Language Trainers Blog

It’s that time of year when the Oscars are announced. Recently I wrote about using world cinema as a tool for language learning and development.  As some of my favourite films have won the Best Foreign Film award, (Czech film Kolya won in 1996, and Argentinian film El Secreto De Sus Ojos took the title in 2009) I will paying particular attention to the nominees this year.

This years’ ceremony takes place on February 26th, and the shortlisted films are due to be announced next Tuesday. This Wednesday, nine films were chosen to be on the long list out of 63 entries. The following titles, at the time of writing, are currently in the running for Best Foreign Film 2012.

Bullhead (Dutch/French)

SuperClasico (Danish/Spanish)

Pina (German, various)

Monsieur Lazhar (French)

A Separation (Persian) This just won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and so is tipped to win the Oscar as well.

Footnote (Hebrew)

Omar Killed Me (French)

In Darkness (Polish/Ukrainian)

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Seediq/Japanese)

As a student of Spanish, none particularly appeal to me from a learning point of view. Having said this, I find it’s always good fun to test your aural skills whilst watching films which feature more than one language. If you close your eyes so you can’t see which character is speaking, can you distinguish from two different languages if you speak neither of them? I had trouble with this when watching Kolya, as both Czech, Russian and Slovak are spoken throughout the film. Therefore, personally, I would be most interested to see In Darkness and Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. The latter features Seediq, an aboriginal language spoken in Taiwan.

Do the Foreign Film awards inspire you to watch other films?

If any readers have seen any films listed here, please let us know!

Does anyone else like to use foreign language films to help build their knowledge? As a world cinema fan, I have quite a few in my collection, and as a Spanish language student, I feel it’s in my best interests to have as many Spanish language films as possible!

Watching a movie in another language is an entirely different experience to a Hollywood blockbuster. One has to concentrate and focus undivided attention on the narrative, not only through the words spoken, but also the subtitles. I love immersing myself in a film this way. The subtitles aren’t always accurate, but it’s a good method to improve your vocabulary and find other ways to say a word or phrase. For pronunciation, it’s great, and just listening to the flow of the words can help too. I’ve heard many people state that they learned English through American and English television shows and films, and I’ve often been able to tell which they watched most of from the accent they use!

My recommendations for Spanish language films:

· Amores Perros (Mexico)

· The Motorcycle Diaries (Argentina)

· Maria Full Of Grace (Colombia)

· Bombon El Perro (Argentina)

· Secuestro Express (Venezuela)

· Live Flesh (Spain)

· Sin Nombre (Mexico)

· The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina)

· XXY (Argentina)

· Chico y Rita (Cuba)

Other favourites include:

Kolya (Czech), Bus 174 (Brazilian Portuguese), Run Lola Run (German), Hidden (French), Gainsbourg (French), Lilya 4-Ever (Russian), Initial D (Cantonese), and Goodbye Lenin! (German).

Which films would you recommend to help with your language skills?

This weekend saw the 8^th annual Liet International Song Contest, which was held in Udine, Northern Italy. The competition is a lesser known version of the Eurovision Song Contest, and songs must be performed in one of 82 languages recognised in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The competition winner is decided by a group of music experts, whereas the second prize is voted for by viewers and the studio audience.

Out of this year’s 12 finalists, the winner was Janna Eijer, from the Netherlands, who sang in Frisian, a language which is spoken in Germany and the Netherlands.

Second prize went to Coffeeshock Company, an Austrian band who perform in Burgenland-Croatian; a language which is spoken in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Other entries were in Friul and Ladin, (both spoken in Italy) Rumantsch, (spoken in Switzerland) Asturian and Basque, (both spoken in Spain) Vepsian and Udmurt, (both spoken in Russia) Gaelic, (spoken in Scotland) Sami,(Scandinavia) and Irish Gaelic (Ireland).

The World Shakespeare Festival takes place next year in locations around the UK, starting from 23^rd April. As part of this event, the Globe Theatre in London will be taking on one of its most ambitious projects yet. The project, entitled Globe to Globe, encompasses 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, each performed in a different language. This will run for 6 weeks only, from 21^st April – 9^th June 2012.

If you’d like to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Korean, Macbeth in Polish, Hamlet in Lithuanian, or Richard II in Palestinian Arabic, tickets start at £5 and are available here.

I always enjoy visiting Engrish Funny for some translation laughs. This image, from sister site Failbook, presents some interesting cultural differences.

In English, the  π symbol (meaning the number) is of course pronounced as “pi,” thus making the phrase on the t-shirt amusing to English speakers. However,  the Greek letter π is “p,” with the pronunciation the same. It’s also pronounced as “p” in French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bulgarian and Portuguese. It seems that English is the odd one out in the way we pronounce it.

Do you know of any other languages that pronounce π “pi”?

I had no idea that the UK had a National Scrabble Championship, but we do, and this year was the 40^th anniversary! Wayne Kelly from Warrington beat Gary Oliver from Southampton to win his very first official Scrabble title, having entered in previous years and not reaching the final.

The contestants entered months of heats, with over 300 players battling for a place in the final. The final itself consisted of five matches, the winner being the player who won the most matches out of five. Mr Kelly used the words “caromel,” (meaning to turn into caramel) worth 69 points, and “travails,” worth 74 points, to seal his victory.

