Language Trainers Blog

It’s the Oscars at the end of this month, so now is the time to catch the nominees for Best Foreign Film, and judge for yourself which is the best candidate!
Up this year are 5 nominees:

No (Spanish)
Amour (French)
A Royal Affair (Danish)
War-Witch (French/Lingala)
Kon-Tiki (Norwegian)

Blog readers will know that I’m a big fan of using foreign films as a language learning tool, and as a student of Spanish, I will be going to see No this weekend (it doesn’t hurt that it has Gael Garcia Bernal in, either!) Here’s the trailer:

If, like me, you’re learning Spanish, then you might want to consider adding this puzzle book to your Christmas list. Wordsearches and crosswords are a great way to test your vocabulary skills. I use crosswords to practise my native English too!

This one is available from Waterstones. If you’re learning a different language, no worries…others are available in Italian, German, French, Swahili, Hindi, Japanese, Pashto, and even Hawaiian!

It’s Film Festival season in London, and here’s a heads up for yet another one! As a student of Latin American Spanish, and a huge Latin film fan, I’m looking forward to getting involved with this one.

The 10 day film fest kicked off on Friday with a performance by Lokandes, followed by a screening of Mexican documentary “And the River Flows On” and a Q&A session with producer Jesus Rodriguez Montes.

Many Latin American countries are represented, with films from Mexico, Honduras, Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, Colombia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Brazil due to be screened.

I’m looking forward to seeing Colombian documentary Cocaine Unwrapped; as well as Tiempos Menos Modernos (Not So Modern Times), which has already won awards at international film festivals. The latter promises some stunning Patagonian scenery as well!

You can find more information here. Tickets are available through individual venues.

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?

London’s Spanish Film Festival kicks off next month at Cine Lumiere in South Kensington. The festival, which runs from Friday 28th September -  Wednesday 10th October, promises several UK premieres for Spanish language cinema fans.

Pedro Almodovar classic Todo Sobre mi Madre (All About My Mother) gets another cinema outing on 30th Spetember, and will be preceded with an introduction from Antonia San Juan, who played transvestite Agrado in the film. Another treat for Almodovar fans on the 1st October with a talk entitled Acting with Almodovar, with actors Lluis Homar, (Bad Education, Broken Embraces) Marisa Paredes, (The Skin I Live In, All About My Mother) and the aforementioned San Juan.

A full programme of events and film screenings can be found here, with tickets available here.

Following the launch of the European Spanish store, online retailer Amazon.com now has a specialist Kindle shop for digital books in the Spanish language on its US site.  The books on offer include an exclusive on Paolo Coelho novels, the popular Twilight and Hunger Games collections, and titles by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The site also offers subscriptions to Latin American newspapers, such as La Nacion.

“We’re excited to introduce Spanish language storefronts on all Kindles, as well as a dedicated store for our Spanish-speaking customers in the US,” said Kindle Content vice president Russ Grandinetti. ”We’re looking forward to continued expansion of our store for Spanish language readers around the world.”

In addition, the company now offers customer help and support in Spanish.

US Kindle users can buy the books here.

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?

It’s that time of year again, where we’re all trying to think of fabulous Christmas gifts for family and friends. Don’t worry, I won’t be making these a regular thing all the way through December! I’ve just discovered these magnets which would make a great gift for any language student, and thought I’d share!

These little Magnetic Poetry Kits now come in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian and Swedish, and are a fun way to practice your writing skills in another language. There’s also a Hebrew alphabet kit, a sign language kit, and a Chinese for Kids kit, but these are a little harder to find.

These are available from Amazon, Eurocosm, and directly from Magnetic Poetry (this is a US site)

It seems that native speakers of certain languages are able to roll their ‘r’s more easily than others. For me, as a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, it’s very difficult to pronounce rolled ‘r’s, which is also known as the alveolar trill. For example, trying to convey the name of a Cuban bar (Barrio) was particularly difficult when trying to arrange to meet up with my Spanish friend Eva recently. Pronouncing ‘r’s in an English accent, in the English form, is a huge disadvantage to communication in Spanish.

An Italian friend tells me that some children are taught the word “rabarbaro” (rhubarb) at school to help them pronounce their ‘r’s correctly. This word is not commonly used in the Italian language otherwise. In fact, when I told my Italian flatmate this word, he didn’t know what it meant. It could have been my pronunciation of course, but I wrote it down for him as well!

Having said all of this, one of my best friends, Mairi, is Scottish, and has no problem with rolling her ‘r’s, especially as you need to roll the r in her name to pronounce it correctly. So, is it down to accent?

This led me to try and find a way to learn how to do this properly. It is all in the tongue vibration, apparently. A lot of online help assumes you have an American accent, but I know of a few tips for us Brits.

The short term solution, for emergency use whilst you practice getting your tongue around your ‘r’s, is to pronounce the r as a hard D. You have to say it really fast to get away with it, but it does work! “Barrio” becomes “baDio,” and at least Eva will now know where I want to meet up for cocktails in the near future.

It’s better to try than to risk becoming a tentative speaker, as this is something that can really damage your confidence with speaking new languages.

Of course, in the long term, the only solution is practice, practice, practice. This video tutorial really helped me work out how to position my tongue properly, which is the basic principal to getting your alveolar trill right. If you’re not a visual learner, the WikiHow article is useful too. There are tongue twisters you can use to practice, but assuming that if you’re not confident with your rolled ‘r’s just yet, your level of Spanish isn’t advanced enough for this, so I like to stick to a short list of familiar words to practice with to begin. “Ferrocarril” (railway) is the perfect word to start off.

What works best for you? Does anyone have any other tips?