Language Trainers Blog

Many people choose a name in their adopted language, in order to communicate more easily with people who are native speakers.  If you decide to choose a new alias, it will show people you are eager to involve yourself in their language and culture.  It also helps conversation move more smoothly, as saying names in foreign languages and accents interrupts the flow of native speech.

I’m sure we’ve all seen a few adopted names that have made us giggle to ourselves.  So how do you choose a name that won’t be old-fashioned, odd, meaningless, or inappropriate?

Choose something similar to your existing name. This is not necessary, and sometimes not possible, but it will help both you and others remember what it is.

Get a second opinion. Talk to a native speaker you trust (more than one, if possible), and who can explain the name to you (or give you some more options).

Ask if your name “sounds right” - that is, it’s not obsolete or weird.  I was listening to a female friend choosing a Chinese name, and a Chinese guy remarked that he would never marry a girl who was called one of the options.  A name may sound fine to you, but it may be for the opposite gender.  Typically, only native speakers know this kind of thing.

Check for other meanings or connotations. Make sure you’re aware of any other meanings, or words that sound similar.  When my father was choosing an English name, he rejected several names because they sounded like unpleasant nouns in English.  In the end he decided not to have an English name at all, which of course he had every right to do.

Go with something you like! Whether it be unconventional or unusual, if it means something special to you, go for it.

Have you had to choose a foreign name?  How did you choose it, and were you happy with your decision?

I’ve spent the last two years working and travelling in Asia, and speaking a mixture of the local language and English to varying levels of success.  I’m now on a long-overdue visit home, and it’s the first time I have been in an English-speaking country in a long time.  I was eased into it as I had a very long journey comprising four different flights and five different cities, and it wasn’t until the fourth city that the flight crew stopped speaking Chinese (Mandarin to Hong Kong, and then Cantonese after that).

It took me a little while to stop the automatic pleasantries popping into my head in Chinese, and for a few days I kept thinking of ways to try to communicate my needs in other languages.  While it’s a bit of a relief to be able to speak plainly and be understood by strangers, it’s also quite encouraging to realise that I do manage to function in my adopted country.

Does anyone else experience a slight delay in language adjustment?  Maybe it’s another result of jet lag.

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™.

It seems like it’s human nature to try to find the easiest and fastest way to do things, and this is especially true for things we find difficult or don’t understand.  Language learning seems to be one of the things that people are constantly trying to find a shortcut for.  Are there quick fixes and magic solutions?

There are many websites that claim that it is possible for people to learn a foreign language easily and quickly, and you can get it done simply by being asleep.  One website even tells this fantastic story, of a student who achieved great success using their methods:

In Budapest, Hungary, a student wanted to learn English quickly enough to win a BBC contest. Using the sleep-learning method , he memorized one thousand and twenty-six English words in six weeks and won first prize!

Sounds easy, right?  Well, an EFL teacher thought he would ask some people who had tried similar methods.  Not only did he find out that there was a lot more work involved than just listening to audio while you sleep, but that the students who had tried it didn’t feel like they were learning about grammar and sentence structures.  They did report that they became more familiar with speech sounds of English, and improved their pronunciation, though.  The teacher also proposed that doing about 15 minutes of study right before sleeping, and right after waking up (as was instructed in the sleep learning courses) could be beneficial to all students.  Read his full post here.

Has anyone else had experience of learning or enhancing their learning by listening to things while they sleep?

In my last post, I talked about the usefulness of dictionaries, and how they will inevitably struggle to keep up with changing languages.  No language resource will ever be completely current, as, by their nature, they are describing what has already happened, words that have already been used.

I read a great post on Confessions of a Language Addict, that discussed this very issue, along with giving some interesting advice about dealing with differences between spoken and documented language, whether the language is natural or created.

