Language Trainers Blog

Ensuring you get the correct spelling, in any written language, is paramount. You can get away with slight mispronunciations is most cases, verbally, but on paper you can and will appear not to have an appropriate attention to detail. The consequences can range from implying something you didn’t intend, to not getting a job because you have misspelled a single word on your CV.

Oh, the irony.

Using spell check sometimes just won’t cut it. Some words which sound the same when vocalised are often used incorrectly in the written form. These can be spelled correctly but often misused. There/their/they’re, two/to/too, and your/you’re are all commonly used incorrectly.

You wouldn’t think to submit an essay or letter without proof reading first in your own language. The best spell check you can use when recording text in another language is someone who is a native speaker of the language which you are writing.

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik‘s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

Being a bit of a pedant, I have quite a few peeves when it comes to the English language.  I don’t really have any favourites, but this post on Hyperbole and a Half has given new meaning to pet peeve.  Allie, the brilliant author, has turned her despair at the common mistake alot (misspelling of ‘a lot’) into a wonderfully surreal alternative.  Every time she sees someone write alot, she imagines it to be a mythical animal by the name of Alot.  The image at left is entitled I care about this Alot.

I know that I’m going to be imagining this cute, furry animal whenever I see alot from now on.  There may need to be some creative rearranging of punctuation, but Alot is very versatile and should cover most situations.  Thanks, Alot, Allie!

On the major Chinese television network, CCTV, newscasters have been told to stop using commonly-understood English acronyms in their broadcasts.  Instead of using short forms like NBA and WHO, TV presenters have been told they must use the full Chinese translations, which are sometimes very long and might in turn be confusing to viewers.  If newscasters accidentally use the abbreviations, they must use the full translation immediately afterwards to establish what they are talking about.

The reasoning behind this move is that government officials do not want the Chinese language to be infiltrated by English and become some sort of mongrel in a few years.  I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, but it is somewhat reminiscent of the Académie française’s crusade to keep French pure.

I don’t know if this move will help maintain the grand traditions of the Chinese language, but it definitely won’t be saving the CCTV (err, China Central Television) anchors any time.

Source: CNNGo.

Subtitles are a great way to watch foreign films and TV shows and be able to understand them, and using them can help if you need a bit of help with your listening comprehension.  There are a couple of other things you can do with them, besides the standard native language subtitle, though.

Make sure you’re hearing all the words correctly by using subtitles in the same language as the audio.  It will also help if you miss a word here or there, and help towards improving your reading recognition, spelling, and comprehension.  If you are a beginner, or the material is particularly complex, it will help to watch the film a few times using your native language first, and/or pause and review frequently.

Another option, if the film has it, is to listen to it dubbed in your language, with the subtitles in the original language.  This will make sure you understand what is going on, but give you more exposure to the written language.  If you are learning a non-alphabetised language, it will help with your recognition, too.  Obviously, pausing a lot will help here, too.

You can always try watching your favourite shows dubbed or subtitled in your target language, but bear in mind that subtitles (as with many translations) may not be correct.  If something seems a bit wrong to you, it very well might be.  Don’t let this put you off though, as there are a lot of benefits to watching and understanding interesting material.  Note down anything weird or interesting, and show it to your teacher or look it up later.

Have you benefited from watching foreign language material?  How did you do it?

Image: meaduva.

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…

A new education strategy from the UK government is recommending that teachers stop teaching the traditional spelling ‘rule’ “I before E except after C”.

Although it’s familiar to generations of English speakers, the National Strategies document Support for Spelling says there are too many exceptions to the rule, and the mnemonic could be more confusing than useful.  Though they say that it is useful only for ee sounds (as in receive), the rule still has exceptions – seize, seizure, and the ee versions of either and neither.

Campaigners for plain English and simple spelling reforms have taken this as support for their cause, but Judy Parkinson, author of I Before E (Except After C): Old-School Ways to Remember Stuff, suggests that teachers should be able to make up their own minds about using the phrase in their classes.

For instance, one predominantly American variation of the rhyme includes the lines “…or when it sounds like an A; as in neighbour and weigh“.  This happily deals with the exceptions veil, beige, eight, and sleigh.

