Language Trainers Blog

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.

When I first heard the song It’s All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and friends, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about.  This was back in 1997, though, when American slang wasn’t quite as widespread as it is now.  These days, I’m quite aware that benjamin* refers to a US $100 note, because of the portrait of former president and inventor Benjamin Franklin.  It’s more commonly used in hip-hop circles than everyday English, and has been mentioned on film (2002 film All About the Benjamins) and TV.  Puff Daddy (aka P Diddy, aka Sean Combs) has been credited with the first use of this term.  He even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary:

The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line “My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins.” (from A.Word.A.Day.)

Benjamin* has also been used for many years in some European cultures to mean the youngest person in a family or group.  “The benjamin of the family”, “le benjamin de la famille” (French), “el benjamin de la familia” (Spanish), and “der Benjamin der Familie” (German) all mean the youngest child of a family.  It’s an older term that refers to the biblical Benjamin, who was the youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons.

*A word that is derived from the name of a particular person is called an eponym.

The Chinese government has been reported to have plans to release a list of about 8,000 characters that they recommend be used for everyday purposes, including textbooks, documents, and names for newborn babies.  Limitations in updating technology to recognise all of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters in existence means that it is very difficult for the government to implement nationwide electronic ID cards, as well as digitisation of texts.  Their solution, rather than adding thousands of characters that most people will never use, is to restrict new baby names, as well as require people with very unusual names to change them.

Everyday Chinese involves about 3,500 characters, and the recommended 8,000 simplified characters are reportedly enough to convey “almost any concept in any field”.  This doesn’t bode well for the some 60 million Chinese people with obscure names, who may have to choose simpler names in order to receive the mandatory ID cards.

Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.

By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.

At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million, followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. To refer to an unidentified person — the equivalent of “just anybody” in English — one Chinese saying can be loosely translated this way: “some Zhang, some Li.”

While I don’t agree with people having to change their names for the sake of convenience for the government, cultures that have an alphabet-based written language can’t compare to this situation.  In English, we have our standard 26 letters, along with numbers, and various punctuation marks.  We occasionally adopt accent marks when we borrow from other languages.  In Chinese, the computer systems must recognise thousands upon thousands of characters.  Many countries also forbid parents to name their children potentially offensive or damaging names, and names with numerals in them have been denied (such as baby 4Real, who was later named Superman).

I think it would also be quite frustrating not being able to input one’s own name on a computer, or have to describe it to someone who had never even seen the character before, but then again, both my English and Chinese names are pretty common.

Full article from NYTimes.com.

FreeRice is an excellent website that combines education and charity.  The concept is simple: answer a question correctly and the UN World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry family somewhere in the world.

FreeRice started out as an English vocabulary game.  They would show you a word and then give four possible definitions or synonyms.  Since then, they have added English grammar, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and several other subject areas like mathematics, chemistry, and geography.

The difficulty level automatically adjusts depending on whether you get the question right or wrong, so the more questions you get right, the harder it becomes.  A great feature is that it will tell you the correct answers to the questions you miss, and repeats them later on in the game - an excellent revision method.

The  highest English vocabulary level they use is 60.  I’ve gotten to a maximum of 50 the last few times I’ve played.  The most memorable word I’ve learned today is jalousie, which is a type of window blind.  I actually guessed the answer correctly, even though it looks like a terrible attempt at spelling ‘jealousy’.

There’s no minimum or maximum number of questions, so there’s no excuse for having no time to feed people in need.  See if you can get to the highest level in your area of expertise, or even better, in the language you’re studying.

They say that nothing is free, but the cost of this is hardly worth mentioning, and the benefits far outweigh the effort of pointing and clicking!

Growing up, we referred to Friday the 13th as Black Friday. It wasn’t until last November that I found out that Black Friday is also the name for the big shopping day immediately following Thanksgiving in the USA, and apparently the Friday just before Christmas in the UK (a big party day). It seems that my usage is non-standard at best (that is, pretty much unknown). Black Friday is also the name that has been given to numerous tragic events, as it seems like bad things happen fairly often on Fridays.

In some places, especially the United States and Commonwealth countries, today is especially unlucky because it is the combination of two unlucky things: Friday, and the number 13. The superstition causes many people to pay extra attention to staying safe, not letting black cats cross their paths, and not walking under ladders (other supposedly unlucky occurrences). Some people are so paralysed by a fear of this day that they can’t leave their houses and some can’t do anything on these days. The phobia is known as paraskavedekatriaphobia, or friggatriskaidekaphobia, which I think is an excellent word to try to say.

Interestingly enough, though Friday and 13 have individually been seen as unlucky for centuries, the combination has only been seen as a particularly unlucky day for the last 100 or so years.

In Greece and in certain Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Spain, and some parts of Latin America), it’s not the Friday that should be feared, but Tuesday the 13th. Tuesday is considered the worst day of the week, and why not, as you haven’t even reached Wednesday (the ‘hump’ day) yet. As a result of this, the horror film franchise Friday the 13th, although released in Spain as Viernes 13 (Friday the 13th), was released in Argentina as Martes 13, or Tuesday the 13th.

