Language Trainers Blogs

February 2012:

February 21 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

This image serves to demonstrate the importance of understanding the idiomatic differences between languages - in English, the verb go has many uses and facets of meaning, but in some languages the role it plays is far more limited. In some Middle Eastern languages, for example, it usually means to leave, rather than being more of a general usage verb. So it was, then, that protesters in an anti-America rally in Pakistan were actually giving the USA an unintentionally positive message... 'Go America go' would usually be interpreted in English as a motivational cheer, rather than an... (Read More).

February 20 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

Tomorrow, February 21st, marks the 12th annual International Mother Language Day. In honour of this worldwide occasion, we bring you some facts about the day, and what it represents. · International Mother Language Day was founded by UNESCO in November 1999 to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, and to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.” It has been internationally observed since the year 2000. · February 21st was chosen to mark the anniversary, and in recognition of, the death of... (Read More).

February 18 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

The German language is full of Anglicisms - that is, words or phrases that come straight from English and insert themselves into German. In German it's known as an Anglizismus, and the habit of incorporating English words into German is called Denglisch (a portmanteau of 'Deutsch' and 'Englisch'). Examples include the words 'crash' and 'reboot' when talking about computers, and these words decline and conjugate like other German words (e.g. 'Ich musste den Computer rebooten, weil die Software gecrasht ist' means 'I had to reboot the computer because the software crashed').) Sometimes... (Read More).

February 17 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

From the title, can you guess which classic book has been translated into Jerriais by St Helier born linguist and writer Geraint Jennings' Jerriais, although not widely spoken, is an official dialect of Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Jennings has been an advocate for preserving the language, compiling and publishing a collection of Jerriais texts online at Les Pages Jerriaises. Mr Jennings has been working on the book for 13 years, and instead of doing a literal translation, he has instead adapted it to make parts of the original storyline relate more to Jersey and its history. Jennings is... (Read More).

February 17 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: youtube.com A couple of weeks ago a video went viral on the internet featuring a 14-year-old girl, later found to be named Alyssa Kramer, whose unique talent is to be able to take any word and say it backwards within seconds. The video quickly gained popularity and at the time of writing has around 2.7 million views. Here's the video, for those of you who might not have seen it yet: The big question is, how is she able to do this' Alyssa claims that she's always been able to do it. You can tell from her replies that she is not doing it entirely phonetically (like the effect... (Read More).

February 13 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

British comedian David Mitchell, best known for his role in cult British TV show Peep Show as well as being a frequent guest on panel quiz shows, is also famous for his wit and bile-fuelled rants about society in general. His 'David Mitchell's Soap Box' series has gained quite a bit of fame on YouTube. Though he seems like the kind of person who would have only distaste for American culture, he is actually pretty forgiving of the intricacies of American English and the liberties Americans have taken with the Brits' precious language. However, there are some that (in my opinion quite... (Read More).

February 13 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

With Valentine's Day approaching, you might want to know how to say 'I love you' in another language. According to Google Data, more than 29 million searches are made every month for that very phrase. The most popular searches are for the phrase in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Korean and Arabic. Instead of using Google Translate, online tool Omniglot is worth a look, it has a pretty comprehensive directory of 'I love you' in these languages and many more you may never have heard of. In other love and language news, scientists at the University of Texas... (Read More).

February 07 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bbc.co.uk/news The original definition of an internet troll is somebody who purposefully posts something inflammatory or purposefully incorrect online in order to gain the attention and ire of fellow internet users. However, these days it is used in a general way to describe anybody who posts malicious or offensive on the internet. Trolls tend to target places that are easy to sabotage or have a large audience that are otherwise sympathetic, like Wikipedia, or Facebook memorial and tribute pages for deceased people. Due to the anonymity of the internet it is very difficult to... (Read More).

January 2012:

January 31 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Apologies for the terrible pun, but I couldn't resist. Learning Chinese is difficult for many reasons, but one of my main weaknesses is learning hanzi, the Chinese pictographic characters. Although some of them make sense (e.g. 川 [chuān], meaning 'river', looks kind of like a river; or 门 [mén], meaning 'gate', looks like a gate), some are a little more cryptic, and some require leaping a few mental hurdles to remember consistently. While sites like memrise.com are very helpful in committing characters to memory, after a while it gets a little stale. In an effort to make rote... (Read More).

January 30 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

Time magazine has published an interview with the author of new book Babel No More, Michael Erard. This book is an intriguing read for language students, and fans of linguistics, as it delves into how to approach learning a new language, and how some people are able to learn a language quickly, whilst others are not. The main focus of the book is people who are able to speak more than one language (polyglots) and people who are able to communicate in many languages (hyperglots.) The interview is available here. You can also read the first couple of chapters free on... (Read More).

January 30 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Now, everybody's heard of the great bard, William Shakespeare, but perhaps not everybody knows that he was much more than just a prodigious playwright. The English language has Shakespeare to thank for a great deal more than Macbeth, Hamlet, et al.: he also invented a great number of words and phrases. According to painstaking calculations, Shakespeare used 17,667 different words throughout all his works, and at least 1 in 10 of these words had never been used before. That's somewhere in the region of 2,000 words that Shakespere coined himself. Among them are common terms such as lonely,... (Read More).

January 24 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

A father and daughter from Gwynedd, North Wales, are refusing to pay their parking fines as the tickets were not written in Welsh. Noel Jones and his daughter Bethan were issued with the £65 tickets after parking in the car park of a village community hall in Penrhyndeudraeth. The private car park is primarily for the use of customers, and resident drivers have been issued with bilingual notices regarding the parking enforcements for the past two years. 67% of locals use Welsh as their primary language, however both Noel and Bethan Jones are fluent in English. The pair feel that the... (Read More).

January 21 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

Language cards are now being used to communicate with tourists who find themselves in difficulty when climbing mountains in Austria. More than half of all mountain rescue operations in Carinthia, in the south of Austria, are for tourists who do not speak any German or English. The A6 size cards hold questions pertaining to any injuries the patient might have, and help the mountain rescue teams communicate how the patient might be safely rescued. It is hoped that the climbers will point to their answers in their own language. Other popular tourist regions in Austria are also looking to... (Read More).

January 19 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

It's that time of year when the Oscars are announced. Recently I wrote about using world cinema as a tool for language learning and development.  As some of my favourite films have won the Best Foreign Film award, (Czech film Kolya won in 1996, and Argentinian film El Secreto De Sus Ojos took the title in 2009) I will paying particular attention to the nominees this year. This years' ceremony takes place on February 26th, and the shortlisted films are due to be announced next Tuesday. This Wednesday, nine films were chosen to be on the long list out of 63 entries. The following... (Read More).

January 19 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: kalimedia.com For those interested in etymology (the study of where words come from), this is a fantastic resource. At first glance it may look like a standard atlas, but take a closer look at the names of places and you'll see that the map doesn't show the modern-day names, but the modern English translation of where the name came from. For example, San Francisco is marked 'St. Little Frank One', New York is 'New Yew Tree Village', Philadelphia is 'Sibling Love', and so on. Some places have more obvious etymology than others (for example Vermont means 'Green Mountain', easily... (Read More).

January 17 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

The English language has historically borrowed words heavily from other tongues (known as loanwords), and is part of the reason why we have such a rich vocabulary compared with every other language on the planet. England had cultural contact with many other races and tribes throughout its history - for example the Roman, Viking and Norman invasions brought Latin, Norse and French to Britain, respectively. The Angles (where we get the word English) were originally a Germanic tribe hailing from Denmark, and they inhabited the British Isles after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Saxons... (Read More).

January 16 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

In honour of the 125th anniversary of the language, students in Stoke-on-Trent have started a campaign to promote Esperanto as the second language of choice. Esperanto is a language which was devised in 1887 by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. It is considered to be an easy language to learn, as the grammar has no irregular verbs, and people in almost every country have learned to communicate using it. An estimated 2 million people speak the language worldwide, with almost 1000 of those in the UK. But why are students in Stoke-on-Trent so interested in Esperanto' Well, the headquarters of the... (Read More).

January 13 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: etd.lsu.edu There are some who would think that your internet privileges should be revoked should you never have run across lolcats - photos of cats, often in humorous positions, captioned in what seems like a rudimentary form of English. One of the most famous lolcats, rather overweight specimen of a cat, bears the caption 'I can has cheezburger'', which helped spawn not only a plethora of other lolcat images, but also the website icanhascheezburger.com (which has just celebrated its five-year anniversary), where people can submit their own. lolcats are a prime example of what... (Read More).

January 09 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

Latvia is set to hold a referendum on February 19th, to decide whether Russian should officially be the country's second national language. Currently, 44% of the population are Russian speakers, however, 16% of the population are ethnic Russians, who do not hold Latvian citizenship thus are not eligible to vote.* According to Latvian law, more than half of Latvian voters must vote in favour for the proposition to pass. The proposal does not have the backing of President Andris Berzins. “Granting the Russian language the status of the second state language is the denial of Latvia as a... (Read More).

January 03 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

There's an app for everything these days, most of which have no practical use whatsoever. With that in mind, here's another one to add to your collection if you're interested in languages: Swearport. Not recommended for younger learners, Swearport allows you to explore the various vulgarities in a multitude of different languages, and is available for both iOS and Android. While swearing is neither funny nor clever, it can actually be an important part of speaking a language fluently. It is said that no matter how proficient they are at speaking another language, people always return to... (Read More).

January 02 2012 (Language Trainers UK)

I came across this on Tumblr recently. Although the point being made with regards to English is interesting, it bothered me more that pronounced is spelled incorrectly.... (Read More).

January 01 2012 (Language Trainers USA)

Happy new year everybody, from Language Trainers USA! Hopefully one of your resolutions is to finally stop putting off your dream to learn a new language... A friend asked me last night why we sing a song called 'Auld Lang Syne', and what it even means. I knew it was a traditional Scottish song and that the words were penned by legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns, but as far as what the words meant, I was at a loss. After a quick Google (remember the days when your phone couldn't tell you anything you ever wanted to know'), we found out that auld lang syne literally translates to 'old... (Read More).

December 2011:

December 23 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

A collective noun is the word used to define a group of something, usually animals. Common collective nouns such as 'herd', 'flock', 'pack' or 'swarm' are well-known, but English has a vast collection of lesser-known collective nouns for certain creatures. For example, 'a murder of crows', 'a bed of eels', 'a parliament of owls', 'an army of caterpillars', 'a cluster of spiders', and 'a streak of tigers'. Some collective nouns even change depending on the nature of the group in question. For example, geese are usually referred to as a 'flock' or a 'gaggle', but these terms should only... (Read More).

December 16 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: abcnews.go.com The latest US Census Bureau figures show that even during a time when so many Native American tribes are struggling to retain their native tongues, 169,000 people speak Navajo at home, more than any other Native American language. However, these figures may be easy to misinterpet. From the article: Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country's population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the... (Read More).

December 14 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: nytimes.com Following on from previous posts about Na'vi (the language invented for James Cameron's Avatar), Klingon Star Trek, and most recently, the language of Dragons (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim): here's another language invented for the media - Dothraki. Though the language is not actually seen in and of itself in the series of novels by George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, when HBO serialized the books into the hit show Game of Thrones, they undertook to create an actual language - complete with full vocabulary, grammar and syntax - for the Dothraki race of... (Read More).

December 13 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

To coincide with Plain English Day last Friday, (December 9th) the Plain English Campaign announced the latest winners of its annual 'Golden Bull Awards'. Each year, the campaign presents awards for the best and worst examples of English. This year's winners include the Met Office for using phrases such as 'overnight tonight' and 'temperatures really struggling,' and my personal favourite, Flybe, for this gem in a letter sent to a customer: I believe that what has not been explained to you is that it is not a £4.50 card charge, in the process of booking a flight, you will have a booking... (Read More).

December 12 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

English is abundant in idioms and proverbs, for example: 'kill two birds with one stone', 'too many cooks spoil the broth', and 'woke up on the wrong side of the bed'. These are ingrained in our language, and we use them almost without thinking about their literal meanings. Chinese also has an abundance of idioms, and one subset of them are particularly interesting: those called chéngyǔ (成语). Chengyu mostly come from ancient stories and Chinese fables, and most conservative estimates say that there are around 5,000 chengyu (though some claim the figure is closer to 20,000). To... (Read More).

December 08 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

December sees the 19th anniversary of the first text message. The very first SMS message was sent in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992. The content'  “Merry Christmas”. Vodafone engineer Neil Papworth messaged his boss, Richard Jarvis, from his computer, starting a new trend in communication. However, it wasn't until the turn of the century that text messaging really took off. It's estimated that 8 trillion messages will be sent worldwide in 2011. Earlier this year, the Oxford English Dictionary added abbreviations commonly used in text messages to its online edition. OMG,... (Read More).

December 08 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

A palindrome is a fairly well-known term for a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. For example, 'Madam, I'm Adam' is a palindromic phrase, as is 'Go hang a salami. I'm a lasagna hog'. Palindromes get trickier the longer they get: the longest palindrome I know is 'A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!' - though somebody with the aid of a dictionary and an algorithm has created the world's longest palindrome, with 17,826 words that read the same forwards and backwards. A variant of a palindrome is a semordnilap. They're like palindromes, but reading the words backwards... (Read More).

December 06 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Does anyone else like to use foreign language films to help build their knowledge' As a world cinema fan, I have quite a few in my collection, and as a Spanish language student, I feel it’s in my best interests to have as many Spanish language films as possible! Watching a movie in another language is an entirely different experience to a Hollywood blockbuster. One has to concentrate and focus undivided attention on the narrative, not only through the words spoken, but also the subtitles. I love immersing myself in a film this way. The subtitles aren’t always accurate, but it’s a good... (Read More).

December 02 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

It's that time of year again, where we're all trying to think of fabulous Christmas gifts for family and friends. Don't worry, I won't be making these a regular thing all the way through December! I've just discovered these magnets which would make a great gift for any language student, and thought I'd share! These little Magnetic Poetry Kits now come in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian and Swedish, and are a fun way to practice your writing skills in another language. There's also a Hebrew alphabet kit, a sign language kit, and a Chinese for Kids kit, but these are a little... (Read More).