I think it would be more trouble than it’s worth to try to include all of these other exceptions: counterfeit, leisure, caffeine, science, ancient, foreign…

Full article from Times Online.

Unless you’ve been living under a virtual rock recently, you’ll know about the so-called microblogging service Twitter.  It allows businesses, news media, celebrities, and individuals to broadcast their thoughts in 140 character tweets, as well as keep up with all manner of other people and organisations.  Best of all, you don’t have to be connected to a PC, or even the internet.  Most functions can be accessed by mobile phone (depending on what country you’re in), and communicating is as easy as sending a text message (SMS).

After skimming over Online Colleges’ extensive collection of 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom, I started thinking about practical uses for tweeting in the language classroom (or, more specifically, outside the language classroom).

From the Communication section:

1. Direct Tweet. [Teachers] and students can contact each other through direct Tweets without having to share cell phone numbers.
2. Get to know your classmates. A class Twitter group will help facilitate [teachers] and students getting to know each other, especially if the class is part of a more intimate setting such as a seminar.
3. Collaborate on projects. When working together on projects, set up a group using an app like Tweetworks to facilitate communication between everyone working together.
4. Make announcements. [Teachers] can send out reminders about upcoming tests, project due dates, or any news that needs to be shared via Twitter.
5. Share interesting websites. Both [teachers] and students can post interesting websites that are relevant to their class.
6. Daily learning. Twitter feeds happen much more frequently than the two or three times a day a student is in class, therefore using Twitter in the classroom means there is a daily opportunity for learning.

More specific to language learning:

1. Practice a foreign language. Language classes can take advantage of the opportunity to communicate in the target language of the class by finding native speakers on Twitter.
2. Follow mentors. If [teachers] or other key figures in your field of study are on Twitter, follow them to keep up with their research and activities.
3. Follow an idea, word, or event. Send “track ___” with whatever word, event, or idea you want to follow in the blank, and you will receive Tweets that contain that keyword.

Teachers can set students short assignments that they have to complete in 140 characters or less.  Students can post interesting new words or points they learn, and can learn from peers around the world.  Post interesting news stories or websites about your chosen language.

The length restriction is a bit of a double-edged sword in that what you will see from native speakers will often be informal abbreviations, or internet slang, but at the same time, because communication is key, learners won’t have to worry too much about spelling and grammar.

It could be worth finding out if your language teacher or fellow students uses the service, or look up a few interesting people who tweet in your target language.  There are a lot of possibilities out there for this kind of thing, and I’d be interested to hear about your experiences.

A sign in Birmingham does a good job of reminding us why spacing and typography are important.

Spotted by Michael James and posted in the Telegraph Sign Language series.

I know I’ve said that Americans don’t spell as well as the British, but there’s no doubting that the institution of the National Spelling Bee is given much more attention, time, and effort in the USA.

Last week, 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas won the coveted spelling bee trophy by correctly spelling the word Laodicean.  The Round 16 word, meaning to be indifferent, especially in religion, put her ahead of the the two runners up, who misspelled menhir (an upright stone monument, carried around by Obelix in the Asterix comics) and Maecenas (a patron or supporter of the arts).

The months of training, which even included skipping her own birthday celebrations, paid off for Shivashankar, as she took home her prizes, worth over US$30,000.  She plans to be a neurosurgeon one day, but said that nothing would ever replace spelling.

It’s unlikely that most of us have ever heard of the majority of the words in the later rounds of the bee.  It’s even less likely that we’d have the opportunity to use them in real life.  Many of them have been adopted into English from other languages, making an already irregular spelling system even more difficult.  Here are a few for you to consider:

phoresy – a non-parasitic relationship where one organism carries another.

guayabera – a type of loose men’s shirt or lightweight jacket, popular in Latin America.

sophrosyne - moderation, discretion.

reredos - a decorative screen used on an altar.

Fourth-placed Kyle Mou tripped up on schizaffin, which I’ve had trouble even finding a definition for (a few different sources seem to think it means ‘characterised by a slender build with slight muscle definition’).  I think these kids deserve a lot of credit for their dedication, hard work, bravery (I don’t think I could go on national TV to spell words most people can’t even pronounce, let alone spell) and doing their bit to keep obscure vocabulary alive.

Full article from the BBC.