Language Trainers Blog

A change in state laws in Germany means that the German language is to lose it’s longest word.

Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz (meaning ”law delegating beef label monitoring”) was first introduced in 1999 in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in north west Germany, as the government looked to halt the spread of mad cow disease. The word is no longer in use as European union regulations have changed, and indeed was used so little that it never made the dictionary! Instead, the acronym RkReUAUG was more commonly employed.

The German language is renowned in linguistics for the use of compound words. These are known in German as Bandwurmwoerter (tapeworm words.)

The longest word now in the German dictionary is the 36 letter Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, which refers to car liability insurance.

Some letters in German can be substituted for two letters in the absence of a German keyboard, which can make a word longer. These letters are ß (ss), which is no longer in common use in Germany, Ä (ae), Ö (oe), and Ü (ue). Indeed, I have used the longer version in this very text! Bandwurmwoerter can also be Bandwurmwörter.

I’ve just spent a good hour on the BBC Skillswise site after finding loads of helpful little English language games. These are aimed at adult literacy learners, but I think some might help with students learning English as a second language too.

As someone who didn’t learn anything about grammar at school, (compound sentences, anyone?) these were very helpful to me, even if just to learn what I’m actually applying in my everyday use of the language. My favourite is the homophones game. Some of the games are very basic, but it never hurts to refresh your skills… you might learn something new! Also, knowing how to use correct grammar in your own language is key to learning another language and how it works.

Enjoy reading? Here are 5 of this summer’s literary festivals to look forward to!

London Literature Festival

When? Monday 20 May 2013 – Sunday 8 September 2013

Where? Southbank Centre, London

Highlights include: Launch of this years’ Poems On The Underground, Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveller’s Wife) discusses her work as an author, poetry readings from Sylvia Plath’s final manuscript, Ariel. 

Hay Festival

When?  Thursday 23 May – Sunday 2 June 2013

Where? Hay-on-Wye, Wales

Highlights include: Interview with the winner of the International Man Booker Prize 2013, lecture on illustration for the greatest chilren’s writer, Roald Dahl, by Quentin Blake; as well as a host of workshops and readings

Latitude

When?  Thursday 18 July – Sunday 21 July 2013

Where? Southwold, Suffolk

Highlights include: Poets Carol Ann Duffy and Murray Lachlan Young,  and journalist Germaine Greer and screenwriter Jeremy Dyson headline the spoken word and literary stages respectively.

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival

When?  Thursday 18 July – Sunday 21 July 2013

Where? Harrogate

Highlights include: In honour of the 60th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, 15 authors will be hosting a Bond themed murder mystery dinner; crime writer Ruth Rendell will be interviewed by Jeanette Winterson.

The Telegraph “Ways With Words” Festival

When? Friday 5 July – Monday 15 July 2013

Where? Dartington Hall, Devon

Highlights include: Author Tony Hawks will be discussing the difficulties of transforming books into films; and Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring) will be lecturing on her new historical novel, The Last Runaway, which was published earlier this year.

Click the links to find out more information and buy tickets!

Thousands of Croatians attended a demonstration in Zagreb on Sunday to protest against the return of the Cyrillic alphabet on signage in the town of Vukovar.

Vukovar, a town in eastern Croatia, was destroyed during a siege in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and was ethnically cleansed of  non-Serbs before being taken by Serb forces. The city was reintegrated into Croatia in 1998. The Croat and Serb communities in Vukovar remain divided.

According to the 2011 census, the Serbian population has reached over a third (34.8%) of the city’s population, which therefore protects the community’s right to have the Cyrillic alphabet displayed on public signs. The Croatian language uses the Latin alphabet. Croatian Minister for Public Administration, Arsen Bauk, said such signs were now necessary under a constitutional law that mandates bilingual signs in towns where a minority accounts for more than 30% of the population.

Croatia is due to join the European Union on July 1st, and protesters are testing the country’s resolve on matters of minority rights.

