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!

Today was rainy, cold, and I was late for work. I jumped into a taxi to take me a relatively short distance in the hideous traffic, and it actually made my morning. I had a lovely little chat with the taxi driver, especially after he slowed it down a bit when he realised I wasn’t a native speaker.

If you are lucky enough to be living in Asia or any place where taxis are cheap and plentiful, you will have many opportunities to talk to locals in a situation where the alternative is just to look out the window. I have a friend who vastly improved his Thai simply because he had to be stuck in a taxi in a traffic jam in Bangkok for hours every week.

In short, take every opportunity to speak to the people you come across every day.  In my experience, they’re more than happy to converse with you, and you will probably pick up a lot of vocabulary that you definitely wouldn’t in a language class!

Is it easier to learn additional foreign languages if they’re similar to the one(s) you already know?  For example, if you already speak Spanish as a second language, will it help you learn Italian?  In my experience, knowing a similar language already can be both a help and a hindrance.

I grew up around Cantonese, and spoke it to an elementary-sort-of level, and best when I was living in Hong Kong.  Since moving to the mainland, I have been around, and studied, Mandarin instead.  The Cantonese helped in a lot of ways, as the grammar structures are similar, and some of the words were similar or the same.  Unfortunately, knowing that a word is similar to one you already know doesn’t necessarily remind you what the new word is.  Now that my Mandarin level is higher than my Cantonese level, and I have been away from Cantonese speakers, I find it difficult to switch languages.

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I spent the flight reminding myself of all the ways the languages are different, and all of the phrases I could remember in Cantonese*.  I didn’t do too badly,  but I was far from being able to switch between three languages fluidly.

Do you know more than one foreign language?  What are your methods for preventing getting rusty in a language you don’t use very often?

*Flights are a great opportunity to cram important language terms before arriving in a foreign language location!  Don’t forget to put a phrase book or flashcards in your carry-on bag to look over before you land.

I had quite a strange dream this morning, part of which involved being made to write my signature in a jellylike substance with a knife (I have no idea why - new technology?).  This was difficult and unwieldy and led to something that didn’t match what I had on my ID at all.  I have one of those signatures that no longer looks anything like my name, and often when I’m stopped in the middle of it (someone interrupts me, or my pen stops working), I have no idea what the next part is.  The action has become fluid and unconscious, and now, when I think about it too hard, I don’t know what all the pieces are any more.

This is the kind of thing we should be aiming for in language learning.  Of course, learning vocabulary is a key area to focus on, but when you want to communicate with others, learn whole sentences or meaningful phrases as one single ‘chunk’.  Practice listening to and saying whole sentences, and you will begin to get the feel for how the language flows, and native speakers will be able to understand you much more easily.

Especially in tonal languages (e.g. Thai, Chinese), if you say a few syllables slowly, it will take a long time for people to put them together, even if you got all the tones correct.  A lot of meaning is gained from the combination of sounds, rather than the individual sounds, so learning phrases will get your point across much easier than knowing how to put the individual words together (if - you - get - my - meaning).

If you get used to the sound and structure of whole sentences, it will be much easier for you to then substitute the nouns and verbs and use the same sentence patterns in many different conversations.

Good luck!

In the same way that I’m fascinated by westerners getting terrible Asian character tattoos, I am deeply interested in the reasons that Chinese people pick their English names (or anyone who chooses a name in another language, actually).  Of course, not everybody has an English name, but it’s rare that you find a younger person who does not.

Unsurprisingly, young Chinese people take this as an opportunity to express their individuality.  In a country of well over a billion people, there are only a hundred or so popular last names, and similar first names are common.  This means that it’s not uncommon for people to meet, go to school with, or work with someone with exactly the same name (I even met another Wendy Wong recently!).  Choosing an a name that reflects some of their personality can be quite important to some, which leads to some interesting choices.  Adjectives and nouns are also quite common names in Chinese, but they can sound odd to English speakers.

Interestingly, English names can also go back in the other direction, as Chinese people call their friends by a ‘Chinesified’ version of their English name.  I had a colleague called Echo, but everyone called her Ai-ke when speaking in Chinese.