Potential contestants need to register with the ABSP (Association for British Scrabble Players) to be eligible for next year’s competition – the prize money is £2000!

Language is constantly evolving, so it’s quite natural that certain words will be replaced and updated. When you read Shakespeare, for example, there is often an index of words to refer to since they are no longer in use today. A new survey has found that text speak is diminishing the usage of such traditional British words. The study of 2000 adults was carried out to mark the launch of Planet Word, the book which accompanies the series of the same name.

J.P. Davidson, the author of Planet Word said: ”This could be viewed as regrettable, as there are some great descriptive words that are being lost and these words would make our everyday language much more colourful and fun if we were to use them. But it’s only natural that with people trying to fit as much information in 140 characters that words are getting shortened and are even becoming redundant as a result.”

The book lists a top 20 of the unused words.

1. Bally: A word from 1885 - a euphemism for bloody

2. Laggard: An 18th Century word to describe someone who lags behind or responds slowly

3. Felicitations: To express congratulations

4. Rambunctious: Boisterous or unruly

5. Verily: From Middle English, simply means true or in truth

6. Salutations: A welcome greeting

7. Betwixt: Originated before 950, and means neither one nor the other

8. Lauded: From the Latin laudāre, to praise

9. Arcane: Known or understood by very few

10. Raconteur: A person skilled in telling stories, originated in the 19th Century, from the French verb, raconter, to tell. Most known now from Jack White’s band, The Racounteurs

11. Cad: An ill-bred man, originates from 19th Century, derived from the word Caddie

12. Betrothed: The person to whom one is engaged

13. Cripes: An expression of surprise

14. Malaise: A vague or unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness

15. Quash: To put down or suppress completely; quell

16. Swell: Originates before 900 from the Middle English verb swellen, meanings include the verb to inflate and an adjective which describes if something is excellent

17. Balderdash: From the 1590s, it was originally a jumbled mix of liquors (milk and beer, beer and wine, etc.), before being transferred in 1670s to ’senseless jumble of words’

18. Smite: To strike, deal a blow

19. Spiffing: From the word spiff, meaning well-dressed, means superb

20. Tomfoolery: Foolish behaviour

Are there  any words you’d like to see banished to history?

Tomorrow is the concluding part of a fascinating five part BBC documentary series called Fry’s Planet Word. In this series, Stephen Fry explores aspects of linguistics and how we learn and how our skills develop, and he travels across the world investigating different languages. I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but each episode is quite a broad range of different topics under the umbrella of a different theme for each episode. For example; in episode one, entitled “Babel,” Fry covers sign language, animal communication, visits the Nilotic speaking Turkana tribe in Kenya, speaks to a psycholinguist, and explores talks to man who taught his son Klingon as his first language! The programme is not a tool to help you learn other languages, it’s rather a study of linguistics, and will be of interest to anyone studying languages as further information. The series is shown on BBC2 and you can also catch up on iPlayer. Here’s a taster on Youtube.

Have you been watching? What are your thoughts?

I’m reading a collection of essays by David Sedaris called Me Talk Pretty One Day. Some of the essays, including the title one, are about his struggles as an American visiting a small town in France and trying to pick up some of the language (there, in Paris, and in New York City). His partner speaks French, so that leaves him as the only non-French speaker in the town (something that I can relate to, though not so much with French).

He starts off pretty much only knowing the word for bottle opener, which he uses with all the local merchants. He proceeds to type all of his new words (using an old-fashioned typewriter) onto index cards, which he then keeps in a box. His progress is quite slow, and with example words like exorcism, slaughterhouse, and sea monster, I can sort of see why. However, his choice of vocabulary doesn’t stop him from trying to use it with the locals, which I can respect.

His method of keeping new words together allows him to state that at the end of his sixth trip to France, he had learned 1,564 words, which he held all together in a box. I rather liked this statement, and the concept of knowing precisely what your knowledge was.

I don’t know how many foreign words I know, but I would kind of like to. Do you keep track of your progress in any countable way?

Google’s NGram Viewer allows anybody to create quick graphs showing word and phrase frequencies in books going back to 1800. The tool searches a database of words from over 5 million  books, and you can filter for American English, British English, English fiction, Chinese, French, German, and Russian.

Although it has its restrictions, such as not giving us accurate information about spoken usage, it’s a great analysis tool. One of the Wall Street Journal’s blogs did a Christmas analysis to see whether the PC phrase ‘Happy Holidays’ has infiltrated the world of books. A quick graph generation later, and it seems that ‘Merry Christmas’ is still way out in front. It also seems that around 1900, people started capitalising the ‘merry’.

When I filtered for British English only, it seems that ‘Happy Holidays’ is almost never used. The tool is case sensitive, though, so there has been some use of ‘happy holidays’, but these could have been in more general sentences, rather than as a greeting. In British English, ‘h/Happy Christmas’ is much more common than in American English, and ‘happy Christmas’ was almost as popular as ‘Merry Christmas’ at a few points in time. It seems that the use of ‘happy Christmas’ is on the decline recently, though.

In other Christmas-related news, while Father Christmas and Santa Claus are about equally popular in British literature (and both much more popular than the Easter Bunny), American literature uses Santa Claus almost exclusively (with Father Christmas being about as common as the Easter Bunny).