Language Trainers Blog

Learning Portuguese here in London? You might be interested to know that Mariza is playing at the Barbican Centre on Monday 13th May.

This is a great chance to hear fado, the popular Portuguese traditional music, live. Mariza has won awards for her music, including a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music.

This video has the lyrics in Portuguese on screen – particularly useful to check pronunciation.

Someone sent me this which I thought I’d share with you… it’s kind of pointless but interesting at the same time.

Music video experimentalists Collective Cadenza decided to put the lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune through every single language on Google Translate… and back to English. Here’s the result.

Collins Dictionary has selected a word or phrase for each month of the year, to define trends and events of 2012. The words were submitted by members of the public on the Collins website.

January – broga – a blend of “bro” and “yoga” and referring to a new form of yoga aimed at men.

February – legbomb – referring to this photo of Angelina Jolie at the Oscars this month.

March – Eurogeddon - referring to Europe’s economic crisis

April – mummy porn – the month when Fifty Shades of Grey was launched

May – Zuckered for the month when social network Facebook made its stock market debut, and share prices immediately went down

June - Jubilympics – I think this one is pretty self explanatory!

July – Romneyshambles - a nice play on omnishambles, the media coined this phrase during this month US presidential candidate Mitt Romney visited the UK.

August – Games makers - the thousands of volunteers who helped make the London 2012  Olympics run smoothly

September – 47 per cent – a key phrase of the US election, after Mitt Romney claimed that 47% of the US would vote for Obama as they “pay no income tax” and are “dependent on the Government”

October – Superstorm – when Hurricane Sandy caused much damage to the East Coast of the US, Canada, and the Caribbean

November - Gangnam Style – the month that Psy’s video hit 1 billion views on YouTube

December – Fiscal cliff – a cut in US spending and rise in taxes which could see the country plunge into another recession

Not all of these will make it to the updated published edition of the dictionary.

I’m afraid a lot of these phrases passed me by – even after paying particular attention to the news this year!

Meanwhile, the Oxford English Dictionary has published its’ own word of the year, which was “omnishambles.” Six other words made the shortlist, only 3 of which featured on the Collins Dictionary list. These were games maker, mummy porn and Eurogeddon. The remaining three words which didn’t make the cut were mobot, second screening and pleb.

If you could choose, which word would sum up 2012 for you?

Ed Manley and James Cheshire from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), were busy this summer. The two researchers collected data from 3.3 million tweets during the London 2012 Games, using Twitter’s API.  They then created an impressive looking map of all of the locations of those tweets. Not only that, but the map is colour coded for each language. The grey parts of the map were tweets in English, which makes up the majority of it. There are pockets of colour elsewhere though, in descending order representing Spanish (white), French (red), Turkish (blue), Arabic (green), Portuguese (purple), German (orange), Italian (yellow), Malay (cyan), and Russian (violet). There were 66 languages used, identified and recorded. The languages tweeted least were Georgian, Belarusian, Telugu and Armenian.

Ed Manley explains that Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines, was excluded from the data as “many of these classifications included just uses of English terms such as ‘hahahahaha’, ‘ahhhhhhh’ and ‘lololololol’.” It was initially the 7th most tweeted language.

They are quick to point out that the work absolutely isn’t a true representation of the diverse demographic of London. A lot of tweets are located on main roads and along train lines. Also, they have only included tweeters who have a good GPS location and are connected to the internet.

Click here to see the map.

Want to learn a new language in London? Try our German courses, Italian lessons, or even learn English!

The Academy Award Best Foreign Film entries for 2013 have been announced.

This year’s winner was Iran’s A Separation, which I wrote about in January, yet Iran have withdrawn their submission for 2013 in protest over the controversial amateur American film The Innocence of Muslims, which is seen as hugely insulting and has provoked violent demonstrations in the Middle East.

High profile submissions include Chile’s No, starring Gael Garcia Bernal; The Intouchables, which is the second highest grossing French film of all time, Denmark’s A Royal Affair, and Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or award winner Amour, which is in French despite being Austria’s official entry. This film will also be shown at this year’s London Film Festival.

