A lot of people use the middle three fingers to denote the number three, though some use other combinations.  In the town in Germany mentioned in Inglourious Basterds, people use the thumb and first two fingers.  In China, many people use the last three fingers (similar to the A-OK hand signal).  I found myself using the latter yesterday when buying three bananas.  It used to feel wholly unnatural to me, but it suddenly doesn’t feel so weird any more.  Strange.

Which signal do you use for three?

*Out of interest, you can also use ‘finger’ as a measure of alcohol.  If you hold your finger horizontally against the bottom of the glass and fill it to the depth of the top of your finger, that’s ‘one finger’.  So, three fingers would be a pretty strong drink!

Check out the National Grammar Day site for ways to celebrate and find out more about grammar and language, including links to some great cartoons, resources, e-cards and t-shirts. Let that grammar slacker in your life know it’s important to you (well, if it is, of course).

From the site, 10 grammar myths exposed:

1. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence.
2. You shouldn’t start a sentence with the word “however.”
3. “Irregardless” is not a word.
4. There is only one way to write the possessive form of a word that ends in “s.”
5. Passive voice is always wrong.
6. “I.e.” and “e.g.” mean the same thing.
7. You use “a” before words that start with consonants and “an” before words that start with vowels.
8. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.”
9. You shouldn’t split infinitives.
10. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.

(Click here for more information about the list above.)

Did you celebrate the occasion? Do you think grammar deserves its own day?

*I think this is a failing of people who start ‘national’ days.  They should really go big and go international. Grammar is important everywhere!

If you are lucky enough to be living in Asia or any place where taxis are cheap and plentiful, you will have many opportunities to talk to locals in a situation where the alternative is just to look out the window. I have a friend who vastly improved his Thai simply because he had to be stuck in a taxi in a traffic jam in Bangkok for hours every week.

In short, take every opportunity to speak to the people you come across every day.  In my experience, they’re more than happy to converse with you, and you will probably pick up a lot of vocabulary that you definitely wouldn’t in a language class!

I grew up around Cantonese, and spoke it to an elementary-sort-of level, and best when I was living in Hong Kong.  Since moving to the mainland, I have been around, and studied, Mandarin instead.  The Cantonese helped in a lot of ways, as the grammar structures are similar, and some of the words were similar or the same.  Unfortunately, knowing that a word is similar to one you already know doesn’t necessarily remind you what the new word is.  Now that my Mandarin level is higher than my Cantonese level, and I have been away from Cantonese speakers, I find it difficult to switch languages.

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I spent the flight reminding myself of all the ways the languages are different, and all of the phrases I could remember in Cantonese*.  I didn’t do too badly,  but I was far from being able to switch between three languages fluidly.

Do you know more than one foreign language?  What are your methods for preventing getting rusty in a language you don’t use very often?

*Flights are a great opportunity to cram important language terms before arriving in a foreign language location!  Don’t forget to put a phrase book or flashcards in your carry-on bag to look over before you land.

Of course, the kids won’t be supervised entirely by these bots, but they will be involved with duties like singing songs and telling stories.  As with many non-English speaking countries, there just aren’t enough qualified English language teachers (let alone native speakers to interact with students), so this easily-standardised method is definitely a viable option.  Most of us wouldn’t be comfortable speaking to a robot, but if kids are acclimatised early, this could lead the way to further robo-education.

With all the advances in computer and robot technology, do  you think that there will soon be a replacement for real live teachers?

Source: Crave blog. Image: ocularinvasion.

This is the kind of thing we should be aiming for in language learning.  Of course, learning vocabulary is a key area to focus on, but when you want to communicate with others, learn whole sentences or meaningful phrases as one single ‘chunk’.  Practice listening to and saying whole sentences, and you will begin to get the feel for how the language flows, and native speakers will be able to understand you much more easily.