I recently found out that another colleague, Gills, intended to call himself Giggs (after footballer Ryan Giggs), but something went wrong along the way.  I’m not quite sure what.  Some other fantastic names I’ve come across in China and Hong Kong have been Paper, Mars, Forrest Gump, Chocolate, Ocean King, and Person.

For some further reading, check out In China My Name Is by Valerie Blanco and Ellen Feberwee.  It’s a book dedicated entirely to Chinese people and the stories behind their English names.

Oh, and happy Chinese New Year!

I was looking over some things at work today, and realised that the word 画 (huà) had been used as the translation for both draw and paint.  I brought it up with the author of the document, and she said that there was no difference in Chinese, and asked if there was a difference in English.  I told her it was quite a big difference (draw being associated with pens, pencils, crayons, etc., and paint being done with, well, paint).  She discussed this with another colleague for a while, and I looked up 画 in the dictionary.

It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means several different things, with the meaning usually worked out from the context or the other characters around it.  In this case, the meaning, to Chinese people, is the same.  It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as traditional Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush, not a pen.

In the end, as I did want to distinguish the difference between the two English words, we compromised with 画 (油画), where the first character (yóu) is the noun paint, and 画 means…paint. And draw.

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.

Punctuation is important. It can change the meaning of simple phrases, and is especially important these days, when so many more people are communicating via text, whether it be SMS, email, online forums, or blogs.  A famous example is the difference between “a woman without her man is nothing” and “a woman: without her, man is nothing“.

I do have an affection for the combination question and exclamation mark, the interrobang (‽), and I’ve already talked about outdated (but useful) characters like the thorn (Þ).  People are frequently using combinations of punctuation to form emoticons to express the intention of their messages, so maybe there is a need for new symbols to clarify meaning.

So, what would you pay for a revolutionary piece of punctuation?  What is the use of a single punctuation mark worth?  According to the people at SarcMark, it’s worth about 2 US dollars.  They have developed a new mark to indicate sarcasm (see above), and want to charge people to use it.  I can understand that this might actually be useful in this day and age, but the fact that you would then have to explain it to everybody you sent it to, and that they wouldn’t be able to use it until they’d purchased it, makes it seem a little too much effort for not much reward.

I think I may be too skeptical for the SarcMark.  How about you?

Thanks to Dave at Languagetrainers.com for the link.

I recently wrote about enthusiasts of Na’vi, the constructed language (or conlang) from the recent film Avatar.  Today I read a news story that claimed that over 12,000 people are learning the language in Australia alone*.

This made me wonder about the number of people speaking minority languages around the world.  According to Wikipedia, of the 6-7,000 languages spoken in the world, around half of them have less than 3,000 speakers.  It is anticipated that in the next 50-100 years, sadly, most of these languages will become extinct.

So, in a few short months, Na’vi has overtaken over half of the languages in the world in terms of numbers.  It may not share rich history or large vocabulary, but something has to be said for the achievements of its creators.  While some may say that it’s a pity that people are ‘wasting their time’ on learning a made-up language, I think it’s kind of nice that there are language enthusiasts out there, regardless of the ‘validity’ of the language.

*This is based on usage from a single website, though, so this may be a worldwide number.

From recent personal experience*, I can say that the answer is: sort of.  It’s not unsurprising that a few quiet drinks will lessen the fears of embarrassment, and also give the impression that you are speaking a lot better than you normally do (mistakes are skimmed over and might be forgotten in the morning). Drinking doesn’t make you any better in itself, but it may make practising easier, which will definitely help you out.

As long as you don’t drink until you’re incomprehensible in any language, alcohol can help smooth the way to more free-flowing speech, which can then lead to increased confidence in your own language abilities. You will find that people really don’t mind about pauses and mistakes, and effective communication is much more about trying it out rather than getting one or two sentences perfectly correct.

Of course, if you don’t want to or need to drink, it’s possible to get the same effect without the alcohol.  For some people it may take a big change in mindset, or a constant low-level of embarrassment, but it’s only ever going to be beneficial for you to practice as much as possible.  Don’t worry about what other people think, and just give it a go.

For another viewpoint and some ideas for finding confidence (and better health!) without liquid courage, Benny the Irish polyglot has written a great post about it at Fluent in 3 Months.

*It was my birthday recently, can you blame me?