Source: BBC News

Today is World Book Day in the UK. The original World Book Day, held on April 23rd, is a UNESCO initiative to promote reading. Our local version is a charity event specifically to get kids reading. Each child in full time education is given a £1 book voucher. In recent years, a selection of 8 books has been made available for this event. This year’s selection can be found here. If nothing there takes your child’s fancy, the voucher can also be used as £1 off any full priced book at participating bookshops.

Some schools encourage children to dress up as their favourite character from a book. Which character from a kid’s book would you dress up as, if given the chance? My favourite was always Matilda (Roald Dahl)!

Here in the UK, it’s traditional to wish people a “Merry Christmas” at this time of year, as opposed to the North American greeting “Happy Holidays.” In fact, the word for Christmas in Old English is Cristes Maesse, and later Christ’s Mass. Mass, in religious context, means a death sacrifice. So maybe not a nice thing to wish, after all?

When some of us are sending our Christmas cards, some write “Merry Christmas,” whilst others use “Merry Xmas” as a shortened version of the former.

In Ancient Greek, the word Christ was spelled with an X – Χριστός (Xpistos) so some believe that the shortened version of the word stems from this.

Either way, the word “Christmas” undeniably has religious connotations and has certainly made me think of the meanings behind the phrase “Merry Christmas.” Maybe “Happy Holidays” is best after all?

Ed Manley and James Cheshire from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), were busy this summer. The two researchers collected data from 3.3 million tweets during the London 2012 Games, using Twitter’s API.  They then created an impressive looking map of all of the locations of those tweets. Not only that, but the map is colour coded for each language. The grey parts of the map were tweets in English, which makes up the majority of it. There are pockets of colour elsewhere though, in descending order representing Spanish (white), French (red), Turkish (blue), Arabic (green), Portuguese (purple), German (orange), Italian (yellow), Malay (cyan), and Russian (violet). There were 66 languages used, identified and recorded. The languages tweeted least were Georgian, Belarusian, Telugu and Armenian.

Ed Manley explains that Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines, was excluded from the data as “many of these classifications included just uses of English terms such as ‘hahahahaha’, ‘ahhhhhhh’ and ‘lololololol’.” It was initially the 7th most tweeted language.

They are quick to point out that the work absolutely isn’t a true representation of the diverse demographic of London. A lot of tweets are located on main roads and along train lines. Also, they have only included tweeters who have a good GPS location and are connected to the internet.

Click here to see the map.

Want to learn a new language in London? Try our German courses, Italian lessons, or even learn English!

Chinese author Mo Yan has won the 109th Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy’s Permanent Secretary, Peter Englund, announced the winner and said that his work “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.

Mo Yan, a pseudonym meaning “no name,” is well regarded in China as one of the greatest living authors.

The prize goes to the writer “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” His latest novel, Pow, is due to be released next year. The dual narrative intertwines the two stories and the book is described as comical.

Mo Yan’s most well renowned title is Red Sorgum, which is about the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, and was made into a film which is now considered a modern classic of Chinese cinema.

The declaration of the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel will surely see increased interest in this writer’s works.

Interested in learning Chinese? Check out our Language Trainers course in Nottingham!

Have you written a poem today in celebration of National Poetry Day? We’d love to hear it! Maybe you can try a poem in the language which you are learning? This years theme is stars. Of course “stars” is a polysemic word in English, so the possibilities are abundant.

Does anyone here use poetry as a tool for their language learning? Please share!

The Commission for the Management of Language Use in Shanghai has reported that English sign accuracy has improved by 85% in the three years since its’ campaign launched to clear up any confusing signage in time for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

Signs such as  “inform police immediately – if you are stolen” have been removed by volunteer translation students.

Websites such as Cheezburger’s Engrish Funny have been set up to publish photos of translation errors in all languages snapped by tourists, and this has added to the notoriety of such gaffes.

Newspaper Shanghai Daily says that whilst there is a Chinese-language government website for reporting “Chinglish” crimes against English, there were “few channels for ex-pats to report incorrect English signs.”

Have you seen any badly translated signs? Please share in the comments!