December 01 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a nice scene taken from the Young Indiana Jones TV show from the 1990s, showing one great benefit of being a polyglot (somebody who speaks several languages) - impressing the opposite sex! Although some of the accents are, let's just say, a little suspect, it would certainly still be very impressive to be able to have a conversation journey through French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Greek and Arabic all in the course of around one and a half minutes... certainly something to aim... (Read More).

November 2011:

November 30 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Many English speakers who enjoy long words will have heard of the 45-letter word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The word did not come about organically, however: it was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzler's League, to serve as the longest word in English. It is primarily made up of common Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes, and means 'a lung disease caused by inhaling very small particles of silica dust'. The rather easier to remember 28-letter antidisestablishmentarianism is also a classic choice for fans of long words - meaning 'against... (Read More).

November 28 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

It seems that native speakers of certain languages are able to roll their ‘r’s more easily than others. For me, as a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, it’s very difficult to pronounce rolled ‘r’s, which is also known as the alveolar trill. For example, trying to convey the name of a Cuban bar (Barrio) was particularly difficult when trying to arrange to meet up with my Spanish friend Eva recently. Pronouncing ‘r’s in an English accent, in the English form, is a huge disadvantage to communication in Spanish. An Italian friend tells me that some children are... (Read More).

November 27 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Following on from an earlier post on denominalisation - the increasingly popular habit of turning nouns into verbs (e.g. 'Facebooking', 'friending', etc.), here's legendary comic artist Bill Watterson's take on the matter through his greatest creation, Calvin & Hobbes. Click for the full size... (Read More).

November 24 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

The people at Hotels.com have been busy conducting surveys recently, and their latest research seems to confirm what we already knew…British people are not renowned for their language skills. 64% of the 2000 Brits surveyed didn’t know a word of any other language. One of the reasons given for this was “expecting hosts to speak English.” (!) 63% of those polled had no idea what the Dutch word “goedemorgen” means. I don’t speak Dutch, but could easily guess that it would be “good morning,” due to the similarities when trying to pronounce it. 1 in 50 respondents claimed to... (Read More).

November 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a great tongue-in-cheek video on the history of English made by the folks at The Open University, dating from the Roman invasion, through the Norman Conquest, British Empire, and all the way to the modern age. It really does manage to show how many sources English has borrowed from: Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, French, German, and many others. In fact, modern English borrows vocabulary from over 350 different languages, and new words continue to be coined every day. The English language really does have a rich, fascinating history, and these videos really makes you appreciate... (Read More).

November 22 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: medicalxpress.com I don't usually refer to medical documents on this blog, but I thought this was a fascinating discovery from the neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), and well worth linking to. Their studies showed that readers who are able to read especially quickly are relying on a 'visual dictionary' in their heads, which helps them immediately recognise common words. These findings are contrary to the long-held belief that our brains work on phonics, 'sounding out' words while reading in our heads. How exactly did they discover this' Through a... (Read More).

November 21 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

This weekend saw the 8th annual Liet International Song Contest, which was held in Udine, Northern Italy. The competition is a lesser known version of the Eurovision Song Contest, and songs must be performed in one of 82 languages recognised in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The competition winner is decided by a group of music experts, whereas the second prize is voted for by viewers and the studio audience. Out of this year’s 12 finalists, the winner was Janna Eijer, from the Netherlands, who sang in Frisian, a language which is spoken in Germany and the... (Read More).

November 18 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: zompist.com Here's an interesting hypothetical question: what if the English writing system adopted pictograms rather than our traditional Roman alphabet' Well, for a start, it'd mean pretty much redesigning our written language from the ground up. But Mark Rosenfelder from zompist.com has explored this hypothetical question in greater detail, coining 'Yingzi' (英子), an English adaptation of Chinese characters, or 'Hanzi' (汉字). He has come up with a system of using basic pictograms for simple words such as man, tree, sun, moon and so on, and then using different... (Read More).

November 17 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

The World Shakespeare Festival takes place next year in locations around the UK, starting from 23rd April. As part of this event, the Globe Theatre in London will be taking on one of its most ambitious projects yet. The project, entitled Globe to Globe, encompasses 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, each performed in a different language. This will run for 6 weeks only, from 21st April – 9th June 2012. If you’d like to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Korean, Macbeth in Polish, Hamlet in Lithuanian, or Richard II in Palestinian Arabic, tickets start at £5 and are available here.... (Read More).

November 15 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

The new video game from famed studio Bethesda, Skyrim, is the fifth instalment of the Elder Scrolls saga, and puts the player in a medieval fantasy landscape that has suddenly come under siege by dragons. I have previously posted about both Klingon and Na'vi - invented languages for Gene Roddenberry's em>Star TrekStar Trek TV show and James Cameron's Avatar movie respectively. Skyrim has adopted a similar technique to give their world more depth and character, and it takes on a pivotal role in gameplay. The player's character is the only one who can speak the Dragon language, and so is... (Read More).

November 15 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I always enjoy visiting Engrish Funny for some translation laughs. This image, from sister site Failbook, presents some interesting cultural differences. In English, the  π symbol (meaning the number) is of course pronounced as 'pi,' thus making the phrase on the t-shirt amusing to English speakers. However,  the Greek letter π is 'p,' with the pronunciation the same. It's also pronounced as 'p' in French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bulgarian and Portuguese. It seems that English is the odd one out in the way we pronounce it. Do you know of any other languages that pronounce π... (Read More).

November 11 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I had no idea that the UK had a National Scrabble Championship, but we do, and this year was the 40th anniversary! Wayne Kelly from Warrington beat Gary Oliver from Southampton to win his very first official Scrabble title, having entered in previous years and not reaching the final. The contestants entered months of heats, with over 300 players battling for a place in the final. The final itself consisted of five matches, the winner being the player who won the most matches out of five. Mr Kelly used the words “caromel,” (meaning to turn into caramel) worth 69 points, and... (Read More).

November 09 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: matadornetwork.com Here's one of the great things about English - since it is ruled by popular usage, all it would take for words that have long fallen into disuse to come back into fashion is for people to start using them again. A blogger is trying to do just that, by taking a selection of 20 words from Erin McKean's series on weird words - titled Weird and Wonderful Words and giving definitions so people can start slipping them into conversation. The words include wonderful terms like jargogle (to confuse), jollux (a fat person), ludibrious (to be an object of mockery),... (Read More).

November 07 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Language is constantly evolving, so it’s quite natural that certain words will be replaced and updated. When you read Shakespeare, for example, there is often an index of words to refer to since they are no longer in use today. A new survey has found that text speak is diminishing the usage of such traditional British words. The study of 2000 adults was carried out to mark the launch of Planet Word, the book which accompanies the series of the same name. J.P. Davidson, the author of Planet Word said: ''This could be viewed as regrettable, as there are some great descriptive words that... (Read More).

November 03 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

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. [caption id='' align='aligncenter' width='500' caption='Oh, the irony. '][/caption] Using spell check sometimes just won't cut it. Some words which sound the same when vocalised are often used incorrectly in... (Read More).

October 2011:

October 31 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Language journal has published a study by three linguists at the University of Lyon, showing that certain languages are more or less equally efficient. The study compared the efficiency of conveying information in spoken German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Researchers took a sample group of 59 people, who each read a sample text in their native language. The recordings were then edited to remove the pauses, and syllables were tallied in order to draw conclusions regarding the density of information communicated in each language. Japanese was found to... (Read More).

October 31 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange is perhaps most famous in popular culture for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick movie adaptation starring Malcolm McDowell. While it was toned down in the movie to aid the audience's understanding, the book puts more focus on Nadsat, a constructed language invented by Burgess to give more depth to the England that he created in the novel. Since the events of the novel took place in the future, Burgess wanted to create slang that would not sound dated to people reading it later on, but an added bonus is the unique type of narrative it creates. In fact,... (Read More).

October 30 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: dictionary.com The word 'psychopath' is thrown around plenty on TV, but few may know the true definition of the mental disorder. Essentially, it's an inability to empathize with others or establish any kind of meaningful relationship. However, this often means that a person exhibiting psychopathic behavior fits a certain pattern of other traits: extreme egocentricity, a failure to learn from experience, and a tendacy to treat other people as a means to further their own ends, rather than individuals in themselves. Here's an interesting article on a study recently performed by... (Read More).

October 28 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a fantastic web site if you're learning a language and need some help with vocabulary (or in the case of langauges with different scripts, flashcards). After selecting the language you're learning, memrise.com helps you learn with a gardening metaphor - it teaches you new words as 'seeds'. These 'seeds' are then 'watered' through you testing yourself via a mixture of multiple choice questions and user input. Once your 'seeds' are 'watered' enough to become 'plants', you'll have to keep them blossoming by revisiting the site and redoing the tests to prove that you recognize the... (Read More).

October 27 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Eagle eyed readers may have spotted that the resident Language Trainers blogger has recently changed. I’m Emma, and I'm taking over from Wendy, who has been posting all the latest linguistics news for the past three years. Wendy has travelled all over the world and now lives in Shanghai, where she has the opportunity to practice her Mandarin skills every day. I’ve also travelled extensively, but am not multi-lingual. I am however currently (slowly) learning Latin American Spanish. A bit about me: I’m British, and as we all know, we Brits are not well renowned for their language skills.... (Read More).

October 25 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

An onomatopoeia is a word that mimics a sound - for example 'woof', 'bang', or 'moo'. While they are popular in English (to the point where some onomatopoeias are no longer commonly recognised as such, like the word 'bleat' to mimic the sound a sheep makes), they are absolutely rife in Japanese. In fact, unlike English, Japanese has two kinds of onomatopoeia: Giongo (擬音語) are words that directly imitate sounds (there's a subgroup of these just for animal and human sounds, called Giseigo (擬声語)), and Gitaigo (擬態語) are words that express emotions, actions, or conditions. Both... (Read More).

October 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a great short film by Australian director Brian Fairbairn that has been doing the internet rounds lately. One of its purposes is to show how we can garner so much from just body language and speech intonation, even if we don't know exactly what people are saying. In 4 minutes of conversation we can't comprehend the actual dialogue, but we can discern what's actually happening. You'll notice that there are quite a few English words in there - or rather, English phonemes. However, there's never enough context to understand exactly what the characters are saying. The words used are... (Read More).

October 24 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Tomorrow is the concluding part of a fascinating five part BBC documentary series called Fry’s Planet Word. In this series, Stephen Fry explores aspects of linguistics and how we learn and how our skills develop, and he travels across the world investigating different languages. I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but each episode is quite a broad range of different topics under the umbrella of a different theme for each episode. For example; in episode one, entitled “Babel,” Fry covers sign language, animal communication, visits the Nilotic speaking Turkana... (Read More).

October 20 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Some debate regarding language usage has been stirred up recently, after respected French language body L’Academie Francaise placed some English words on their blacklist of words to “ban”. In reality, only two words/phrases have been listed so far – “le best of” and “impacter,” a word which means “to impact” and is a mixture of French and English. This move is intended to preserve and enrich the French language. It does not include English words such as “weekend” and “sandwich” which are in everyday use in France. Other words, such as “email,” are encouraged... (Read More).

October 19 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: dialectblog.com Here's a great article about the difference between dialect and accent - and why Americans tend to get them mixed up, even though they refer to two very separate linguistic ideas. Strangely enough, it often seems to be linked with race rather than area - Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader during the 2008 Presidential elections, famously said that Obama spoke 'with no negro dialect' - the article's author argues that 'I doubt he would have mentioned a candidate’s ‘Tennessee dialect’ or ‘New York dialect’ (he probably would have used... (Read More).

October 18 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Kanji are the Japanese forms of the traditional Chinese characters that were first used as far back as 8,000 years ago. Many countries in Asia use some form of traditional Chinese pictograms: variants are present in the written languages of Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as mainland China and Japan. Frustratingly hard to learn for westerners, a competent Kanji reader can identify at least 2,000 different characters, though there are apparently around 50,000 different characters in all. However, most of those are archaic, technical or very rarely used. Some of the most basic forms of... (Read More).

October 17 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

[caption id='attachment_2094' align='alignright' width='206' caption='The legendary Giacomo Casanova'][/caption]Source: effword.com This is a fantastic article about sexual eponyms - an eponym is a word derived from somebody's name, or a place. There are hundreds of them in English, and we use them without ever thinking about their origins: for example, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is named after physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. Likewise, a mausoleum is named after the ancient Carian leader Mausolus (Μαύσωλος), who had a huge tomb built for him by his sister and widow: now the... (Read More).

September 2011:

September 27 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: merriam-webster.com The Merriam-Webster online dictionary's definition for 'literally' now includes a note on the 'incorrect' usage of the word: 2. : in effect : virtually Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary. I know people who will literally start foaming at the mouth (hah) when people confuse the word 'literally' with 'figuratively'. However, this is English, and... (Read More).

September 23 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: newscientist.com Here's a truly interesting article written by social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, on those little words that we never put much thought into - pronouns. Pronouns are the short words that we often substitute for other nouns - 'I', 'you', 'he', 'she', 'it', 'they', 'we', etc. What started as a study into how we use pronouns and other 'function words' - especially when talking about dramatic or traumatic events - became a life's work for Pennebaker. 'Function words' (pronouns, articles ('a/an' and 'the'), prepositions (like 'to', 'for', 'from', etc.), auxiliary... (Read More).

September 22 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

As someone who is currently learning Mandarin, I find the language very challenging - both to speak and to write - as well as extremely quirky. It is, however, a very satisfying language to learn, as it's almost impossible to learn to speak Chinese without learning a little about Chinese culture. One element I find especially interesting is the way Chinese combines words to form new words or phrases. A much earlier post touches on this, discussing how Chinese has to combine ideas to give names to modern concepts like the computer: The age of the Chinese language means that it has to... (Read More).

September 20 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: news.bbc.co.uk 'John's chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day 'cos he wanted to jam with his bred'rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.' Be honest, how much of that did you understand' If the answer is 'not much', then don't worry - you're not alone. A while ago, the BBC performed a small study on the slang terms used by children from schools across the United Kingdom, and found that the vocabulary used varied even more than they thought it would. With England being such a small country in... (Read More).

