Language Trainers Blog

As a student of Mandarin Chinese, I use the romanisation system pinyin to ’spell out’ the sound of Chinese characters, including their tones.  Each tone marking shows what sound you should make for the vowels.  For a long time, I have been looking for an input engine that would allow me to type tones directly, instead of having to use letters and numbers, or go through a complicated special symbol input.  I wanted to be able to type something like e3 and come up with ě on the screen.  Until recently, my only options were to use the input engine NJStar (which works really well, except that the full version is really expensive), copy and paste special characters each time I wanted to use them, or create complicated macros which would only work in certain programs.

A while back, I thought I could use Texter, which is a tiny yet powerful text replacement program from Lifehacker.  Unfortunately it doesn’t support Unicode characters, which are the ones I wanted (although give it a go if you type the same things a lot and want shortcuts that work in all your programs).  I couldn’t find many other alternatives online, although I found a few other people online who had the same (pinyin writing) issues as me.

Then I found a link to PhraseExpress, another text replacement program, and I thought I’d give it a go.  Well, lo and behold, it works perfectly!  All you have to do is add your desired characters (e.g. ā) and the key combination you want to associate it with.  You can even add whole pages of text instead of just special characters, and export your shortcuts so you can use them on different computers.

I did have to fiddle a bit with the format of the shortcuts (you obviously have to use something which you don’t use anywhere else), but finally decided on using .[letter][tone number] as my template.  So now if I type “.i2,” I get “í”.  Magic!

If you have been wanting to type special characters in any language simply and quickly, I highly recommend downloading the PhraseExpress software.  It’s completely free for personal use.

If anyone has any additional comments or recommendations, that’s what the comments box is for!

With the script technology available these days, it’s uncommon for language learners to focus so much on the writing of languages like Japanese and Chinese.  All you need to do is recognise a character, and know what it sounds like, to be able to write it on a computer.  Even in my own study, I am trying to focus more on reading, listening, and speaking, as it seems like it will take a long time to rote learn individual characters.

On the flip side, learning how to write characters yourself helps make them more concrete in your mind, and can really help you understand them and their relationships to other words and characters.  A useful tool I’ve found to help you write Japanese or Chinese (on the computer, no less!) is Skritter.  With Skritter, you can practice writing characters on the screen, and the program can help you with stroke order as well as giving useful information about the characters and radicals.  It also provides a tracking service so you can see your progress, and focus more on characters that you are having trouble with.

They provide a two week full service trial for learners of Japanese and Chinese (both traditional and simplified), so if you want to improve your writing skills, check it out!

I recently gave in and bought an iPod Touch, and it was, in all honesty, mostly so I could try out some of the hundreds of useful language-learning applications out there.  The incredible potential of having not only mp3s and podcasts, but dictionaries, flashcards, and other learning tools in your pocket is a little bit mind-blowing.

So, you will probably see a few reviews and recommendations for not just individual applications, but general good practices when using your iPhone (or Android).

This first one is a slightly alternative way to use a productivity tool.  I first downloaded the demo version of Use Your Handwriting (UYH) from Gee Whiz Stuff because it provided a seemingly novel way of jotting down notes and to do lists in your own handwriting (or fingerwriting).

After playing with it for a little bit, I realised that it would be an ideal way to practice my Chinese characters, as there’s a simple interface and a big writing/drawing area.  You can easily move to the next screen (it even does it for you if you want), and shake to erase if you’re unhappy with your writing.  If you turn the device vertically, you can write top-to-bottom and left-to-right like they used to do in the old days!  The paid version even has rainbow colours (although you can, of course, choose other ones), which are different for almost every stroke, so you can tell if you are doing them correctly.  It also lets you write long notes and has a very handy email function, so you can send your jottings to yourself, your teacher, or your friends.

If you’re a learner of a language with a non-roman script, I would highly recommend it for practicing your writing (get a stylus for even better results).  It’s also a good place to jot down characters or words that you see during the day but can’t look up immediately.  Or just general note-taking in bright colours!

Do you know any other good apps for this purpose, or language learning in general?

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.

Learning doesn’t need to be (and probably shouldn’t be) limited to the classroom, or dedicated ‘learning time’.  If you are learning a language, it can be helpful to try to integrate that language into your daily life, whether or not you are speaking it outside the classroom.

If you are learning a non-roman script, try switching your mobile or computer default language to it.  Even if you don’t use it that much, having to switch out of it each time might make you ask yourself if you could write what you need to in another language.

Try to write your correspondence with your teacher and language exchange partners in your target language.  Even if you can’t think of the word (and don’t have time to look it up), putting a few words in English here and there will be fine.  Even writing text messages in your target language will help you, and will probably get you some brownie points (or at least helpful feedback) from your teacher.

