Language Trainers Blog

Most people think of language as a way to communicate and describe the world around us, but have you ever considered how much our language affects how we see the world?

I read a great article on the Wall Street Journal about just this.  It’s not something that I really think about unless it’s put in front of me, but language really can affect how we interpret the world.

One of the most interesting parts of the article talks about how some cultures (up to a third of languages!) don’t have words like left and right, and instead talk about direction in absolute terms (north, south, etc.).  In these languages, you would talk about things like your east leg, or your northwest arm, depending on which direction you were facing.  If you’re thinking about absolute directions all the time, you are most likely going to be better at finding your way around.  Also fascinating was that for people who speak languages where no blame is given to accidental wrongs (e.g. someone knocking over a glass), it is more difficult to remember who did it.  For example, in English we would say that ‘Jack knocked the glass over’, but in Japanese or Spanish, they would just say that the glass had been knocked over.  I wonder how much this has perpetuated the tendency in English-speaking countries to lay blame on others for things that happen to us.

Does language shape culture, or does the culture we live in affect the language we use?

With the script technology available these days, it’s uncommon for language learners to focus so much on the writing of languages like Japanese and Chinese.  All you need to do is recognise a character, and know what it sounds like, to be able to write it on a computer.  Even in my own study, I am trying to focus more on reading, listening, and speaking, as it seems like it will take a long time to rote learn individual characters.

On the flip side, learning how to write characters yourself helps make them more concrete in your mind, and can really help you understand them and their relationships to other words and characters.  A useful tool I’ve found to help you write Japanese or Chinese (on the computer, no less!) is Skritter.  With Skritter, you can practice writing characters on the screen, and the program can help you with stroke order as well as giving useful information about the characters and radicals.  It also provides a tracking service so you can see your progress, and focus more on characters that you are having trouble with.

They provide a two week full service trial for learners of Japanese and Chinese (both traditional and simplified), so if you want to improve your writing skills, check it out!

A lot of phrases in English are understatements, as if we don’t want to commit too much to what we’re saying.  One of them that springs to mind is easy on the eyes, which is another way to say someone is good looking, sexy, beautiful.

In Chinese, there is the opposite.  The word they use for ‘ugly’ is 难看 (nánkàn), which is, literally, hard to look at. Ouch. The Japanese also have the word バックシャン (bakku-shan) for someone who appears hot from behind, but not from the front.

Do you know any other interesting phrases for someone who’s not so easy on the eyes?

*Note: looking up ‘ugly’ on Google Images isn’t really that good of an idea.

I’ve just read an article about the often difficult practices of apologising in Japan.  The article itself is focussed mainly on corporate responsibility-taking, but it talks about some interesting facets of Japanese apologies, which are of many different degrees, including the depth of bow accompanying them.

The art of apology is an intrinsic part of Japanese culture. When you ask a shopkeeper for help, or when you bump into someone on the inevitably crowded trains, you say “sumimasen.” A direct translation of this phrase is “excuse me,” but a more a more accurate rendition is “I am so sorry to bother you.”

Apologizing is as common as saying please and thank you. It is a way of maintaining harmony in social situations. If you are the first to leave work in a Japanese office, you say “Osaki ni sitsuree simasu,” which means “I commit the great rudeness of leaving first.”

It also gives some extreme examples of historical corporate apologies:

Japan has a long history of corporate personal apology in Japan. In 1985, following the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123, the president of JAL Yasumoto Tagaki assumed full responsibility for the accident, the worst single-airplane incident in aviation history. Of the 524 passengers only four survived.  Takagi went to the extraordinary length of personally visiting the families of the victims. It was only after he had fulfilled this obligation and offered one last public apology that he resigned. Another JAL employee, a maintenance manager apologized in a more extreme manner: he committed suicide.

Some apologies don’t actually apologise, either.  Sometimes they include remorse and regret, and sometimes even compensation, without ever actually taking responsibility and giving apology.  Do you think these are valid apologies?

Some parts of culture are so deeply ingrained in countries that it becomes very difficult for outsiders to get a grip on them.  How is apologising different in your country?

Source: MSNBC.

For regular note-taking and writing practice, everyone has their own preferences for paper - lined or unlined, spiral bound, A4, A5, 100gsm.  Then there are the writing implements - pens, pencils, markers.  Some people prefer just to record audio, or use a laptop or netbook.  Even with all of these choices, when it comes to specialist paper for writing Asian characters, it can be difficult to find what you want if you don’t live in a place with a large Asian community.

I’ve found a few online resources for downloading and printing your own character practice pages, and will list them below.  Please add more in the comments if you know of any!

Dr Lili Worksheet - Character worksheet with spaces for name and date.  Grid with horizontal and vertical internal lines.  Has room under each line for writing pinyin/notes.

Dofufa practice paper - Character practice paper with three different sizes of grid.  Internal horizontal and vertical lines.