September 15 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

The Welsh language (known to its speakers as Cymraeg) is a language dating back to the 6th century, and is spoken daily in the small country of Wales, in the United Kingdom, by around 60% of people living there. While it is considered a minority language, the number of speakers continues to grow due to a number of measurements by Welsh authorities who want to promote the continued use of the language. To many outsiders, the Welsh accent sounds slightly odd, as its phonology is quite rare - many of the sounds required for speaking Welsh do not exist in English. The written language is also... (Read More).

September 10 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: time.com Here's a fascinating article about why some languages sound so fast to English native speakers - the results may surprise you. But it doesn't change the fact that some languages seem to fly by compared with your native tongue. Being an English speaker learning Mandarin Chinese, I often find myself flummoxed when I'm trying to comprehend native Mandarin speakers: not because I don't know the words, but I simply can't keep up with the speed at which they're coming at me. One of my most common phrases in Chinese is 'màn diǎn, nǐ shuō de hěn kuài!' - 'speak a little... (Read More).

September 08 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: crosswordcontest.blogspot.com Let's take a break from all the academic waxing linguistical for a minute, and have some fun - this crossword puzzle was made by crossword puzzle writer extraordinaire, Matt Gaffney, on his blog, 'Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest'. At first it seems like a pretty ordinary crossword puzzle, but the black squares arranged in a diagonal in the middle of the puzzle are actually a meta element of the puzzle itself - if you solve all the clues correctly, those squares will also form an extra word - a common method of transportation. Click the... (Read More).

September 01 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: reddit.com/r/tattoos The Tattoos section on social bookmarking site Reddit is a great place to ask for advice on body ink, and for showing off your new tattoos to the world. Unfortunately, user 'MikeTheDudeHenry' got a little more than he bargained for when he revealed his new 'Latin' tatto emblazoned across his shoulder blades. Clearly following the adage of quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur ('anything said in Latin seems profound'), he hoped for a wholly positive reaction to his cemel dosce tattoo, which he claimed was Latin for 'know thyself'. It soon became apparent... (Read More).

August 2011:

August 28 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Dictionary makers Collins have removed a selection of lesser-used words from their smaller dictionaries. These uncommon words have been tracked in recent usage and the least-used ones will now only be  marked obsolete and removed from current editions of dictionaries. Some of the words to be removed are: 'wittol'– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s. 'drysalter' - a dealer in certain chemical products and foods. 'alienism' - the study and treatment of mental illness. 'cyclogiro' - a type of aircraft propelled by rotating... (Read More).

August 26 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

The next in the series of posts exploring how numbers are rendered in different languages is Japanese. Japanese, along with many other Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and Korean, has a reputation for being fiendishly difficult to learn for native English speakers. While this is true in many ways, the number system is in fact pretty straightforward. When I learned Japanese, counting from 1 to 10 was one of the first things we learned to do. It was only after we had mastered the first 10 numbers that our teacher told us that by learning just a couple more words, we could... (Read More).

August 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: nature.com/news Here's an old news article that talks about why English has so many irregularities when it comes to the past tenses of common verbs (e.g. 'I am' -> 'I was', 'I see' -> 'I saw', etc.). As it turns out, the reasons aren't too surprising - like so many things in English, it relies on common usage. The article compares such linguistic evolution to biological evolution - after all, the most often-used (and therefore useful) genes generally stay the same while the rest of the organism evolves. 'To help' isn't as common a verb as 'to be' or 'to have', and so is more... (Read More).

August 22 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: idlewords.com I found this brilliant blog post a few days ago, and had to share it here. My father's native tongue is Arabic, but I was brought up speaking English - something I regret deeply, as it would have been great to have been raised a bilingualist. I picked up bits here and there growing up, but have little understanding of the grammar and syntax of modern Arabic, so this post really opened my eyes to what a complex language it is. In this blog entry, they give 11 reasons why Arabic is such a varied and interesting language, though sadly this goes hand-in-hand with it being... (Read More).

August 22 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

A while ago, I wrote about the SarcMark, a proposed new punctuation mark to indicate that someone was being sarcastic. My conclusion was that people just wouldn't get it. They would have to have it explained to them, and I sincerely doubt that someone would want to pay for the privilege of using it. The latest attempt at expressing sarcasm in a universal form is Sartalics. Unlike regular Italics, Sartalics lean to the left to indicate that someone is being sarcastic. A team of design interns decided that it was time to introduce an easily-recognisable way to demonstrate sarcasm via... (Read More).

August 18 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Dinosaur Comics are one of my favourite webcomics, because they manage to be both funny and smart (and they have dinosaurs!). A recent comic discussed the sexism inherent in some words of English. It may be a carry-over from times well past, but there's no denying that the feminine versions of many words have more negative connotations than the masculine versions. The examples from the comic are: Master/Mistress - both can be in charge of something, but a mistress can also be an extramarital lover (what is the male version of this word'). Sir/Madam - both are polite ways of... (Read More).

August 15 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a funny comic I found on webcomic Rooster Teeth, about word sizes in English. It's funny, but he has a... (Read More).

August 13 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Memrise is a new vocabulary-learning website that I'm already a bit addicted to. It takes the standard spaced repetition method (you see the same word at increasing intervals until you know it consistently), but adds a cute theme. After you choose a word list to learn from, each new word is seen as a seed that gets planted when you first view it. After you 'plant' it, you 'water' it by answering multiple choice questions. Eventually you will know it well enough to 'harvest' it, so it moves from your greenhouse to your garden. In your virtual garden you can see all the words you know, growing... (Read More).

August 12 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: my.vocabularysize.com If you've ever wondered just how many English words you truly know, here's a test that does a pretty good job at estimating the number of English word families you recognize. A word family is a set of related words by form - for example the verb 'to conquer', the noun 'conqueror', and the adjective 'conquered' and any other related forms are all one word family. The test consists of 140 questions - each time it gives you a word, and uses that word in an example sentence. You then have a choice of 4 definitions for that word. You simply need to choose the... (Read More).

August 08 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: endangeredalphabets.com There are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages alive and active in the world today, but it is estimated that as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. This means that not only many languages but also many alphabets and writing systems will be lost forever. Of these 6,000-7,000 remaining languages, there are only around 100 different alphabets in use. But not if the Endangered Alphabets Project can help it - it has been discovered that of the 100 alphabets in use, around a third of them are endangered. That is to say, they... (Read More).

August 03 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: futilitycloset.com In 2001, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary purposefully inserted a fake word into their 2001 edition, in an attempt to fool other lexicographers (people who are involved in the making of dictionaries) into proving that they stole material from them. If another dictionary cited the word that the NOAD had invented, it showed that they were simply lifting words from them. The word was esquivalience, and the fake definition given was (rather aptly) 'to shirk your duties'. Predictably, the word was picked up by dictionary.com (who later removed... (Read More).

August 01 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: dictionary.com Reference site dictionary.com recently compiled a list of the most often misspelled words in the English language, featuring words such as 'accommodate', 'definite', 'foreign', 'miniature', 'judgment', and 'pronunciation'. You can see the full list here. Most of them are pretty simple in terms of meaning, but have various properties that lead many people to spell them incorrectly - for example many people like to add an 'e' to 'judgment', since the root word is 'judge'. However, 'judgement' is incorrect. Using their flashcards, you can make sure that you know how... (Read More).

July 2011:

July 31 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

We've all read those few phrases in phrasebooks where we think 'When would I ever use that'' For me, it's mostly the pick-up line section, but I guess I'm not the kind of person who will go home with someone I can't communicate with at all. After writing about how I didn't think it was funny to purposely give people the wrong translation for something, I was linked to the Zompist phrasebook by reader Adrian. I hadn't heard of the site before and so wasn't really sure what I was expecting. I clicked the link and up came a categorised list of phrases, which appear to be translated correctly... (Read More).

July 25 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Google+ is the latest offering from Google - a social networking tool which may yet rival Facebook (although it's in its early days). For many people, this development may seem like just another version of Facebook (without the ads and the silly games), but there is one big difference: Hangouts. A Hangout is basically a video chat room that anyone can start, and anyone with the invite link can join. It allows up to 10 people to all see each other, share links, talk, text chat, and watch videos together. This is a great social tool, but also has the potential to be a great learning tool. If... (Read More).

July 22 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Besides the occasional exception (such as the country Qatar), in English the letter Q is always followed by U - but we never question why this is the case. Why are these letters so closely linked' It seems we owe this - along with so many other things in English - to Latin. The Classical Latin alphabet had fewer letters than we do today (for example U and V used to be one and the same), and Q was used as an alternative to C and K in certain situations. Latin orthography dictated that a Q should be followed by a U, and the habit stuck, making QU a common digraph. From Wikipedia: In... (Read More).

July 22 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

In my last post I talked about couples communicating in other languages, and wondered how successful it can be. I've also talked about what is sometimes called getting a black-haired dictionary (learning a language from a paramour, in this case a Chinese girlfriend to teach you Chinese). If you have a partner who speaks a different language from you, will it always help you learn that language' Not necessarily. Depending on your situation, having your partner available to you may be very successful, or not really help you with your language progress at all. Obviously, one of the big... (Read More).

July 20 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a great playlist on YouTube of 10 one-minute videos gradually detailing the history and evolution of the English language. They're presented in an entertaining, bite-sized, yet educational and engrossing way. The videos are provided by the Open University, a British institution that provides distance learning to a huge number of people. Here's the first video in the series - 'Anglo... (Read More).

July 19 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I was reading a really interesting blog post on Speaking of China, a blog by a western woman who is married to a Chinese man. The post was all about love and language, and people who communicate with their loved one/s in a language that is not native to one or both parties. She was asked whether she had a better relationship with her husband in Chinese or in English. She said that it fluctuated between the two (and may be slightly better in English because of her husband's studies in the US), but that they have some kind of hybrid Mandarin-English language that they communicate in. Her... (Read More).

July 18 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Following on from a previous post on the relative complexity of counting systems in different languages, it struck me as interesting to explore a couple of the more interesting number systems in certain languages. Starting in relatively familiar territory, French compares very similarly with English, up until a point. Whereas we name our multiples of ten using the base number and adding '-ty' (e.g. sixty, seventy, eighty, etc.). French does the same, until 70, which is soixante-dix, literally 'sixty-ten'. 80 gets even stranger - quatre-vingts, literally 'four-twenties', and 90 is... (Read More).

July 15 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I watched an old episode of the sitcom Frasier the other day. In it, Frasier wants to give a speech to his son in Hebrew, but doesn't know how to because he isn't Jewish. He enlists a coworker to translate and help him with pronunciation. Later on, the coworker feels slighted, so instead of Hebrew, he translates the speech into Klingon (a fictional alien language from the Star Trek TV show, in case you somehow didn't know). It all worked out well in the end, but it made me think about similar language tricks. I've met plenty of people who have, as part of their kind language guidance to... (Read More).

July 12 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: translation-telephone.com Here's a fun site - enter a message in English, and it'll translate it through 15 different languages and then back into English. Machine translation - as much as it has improved in the past 10 or so years - is very rarely perfect, especially with language pairs that are very different (such as English and Chinese). As a result, it often mangles the original phrase into something that's barely recognizable - much like the old party game also known as 'Telephone' or 'Chinese Whispers'. It works particularly well with song lyrics - the chorus to Rebecca... (Read More).

July 11 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: sf.airnet.ne.jp Another interesting link found on my favorite content aggregator, Reddit, shows one man's research into the counting systems in different languages, and how some are more complicated than others. Creator Takaguchi Shinji is a mathematician at heart, and wanted to show whether or not the common stereotype of Chinese students being good at math could be related to the supposed relative simplicity of their counting system. As it turns out, the Chinese counting system is far more regular than that of English - in fact, Mandarin rated 65th out of the 69 languages... (Read More).

July 11 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I have been in situations before where two speakers have a reasonable knowledge of each other's languages, but perhaps are not confident enough to speak them. In some of these cases, both speakers carry out their half of the dialogue in their own language, with a fair amount of success. Sometimes I find it too difficult to explain something in another language, but I know the listener will be able to understand me if I speak English. While this can be considered a form of listening practice, and successful communication is fantastic, it obviously lacks the speaking element. Conversely, if... (Read More).

July 08 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Everybody has different aims to consider when learning languages. One of them is whether to focus on written or conversational language. Of course, you don't have to focus entirely on one (and I wouldn't recommend you to), but it will affect things like the type of texts or materials you study from. At the moment, I'm studying a reading textbook, which has short essays followed by comprehension questions. My teacher is careful to point out which things are only suitable for written texts (and so I should avoid saying things that way). There are also discussion questions so I can get my fill... (Read More).

July 04 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: mcclatchydc.com Here is a great article on how technology may be helping preserve languages and dialects that are slowly becoming extinct, rather than help kill them off as sometimes believed. Across the globe in the Philippines, teenagers think it's 'cool' to send mobile phone text messages in regional languages that show signs of endangerment, such as Kapampangan. Technology, long considered a threat to regional languages, now is being seen as a way to keep young people from forsaking their native tongues for dominant languages. YouTube and Facebook, as well as Internet... (Read More).

July 03 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

When you learn a language, do you choose your accent, or does your accent choose you' Perhaps you are learning in a rural place and get used to the local accents because you talk to the locals. In this case, do you insist on training yourself to use a 'standard' form of speech' Obviously, regional words and phrases may make you easier to understand for locals and more difficult for others, but if you were as comprehensible as other regional speakers, would you mind having an accent' When learning Chinese, would you go with southern pronunciation, or the Beijing accent which has... (Read More).

June 2011:

June 30 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I've written a lot about trying to listen to as much language as you can, whether it be in real life, or (even better) in a format that you can listen to more than once, and hopefully read along with. I'm lucky to have a language teacher who has a very pleasant voice and manner of speaking, so when she records texts for me, it's never a chore to listen to (although I do sometimes have to talk myself into listening to lessons rather than music or podcasts in English). However, I've heard a lot of people whose recording voices are almost painful to listen to, and I would struggle to make it... (Read More).

June 28 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

When I first saw the link to this article about tweeting and grammar, I thought it was talking about people using Twitter in a grammatically correct way. I thought this was both fantastic and statistically unlikely. It turns out that the article is talking about a species of bird, the Bengal finch, that appears to recognise some kind of grammar within its bird songs. Bengal finches make a lot of noise when they hear unfamiliar bird songs, most probably related to maintaining their territory in the face of strange birds. Scientists familiarised a group of finches with a new song, which... (Read More).