Especially in tonal languages (e.g. Thai, Chinese), if you say a few syllables slowly, it will take a long time for people to put them together, even if you got all the tones correct.  A lot of meaning is gained from the combination of sounds, rather than the individual sounds, so learning phrases will get your point across much easier than knowing how to put the individual words together (if - you - get - my - meaning).

If you get used to the sound and structure of whole sentences, it will be much easier for you to then substitute the nouns and verbs and use the same sentence patterns in many different conversations.

Good luck!

The art of apology is an intrinsic part of Japanese culture. When you ask a shopkeeper for help, or when you bump into someone on the inevitably crowded trains, you say “sumimasen.” A direct translation of this phrase is “excuse me,” but a more a more accurate rendition is “I am so sorry to bother you.”

Apologizing is as common as saying please and thank you. It is a way of maintaining harmony in social situations. If you are the first to leave work in a Japanese office, you say “Osaki ni sitsuree simasu,” which means “I commit the great rudeness of leaving first.”

It also gives some extreme examples of historical corporate apologies:

Japan has a long history of corporate personal apology in Japan. In 1985, following the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123, the president of JAL Yasumoto Tagaki assumed full responsibility for the accident, the worst single-airplane incident in aviation history. Of the 524 passengers only four survived.  Takagi went to the extraordinary length of personally visiting the families of the victims. It was only after he had fulfilled this obligation and offered one last public apology that he resigned. Another JAL employee, a maintenance manager apologized in a more extreme manner: he committed suicide.

Some apologies don’t actually apologise, either.  Sometimes they include remorse and regret, and sometimes even compensation, without ever actually taking responsibility and giving apology.  Do you think these are valid apologies?

Some parts of culture are so deeply ingrained in countries that it becomes very difficult for outsiders to get a grip on them.  How is apologising different in your country?

Source: MSNBC.

Unsurprisingly, young Chinese people take this as an opportunity to express their individuality.  In a country of well over a billion people, there are only a hundred or so popular last names, and similar first names are common.  This means that it’s not uncommon for people to meet, go to school with, or work with someone with exactly the same name (I even met another Wendy Wong recently!).  Choosing an a name that reflects some of their personality can be quite important to some, which leads to some interesting choices.  Adjectives and nouns are also quite common names in Chinese, but they can sound odd to English speakers.

Interestingly, English names can also go back in the other direction, as Chinese people call their friends by a ‘Chinesified’ version of their English name.  I had a colleague called Echo, but everyone called her Ai-ke when speaking in Chinese.

I recently found out that another colleague, Gills, intended to call himself Giggs (after footballer Ryan Giggs), but something went wrong along the way.  I’m not quite sure what.  Some other fantastic names I’ve come across in China and Hong Kong have been Paper, Mars, Forrest Gump, Chocolate, Ocean King, and Person.

For some further reading, check out In China My Name Is by Valerie Blanco and Ellen Feberwee.  It’s a book dedicated entirely to Chinese people and the stories behind their English names.

Oh, and happy Chinese New Year!

It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means several different things, with the meaning usually worked out from the context or the other characters around it.  In this case, the meaning, to Chinese people, is the same.  It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as traditional Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush, not a pen.

In the end, as I did want to distinguish the difference between the two English words, we compromised with 画 (油画), where the first character (yóu) is the noun paint, and 画 means…paint. And draw.

Because of an agreement between China and several other countries, any pandas (and their offspring) sent out of China to foreign zoos are only on loan for study purposes, and must eventually return to their homeland.

Mei Lan, a panda born in Atlanta, Georgia, is due to move to a breeding centre in Sichuan province in China this week.  As part of her welcome and orientation, the centre is arranging for a Chinese language tutor to teach her some basic phrases, as she has only ever heard English.  She will be also be weaned off the biscuits she was used to in the US, and moved on to a Chinese recipe supplemented by fresh bamboo.

I’m not sure how fast pandas can learn commands, though.  If their general behaviour is anything to go by, it will be a slow process!

Source: LA Times.