Language Trainers Blog

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?

Language journal has published a study by three linguists at the University of Lyon, showing that certain languages are more or less equally efficient.

The study compared the efficiency of conveying information in spoken German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Researchers took a sample group of 59 people, who each read a sample text in their native language. The recordings were then edited to remove the pauses, and syllables were tallied in order to draw conclusions regarding the density of information communicated in each language.

Japanese was found to be the fastest spoken language, with 7.84 syllables spoken per second. Mandarin Chinese was the slowest, with the average syllabic speech rate at 5.18. However, the researchers note that in ‘faster’ languages, the individual parts of words are shorter, meaning there are more syllables. They concluded that a higher rate of syllables by no means implies that content can be transmitted more quickly.

A more comprehensive study, carried out by University of Klagenfurt linguistics professor Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon in 2010, reached similar conclusions. In this case, 51 different languages were recorded, with Indian language Tegulu found to be the fastest, and Thai the slowest.

The latest study, in more detailed form, can be found here.

Most people think of language as a way to communicate and describe the world around us, but have you ever considered how much our language affects how we see the world?

I read a great article on the Wall Street Journal about just this.  It’s not something that I really think about unless it’s put in front of me, but language really can affect how we interpret the world.

One of the most interesting parts of the article talks about how some cultures (up to a third of languages!) don’t have words like left and right, and instead talk about direction in absolute terms (north, south, etc.).  In these languages, you would talk about things like your east leg, or your northwest arm, depending on which direction you were facing.  If you’re thinking about absolute directions all the time, you are most likely going to be better at finding your way around.  Also fascinating was that for people who speak languages where no blame is given to accidental wrongs (e.g. someone knocking over a glass), it is more difficult to remember who did it.  For example, in English we would say that ‘Jack knocked the glass over’, but in Japanese or Spanish, they would just say that the glass had been knocked over.  I wonder how much this has perpetuated the tendency in English-speaking countries to lay blame on others for things that happen to us.

Does language shape culture, or does the culture we live in affect the language we use?

We’ve all had that experience where we know we know a word, but we just can’t recall it.

An American study set out to reproduce this phenomenon to see if there was any difference between monolingual and bilingual speakers’ chances of having a ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ moment.

It has already been documented that people who only speak one language have fewer instances of words on the tips of their tongues, but researchers wanted to know if it was because people are sounding out words in their heads (and bilinguals have around twice as many words in their heads as monolinguals).

To study this, the researchers asked participants to name dozens of different objects (often with rarely-used names, like metronome and gyroscope), and counted the number of tip-of-the-tongue experiences (but only for those instances where the participant actually knew the word).  They found that monolingual participants had fewer occurrences, but that English-Spanish speakers had around the same number of tip-of-the-tongue moments as English-ASL (American Sign Language) speakers.

This led the researchers to believe that we’re not sounding things out in our heads at all (as ASL does not have sounds), but looking through a catalogue of rarely-used words.

Full article: New Scientist.

I’ve talked previously about learning language through other personal interests or hobbies, but how about through other academic subjects, or through general knowledge?  Imagine being able to play Trivial Pursuit in your new language!

One way to boost your vocabulary is to learn what countries, cities, and people are called in your adopted language. You might even learn a few things about each place on the way.

Nations Online is a fascinating website with all sorts of information about the world on it.  Their Country Lists page has links to lists of countries in eight different languages, as well as the local names for places.  It also has lists of countries sorted by the mega languages they speak (Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, and French).

If you are learning one of these languages, it could be an interesting place to start research into geography, culture, traditions, and even local dialects of your chosen language.

Curt Smothers has developed an interesting exercise for Spanish learners based around Spanish-speaking country names, the names for their nationalities, and fun facts about the places.  This exercise could easily be adapted for any language, and is interesting for children and adults alike.

Some fun facts:

• Belize is the only non-Spanish speaking country in Central America.  Its official language is English.
• Papua New Guinea is a small country in the Pacific, and is the most linguistically-complex country in the world.  Over 800 languages are spoken there.
• The most widely-spoken languages in the world are (from most speakers to least): Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, and Arabic.
• Africa is the continent with the most living languages, at over 2,000.
• There are nearly 7,000 living languages in the world.

Go to en.bab.la to order a full-size poster of the map above.

I recently started a salsa dance class, out of interest in dance, as well as a need for exercise.  I had assumed that because the website and the woman I dealt with were bilingual, that at least some of the instruction would be in English.  I was almost right.

I was the only person in the class who didn’t speak Chinese, so I mostly watched and followed along.  The names of the steps were in English, so that helped a bit.  In fact, I got to learn a few new terms because of the repetitive nature of the class, it helped with my listening skills, and I got to do something I enjoyed at the same time.

Taking an interest course in a different language is a great way to practice your language skills, but it may be difficult if your language level isn’t very high yet.  Practical courses are easier, because there is a lot of watching, demonstration, and practice involved, with the instruction not being the main part.

Even if you don’t want to take a course entirely in another language (or if this option isn’t available to you), you can still pick up or develop a hobby that involves other languages or culture.  Dance or music from other countries, foreign films, cuisine, crafts.  Learn more about terms you already know, for example, the background of Italian food names, or learn how to read knitting patterns in another language.  It will add interest to your existing hobbies, and won’t put too much pressure on your language learning.

Taking it to the extreme, American Jim O’Neill’s lifelong love of baseball language (not the sport itself, but the language used) has led him to create a dictionary of baseball terms.  Not just an English dictionary, but an English-Spanish one.

“I was just a little kid when I first heard ‘Can of corn,’ ” O’Neill said. “And I thought that was the coolest expression I had ever heard in my life.”

Hearing that baseball phrase, which means an easy-to-catch fly ball, started O’Neill on a decades-long quest to translate English baseball phrases into Spanish dialects.

O’Neill, faculty emeritus in the St. Cloud State University Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, turned his love of the language into a book he self-published, “The Bilingual Baseball Dictionary English-Spanish/Spanish-English.”

His dictionary contains about 8,000 definitions in its 344 pages, with nearly 3½ pages alone dedicated to various ways of saying “hit a home run” in Spanish.

I thought that most hobbies would only have a few pages’ worth of useful terms, but who knew baseball could have so many?

Full article from the St. Cloud Times.

Further to what I said the other day about attitudes towards communication, I find that it makes a big difference to be around people whose foreign language skills are equal to, or lower than yours.  Not exclusively, of course.  Let me explain:

If you are communicating with someone who speaks very little of your native language, you will be further encouraged to speak with them in theirs.  I find that the language of communication tends to be that which both parties can speak the best, kind of like water always sinking to the lowest level possible.  So, if you are an English speaker learning Spanish, and you meet a Spanish speaker who doesn’t speak English, naturally you will try to communicate in Spanish.  If the Spanish speaker’s English is better than your Spanish, then you will probably speak mostly in English.

On the other hand, if you are in a foreign country and your companions speak less of the local language than you do, often times you will be relied on to be the primary communicator.  I found this when my relatives came to visit me recently.  They can speak Cantonese, but not Mandarin, so I had to rely on my paltry Mandarin to get us around.  It’s always encouraging to find out exactly how much you know, and you may surprise yourself!  It doesn’t hurt that your companions are often impressed with your skills.

I find that the best speaker in a group will inevitably end up being the spokesperson.  It makes interactions smoother, but it doesn’t help the other members of the group with their confidence.

Be bold, and be proactive in your speaking.  Every opportunity to practice is a chance to get better.  Don’t miss one just because you feel that someone else can say it better than you.

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.