June 27 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

I came across this animation recently showing the evolution of the western alphabet, from its Phoenician origins circa 900 BC to the modern Roman alphabet we use today. The most interesting transition in my opinion is from the Etruscan alphabet to the first Latin script (which is the first most people will recognize). Many letters are flipped horizontally - B, D, E, F, K, L, and P. A couple disappear completely - for example, the Greek letters theta (Θ), xi (Ξ) and phi (Φ). The sounds still exist in English, though they are formed differently. Theta is a 'th' sound, xi is the 'ks' sound... (Read More).

June 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Contractions - the act of replacing letters in words with an apostrophe - are often used in spoken English. It's easy to see where contractions such as 'shouldn't' and 'didn't' are short for, but a word like 'won't' has rather less obvious origins. The origins of the word 'won't' are, in fact, pretty indicative of the long history of the English language. It's an evolved short version of 'will not', originating back in the 15th century, when it was spelled and pronounced as 'wynnot'. As English continued to change over the years, it became 'wonnot', and eventually was shortened to 'won't'.... (Read More).

June 23 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm reading a collection of essays by David Sedaris called Me Talk Pretty One Day. Some of the essays, including the title one, are about his struggles as an American visiting a small town in France and trying to pick up some of the language (there, in Paris, and in New York City). His partner speaks French, so that leaves him as the only non-French speaker in the town (something that I can relate to, though not so much with French). He starts off pretty much only knowing the word for bottle opener, which he uses with all the local merchants. He proceeds to type all of his new words (using... (Read More).

June 21 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bbc.co.uk/news As mentioned a few posts back, mainland China uses a different form of written Chinese from Taiwan. While China reformed their script during the cultural revolution of the 50s to Simplified Chinese (jiǎnhuàzì), Taiwan stuck with the more complex Traditional Chinese (zhèngtǐzì). Around 2,000 characters were simplified, in an effort to raise literacy rates across China. Taiwan - a separate entity from China since 1949, retained Traditional Chinese writing and has continued to diverge from mainland China culturally and politically since then. [caption... (Read More).

June 21 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I've seen my fair share of awful translations into English, which I forgive because most of the time they are hilarious, and I imagine that the people who commissioned them probably don't have much more than an online translator available to help them. Sometimes, though, I come across words that look like legitimate English words, but I have no idea what they mean. Sometimes I can glean a fair idea from the context, but there are times when I just have to look up the word to see what they are talking about. I don't know why, but people seem to pick the most obscure or out-of-date words... (Read More).

June 17 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Recently, I dipped into the Chinese microblogging world, ruled by 微波 (wēi bó). Like Twitter, it can be completely overwhelming to the uninitiated, especially with the millions of users and the Chinese interface. I wasn't sure how much time or energy I wanted to spend on it, and how much benefit I would end up getting out of it. So here I sit at the edges without throwing myself in. On one hand, there is a wealth of information out there, and so many people to interact with. I know some non-native speakers who rave about the service, and about how you can say so much more with... (Read More).

June 14 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: dictionary.com It might seem odd to spend some 90 years deliberating on a dictionary of a language that has been dead for 2,000 years, but the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is more than a simple reference book. It is an in-depth, 21-volume reference of ancient Mesopotanian dialects, and also acts as an in-depth study into one of the first-known writing systems, developed as far back as 30BC: cuneiform script. The nearly 28,000 words compliled in this mammoth dictionary reflects more than just an old language, but a lot about its culture. Martha T. Roth, the editor in charge,... (Read More).

June 14 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

And now for some light relief - Simon Pegg back in his Big Train days, a mostly absurd British comedy series. This is a short but funny sketch about a woman looking for help from non-English speaking... (Read More).

June 13 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bbc.co.uk/news A recent article on the BBC News website uses an iconic British children's book (A Bear Called Paddington) to compare how English speakers and German speakers differ not only in terms of the words they use, but also the subject matter of their conversation. Specifically, 'smalltalk' or 'phatic conversation' is the focal point. Americans and Brits almost always begin a conversation with a couple of pleasantries - for example asking the other person how they've been or what they've been up to, or talking about the weather. This lightweight chatter serves little... (Read More).

June 11 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

The 2014 Winter Olympic Games are being held in Sochi, Russia. With English being announced as the official language of the games, organisers and staff are scrambling to learn enough of the language in time for the games. The organisers have announced Education First (EF) as their official language education provider. EF has already organised an online learning centre for the 70,000-strong Olympic support staff, which will offer online language classes and support, especially in English relating to the Winter Games. Because online and distance learning are still not common in Russia, this... (Read More).

June 07 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

With the ease of online translation these days, it is hard for me not to get lazy sometimes and just run text through a translator to get the gist of what it's saying. Often this is enough for me, but sometimes it's just so I know what the text is about before looking at it more closely. Usually it also helps with speed (I read and comprehend slowly sometimes). The other day, I threw some text through a translator, but what it gave me was tantamount to rubbish. The original text was mostly phrases that didn't have much context, and so the result was even more garbled. I had to struggle to... (Read More).

June 03 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

At the beginning of your language learning, trying to learn a lot of vocabulary might not be that helpful or easy. If you can't actually use this language in real sentences and constructions, it will be even more difficult to remember. But at some point in your language learning career, you are likely to feel that you don't have enough vocabulary. You will have enough sentence structures to want to fill them in with useful (and/or random) words. This is when the word lists and the flashcards will come in handy. It may feel like you're back in primary school, but reviewing flashcards is a... (Read More).

May 2011:

May 31 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: reddit.com/r/linguistics Here's another interesting linguistic post from social bookmarking site Reddit - something that seems to be becoming a monthly ritual. This time in concerns internet slang, more specifically laughter. Whilst acronyms like 'LOL' and 'ROFL' are pretty much almost universal now in the online world, the question posed was how people from different cultures denote the sound of laughter online. English's 'hahaha' or 'hehehe' sum up the sound of a hearty gut laugh quite nicely, but different languages have different phonetics for particular letters, leading to... (Read More).

May 31 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I am fortunate enough to hang around with friends who are all at different levels of learning the same foreign language, and who are all fairly keen to speak it to each other. The people who are at a lower level learn a lot from the people who speak it really well. Me being somewhere in the middle, I am able to both learn and teach and it's very satisfying. I find that when I listen to a non-native person speaking a foreign language, I understand more readily than when a native speaker is speaking it (provided, of course, that they have a certain level of language knowledge). I think it's a... (Read More).

May 30 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

English is a fascinating language, and like all languages has its fair share of interesting oddities. Unpaired words are one such oddity - they are words that would appear to have a related word or one with the opposite meaning, but don't. For example, the words disambiguate, inevitable and unkempt would seem like they have direct antonyms given the prefixes in- and un-, but the words ambiguated, evitable and kempt don't exist. Most unpaired words are a result of words falling out of use. However, many never had a 'normal' form in the first place, but happened to start with the same... (Read More).

May 29 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm a fan of word games, especially ones like Scrabble and Boggle (both trademarked, of course), and anagram games like Text Twist. So I was pretty happy to try out a version of the anagram game where you have to find as many words as you can from the given letters, and the words power a cute little train. This game is called Text Express 2, if you want to try it. I feel like I should warn you that you may find it slightly frustrating, as I did. Usually I'm very good at these games, so when I got the letters H U L E N E, and I tried to find the 6-letter word, I was stumped. This was the... (Read More).

May 25 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Having been an on and off blogger and generally outspoken person for many years, I can't imagine the concept of having no right to free speech at all. Even though I've lived in countries where you have to keep a lid on your opinions to some extent (Turkey, China), I've never felt in danger of being reprimanded, hurt, or imprisoned. So when I heard about the amazing Afghan Women's Writing Project, I had to stop and think for a while. The project helps Afghan women write and publish pieces in English about their real lives and experiences. These women often have to publish work anonymously,... (Read More).

May 23 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bbc.co.uk/news Since I currently reside in Shanghai, this bit of linguistic news was of great interest to me. While China and Taiwan share the same original language of Mandarin, 60 years of going their own ways - both politically and linguistically - have caused the languages to evolve in different ways. While a native Chinese person will have little difficulty conversing fluently with a native from Taiwan, the devil is in the details, so they say. From the article on BBC News: A Taiwanese visitor to mainland China was shocked to see sliced 'tu dou' on a menu. The word means... (Read More).

May 21 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I have a few colleagues and acquaintances who are currently labouring under the impression that my foreign language skills are better than they are (and I don't really have a problem with that). Why' Because most of our communications are done in text format, and that makes it much easier for me to make sure that I understand them, and that they understand me. Besides being able to take my time a little bit more, working via instant messages or email allows me to check both directions of communication using an online translator. Obviously, Google Translate won't give me perfect sentences,... (Read More).

May 20 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu This appeared in one of my favorite language blogs recently, and was too good not to share. I live in China, and often see poorly translated English signage all over the place, but rarely is something this badly (and unintentionally hilariously) translated. This sign was found on a shower door - the Chinese character (拉 - 'lā') simply means 'pull'. However, its translation here is given as 'Latin America'. While the reason why this was chosen as the best translation by the makers of the sign is a little unclear, this is Victor from Language Log's... (Read More).

May 17 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

The cast of reality TV show Jersey Shore doesn't really have a reputation for being particularly scholarly, but some of the cast members are ensuring that they will be able to speak some Italian for the upcoming season. The fourth season will be filmed in Florence, where apparently officials aren't exactly welcoming them with open arms (too much chaos in the first three seasons). Some of the cast members have Italian backgrounds, but none of them speak the language. In order to be able to 'know how to order grilled chicken', cast members have requested that they be furnished with copies of... (Read More).

May 16 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Esperanto, a language constructed by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, was designed to be a modern language for the whole world to speak: the aim was to create a politically neutral language that was easy to learn, which would help not only foster communication between those in different countries, but also improve international relations by giving them some common ground. The thing is, Esperanto never really caught on as Zamenhof had hoped. While it is still spoken by a small percentage of people in the world, it has a long way to go before it will be used as any kind of lingua franca. A... (Read More).

May 13 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Native Spanish speakers and those who have ever taken Spanish will immediately recognise the inverted question mark - ¿ - in the Spanish language, questions are not just ended with a question mark as in English, but are surrounded with them. For example: ¿Cuántos años tienes' means 'how old are you''. This practice is actually quite useful. By using the question marks like inverted commas or parentheses, questions are clearly marked. But why don't we do this in English' The answer is very simple: word order. In English, we have our own way of disambiguating between statement and... (Read More).

May 13 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

One of the things I find fascinating about languages is connotations. Even if some languages (or even cities or countries) share the same words, the common meanings may be completely different. Today I learned that in China, you can use the term 爱人 (àiren, literally love person) to mean your husband, wife, partner, sweetheart. A man can introduce his wife to people as his àiren, and the wife can do the same. I find this quite sweet and, as a person who severely dislikes most terms for 'significant other' in English (including partner, other half, better half), I think it does the... (Read More).

May 10 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

English has more words than any other language - around 2 million at the last count - but the average person's vocabulary only spans from around 12,000 to 17,000 words. That leaves a lot of perfectly acceptable words that seem strange to most native speakers, since they're either words with a more common synonym, rarely-used variants of otherwise known prefixes and suffixes, or just simply words that have become obsolete. Here are a few examples of words that probably aren't part of the average person's vocabulary. It's probably better not to think of this as an exercise in expanding your... (Read More).

May 09 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

I've stumbled across this in written English many times - for when somebody wants to announce 'there it is', English borrowed the French word 'voila' (not to be confused with a 'viola', the stringed instrument one size larger than a violin). 'Voila' literally means 'see there', and comes to mean 'there it is' or, more idiomatically, 'there you have it'. An example usage might be 'I couldn't find my glasses, until I checked my head - and voila! There they were.' However, since it is a word you rarely see written out - and being French has a slightly unexpected spelling for English... (Read More).

May 08 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

This is just a bit of a silly post, but again, it just goes to show how knowing your punctuation and reading questions properly could get you...$200' Make sure you double check your spelling and punctuation before you give your final... (Read More).

May 05 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

It's not difficult to notice which story has been dominating the news this week. The death of Osama bin Laden has brought with it a variety of reactions from around the globe, the vast majority of it celebratory. With one death, however, something else has been born - a quotation, attributed to the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: 'I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy'. This very apropros quotation has been spreading around Facebook like wildfire, but perhaps it's just a little too apropros - in fact, quite... (Read More).

May 04 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Sometimes it's difficult to write posts about learning from e-book readers or mobile devices because there are so many different devices, formats, and applications out there to use. What I find useful might not be what you find useful, and in many cases, may not be available to you on the gadgets you prefer. I also want to steer away from promoting any one application or service. In spite of all of this, I wanted to talk about how my e-reader (a Kindle 3 wifi version, if anyone's interested) has really helped me with making my learning more portable (along with my MP3 player, of course).... (Read More).

April 2011:

April 29 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: wikipedia.org As a final note this month on foreign language adaptations (following on from the question about the consistency of Yoda's syntax and Buzz Lightyear's 'Spanish mode'), here's a quick note about the well-known children's cartoon, Dora the Explorer. While English speakers familiar with Dora the Explorer will know that during her adventures she (and the children watching) learns basic Spanish words and phrases. However, since Dora has since become a household name, there have been many foreign adaptations made - including Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Malay and Tamil.... (Read More).

April 28 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

For a little light relief, here's a hilarious sketch from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie - the latter now better known for affecting an American accent and playing Dr. House on FOX. This sketch, from the first season of A Bit of Fry & Laurie on BBC, shows the duo discussing the very topic of this blog: language. As silly as the discussion is, Stephen Fry's discussion points actually make a remarkable amount of sense. But maybe that's the... (Read More).

April 28 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

At a recent TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) conference, an interesting point was brought up about the learning of English. Dr Peter Waters, from German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech), presented 'Sounds: Avenues for Language Learning', a presentation about English pronunciation. He addressed the common problem of students not being trained to understand just the sounds of English (rather than how words are spelled). There are far fewer sounds in English than there are ways to spell them, and this inconsistency often brings up problems for English... (Read More).