For any notes you write to yourself, including to-do lists and calendar entries, try to use your second language.  Business or technical notes might be a bit difficult, but ‘go to the bank’ and ‘get a haircut’ are useful phrases to learn.  A side benefit is that it will be harder for people to read your reminders!  If you find an indecipherable note in the future, it will be a good prompt to revise some vocabulary you’ve forgotten.

Do you have any tips for everyday use of new language?

Image: TMAB2003.

Well, the short answer is no.  However, it’s actually possible to learn how to read and pronounce hangul, the Korean written language, in a study session or two.

To the casual observer, hangul appears to be a pictographic script, like Chinese or ancient Egyptian. In actual fact, it’s an alphabetic language with fewer letters than English.  There are 14 consonants and 10 vowels in Korean, and they are grouped together to form written characters that represent single syllables.

There are some great resources out there for learning, and Joophas collected a few of them in this very comprehensive post.  If you go to the end of the post, there are some very useful links, as well as some beautiful script/pronunciation charts.

If you manage to associate each letter with its sound, and become familiar with how they fit together in script, you will be able to read Korean out loud in no time.  Of course, knowing what you’re saying is the next important step! 

Have you got any useful Korean language tips?

For regular note-taking and writing practice, everyone has their own preferences for paper - lined or unlined, spiral bound, A4, A5, 100gsm.  Then there are the writing implements - pens, pencils, markers.  Some people prefer just to record audio, or use a laptop or netbook.  Even with all of these choices, when it comes to specialist paper for writing Asian characters, it can be difficult to find what you want if you don’t live in a place with a large Asian community.

I’ve found a few online resources for downloading and printing your own character practice pages, and will list them below.  Please add more in the comments if you know of any!

Dr Lili Worksheet - Character worksheet with spaces for name and date.  Grid with horizontal and vertical internal lines.  Has room under each line for writing pinyin/notes.

Dofufa practice paper - Character practice paper with three different sizes of grid.  Internal horizontal and vertical lines.

Incompetech free online graph paper - Probably my favourite resource for printing paper.  They have a lot of different kinds of graph paper, as well as note-taking paper and a few options for Chinese and Japanese character practice.  Their graph paper generator allows you to choose the size of your paper, the size of the grids, and even what colour you would like to print in.  Try printing in landscape for even more options.  My favourite is the Chinese Character Guide (X-style), which has room for writing pinyin as well as diagonal internal lines.

Good luck with the practice!

October is National Poetry Month in the United Kingdom, and it’s a great opportunity to celebrate the beauty that language can create, whether it be in your native tongue or a foreign language.

This month is the perfect time to discover something new in poetry, whether you are an existing enthusiast or not.  These days poetry doesn’t have to be classical, or in rhyming couplets.  It can take the form of non-rhyming prose, haiku, performance art, or poetry jam.  It can be dramatic or serene.

For language learners, poetry can be a great inspiration, and it’s very fulfilling to be able to understand a poet’s original intention.  Try a couple of poems in your target language, and compare them to their translations.  Can you see any difference?  It’s always useful to bear in mind that translations of art need to be somewhat artistic themselves, and fail as poetic translations if they are word-for-word.

What are your favourite foreign language poems?

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?

It’s not always just people’s foreign language skills that need polishing.  Often, people need a little bit of help with their own language, whether it be improving their overall skill levels, or bringing their literacy up to speed with their oral language capabilities.

I am completely in favour of literacy organisations, and a lot of them do great work within communities all over the world.

I recently stumbled across a literacy site supported by the Verizon Foundation in the US.  It offers a wide range of free resources for teachers and parents, but for some reason, the name bothered me.  The name of the site is Thinkfinity, which appears to be a portmanteau made up of the words think and infinity.  I know that made-up words are used for many things, including business names and newfangled jargon terms, but the use of a non-word to support literacy development scratches at me the wrong way.  It’s not even a particularly good portmanteau.

Don’t get me wrong, though, this won’t make me take support away from their general cause.

I found an A-Z of literacy organisations, and from that list drew a few more gems:

Read On - Write Away! - a Derbyshire organisation who not only have a great pun in their name, but also use the exclamation mark in their acronym, ROWA!

ContinYou - a British community learning organisation.  For some reason, their name doesn’t bug me at all, as it sounds like an actual word, and also directly conveys a feeling of self improvement.

Clinks - an organisation working with NGOs (non-government organisations) and the criminal justice system in the UK.  This may be my favourite one, as it not only incorporates the idea of community links; clink is also a slang term for prison, or jail.