When you’re learning a language, real or made-up, one of the struggles you’re going to face is that no resource is going to be completely accurate, at least not for the time you’re learning it. Study French and you’ll think that “I don’t know” is je ne sais pas, pronounced “zhuh nuh say pah.” But you’re more likely to hear “shay pas.” Orthography hasn’t caught up to speech - and probably won’t. That’s because of the strange byplay between orthography and speech: People will still say “zhuh nuh say pah” for emphasis because when you’re carefully sounding something out, you sound it out as it is written, not as it is transcribed. Likewise in English, “I’m gonna go ta New York tamara” turns into “I am going to go to New York to-morrow” if you’re asked to repeat yourself. So writing isn’t always great for everyday speech, but it’s marvelous if you want to talk to someone as if he is half deaf.

So what can we do?  Well, if you are determined to use a formal version of your target language, I think you’ll be fine to use written resources as they are.  But what if you want to learn to talk to real people?  To be understood by them and speak, as much as possible, as native speakers do?

Don’t take written material as gospel.  Embrace the fact that there will be differences between what you read and what you hear and experience.  Trust that maybe your ears aren’t deceiving you!

Learning from a native speaker is always a great direction to take.  He or she will be able to answer any questions you have about the differences between textbooks and real speech.  In order to really see language at work, though, you have to be able to hear real people speak to each other.  Beginners will often need slower versions of conversations, or breakdowns of examples.  Podcasts are a great way to go, especially if they have some written material to go along with them.  If you can’t get out into an environment where people speak your native language, try audio books or internet radio.  Repeat what you hear.

Dialects and regional usage mean that nobody will ever speak the imaginary ‘real’ language.  This should encourage you!  Listen, repeat what you hear, speak the language, and revel in the fact that people begin to understand you on their terms.

I can’t count how many times I have ‘learned’ a new word, and then promptly forgotten it again. I ask someone how to say something, they tell me, I repeat it back, and half an hour later, I have no idea what the word was.

It doesn’t really help that I am learning Chinese at the moment, so it’s more difficult to put the sounds, pinyin (Romanised pronunciation), and character together than it is for languages that use a similar writing system to my native language.

Nevertheless, I have found that, unsurprisingly, writing these words down helps. I managed to find a perfect little vocabulary notebook for this purpose (it has columns for word, part of speech, pronunciation, and meaning), though of course any notebook could be used for this. And in this technologically-driven world, a mobile phone, organiser, or even music player could do the same job.

Making a note of the word will reinforce it in your mind, and if you reorganise these words alphabetically or by group, and periodically read back through your collected words, they will become more familiar much faster. Not only will you be reminded about these words more often, it is likely that the words and phrases you discover on your own (rather than from textbooks or classroom material) will be more relevant or useful to you.

I’d better just make a note of the word for eggplant, before I completely forget it…

Groups of people, especially very different people, can produce interesting and educational experiences.  When people speak different languages, it can be a challenge, or it can be a great learning opportunity.

I’ve been in situations where I have been the primary speaker because I happen to know the most of a foreign language, and also the person who has to have everything translated for her.  I’ve also been in the situation where others think that because I look like I speak the language, I’m the primary speaker, but it’s not the case at all.

I recently came across a great anecdote about trying to find a kitchen utensil in Italy.  The author speaks some Italian, but doesn’t understand that much, which is the opposite of how many people are in a foreign language.  He explains:

The problem, however, was this: I can speak Italian well enough to pose a question without sounding like a complete idiot, but when it comes to getting the answer, I am just that: a complete idiot. In fact, I’ve tried learning several languages in my life and always have the same problem: I can speak okay, but for some reason I have a hard time comprehending when someone speaks back to me. I understand nothing. Most people seem to have the opposite problem when learning a new language. When my wife Jessie and I had lived in Rome a few years earlier, we were an Italian-speaking team: since I spoke better, I’d do all the speaking and pose all the questions. Then, Jessie would listen to the answer, the whole time I’d be watching her bob her head in comprehension, until she’d translate it into English for me so I could respond. It was odd, but it worked.