Incompetech free online graph paper - Probably my favourite resource for printing paper.  They have a lot of different kinds of graph paper, as well as note-taking paper and a few options for Chinese and Japanese character practice.  Their graph paper generator allows you to choose the size of your paper, the size of the grids, and even what colour you would like to print in.  Try printing in landscape for even more options.  My favourite is the Chinese Character Guide (X-style), which has room for writing pinyin as well as diagonal internal lines.

Good luck with the practice!

Good news for Japanese language learners: the Japanese government has sponsored a website that allows transcription of any podcast recorded in Japanese.  Podcastle produces automated transcription of Japanese podcasts into Kanji, and from there, users of the site can correct and modify as necessary.

I’ve already discussed how useful podcasts and radio shows can be for language learning, especially when teamed with transcripts to refer to or read over before or after listening.  Using a lot of audio for learning will help to improve your listening, pronunciation, and speaking fluency.

By all accounts, the transcriptions aren’t perfect, but that’s to be expected.  As technology gets more accurate, and as the site gains more users, transcripts will become much more accurate.  As it stands, they might be better for intermediate and advanced learners of the language, but it is still a worthwhile effort.

For more information and a review of the service, go to Street-Smart Language Learning™.

Back in 1985, cognitive scientists at Princeton University began work on a lexical database called WordNet.  It’s essentially a dictionary and thesaurus which groups and links words according to their meanings.  WordNet provides users with synsets, which are groups of words or phrases which essentially mean the same thing.  It’s a great tool for writers, students, language learners, and anyone who needs a definition, synonym, or broader view of a word or phrase.  WordNet is searchable online, and a downloadable application is also available.

A fantastic extension of WordNet is VisuWords, which allows you to see a visual interpretation of the WordNet links for words of your choice, or random words.  Each visual map shows the possible meanings and synsets for the central word and the relationships between them all.  It’s also interactive, allowing you to move parts around to see them more clearly, and synsets move around in quite a calming and hypnotic way.  The above image is what comes up when you plug ‘language’ into the search engine.

WordNet has inspired wordnets for many different languages, and a full list can be found on the Global WordNet Association website.  Many of them are browsable online (e.g. MultiWordNet On-line*), and some also have visual interfaces (e.g. Asian WordNet Project**, aimsigh.com (Irish)).  The GWA’s aim is to integrate as many wordnets together as possible, to make a global grid.

*Searchable in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, and Latin.
**Searchable in Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Bengali, Indonesian, and others.

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!

When it comes to personality, some people seem to have been put on the planet to make life easier for everyone else:

 
Cooperar: (Spansih, Central America) to go along willingly with someone else to one’s own disadvantage. 

Abozzare: (Italian) to accept meekly a far from satisfactory situation. 

Ilunga: (Tshiluba, Congo) someone who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time 

Flattering
 
Vaseliner: (French) to flatter (literally, to apply Vaseline) 

Happobijin: (Japanese) a beauty to all eight directions (a sycophant) 

Radfahrer: (German) one who flatters superiors and browbeats subordinates (literally, a cyclist) 

Fawning 

The Japanese have the most vivid description for hangers-on: kingyo no funi. It literally means ‘goldfish crap’ –a reference to the way that a fish that has defecated often trails excrement behind it for some time.

In every language, there seems to be certain “unmentionables” – words of such strong affective connotations that they cannot be utilised during polite discourse. In English, the first of these that come to mind are, of course, words dealing with excretion and sex. We ask movie ushers and petrol station attendants where the “lounge” or “rest room” is, although we usually have no intention of lounging or resting. “Powder room” is another euphemism for the same facility, also known as a “toilet”, which itself is an earlier euphemism.

Indeed, it is impossible in polite society to state, without having to resort to baby-talk or a medical vocabulary, your true purpose for needing to use the “rest room” (it’s not where you “wash your hands”).

Money is another subject about which communication is in some ways inhibited. It is all right to mention sums of money, such as “ten thousand dollars” or “two dollars and fifty cents”. But it is considered bad taste to inquire directly into other people’s financial affairs, unless such an inquiry is necessary in the course of business. When creditors send bills, they practically never mention money, although that is, of course, what they are writing about. There are many circumlocutions: “We beg to call your attention to what might be an oversight on your part”; “We would appreciate your early attention to this matter”; “May we look forward to an early remittance”…

The fear of death carries over, quite understandably in view of the widespread confusion of symbols with the concepts they symbolise, into fear of the words having to do with death. Many people, therefore, instead of saying “died”, substitute such euphemistic expressions as “passed away”, “gone to meet his maker”, “departed”, and “gone west”. In Japanese, the word for death, “shi”, happens to have the same pronunciation as the word for the number four. This coincidence results in many linguistically awkward situations, since people generally avoid “shi” in the discussion of numbers and prices, and use “yon”, a word of different origin, instead.