April 25 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

All this talk about Yoda's syntax raises another interesting cross-language movie question - or at least I think it's interesting: in Toy Story 3, when Buzz Lightyear accidentally gets put into 'Spanish mode' by the other toys, what language does he speak in the Spanish language version of the film' Compared with the variety of methods used to set Yoda's speech aside from that of others in the international Star Wars dubs, this Toy Story linguistic conundrum is a little more mundane - Buzz still speaks Spanish. In the Spanish version made for Mexico, the rest of the characters speak the... (Read More).

April 25 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

One of the many things I find fascinating about living in China is seeing how the foreigners deal with the language. For many people, the only Chinese they know will get them home in a taxi and maybe to a drink at the pub. There are some Chinese words, though, that become part of daily usage for non-native speakers regardless of their language level. Sometimes they are simply Chinese words for things we don't have in other countries (mostly region-specific foods and dishes). Sometimes they are an interesting reflection of the way life is here. One of the words in the 'interesting' category... (Read More).

April 20 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

The two remaining fluent speakers of Ayapaneco, a language pre-dating modern Mexico, are not speaking to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, who live 500m apart in the village of Ayapa in Tabasco state, are the only two people left speaking the ancient language. They, however, do not wish to speak it to each other. According to Segovia, who spoke Ayapaneco with his brother until his death about 10 years ago, there is no real animosity between him and Velazquez. Other sources say they simply don't enjoy each other's company. Segovia has tried to start classes in the... (Read More).

April 18 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I was reading a guest blog post the other day about living in a foreign country and not understanding the language very well. One phrase jumped out at me and really made me think. Fiona Reilly of Life on Nanchang Lu dropped the phrase functionally illiterate into a paragraph about whether it's harder to live obliviously in a foreign place or run an emergency department in a hospital. In her former life, she was an ER doctor, and so not being able to communicate or work in a foreign place is obviously difficult for such an educated person. In my experience of being in places where you can't... (Read More).

April 16 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: guardian.co.uk While it may not be a well-known language (in fact, it could compete for being one of the least-known languages on the planet), Ayapaneco has been spoken in Mexico for centuries - before it was even known as Mexico. However, today there remains only two fluent speakers of the language - and they don't want to talk to one another. Exactly why Manuel Segovia (aged 75) and Isidro Velazquez (69) don't enjoy each other's company nowadays is not known, but the death of whatever friendship they may have had may also spell the death of yet another indigenous world... (Read More).

April 15 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Recitation is a very traditional language learning method (Recitation is a very traditional language learning method.) It's not the most fun of all the options, but there are definitely arguments for it. Reciting something that has been written natively gives learners a chance to simply get used to phrasing, rhythm, and sentence patterns that might otherwise get left behind when purely creating output (that is, making up the sentences yourself before you say them). I know that I have definitely had trouble with the flow of my speech because I am still trying to work out what I want to... (Read More).

April 12 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: voxy.com Voxy do make some interesting infographics - I previously posted about their detailing the use of Beatles songs in ESL classes. This time they've created a diagram that gives lots of great information about the difficulties of learning various languages as a native English speaker. Languages are ranked in three levels: rather simplistically labelled 'easy', 'medium' and 'hard'. Each language is broken down into the number of native speakers, with harder languages given reasons for their difficulty. Click to make it bigger: It seems that the primary criterion by... (Read More).

April 09 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: reddit.com/r/linguistics I make no secret on this blog of my fondness (perhaps bordering on obsession) with social bookmarking site Reddit. What sets apart Reddit from other similar sites is the quality of its community: unlike the comments you'll find in other online communities such as YouTube, the ability to 'upvote' interesting, thought-provoking articles and comments means that the best stuff always floats to the top. Also, given the sheer depth and breadth of Reddit's userbase, any question you find yourself asking probably has at least a handful of people knowledgeable... (Read More).

April 07 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Somewhat related to a recent post about Michel Thaler's verbless novel, I was recently made aware of a 1939 book by American author Ernest Vincent Wright called Gadsby. The novel is written as what is called a lipogram - a word game by which you avoid a particular letter or group of letters. Wright chose in Gadsby to avoid the English language's most popular letter: E. In case you aren't aware of just how important the letter E is in English, it's quite interesting to see just how limited he was in certain ways. For example, There is no number between six and thirty that he was able to use... (Read More).

March 2011:

March 31 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

A voice mapping project by the British Library has collected thousands of voice samples from around the world. Speakers have recorded either six specific words, or Roger Hargreaves's classic Mr Tickle*. Recordings are tagged with the place that the speaker grew up in, their age, and their gender. The map is based on the location the recording was made in (not the place the speaker comes from). There are a lot of ways to look at this information, besides general interest and keeping a record of the way English is spoken todya. I read an interesting article about the fact that British... (Read More).

March 30 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: ted.com When MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy decided that he wanted to know how his infant son picked up language day-to-day as he developed, he went a little further than most. Rather than observe what he could, he decided that the best course of action would be to observe everything, and so he set up fish-eye cameras in every room of his house in order to document how his son dealt with and learned language. For five years, starting from the very day the newborn baby was brought home from the hospital, the activity in each room was recorded and logged, and over 200 terabytes... (Read More).

March 29 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: oed.com Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The Oxford English Dictionary has added the popular internet acronyms LOL (laughing out loud) and OMG (oh my God) to the latest edition of OED Online, the online form of the dictionary. They are not the only acronyms to make the cut: They join other entries of this sort: IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’) [IMHO at I n./1], TMI (‘too much information’) [TMI at T n.], and BFF (‘best friends forever’) [BFF at B n.], among others. Of course in such a context initialisms are quicker to type than the full forms, and (in the... (Read More).

March 27 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Chinese is one of those languages where just getting a tone wrong can result in something completely different from what you'd intended, although every language has certain words that are very easy to mix up. The worst is when you are absolutely convinced that you are using the correct word, but it turns out that you just asked for something ridiculous. The other day, I was telling my teacher that it was OK to eat steak rare, as long as it's fresh (鲜, xian with a high tone). Unfortunately, it sounded like I was saying �'� (xian with a rising tone, meaning 'salty'). Obviously, it's easy... (Read More).

March 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: theonion.com Ah, I do love me some good satire. Using the red (spelling) and green (grammar) underlining in Microsoft Word as the basis of the joke, The Onion have come up with a new way the popular word processor can help you reach your audience: 'Microsoft Word now includes squiggly blue line to alert writer when word is too advanced for mainstream audience'. Sadly, as with all good satire, there is a firm basis in truth to this gag. In order to pander to as wide an audience as possible, all formats of media often reduce themselves to the lowest common denominator. Reality TV... (Read More).

March 21 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

My last 'annoyances' post about confusing wreck and wreak made me think a little about other words that are often confused with each other in daily use. A lot of the confusion seems to stem from the fact that one of the words is used in an English idiom - a set phrase, for example - which has old, often forgotten roots. This word may be similar to another, far more common word. If you first experience these idioms without seeing it written down, it's easy to associate it with a more common word. So, as I explained last time, is the case with wreck and wreak - for most of us, the English... (Read More).

March 20 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I've been talking to a friend lately about his progress with his language lessons. He seems to be doing well, and moving very quickly through textbook after textbook (three in 6 months!). Sometimes he worries about it moving too quickly, but from what I can see, he is making steady progress, and is his language teacher's best student. On the other hand, my own lessons have been all over the place in comparison. I had a textbook at one point, but it was hardly ever opened. I began my language lessons at an ability slightly higher than the beginning of the book, but I never really found the... (Read More).

March 17 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Just a short post here about something that either I've been hearing more often as of late, or simply been noticing more often: the difference between the words wreck and wreak. Wreak is almost always only heard in the popular idiom 'to wreak havoc', which means to inflict devastation or damage to something or someone. You can also say 'to wreak anger', which means to let loose your anger on somebody, e.g. 'He wreaked his anger on the children'. It's pronounced the same as the word reek (meaning to smell strongly). Wreck is used far more often, usually related to traffic accidents, and... (Read More).

March 17 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

In the continuing wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster, many people are turning to Japanese channels as different and possibly more current news sources. For those of us who don't understand Japanese, this can be a bit of a challenge. Luckily, there are a couple of ways that you can get around the language barrier if you are not conversant in Japanese. NHK, the public broadcasting channel in Japan, offers NHK World, with TV broadcasts in English and radio broadcasts in 17 languages. NHK News offers bilingual, English-only and English subtitled shows. Yokoso News offers... (Read More).

March 15 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: vanityfair.com I came across a very interesting (if slightly old) article on the Vanity Fair site recently on the 'like' pandemic in American English. Perhaps most noticeable in female Californians' accents, some see the over and misuse of 'like' as a scourge on the English language, some simply as a harmless form of teen slang, others see it as the way the language is evolving. Christopher Hitchens talks not only of how the word has pervaded the daily vocabulary of American teens, but also how it has near enough completely replaced the use of the word 'as' when forming similes... (Read More).

March 14 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Hace algún tiempo hablábamos del peligro de extinción en el que viven miles de idiomas en el mundo y que podría tener como consecuencia la reducción del número de idiomas hablados en el  mundo a la mitad. Con el objetivo de minimizar la perdida cultural que ello supone, la asociación National Geographic colabora en  “Enduring Voices”.  Este proyecto pretende crear un registro de idiomas en peligro de extinción para que no se pierdan completamente y el conocimiento que se esconde en ellos sobreviva a sus últimos hablantes. Nace de la colaboración entre National Geographic y... (Read More).

March 13 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

If you're anything like me, the big achievements in language learning aren't when you get good scores on your classroom tests. Sure, getting questions right is encouraging, especially in your most difficult areas (for me, listening), but for me, those aren't the highlights. Knowing the correct answer in the classroom is a huge distance away from knowing the correct responses in real life situations. I remember the feeling of satisfaction when I managed a whole conversation solely in a foreign language (yes, you can be extremely proud of yourself for that!). Or when I was half-listening to... (Read More).

March 11 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Having studied Latin & Greek I'm always fascinated by etymology - the study of where words originated. I seem to learn new ones every day... today's is the origin of the word 'gorgeous'. According to etymonline.com, a great online etymology dictionary, the word comes from the Old French word gorge, which means the bosom or throat. The implication is that something is so beautiful it would be worth hanging around your neck as jewelry: thus its modern-day meaning of 'very beautiful'. I could spend many hours browsing etymology dictionaries, looking at entries for something as seemingly... (Read More).

March 10 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Ah, you have to love a bit of language-related humour. [sic] humor is a tumblog that allows the author to vent frustration arising  from the clearly terrible fiction she has to read at work. Sure, writers may technically be using language correctly, but that doesn't mean that they can't put together some cringe-worthy word combinations. In many cases, though, they aren't even close to getting the language right. Here are a few of my favourites: Awesome use of a colon: “Hunter was wearing a track suit that featured: pants that could turn into shorts by unzipping the lining of the... (Read More).

March 09 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: guardian.co.uk In a move that simply reeks of maximizing profits in an increasingly digital age, publishers Harper Collins have decreed that their eBooks can only be borrowed 26 times before they have to be replaced. Their reason' Because apparently 26 is the magical number that represents that average number of loans before an actual book has to be replaced by the library. Their official statement on the issue reads: 'HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our... (Read More).

March 07 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Though the word seems to have been misappropriated by bloggers and quasi-journalists as meaning 'a little fact', the word factoid actually refers to something that looks like or is presented as a fact, but isn't. The suffix -oid means 'resembles', it is not a diminutive suffix (that is, something you add to the end of the word to mean a smaller version, like -ette, -icle, -ling etc.). There are many words in English that have, over the years, come to have a different meaning in popular usage than their original intended definition. For example, the word nonplussed is often used to mean... (Read More).

March 06 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

It seems that we are having some problems with the blog site, although things should be working normally with the RSS feed. There's somebody working on the problem right now, and hopefully we'll be back to you as normal very soon. In the meantime, there are lots of technical words that have been adopted from their original language, and either used in their original form or in a transliteration (approximation in the second language). Sometimes I listen to whole conversations peppered with English words, and sometimes they are enough for me to actually understand the conversation. I find it... (Read More).

March 02 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

We all know that feeling when you are involved in a conversation and the other people start referring to you in the third person. Before you know it, they're telling each other what they think '(s)he' should be doing with 'his (her)' life, or relaying a story about you complete with analysis. I've definitely said 'I'm standing right here!' more than once in my life. Last night I was at a restaurant and needed to order a couple of things that I didn't know the local names for. I incorrectly assumed that the waitress didn't speak English. She politely stood there and listened while I fumbled... (Read More).

February 2011:

February 28 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ It seems I am a little late to the party to this one, but still worth talking about: in 2004, a French writer called Michel Thaler wrote a novel, Le Train de Nulle Part ('The Nowhere Train'), that contains no verbs. Not one single verb. As anybody who has taken any kind of language classes (or has even the vaguest recollection of English grammar from school), verbs are... well, they're pretty important. Integral, you might say. Try writing even one sentence without using a verb, and you'll find that it creates a pretty strange effect - now... (Read More).

February 28 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

There are many different ways to get over your fear of speaking a new language, but one of the most immediate, motivating, and gratifying ways is to be forced to speak it on behalf of someone else. If you are responsible for speaking for someone who has little or no knowledge of the language you're speaking (or the place you're navigating), you will have no choice but to use all those words you've been studying but may not have had a chance to use yet. When I first moved to China, I mostly went out with people who had a much better grasp of the language than I did. I didn't motivate myself... (Read More).

February 24 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

A veces el exotismo lo encontramos mas cerca de lo que nos pensamos. No nos tenemos que ir hasta la estepa rusa para encontrar idiomas que se salen de la norma y no se encuadran en la familia de las lenguas indoeuropeas. El euskera, hablado en el norte de España y en el sur de Francia no pertenece a las lenguas indoeuropeas y representa por ello uno de esos casos con origen incierto y que mantiene el debate abierto. Tal y como es el caso en muchos casos, la política tiene cierta influencia en el idioma. Sin embargo, el caso del euskera tiene una connotación política menor que el que... (Read More).

February 24 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

In the wake of Tuesday's earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, I've been thinking about the use of strong and emotional words to describe events. Recently there have been a lot of awful things happening around the world (floods, cyclones, protests, unnecessary bloodshed), and they can all claim valid use of words like destruction, devastation, and disaster. The problem is, I feel like these descriptions don't have the same effect on me as they should. Of course, sitting at my computer at work, I don't want to really empathise with survivors of disasters, for fear of crying in public, but I... (Read More).