Kenya has submitted it’s very first entry, crime drama Nairobi Half Life.

The five finallists will be announced in January, with the winner being awarded at the ceremony on the 24th February. A record 71 countries have submitted entries, with 54 languages being represented. The languages are certainly diverse, with Greenlandic, Azeri, and Lingala all being featured. The most represented language is Spanish, with no less than 7 films.

If you’re looking to learn Spanish, why not try our lessons in Brighton?

How many of us haven’t tried a crafty trick whilst playing Scrabble? One player took it to the extreme this week by cheating at the US National Championships. The five day event, held in Orlando, Florida, saw 350 players competing for a $10,000 (£6400) prize. The player was a minor, and thus has not been named. His methods, however, have. In the 24th of 28 rounds, a player who was due to be the next opponent of the boy saw two blank tiles on his side of the table. After the game, the boy was seen dropping the two blank tiles on the floor, in an apparent attempt to use them in the next round. He was questioned, admitted to taking the tiles, and disqualified from the tournament. His previous opponents were then awarded wins.

Cheating in championship Scrabble is not common. According to the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), there have been five suspensions for cheating since 2008.

You may be familiar with cut and paste kings Cassetteboy. I discovered their latest creation today, and it’s just too good not to share with you. The victim of this video is London mayor Boris Johnson.

On their YouTube page, Cassetteboy introduce the compilation of Borisism’s particularly well.

“Fluff-headed loon Boris Johnson welcomes the world to the London Olympics.”

Watch here before it gets taken down!

The US team have been busy making a series of videos ahead of the upcoming Games. The first two concentrate on the Americans trying their hands at a little Cockney rhyming slang. The first phrase they learned is: “If you win a medal, you can go chicken oriental.” Chicken oriental is slang for “mental” or crazy, and isn’t used widely in London! The second video shows the athletes working on saying “Now I’ll stick on the Hansel and Gretel, and make us a nice cup of Rosie Lee.“ The only rhyming slang we use here is Rosie Lee (tea).

Although none of the team have the accent correct at all, it’s nice to see them have a laugh with it and have fun! The videos are a very nice gesture, although I don’t think they’ll need to use either of these phrases whilst here in London!

You can see their channel, ThankYouBritain, on YouTube. More videos will be uploaded as it gets closer to the start of the Games.

And now for something a little more silly…

Yesterday viewers of long running Channel 4 show Countdown were surprised to see the word “minge” pop up when letters were pulled up randomly for the board. For those who haven’t seen it, Countdown is a number and word puzzle game show, and is great as you play along and test your English vocabulary! In this particular round, contestants attempt to make the longest word out of randomly chosen vowels and consonants, which are selected by one of the contestants.

The winner of this round made the slang word “mingers,” if you’re interested!

This isn’t the first time questionable words have featured on Countdown. If you have time this Bank Holiday weekend, you can view some clips on YouTube, and read more here!

Photo credit: © Channel 4

Paul McCartney’s music video for his latest single My Valentine features actors Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman using sign language to convey the lyrics of the song.

It has been widely reported that there are some errors in the sign language used, most notably, that both actors use the sign for ‘tampon’ rather than ‘appear,’ and ‘enemy’ instead of ‘Valentine.’ Whilst in British Sign Language, the sign is for ‘tampon,’ it’s important to note that the actors are using American Sign Language, for which the signs for some words differ slightly. Therefore, the sign they used to signify ‘appear’ is correct. There are actually two ASL signs for the word ‘appear;’ one means ‘to show up’ and the other is ‘to seem.’ Natalie Portman used the correct sign.

It’s a shame that Johnny Depp remained expressionless throughout the video, as all sign language relies on facial expressions to bring the language to life. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see sign language brought to the spotlight!

You can view a Johnny Depp solo video, a Natalie Portman solo video, AND the video featuring both actors on Paul McCartney’s YouTube channel.