Language Trainers Blog

What is your motivation to learn a language?  For some people, it helps to have a concrete goal like successfully understanding a favourite book in its original language.  Some people choose a famous novel or poem or writer to use as their inspiration for continuing their language study.  As good as translators can be these days, they can never capture exactly the original feeling that the author intended, and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to read and understand the majority of an original piece of writing.

Whether you are learning a language for business or personal reasons, it can be really helpful to have a target like this, especially when it is a book or piece of prose you know you will enjoy.  Of course, for professional reasons you may wish to read material related to your own industry, but the comprehension of this is also rewarding.

If you are new to a language, start with achievable goals, like reading children’s stories, newspaper articles, or simple short stories.  Using a Dostoyevsky epic in its original Russian as your first goal might be a bit ambitious, but you could always use it as a long-term aim.  Also bear in mind that reading classical stories in outdated languages might not help you with your conversational vocabulary.

Some websites and publishers also provide side-by-side translations of books and texts, so you can refer to the translated text whenever you come across something you don’t understand.  Remember that to understand something, you don’t have to know every single word.  Even native speakers stumble on vocabulary sometimes.  Look words up when you need to, but don’t let difficult words interrupt your enjoyment of reading.

I came across an interesting discussion thread about people’s ‘books they’d learn a language for’, which includes suggestions about great books in contributors’ own languages.  Which books do you want to read in their original forms, and which would you recommend to learners of your language?  Have you achieved any of your language goals?

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.

A Chinese student from Sichuan province failed his gaokao (final examinations) essay because it was written in ancient characters, some of which were from thousands of years ago.  From Shanghaiist:

The script, called “甲骨 Jia Gu” (oracle bone script) is from the Bronze Age and is usually found on ox bones or turtle shells. Professors who translated the essay into modern Chinese found that 19-year-old Huang Ling’s character use was largely correct, but his essay was awarded an 8 out of 80 (later lowered to 6).

The student’s score would normally mean that he would not be accepted into university, as Chinese requirements are usually very strict.  However, examiners were impressed by his knowledge, and correct usage, of the so-called Oracle Bone script, and he may be accepted into Sichuan University after all.

Although I applaud his risky performance, I wonder if the results would be as positive if a British student wrote an essay in Middle English, or a French student in Gaulish.  I kind of like to hope so.

I’ve already mentioned the great service that the Simple English version of Wikipedia provides for both learners of English and native speakers who want the layman’s version of things.

Now there’s a website that can show you what you’re missing when you’re reading the simple version, or what you’re not understanding when you’re reading the regular version.  Again, But Slower does the simple but effective job of putting both versions side by side.

It can help you grasp the meaning of the more technical terms in regular Wikipedia articles, or give you a quick overview if you don’t have time to read the full-length versions.  Give it a try!

Link via Lifehacker.

As a quick follow-up to the post I wrote the other day about Twitter: TweetTranslate.com is a web-based tool that allows you to type tweets in your own language, and have them automatically posted or saved in another language.  Though I suppose you really should be trying to translate them yourselves, this is a handy tool for quickly communicating with people who speak another language, or setting up profiles for businesses aimed at international markets.

When I was writing about my love of eggcorns (misheard words or phrases that still somehow make sense), I wondered how often they happen in foreign languages, especially for learners.  I got a bit of an answer recently.

One of my favourite things to order here in Asia is what is usually translated to a fruit ’smoothie’.  It’s not exactly what a western smoothie would be, and they’re usually made of fresh fruit blended with ice and sugar syrup.  Almost any fruit smoothie makes a delicious frozen snack or dessert.

For a while, I had only heard other people order them, and never seen it written down.  What I heard was bīngchá (冰茶), which means ice(d) tea.  I was a little bit confused, as iced tea is something completely different, but it kind of made sense.  Eventually I saw a menu, which showed 冰沙, instead, so I looked up the second character (shā).  The word for smoothie is bīngshā, or shābīng, meaning ice(d) sand or sand ice.

It makes much more sense to me now, and I created my very own eggcorn.  Has this happened to anyone else?

Back in 1985, cognitive scientists at Princeton University began work on a lexical database called WordNet.  It’s essentially a dictionary and thesaurus which groups and links words according to their meanings.  WordNet provides users with synsets, which are groups of words or phrases which essentially mean the same thing.  It’s a great tool for writers, students, language learners, and anyone who needs a definition, synonym, or broader view of a word or phrase.  WordNet is searchable online, and a downloadable application is also available.