February 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

This is a slightly more in-depth grammarian kind of post than usual, but I hope it's still interesting! Two useful grammatical terms used when discussing certain words and phrases refer to tautology and autology. While the terms sound similar, they have very different meanings. Tautology (sometimes also called circumlocution) is used to describe a phrase where the same thing is said more than once, even though it does not help to clarify the overall meaning of the phrase or add any further information. For example, the common phrase 'free gift' is a tautology, since a gift is free by... (Read More).

February 22 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

One of the recent trends in China is for people to watch video lecture series from high profile universities in the USA. Students and regular workers alike have started learning through these free open courses, and are benefiting greatly from them. The first series I looked at, The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food, from Yale University, has already been viewed over 50,000 times on Sohu. Video learners are using the opportunity to receive free instruction from overseas, and are getting support through online study groups based in China. Many people are getting up earlier or using... (Read More).

February 21 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: ted.com Today I watched an absolutely mindblowing video on ted.com, a site of small, non-profit group TED, who are devoted to 'ideas worth spreading'. There is a goldmine of interesting stuff in their archives, but being somebody with a keen interest in languages this video seemed truly worthy of sharing. The talk is given by Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington and expert on early language and brain development. We all know that babies and young children are better at picking up new languages than adults,... (Read More).

February 20 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Sometimes (or most times) it's daunting to speak a new language to its native speakers. You might be worried that they won't understand you or you'll be laughed at. I hate to tell you that these things will probably happen, but if you get laughter, it probably won't be malicious. In cultures where there is a definite idea of foreigners (e.g. some places in Asia or the middle east), your potential audience may be just as freaked out as you are. From the moment you start approaching, they need to think about possibly having to speak a language they don't know at all, and that situation is... (Read More).

February 16 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

One of my favorite comedians growing up (and still is today) was the great George Carlin (1937-2008). His constantly sardonic, generally profane yet ingenious rants helped shape my thoughts during my teenage years in more ways than I care to imagine, and a particular fascination that we shared was the English language. Of course, George is better known - perhaps even infamous - for another language-related sketch, '7 Dirty Words', in which he presents and analyzes the 7 words you cannot say on television. It doesn't take an expert to work out what at least some of these words... (Read More).

February 15 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bitesizeirishgaelic.com I found an interesting article recently about the 'switch' in the brain that occurs when you achieve fluency in another language. Everybody's brain can train itself to the point of achieving this 'switch', which allows you to start thinking in the target language, allowing you to achieve fluency faster. The trick, as with any other skill, is practice - and a lot of it. The article talks about learning Irish Gaelic and Icelandic - two languages with relatively few speakers - but the same rules and techniques hold true for any language that you want to... (Read More).

February 14 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I generally speak pretty good English. (As far as I know,) I make few mistakes, and those that I do make, I am aware of. It doesn't really excuse me, but I know when I say The Ukraine, it should just be Ukraine (although they used to use the article, so...partial credit'). Then there's the none is versus none are argument, but I stand firm that none are is OK. So imagine my delight when I came across a comprehensive list of common errors in English Usage by Paul Brians, Emeritus Professor of English at Washington State University. It has an easily navigable list, with each link leading to... (Read More).

February 13 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Cada vez que se habla de los idiomas en Europa, un concepto es citado en casi todas las ocasiones: “Lengua indo-europea”. Y es que si nos fijamos en el mapa lingüístico europeo se nos viene a la cabeza el comienzo de los cómics de Asterix, en los que toda la Galia estaba dominada por los romanos a excepción de la pequeña aldea que siempre era capaz de resistir la dominación romana. En este sentido podríamos equiparar la familia lingüística indo-europea a los romanos y podemos hallar también algunas excepciones lingüísticas, que al igual que el pequeño poblado galo, han... (Read More).

February 10 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: physorg.com Cambridge Dictionaries Online have revealed that the top searches by English learners were generally English idiomatic phrases and slang - which are so often hard for learners due to old or strange origins. As such, they are difficult to teach, but if a foreigner can master a handful of them, it can make a great difference in how fluent their English seems. Phrases such as 'eat your heart out' (used in jest to say that someone is better), 'right you are' (expressing agreement), 'catch a few rays' (to sunbathe) and 'no mean feat' (a worthy or great achievement) were... (Read More).

February 09 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

This isn't foreign language related, but might be of interest to people who like typography. Wordmark will show you your chosen text in every font installed on  your computer, in one webpage. You can then change the size, choose white on black or the opposite, and select your favourites and filter them out to compare them next to each other. For those people, like me, who have changed a font over and over again in a word processor before deciding which one is best, this is brilliant. You can put in a long or short string of text, but the shorter the text is, the more fonts you will be... (Read More).

February 08 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

I found this fascinating map on my favorite news aggregator site Reddit. It details how the names of countries came into being by literally translating their names from the original languages of their founders, and has quite a few surprising entries. Click the small image below to get the full size version - watch out, it's big! (4500x2234) Some of the more interesting country and continent name etymologies include 'land of dust' for Africa, 'village' for Canada, 'abundance of butterflies' for Panama, 'Where the land ends' for Chile, 'isle of shrewmice' for Spain, 'place of many... (Read More).

February 06 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

A simple question this time around - the words 'while' and 'whilst' are relatively common, but is there a difference between them' Simply put, no. The word 'while' can act as both a preposition (e.g. 'While I was walking down the street, I saw a fox') and a noun (e.g. 'It took a long while to finish'). 'Whilst' is simply an older version of the preposition form of the word 'while'. It is more often seen in British English, which explains why it is mostly seen in literature, but rarely (if ever) in American publications. While you may not end up ever using the word 'whilst' yourself,... (Read More).

February 05 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

In the ongoing debate between language prescriptionists and descriptionists, I generally sit somewhere in the middle (but a little to the side of the people who believe there is a right and a wrong way to say something). With English as fluid as it is, there's no real point in telling people that they're doing something wrong, and besides, the fact that the language grows and changes so fast is one of the best things about it. However, I recently read a blog post on Wordnik that made me stop and think. In updates of dictionaries, definitions of words are sometimes edited for length,... (Read More).

February 02 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

A pesar de ejemplos como el de Suiza, con una política lingüística integradora y que tiene como objetivo que los ciudadanos se conviertan en políglotas, el idioma puede llegar a tener un componente político muy importante, obligándonos, una vez mas, a mirar hacia la historia para poder tener una visión mas completa. En este sentido podemos hallar un ejemplo muy nítido en Bélgica. Incluso antes de la creación del estado belga, el idioma ya tuvo una gran influencia en la política. Así pues, tras la incorporación de sus territorios en el imperio francés trajo consigo la... (Read More).

January 2011:

January 30 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, is starting this week. The biggest celebration of the Chinese calendar, it is a time for families to get together and ring in a prosperous new year. Many of the traditions associated with the festival have grown up around words that sound like each other. The Chinese are big on wordplay, which is totally fine by me. For example, it is common to eat fish and leave some for the new year, because the Chinese word for fish, 鱼 (yu2),has the same pronunciation as the word for surplus, 余. So if you say the phrase 年年有余兔 (nian2 nian2 you3 yu2),... (Read More).

January 30 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

One language error that is often seen, not only in high school essays across the USA but in many places that should possibly know better, is the confusion of the two words imply and infer. Many think these two words mean essentially the same thing, but in fact the words are almost antonyms. Put simply, you can imply an idea or opinion, but you infer an idea or opinion from something. Therefore, the person doing the implying is not the person doing the inferring! Here's an example: Jack's smile implied that he was having a good time. Jack's mother inferred from Jack's smile that he was... (Read More).

January 27 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Chocolate, queso, relojes de cuco y cuentas bancarias secretas. En estos cuatro conceptos se centra normalmente la idea que tenemos de Suiza. Un país que se encuentra en un mar de montañas y que a pesar de no contar con salida al mar, durante varios años tuvo al ganador de la Copa América de vela en su haber. Cuatro son también los idiomas oficiales de Suiza. Alemán, francés, italiano y el retorrománico. Grosso modo, se le puede asignar una región geográfica a cada idioma, completamente lógica si observamos el mapa lingüístico europeo. Así pues el alemán se concentra en el... (Read More).

January 26 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

I've found that a lot of native English speakers, when speaking to other native English speakers, say foreign words in a blatantly Anglicised way. This seems to happen even when the speaker can speak the foreign language quite well. I don't know if it is because they feel uncomfortable 'trying too hard', or for another reason. I generally try to use the correct pronunciation, or my best approximation, but many other people don't. A friend brought up a good point, though. For words that are commonly used in English, we use the English version. Unless you are French, saying Paris as Paree will... (Read More).

January 24 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: voxy.com/blog Being a bit of a Beatles fanatic, I was very happy to find this interesting infographic from voxy.com. They treated the legendary Beatles album Abbey Road as a linguistic corpus - that is, a body of words. By doing this, they can analyze things like the most often-used words, words per song, compare the songs on side A to those on side B, and so on. However, it also reveals just why Beatles songs can be (and often are) used as teacher's aids for those teaching English as a second language. Not only are the songs catchy and easy on the ear, but so is the... (Read More).

January 21 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

You may have noticed that some people like to tap the space bar twice after finishing a sentence. Why do they do this' The double space after a period habit comes from the days of typewriters. The problem with typewriters - besides error correcting, of course - was that due to technical limitations, the text was monospaced, also known as fixed-width or non-proportional. That is to say, unlike when you type on your computer, a character like the letter l or i takes up just as much horizontal space as a wider letter like a D or H. This made things look a little messy sometimes, due to there... (Read More).

January 19 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Si hay una máxima a la hora de analizar los idiomas que se dan en el mundo es la necesidad de verlo como una extensión de una cierta cultura. Y estudiar la historia de la misma nos ofrece detalles muy enriquecedores. Ésta máxima se puede aplicar para todas las lenguas del mundo, y naturalmente también a la hora de analizar el japonés. Parándonos a analizar la historia de Japón y a la sociedad que ha traído consigo, podemos ver a las claras el camino que tomó el japonés. Sin embargo, el origen del idioma es un tema que ofrece controversia, dada la imposibilidad de relacionarlo... (Read More).

January 19 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

With the ubiquity of so-called 'smart' phones nowadays, people have struggled with tiny touchscreen keyboards and not-so-agile thumbs. Back in the day (when cellphones had these archaic things called 'keys'), people eventually learned to type incredibly fast - the current Guinness world record for sending a 160-character phrase on one of these old-school phones is 37.28 seconds, held by a 24 year old Norwegian, Sonja Kristiansen. At some point came T9, where you only needed to press each number key once and a built-in dictionary would work out the word you wanted, which sped up the process of... (Read More).

January 17 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

In my last post I wrote about how words like 'Google' and 'Facebook' used as verbs had made it to Lake Superior State University's annual 'banished words' list. It's an interesting linguistic shift and with the ubiquity of the internet we see and use these words almost every day. 'I friended her on Facebook', 'I spend too much time Facebooking', 'Let me just Google that'... and right now, in fact, I'm blogging. The use of nouns as verbs has been notable in recent years, and is especially so in the fact that, well, it is no longer considered particularly notable. People just do it, even if... (Read More).

January 12 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Uno de los temas recurrentes a la hora de hablar del aprendizaje de idiomas es el bajo nivel que ha existido históricamente en España. Las razones que se le ha atribuido suelen ser varias, pero sobre todo destacan dos. El fracaso del sistema educativo y el hecho de doblar las películas y series extranjeras, tanto en cines como en las televisiones. Con respecto al sistema educativo, cabe destacar como en prácticamente todas las reformas del sistema educativo llevadas a cabo en las últimas décadas, la mejora de la enseñanza de idiomas ha sido uno de sus elementos principales. Se ha... (Read More).

January 10 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: reuters.com Recently I blogged about how the internet was instrumental in helping to coin and spread new phrases in China. However, as with all things, there is another side to the coin. The internet has also been responsible for particular other words and phrases gaining notoriety around the world, words that have become so overused and misused that they have made a list of 'banished words' for 2011, as collated by Lake Superior State University, a small college in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. They make one of these every year, the first list made back in 1976, when the 'winner'... (Read More).

January 08 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

January 07 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

'Boo!' is a short sound that all English speakers will be aware of, used to startle or surprise somebody. 'Peek-a-boo' is an ever-popular game to play with babies. Though sources place the origins of the word as from the Latin verb boare (Greek boaein), 'to cry aloud, roar, or shout', it's a slightly strange word, only used in this way as an interjection. Like my very first post on this blog, about onomatepoeias and how they differ around the world, it's interesting to see how expressive sounds like 'boo' differ from country to country. Surprisingly, most European countries retain... (Read More).

January 05 2011 (Language Trainers Spain)

Comienza un nuevo año y a parte de recuperarnos de los excesos de comida y bebida de las navidades y dejar que la cuenta corriente se recupere de los gastos navideños, miramos a un calendario en blanco y pensamos sobre lo que esperamos que nos depare el año que acabamos de iniciar. Es curioso que sea el año nuevo y no el cumpleaños de cada cual el que nos lleve en mayor medida a fijarnos objetivos o a tratar de enmendar situaciones con las que no nos sentimos del todo bien. Perder peso, dejar de fumar, viajar, cambiar de trabajo. Las posibilidades son inmensas y entre ellas podemos... (Read More).

January 04 2011 (Language Trainers USA)

I was recently asked by a family member why the word naïve has two dots above the i, even though they can only ever remember seeing it written as naive. They thought it was an umlaut, which is added to certain vowels in German (usually ö and ü) to change their pronunciation. A German umlaut (or a 'trema' when applied to Dutch) implies an 'e' sound, and words can be written with or without the diacritic: e.g. the German for 'spoon' can be written löffel or loeffel. However, the ï in naïve is not an umlaut - it's a diaeresis, also known as a hiatus. An umlaut signifies a compound... (Read More).

January 04 2011 (Language Trainers UK)

This isn’t going to be a post about learning /as/ a couple, where both people are learning languages. This is more of a reflection of the extra difficulties in finding time to study when you have time commitments to your spouse and/or children. I read a blog post and a forum thread on Lingq about this, and most contributors agree that you have less time to yourself when you are part of a couple or family living under the same roof. Once you factor in work, meals, chores, quality time, going to school-related events, etc., there’s not a lot of time left for studying. A few people... (Read More).