The full story is both entertaining and well written, and you can find it here: The Language of Can Openers in the Italian Countryside, by David Farley.  Image from Ed Yourdon, under Flickr Creative Commons.

I seem to be giving out suggestions from personal experience at the moment, so I’ll continue along that vein.

Today’s snippet of advice is: don’t get ahead of yourself.

You’d think it was always beneficial to have good pronunciation, but sometimes it’s actually better to make sure that native speakers know that your level isn’t quite the same as theirs (if this happens to be true).  If their first impression of you is that you’re fluent when you’re not*, you will just be overloaded with lightning-speed responses that you possibly won’t understand.

If the person you’re speaking to is made aware that perhaps you aren’t quite as proficient as they are, they will be more likely to grade their language and slow their speech a little.  It’s much better to be able to understand all or most of the conversation and be able to respond than to miss everything because of speed or local dialect.

So, if you know how to ask a question in a contracted or colloquial way, make sure that you will also be able to predict and understand the answer!

Similarly, maintain a comfortable and steady pace.  If you can say some sentences very quickly, but stumble on others, it will make the conversation much more difficult for the listener.  A steady rhythm will ensure you say your words correctly, and will give the listener an idea of how quickly to provide their responses.

*I’ve had endless experiences with this kind of thing in Asia.  I always try to learn a few pleasantries in the local language, but because I sometimes look like I could be a local myself, I get torrents of Thai, Vietnamese, and Mandarin in response.  I’m glad most people are accepting of my blank looks and stilted apologies.

In just the last week, I’ve been involved in two separate mix-ups using the words food and foot.

In the first instance, my friend and I were heading to a bar she recommended. On the list of positives about the place was what I heard as baby food. When I obviously had no idea what she was talking about, or why you would want baby food in a bar, we discussed it further, which included some amusing miming. It turns out that baby-foot is what they call table football, or foosball, in France (and other places). I learned something new.

In the second instance, I taught a Business English class where I introduced the phrase to eat your own dog food. This is predominantly used in the IT industry, and is used when a company uses its own product in-house, before the latest version is released to the public. The practice of dogfooding has its benefits and drawbacks. Anyway, after the class, which told the story of the dog food company whose advertising campaign led to the phrase, I received some homework which repeatedly used the term dogfooting. I can’t work out what she thinks eating your own dog foot involves, but it doesn’t sound fun. Maybe it’s putting your foot in your mouth, but even worse?

I’m not sure whether the problem is with the interchangeable /d/ and /t/ sounds, the long and short versions of oo, or some combination of the two. I know with the first example, it was probably a combination of mispronunciation and my trying to hear a phrase that sounded familiar (but didn’t make sense). Just looking at the two words, you would think they would rhyme, but they don’t. It’s no wonder non-native speakers get confused.

I’m not really a fan of acronyms like LOL (laugh[ing] out loud), so I tend to stick with the written representations of laughing sounds, and the ones I usually use are hahaha (that’s funny!), hehehe (that’s kind of mean!), and hee (cute! squee!).

I’ve always thought the Spanish versions - jajaja, jejeje, jijiji - were really cute, but I have a tendency to read jajaja in a German accent, so it says ‘yes yes yes’.

Here are a few more ways* to show your humour in other languages:

Chinese
哈哈 / ha ha
嘿嘿 / hei hei
呵呵 / he he

Russian
ха-ха-ха (hahaha)
хи-хи (heehee)

Malaysian
kahkahkah (hahaha from comic books)

Turkish

eki eki (used in comics, as the older way of laughing)
muhaha (evil laughter)
nihaha (evil laughter)
puhaha, uhaha, zuhaha (used if something’s really funny)

German
hnhnhn, hmhmhm, chrchrchr (giggle)

My favourite at the moment is a Chinese coworker’s use of hohoho.  I don’t think she really means to sound like Santa Claus, but it brightens my day.

*Many of these examples are from WordReference Forums.