You may know that I was pretty happy about Senator Obama becoming President-Elect Obama.

On the eve of his historic inauguration, I hope that displays of this sort will become rarer in the future (is it just me, or did someone prepare these labels just to take advantage of every time they saw a bilingual sign?).

It might be naive of me, and things may well get worse before they get better, but I hope that tolerance for other languages and cultures will increase over the next few years, especially in the United States.

10 hours to go!

I’ve been working on an English pronunciation project recently, and we came up against the age-old (well, not really) question of American (AmE*) vs British (BrE*) English pronunciation. This particular project is required to use BrE, and the standard UK IPA symbols. I realised that if and when I need to create an AmE version, I will need to use a different set of phonetic symbols (notably for vowels), and teach some words in completely different ways. For example, AmE doesn’t really use the sound /ɔ:/ (the first syllable in the British ‘water’), but pronounces a whole lot more r’s than its British counterpart.

This led me to the question of choosing an accent. When you’re about to learn a new language, do you consider which dialect or accent you will be picking up, and will it matter in the future? Can the complete beginner even tell the difference? If you are learning English, should you pick a North American, European, or even Australasian accent? Apparently Canadian is the easiest to understand. If you’re learning French, do you want to speak like a Parisian or a Montrealer?

I know that when I was trying to improve my Cantonese, I preferred a Hong Kong accent to a country accent, and similarly I would rather have a Beijing or Shanghai accent than that of a small town that nobody’s ever heard of.

Of course this may sound like snobbery, but it basically boils down to increasing your chances of being understood. If you do your best to emulate a standard accent, people will be much more likely to understand you. I don’t think it matters if you choose American or British English, or American or European Spanish, as long as you try to learn a dialect that is commonly understood. If you go to a village an learn their particular accent and dialect, not only will you be an anomaly, but it will be much less likely that you will achieve the goal of learning a language - communication.

So if you’re making this sort of decision - just pick an accent and run with it.

*To prevent confusion, I am using American English to mean the standard or General American (GA) accent, and British English to mean a standard accent from England, sometimes referred to as BBC English or Received Pronunciation (RP). Not many people actually speak with either of these accents, but they are taken as a frame of reference. Please don’t leave me angry comments about how I should just call it English. English English is too confusing a term to use. As is Spanish Spanish.

If you’ve ever had to type a handful of words in a foreign language, but don’t use that foreign language enough to warrant adding it to your computer’s language bar, then TypeIt.org may be what you’re looking for.

It has pages for twelve different languages, including a one that lets you type the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for English pronunciation. Unfortunately the keyboard shortcuts only work for Internet Explorer, but even without them, it’s a simple type/click, copy, paste scenario.

If you’re worried about getting your diacritics right, and don’t want to bother with using a character map, inserting a symbol, or changing your keyboard input language (and having to remember where the right keys are in the different layout), then check it out. It has character sets for Czech, French, German, Hungarian, IPA (English), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

The school students of Texas have been recommended a list of 150 books that includes only four that reflect Hispanic culture, despite nearly half of the students coming from Hispanic backgrounds.  The list is heavy on the ‘classics’ but has been roundly criticised by local teachers for not providing literature that many of the students will be able to relate to easily.

The chairman of the State Board of Education, Don McLeroy, said that he couldn’t comment on the list, as he hadn’t read it.  From the full article at a local paper:

However, McLeroy said he directed a group of experts to add examples of “good literature” to the list. He said students should spend their time in English class learning English and reading literature that will help prepare them for college.

“What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book?” he said. “You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That’s not going to help you master … English. So you really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child’s time trying to learn a word that they’ll never ever use again?”

He added that some words — such as chow mein — might be useful.

Despite the fact that the criticisms weren’t anything to do with ‘Chinese stories’, Mr McLeroy has provided some great insights.  Perhaps only stories about ordering food from ethnic restaurants are appropriate for the students of the Lone Star state.

I have found this curious list of English names meanings when they are written in other languages:

Adam (Arabic) skin

Alan (Indonesian) comedian

Alf (Arabic) thousand, millennium

Anna (Arabic) moans and groans

Calista (Portuguese) chiropodist

Camilla (Spanish) stretcher

Cilla (Zarma, Nigeria) basket

Doris (Bajan, Barbados) police van

Eliza (Basque) church

Eve (Rapa Nui, Easter Island) buttocks

Fay (Zarma, Nigeria) divorce

Fred (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) peace

Jim (Korean) baggage

Kim (Ainu, Japan) mountain

Kylie (Dharug, Australia) boomerang

Laura (Greek) groups of monks’ huts

Luke (Chinese) traveller

Marianna (Italian) accomplice who tells a gambler the cards held by other players

Sara (Hausa, Nigeria) snakebite

Sid (Arabic) plaster

Susan (Thai) cemetery

Vera (Italian) wedding ring