December 2010:

December 31 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

As 2011 beckons and the wanton partying that goes with the celebration of a new year, people have usually planned their night out well in advance. Traditionally spent with friends and loved ones, the celebration (for me, anyway) usually culminates in screaming 'HAPPY NEW YEAR!' at the top of our lungs before breaking out into an impromptu (and generally slightly inebriated) rendition of Auld Lang Syne - usually as many of the words as I can recall at that point. I've never questioned why we do this, and why other English speaking countries have the same tradition. And what exactly is 'Auld... (Read More).

December 31 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Ah, the end of the year. The time for annual reflection and the making of promises that we probably won't keep. Along with your the ever popular 'eat better, exercise more, do more for others' sorts of resolutions, what language learning goals will you set for yourself' If you keep them small (or progressive) and realistic*, there's no reason that you won't be able to tick at least some of them off your list in 2011. During the last few months of this year, I have been taking my language classes, but not really been following them up. It feels like I don't have enough time, and I am... (Read More).

December 26 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In news that has come as a shock to readers, writers, and educators throughout the UK, the government has announced that they will be cutting the annual £13 million grant given to book-gifting charity Booktrust. The announcement came as a surprise even to the charity, which had offered to take a 20% cut in funding earlier this year. Through various book-gifting schemes, Booktrust has been providing books to millions of babies, children, and teenagers (and their families) for nearly 20 years, and has inspired over 20 other countries to start up similar schemes. The availability of books to... (Read More).

December 23 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

We use so many acronyms in modern day English: especially on the internet, where terms like LOL (laughing out loud), AFK (away from keyboard) and BRB (be right back) are so commonplace that they are almost universal. Some are a little rarer and less-known, such as FWIW (for what it's worth) YMMV (your mileage may vary) and TIL (today I learned), but spend enough time on internet messageboards and discussion threads and you'll end up learning a great deal of them. Acronyms are something of a 20th century invention, and were extremely rare before that. Some acronyms have become so part of... (Read More).

December 23 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Google's NGram Viewer allows anybody to create quick graphs showing word and phrase frequencies in books going back to 1800. The tool searches a database of words from over 5 million  books, and you can filter for American English, British English, English fiction, Chinese, French, German, and Russian. Although it has its restrictions, such as not giving us accurate information about spoken usage, it's a great analysis tool. One of the Wall Street Journal's blogs did a Christmas analysis to see whether the PC phrase 'Happy Holidays' has infiltrated the world of books. A quick graph... (Read More).

December 22 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Un año mas se acerca la navidad en el mundo cristiano. Con un origen marcadamente religioso, también es celebrada por muchas personas menos o nada religiosas como una fiesta en la que reunirse con los seres mas queridos e intercambiar deseos y regalos. Independientemente del grado de religiosidad de cada cual, se celebra el nacimiento de Jesús. A pesar de este aspecto común, a la hora del origen de la palabra y su significado utilizada por distintos idiomas sí se dan algunas variaciones. En español el término se deriva de la palabra latina “nativitate', compuesta por... (Read More).

December 22 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

English is a tough language to learn. Recently I was discussing difficulties I was having with Chinese pronunciation with some native Chinese speakers, and they told me that Chinese pronunciation was far easier than English. They had a point. Whilst English is not a tonal language like Chinese (where the same word said 5 different ways can have 5 very different meanings - for example, māo means a cat, but mào means a hat, and máo means hair), at least Chinese pronunciation is regular. That is to say, if you see the word māo, at least you instantly know how to pronounce it. Their... (Read More).

December 19 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Aktuell helfe ich dabei eine globale Facebook Page zu betreuen. Das Wort global fällt dabei leicht im Zusammenhang, da nun mittlerweile mehr als 500 Millionen Menschen in dem sozialen Netzwerk angemeldet sind und nunmehr 60% der Benutzer außerhalb der USA angesiedelt sind. In der Tat kommt der Grossteil der Fans unserer Page aus verschiedenen Ländern von Türkei bis Frankreich und Indonesien bis Serbien. Der Austausch wird hierdurch selbstverständlich interessanter in dem viele verschiedenen Kulturen ihre Meinungen austauschen. Allerdings wird der Diskurs auch schwieriger, weil die... (Read More).

December 19 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've just finished reading The Word Brain by Bernd Sebastian Kamps. Its tagline is A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning. Initial caps aside, it's a 70-page document that covers (with a single chapter each) Kamps's advice on words, listening, reading, teachers, speaking, memory, and nailing. The latter is a term he uses to better encompass the concept of learning a word by heart. Kamps's methods are not for the faint of heart, and he mentions this right at the beginning of the book. He presents the total number of hours you are likely to need to reach a competent language level (being... (Read More).

December 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: questvisual.com Every day we seem to move a little closer to developing the equivalent of Douglas Adams' legendary Babel Fish: a device that allows instant translation, transcending the language barrier and enabling universal communication. The idea of the Babel Fish has fascinated me from the first time I read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and I find it incredible that just 15 or so years later, what I originally thought to be a quirky yet impossible invention is fast approaching realization. Of course, machine translation has been around us for a while - from... (Read More).

December 14 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: pleco.com As someone who is living in China and has only recently started learning Chinese, I am constantly flummoxed by Chinese characters. They might call it 'Simplified Chinese', but it still looks pretty complicated to me! I have been using a dictionary on my phone called Pleco, which has been a fantastic tool. It's packed with features, including flashcards, audio pronunciation (very useful for a tonal language like Mandarin), handwriting recognition (which is so accurate it's almost eerie). However, their latest update has brought along with it something that makes... (Read More).

December 14 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

A few days ago I stumbled across a Christmas-themed quiz about misheard Christmas carol lyrics. I usually start listening to Christmas music (everything from choral to Mariah Carey to Run DMC) as soon as December starts, so I thought I’d give the quiz a go. Some of the Christmas mondegreens were pretty entertaining, but I got stalled on one which I didn’t actually know the answer to: Troll the agents you’ll tie Carol... After realising I didn’t know the first word to the line (the rest being ‘the ancient yuletide carol’), I guessed at toll (bells are quite Christmassy after... (Read More).

December 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

I've recently started learning to read and write in Chinese, and while learning some of the characters for some of the basic words I learned a while ago, I came across the characters for 'Mĕiguó', Mandarin for 'America'. As it happens, the two characters that make up the word are 美国. Chinese characters each have their own distinct meanings, but can alter their meanings depending on the characters they are combined with. 国 means 'country' and is part of most words for countries in Chinese (e.g. 英国 (Yīngguó) is England, 法国 (Făguó) is France, 德国 (Déguó) is Germany,... (Read More).

December 09 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm sure it's happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you're doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven't noticed. So, it turns out that accent imitation, besides being used for intentional and accidental mockery of others, can actually help you to understand the speaker's accent. A study in the Netherlands has shown that if accented speech is repeated, it helps the... (Read More).

December 08 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Hay ciudades en las que al pasear por ellas, la historia nos inunda. El mejor ejemplo que podemos encontrar probablemente sea la ciudad de Roma, que no en vano recibe el nombre de ciudad eterna. Al recorrerla, compartimos el escenario de mas de 3000 años de historia. Cuando el brillo de la Roma imperial se apagaba en el siglo III, Constantinopla, capital de lo que se convertiría en el imperio bizantino, surgió como gran metrópoli. Una vez conquistada por los árabes se convertiría en Istambúl y en capital del imperio Otomano. Y al desmembrarse el imperio otomano, perdería su... (Read More).

December 05 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I'd heard that people are more likely to believe a person who speaks with the same accent as them (meaning people will be more likely to think that foreigners are untrustworthy*), and another study has shown some interesting results when comparing listener reactions to different accents. The study, conducted at the University of Glasgow, used fMRI scans to analyse brain activity in Scottish listeners when they heard people speaking in American, English**, and Scottish accents. Participants listened to recordings of nine different female voices: three of each of American, English, and... (Read More).

December 03 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Im Zusammenhang mit dem Internet ist vor allem in den letzten Jahren ein Wort immer sehr häufig gefallen: Social Media. Wikipedia definiert Social Media wie folgt: „Als Social Media (auch Soziale Medien) werden Soziale Netzwerke und Netzgemeinschaften verstanden, die als Plattform zum gegenseitigen Austausch von Meinungen, Eindrücken und Erfahrungen dienen.“ Die Paradebeispiele sind Facebook und Twitter welche inzwischen weltweit und durch sämtliche Altersgruppen hinweg Bekanntheit und Verwendung gefunden haben. Facebook selber hat inzwischen mehr als 500 Millionen Benutzer. Wie... (Read More).

December 03 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Named after creator Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha is a different kind of search engine from Google, Yahoo and all the others - it brands itself as a 'computational knowledge engine' with hundreds of practical uses. You can input math calculations, get in-depth weather reports, study socio-economic data, or even find out how many calories there are in a cubic light year of fried chicken (hint: a lot). However, it also has linguistic uses, and one that I've found myself using a couple of times is a kind of 'crossword puzzle solving' feature. You know when you have a word on the tip of your... (Read More).

December 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

This is another one of those posts where I admit something shameful, and then somehow turn it into something educational. I hope. So, I have read the first book in the wildly popular (with teenage girls) Twilight series. I did it out of a combination of morbid curiosity (forgive the pun), and the need to know exactly what it was that I was making fun of. A little part of me even hoped that I would be pleasantly surprised. However, Stephenie Meyer has managed to write a story that is ripe for the mocking, and she hasn't even written it well. Luckily for the non-fans, the awfulness of the... (Read More).

December 01 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

  Cuando se saca a colación el idioma chino en cualquier conversación o noticia, se suele hablar de dos aspectos que conciernen a este idioma: que es el idioma más hablado del mundo y la posibilidad de que se pueda convertir en el idioma del futuro, desbancando al inglés como el idioma internacional. Sin embargo, la riqueza cultural de China va más allá del tamaño de su población y sus posibilidades como potencia económica. A pesar de la importancia de estos dos aspectos, la República China ofrece una variedad lingüística mucho mayor que lo que podemos definir como chino,... (Read More).

November 2010:

November 29 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Obwohl der Wettbewerb bereits seit 2 Monaten sein Tore für Einreichungen geöffnet hat, so bin ich erst vergangene Woche durch einen kleinen Onlineartikel der Sueddeutschen darauf aufmerksam geworden. Tongue Stories – Wettbewerb für Sprachgeschichten lautet der Name des großen Sprachenprojekts der Europäischen Kommission. Die EU besteht mittlerweile aus 27 Staaten mit 23 verschiedenen Amtssprachen. Um ein einheitliches Europa zu schaffen, dass sich gegenseitig unterstützt, zusammenhält und Probleme löst, müssen sich die Menschen verständigen können. Der beschriebene Wettbewerb... (Read More).

November 28 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Although in theory the English that you use (whether American or British) shouldn't matter too much these days - there is a lot of crossover, and in general the dialects are mutually intelligible - there are still debates about which is 'better' to use. Individuals, organisations, and even countries have their preferences, which may or may not be politically based. I think, in general, the trend is moving from a preference for the British form, and now people seem to be leaning towards Americanised English in non-English speaking countries. This is unsurprising, as American media is... (Read More).

November 26 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: blogs.nytimes.com The New York Times are currently running a fascinating series of articles about American speech throughout the years. The sixth part is a compendium of the vocabulary of the average 1962 traffic policeman, and contains some interesting definitions. It seems that quite a few are still in use today. The specialist vocabulary came about as a result of the nature of the job, and the language is of a 'highly confidential nature, being used almost exclusively on the job or in talking about the job, and usually in speaking to another policeman, to an insurance... (Read More).

November 24 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

A la hora de referirse al aprendizaje de un idioma, normalmente nos centramos en idiomas orales. Independientemente de si el idioma que queremos aprender es el inglés, alemán o el francés. Sin embargo, esta visión deja de lado un amplio número de idiomas, tal y como son las lenguas de signos o señas. Ni siquiera se les suele dar el calificativo de idioma, sino se les denomina lenguajes. Ello se debe a la idea preestablecida de que se trata de un código mnemotécnico para denominar ciertos objetos, siempre como una adaptación de un idioma oral particular. Sin embargo,... (Read More).

November 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Living in Shanghai is always interesting, and learning Chinese even more so. How else could I have come across a Chinglish gem like this' The Mandarin word 'gĕilì' (给力) literally means 'to give more power' or 'to give more force'. Thanks to the ever-increasing spread of English in China, this has given rise to the wonderful portmanteau 'ungelivable'. A mixture of 'gĕilì' and 'unbelievable', the slang word originating on the internet has come to mean 'not strong enough', and is an interesting example of how two very different languages can sometimes fit together to create a... (Read More).

November 24 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I posted this on the Australian and New Zealand LT blog, with reference to my New Zealand accent, but I thought it was too funny not to post here as well. I've had some problems with voice recognition myself, but not as many as you'd think. Do any of you have strong regional accents that computers have trouble... (Read More).

November 22 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: thestar.com The latest rendition of the world's best-selling book is being criticized for taking a step backwards in terms of some of the language used. Those responsible for the latest translation - the committee for the New International Version of the Bible - have reverted to using more traditional terms in certain passages containing terms like 'him', 'his', 'he', 'son', 'father' and 'brother'. In the previous 2005 version of the TNIV (Today's International Version) Bible, these pronouns and nouns were not gender-specific ('them', 'theirs', 'they', etc.). Even though the... (Read More).

November 21 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Die Gründe, ein Fernstudium aufzunehmen, sind vielfältig. Meist entscheidet man sich dafür aufgrund einer bestehenden Berufstätigkeit. Der Lebensunterhalt ist zu bestreiten, eine Familie ist zu ernähren, der gewohnte Lebensstandard soll beibehalten werden … So unterschiedlich die Hintergründe sind, ein Fernstudium aufzunehmen, so vielfältig sind die Angebote der Bildungsträger für Fernstudiengänge. Fast alle Studiengänge, die man im klassischen Präsenzstudium belegen kann, sind heute als Fernstudium am Markt vertreten. Die entsprechenden Bildungsträger sind hervorragend... (Read More).