A fantastic extension of WordNet is VisuWords, which allows you to see a visual interpretation of the WordNet links for words of your choice, or random words.  Each visual map shows the possible meanings and synsets for the central word and the relationships between them all.  It’s also interactive, allowing you to move parts around to see them more clearly, and synsets move around in quite a calming and hypnotic way.  The above image is what comes up when you plug ‘language’ into the search engine.

WordNet has inspired wordnets for many different languages, and a full list can be found on the Global WordNet Association website.  Many of them are browsable online (e.g. MultiWordNet On-line*), and some also have visual interfaces (e.g. Asian WordNet Project**, aimsigh.com (Irish)).  The GWA’s aim is to integrate as many wordnets together as possible, to make a global grid.

*Searchable in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, and Latin.
**Searchable in Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Bengali, Indonesian, and others.

One of my favourite linguistic phenomena is the eggcorn.  It occurs when a person hears something slightly different to what was said, but the misheard form still makes some sort of sense.  If a person never sees the phrase written down, it’s very possible for them to think that their interpretation is the correct version.

A good example is the word eggcorn itself, which some people believe is the correct pronunciation and spelling of acorn.  It qualifies as a true eggcorn, because acorns are egg-shaped, and corn is a kind of seed, so eggcorn almost makes sense.

A little digging around the internet has revealed some gems, and the Eggcorn Database is a great source.  It encourages public submission, discussion, and possible etymologies.  It even includes some that it doesn’t technically classify as eggcorns.

Here are some of my favourites:

• (chocolate) eclair >> eggclair
• (social) leper >> leopard
• an arm and a leg >> a nominal egg
• eau de cologne >> odor cologne
• cold-hearted >> coal-hearted

Social leopards

The last couple of posts I’ve written have been about translation, both in the healthcare industry, and via free, public, online services.  Translation services by machine are still far from perfect, although the SignTranslate system is specifically targeted at the interactions between doctor and patient, so would hopefully be more accurate.

I suppose I just wanted to make a note about the fact that online translators like Google Translate and Yahoo! Babel Fish, among others, are not infallible.  On the occasions that I do use them, I try to do more than one translation, or a reverse translation back into English, to somewhat ensure I’m getting something close to what I want.  I definitely don’t want to end up with something like this:

Also of note is the fact that perhaps sometimes it isn’t the biggest and most widely-spoken languages that necessarily need translations.  The array of languages offered by SignTranslate for use in doctors’offices (including Punjabi, Somali, Urdu, and Polish) may well reflect the populations who actually need the service.  Some patients may not even be literate, let alone able to speak a second language, so it makes much more sense than having translations for languages like German or Dutch, where speakers are very likely to have learned some English at some point.

Although I think it’s wonderful for people to be able to communicate in their native tongue, I think it’s more pressing that people who have no other choice are able to communicate at all.

From a recent article (Google translates into Welsh as ‘No’):

IT’S just the latest in a long line of tools designed by one of the world’s best-known internet companies to make our lives that little bit easier.

But users of Google Translate – which has followed in the footsteps of the firm’s maps, images and news functions – have spotted one significant flaw: it won’t translate into Welsh.

Well, I use Google Translate via (Mozilla add-on) Ubiquity all the time, but I’d never noticed the lack of Welsh, to be honest.

Bethan Williams, chair of the Language Act Group – Cymdeithas yr Iaith, said: “For a multi-national company like Google failing to consider the Welsh language with translating tools is disgraceful.

“They offer translation services in Arabic, Hindi, Maltese and a host of other languages so why not Welsh?

Google Translate is currently available to work between 42 languages, and the Google search page is already available in Welsh.  Now, before any angry Welsh language speakers email me about my insensitivity, I’d just like to point out that not only would it take an awful lot of man hours to add more languages to an already quite comprehensive and free translation service, but that other languages may have a more pressing need.

According to a 2004 survey, there are approximately 600,000 Welsh speakers living in Wales, while another survey indicated about 130,000 living in England.  Very, very few of these speakers are monoglots (only speak one language, i.e. Welsh).  Therefore, any translation services would likely only be needed by non-Welsh speakers, and not the other way around.

By comparison, over half a billion people speak Arabic, which has multiple dialects and a completely different script to English, and even Galician, which I’d never heard of, has over 3 million speakers in Spain and Portugal.

Now, I’m not telling Welsh language campaigners to get over it, but maybe just to be patient.  Who’s to say which of the thousands of languages spoken in the world gets priority over any of the other ones?