learn (especially since you obviously don’t know these things), but if I can eventually get to where I can understand all of my realia, I’ll be ready to move on to learning how to fire someone or something.

Where do you get your study materials?

There are certain things about learning that we know. Things like how you are supposed to study in a quiet place and how every student has a different learning style. I just read a very interesting article that turns a lot of these established theories on their heads.

A study by Californian psychologists has shown that there’s no evidence to support teaching to accommodate different learning styles. Even though everybody does prefer getting input in slightly different ways (e.g. visual vs aural), regular teaching is basically equally beneficial to everyone.

Another myth is that you should use the the same quiet study area for every study session. New evidence has shown that if you vary your surroundings, it will better store information in your brain. If information is associated with more than one thing (e.g. sound or visual information), it will help reinforce the neural pathways. Also, if you study more than one thing in a session (e.g. vocabulary, speaking, and listening), it is much more effective than sticking to just one topic.

To summarise, mix it up a little, in both location and subject. See if it works for you!

Full article: The New York Times.

I’ve had a bit of a change in my schedule lately which means that I have a much longer commute than before.  I hate getting up early in the morning, but I’ve been trying to look at the upside - I have more time before and after work to listen to music, catch up on news, watch TV, or, most importantly, work on my language study.  I’ve been flicking through some flashcards on the subway, and also listening to some language podcasts (right now I’m listening to Chinese Lessons by Serge Melnyk and lessons from Popup Chinese).

I’ve never really taken advantage of the speed adjustment on my iPod Touch before, but I was listening to a dialogue the other day that was just that little bit too fast.  I slowed it down to half speed and tried again.  It was a little bit jumpy, but generally worked quite well.  After listening to that specific dialogue a couple of times at half speed, I changed it back to normal and it was fairly comprehensible.  I also made use of the little go back button (I don’t know what it’s actually called) which jumps you back 30 seconds instead of having to try to rewind with the slider.  I still haven’t found a use for the 2x speed, but maybe it would be a slightly more accurate way to cue up the part of the podcast you need.

For intermediate and advanced learners, perhaps this function will allow you to subscribe to podcasts completely in your target language.  There are podcasts about pretty much anything these days, so it is another great way to integrate your language and your interests.  If the speakers go too fast, slow it down for the first couple of listens, and then see if you can understand the regular speed.  Try news programs for a slightly slower pace.

Unfortunately this function doesn’t exist for regular audio files or voice memos (just podcasts) on iPod, so it’s not that useful for your own recordings.  If anyone knows of any apps or other players that can get around this, drop me a note in the comments.

For the most part, the kind of foreign language you learn is practical or theoretical.  The kind of things you’ll need to know to get around a foreign city, write a meeting agenda, or buy fruit at the market.  Getting into complex literature usually takes a pretty high language level, but what about kids’ books?  Surely they’d be much simpler?

High school student Charlie Anderson has written a great piece about reading her first piece of children’s literature entirely in French.  She discusses the very valid point that even when written for kids, literature has a totally different style and language from conversation and formal language.  Even if you know all of the individual words, sometimes the phrasing is confusing, or you may not have any idea what’s going on.

If you are finding yourself stagnating in your learning, or want an extra challenge, pick up a storybook in your target language and see how well you do.  It’s not as easy as it may seem!

Full article: Reading in a foreign language no ‘petit’ task.