November 20 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

What do you think are the most beautiful words in the English language' Does the definition include what they look like, how they sound, and what they mean' Well, someone more qualified than I am has made a list of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language. Robert Beard, long-time dictionary maker, poet, and word-of-the-day-writer, has created a list of what he thinks are the most beautiful-sounding words in the language. Their meaning may not be as pleasant (e.g. nemesis, woebegone), and some of them I hadn't even heard of (e.g. propinquity (an inclination), imbrication... (Read More).

November 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Even for (or rather, especially for) people like me who write often, a decent dictionary can be critical - not simply as a tool to check that you've spelled a word correctly, but also to continue to expand your vocabulary. Of course, thanks to the internet you no longer have to leaf through a hefty tome of definitions to find the word you're looking for - simply typing your word into your favorite dictionary web site will take you to the definition within a second, and even if you've spelled it wrong it will still intelligently take a guess at what word you meant. However, as someone... (Read More).

November 16 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Nos hemos acostumbrado a la cultura de la velocidad, lo inmediato y lo reemplazable. A través de los distintos servicios de telefonía, de mensajes instantáneos y el email nos podemos comunicar en cuestión de segundos con personas en lugares remotos. Hasta hace poco quien quisiese contactar con alguien de otro lugar tenía que decantarse casi obligatoriamente por las cartas. Hoy en día, uno no solo puede comunicarse instantáneamente por internet, sino si en un ataque de nostalgia uno se decidiese a escribir una carta, el desarrollo de los medios de transporte tendrían como consecuencia... (Read More).

November 16 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In what surely is a sign of the imminent downfall of modern society, Sarah Palin's non-word refudiate has been named New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2010. Apparently, the combination of refute and repudiate has a slightly different meaning from either word, as the Oxford University Press blog says: From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a... (Read More).

November 15 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: lifehacker.com Smartening up your grammar skills doesn't have to be a boring affair - in a previous post I linked to humor site The Oatmeal for their guide to correct apostrophe use, presenting the rules of one of the most oft-misused marks of punctuation in a series of bizarre and surreal cartoons. Lifehacker.com - a site mostly known for its tech articles - has recently collated and published a list of the best sites to go to for brushing up your grammar skills without having to force yourself to read through dull, instructional texts and rules. The collection of sites all aim... (Read More).

November 14 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

The word slang has misty origins, but before being used to talk about the jargon of particular professions, social, or regional groups, it originally meant ‘special vocabulary of tramps or thieves’. Slang still forms an integral part of the criminal subculture, and it only takes me listening to one or two hardcore rap songs to realise it (if I can make it through, of course). Terms for guns, drugs, women, cars - I only know the ones that have become mainstream. And this is sort of the point: slang keeps outsiders from knowing what’s going on. Whether it be police, spies, passersby;... (Read More).

November 12 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Aktuell findet das G20 Summit der 19 wirtschaftsstärksten Länder der Welt und entsprechendem Vertreter der EU in Seoul statt. Die Staatsoberhäupter, Finanzminister und respektiven Bankpräsidenten reisen aus diesem Zweck in die südkoreanische Hauptstadt. Aufgrund der hohen Internationalität sollte es niemanden verwundern, dass hier insgesamt mehr als 14 verschiedene Sprachwelten aufeinander treffen und dies zählt noch nicht einmal die lokalen Dialekte. Aus diesem Grund werden, wie bei anderen großen, internationalen, politischen Ereignissen auch, viele Übersetzter eingesetzt. Es... (Read More).

November 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: latimes.com I remember when I was younger and was watching TV with the family, my parents would balk at any rude words uttered on-screen. It's not that I didn't know the words already, but it's traditionally a parent's duty to shield their children from things that are harmful, and in many ways bad language is harmful for those at the more impressionable ages. However, prime time US TV has over the years increased its familiarity with what is considered 'mild swearing' - words like 'ass', 'crap' and 'hell' have become commonplace in recent times. Words with sexual connotations,... (Read More).

November 10 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

For various reasons, I suspended my language lessons over the summer. I had professional and personal circumstances that wouldn’t allow me to carry on with the same teacher, but luckily I have recently been able to reunite with her and try to pick up where I left off. Unfortunately, picking up where you left off sometimes isn’t that easy when it comes to language (and many other pursuits that involve practice or study). I hadn’t been maintaining the same level of exposure and practice with Chinese, and it took me a couple of lessons to pick up steam again. My teacher allowed me a... (Read More).

November 06 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In what would have made excellent TV viewing (in my mind, at least), Channel 4 has ruled out the use of a weak expletive on popular word game show Countdown. When presented with the letters DTCEIASH and F, 18 year old Cambridge University student Jack Hurst came up with the longest word he could: shitface. Despite the support of Dictionary Corner's Susie Dent (who 'told presenter Jeff Stelling the term, slang for 'rude or obnoxious person' or 'drunk person', would have been acceptable.'), Channel 4 bigwigs ruled that the word was inappropriate for a daytime audience. The set of letters... (Read More).

November 05 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Following on from a recent post on sign language over cellphones, it seems that even A-listers are hopping on the sign language bandwagon. Pop 'singer'-turned-fashionista Victoria Beckham - perhaps more famously known for being the wife of footballer David Beckham - has decided to learn sign language. Mrs Beckham and her 3 children - Brooklyn, Romeo, and Cruz - have taken up sign language as they have family friends who are deaf, and they want to be able to talk to them more easily. I applaud Victoria Beckham for encouraging her kids to take up sign language. Learning these things from a... (Read More).

November 03 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I always thought my English vocabulary was fairly extensive, so it's not often that I hear new words and think 'why haven't I heard of that word before'' (this doesn't count for technical and regional terms, of course). Recently, though, I had trouble understanding the concept that my teacher was trying to explain to me. So I looked up the word in my trusty dictionary, and it came back with the translation 'convene, convoke'. Convene is fine. Convoke was a different story. Revoke and invoke, I'd heard of, but convoke was new to me (it means to call together to a meeting, in a sort of... (Read More).

October 2010:

October 31 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

El sistema imperialista protagonizó los últimos siglos de la historia occidental y tuvo un ámbito geográfico enorme. Las potencias coloniales, turnándose en el transcurrir del tiempo, se convirtieron en vastos imperios. En éstos basaron su economía, su política y su poder. Para crearlos o defenderlos se enfrascaron  en muchasen ocasiones em distintos enfrentamientos, tanto abiertos, como de manera más solapada. La política internacional en el imperialismo tendió en gran manera hacia el proteccionismo y a reducir los contactos internacionales a meros acuerdos para evitar... (Read More).

October 30 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

So, a new Apple patent, which may or may not ever be used, is aiming to censor our texts. With the intention of providing better parental or corporate controls, this app aims to disable sending of messages until certain banned words are removed or changed.  It also provides an alternative use as a language learning tool. The censoring function is supposed to discourage 'sexting' and inappropriate language, both for kids and for adults. Should a parent (or a corporation, or jealous spouse) want to limit what their child (or employee, or suspect spouse) is sending out, they could turn on... (Read More).

October 27 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

In a previous post I extolled the virtues of Google's visual search feature built into Android smartphones - Google Goggles. The idea is that instead of going through the effort of typing to search for something, you can simply snap a photo of it with your built-in phone camera, and upload it straight to Google, who do the rest of the work for you. Want to know what a painting is' Just take a photo of it and Google Goggles does the rest. Recently Google also built in a translation feature, allowing you to take a photo of a foreign text - be it a book, a menu, anything - and in combination... (Read More).

October 27 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I saw mention in a language learning blog post about using a bilingual bible to help study English. To be honest, as a non-believer, this had never crossed my mind, but it makes  a lot of sense. If you read content that is both important to you and familiar to you in your own language, mastering the translation should work pretty well. Provided the translation is done well, of course. I guess the main problem I can think of is that some of the vocabulary and phrasing might not exactly be what you will use in real life, but at the same time, meaningful content will stick better in your mind,... (Read More).

October 25 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

YouTube user evan1965 is currently teaching an entirely self-contained audio/video Latin course using the popular video sharing site - but not, like most Latin courses (and like every one I ever studied), a course that simply enables you to read and understand existing Latin texts. This Latin course, or rather 'cursum latinum', teaches Latin language, as you would learn any other language, training you to read, write and speak in the ancient tongue. Besides a little English in the first couple of introductory lessons, the entire course is taught in Latin, meaning that it's open to everybody,... (Read More).

October 23 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

This is an old skit, but it's smart, funny, and brings up a good point about people speaking their own languages while in foreign countries. Sure, sometimes you don't have any other choice, but... Anyway, just watch the video and tell me what you think in the... (Read More).

October 22 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

In vergangenen Blog-Einträgen habe ich schon öfter auf die Relevanz von Sprachen aufmerksam gemacht, wenn es darum geht, neue Sachen zu lernen oder Problem zu konfrontieren. In diesem Zusammenhang habe ich nun eine Kollektione von Studien gefunden, orchestriert bei Lera Boroditsky, welche assistierende Professorin in Psychologie, Neurowissenschaft, und Symbolische Systeme an der Stanford Universität ist. Sie hat sich ausführlich mit der philosophischen Frage beschäftigt, ob Sprachen unsere Denkweise diktieren oder zumindest beeinflussen. Persönlich sieht sie die Fähigkeit eine Sprache... (Read More).

October 22 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: bbc.co.uk/news Think what you will about the current political situation in Tibet, but the latest protest emanates from Tibetan students in China who feel that being forced to study in Mandarin Chinese is 'an erosion of their culture and language'. The march took place on Tuesday in Tongren (Qinghai province), and unlike previous protests, this one was entirely peaceful. It was sparked by forthcoming changes to the education policy limiting the use of the Tibetan language in schools, instead dictating that all text books be only in Mandarin Chinese, besides subjects that are... (Read More).

October 20 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Words are funny things. In their base form, they are thoughts spoken aloud - we want to voice a thought, and so we are assigned a word for that particular thought, and so we use that word to express what we're thinking. Words (and all other kinds of verbal communication) are what separates us from all the other species. But where do we get all these words from' English has the largest vocabulary of any language, and it continues to grow. No language so far comes close to the number of words in English - around 2 million, though it is difficult to be precise about this figure. Some words... (Read More).

October 19 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I just stumbled across an excellent blog, Separated by a Common Language, about the differences between British and American English by an American linguist living in the UK. A lot of it is quite technical (although very interesting for people interested in linguistics), but it is very interesting. One post that reminded me of my childhood was bags, dibs, shotgun. It talks about the way that people (mostly kids) lay claim to something. In the US, dibs is common, e.g., 'I call dibs on that!'. In the UK, bags or bagsies is used, e.g., 'I bags that!' The post also talked about the word... (Read More).

October 18 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: sfgate.com I read an interesting article today in the San Francisco Chronicle about machine translation. We've all used Google Translate (or perhaps another online machine translation tool such as Altavista) at some time or another, and your mileage can certainly vary. Some similar languages play nicely with one another - Spanish to Italian, for example. However, translate Chinese to English and you start getting some pretty odd-sounding results. This is mainly due to the way machine translation works: the vast majority of languages are so idiomatic, having undergone slow but... (Read More).

October 16 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

October 16 is Dictionary Day! In honour of Noah Webster (left, of Merriam-Webster Dictionary fame), who was born on October 16, 1758, today is a day to celebrate dictionaries, improving vocabulary, and language in general. Look up some new words, find another way to say an everyday phrase, pick up a print dictionary and appreciate its pages. If you're at a loss, try a random word generator, or follow @langtrainers on Twitter for a new word every day. Happy Dictionary... (Read More).

October 14 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: indiatimes.com A recent report from Spain's Fundacion Telefonica has found that Spanish is the third most used language on the internet, after English and Chinese. It was found that 8% of internet users converse online in Spanish, with 22% in Chinese and English with the largest community at 38%. Latino web surfers from the US comprised a large share of that 8%. From the article: The report titled 'Spanish on the Web' was prepared by the Fundacion Telefonica, an institution created by Spain's Grupo Telefonica. It was the result of an investigation led by Jose Luis Garcia... (Read More).

October 13 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: online.wsj.com Neuropsychologists have recently found that the added cognitive reserves gained from speaking in more than one language for a prolonged period of time can help greatly with the onset of Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of mental dementia for an average of 4 years. This is not to say that those that bilingual speakers are more intelligent, able to avoid dementia entirely, or have more resilient brains than monolingual people - the ability to speak another language is likened to a 'reserve tank': once your brain runs out of 'fuel', your reserves can simply help you... (Read More).

October 12 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Students at UCLA, UC San Diego, and other schools in California are deciding to learn indigenous Central and South American languages rather than the standard choices like Spanish, French or German. Students are now learning Mixtec and Zapotec (spoken in the Oaxaca region of Mexico), and Aymara and Quechua (spoken in the Andes - Bolivia, Peru, and Chile). Many of the students will never go to a place where these languages are spoken, but some are using it as a base from which to travel or carry out charity work. These new courses have even had positive consequences for the teachers.... (Read More).

October 09 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: blogs.cnn.com Autism is a highly variable neurological developmental disorder which usually manifests itself before the age of three, and one that is not yet particularly well understood by scientists. It generally results in the sufferer having very slow communication and social interaction development (little to no eye contact, late talker, etc.), and repetitive behavior such as stacking blocks or putting objects in lines and rows. While it is well known that autistic children suffer from an ingrained difficulty with social interaction, a new study from the American Journal of... (Read More).

October 08 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

A research team at Carnegie-Mellon University has created a self-educating computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (or NELL). It was designed to be able to work out the connections between words based on how they are used together.  The system was given pre-defined relationships between words and categories, and using this information, it can create its own interpretations of other words and phrases. NELL was designed to learn as humans learn, and using information from websites all over the internet, it can also update its knowledge if it finds conflicting information... (Read More).

October 04 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

When I was younger, I had a friend who wrote only in capital letters. I always thought it must have taken him longer to write than lowercase, and it was a bit more difficult to read (not to mention the fact that all caps makes it look like you're being shouted at). Now, it seems that it's been proven that text in uppercase is more difficult and time-consuming to read than lowercase (or initial case). It only takes a few milliseconds longer, but the US federal highway administration has decided that these milliseconds could be life-threatening. From the New York Post: 'Studies have... (Read More).

September 2010:

September 30 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've just started one-on-one lessons again after a really busy summer, when I admittedly did little in the way of language study (besides learning a few words essential to getting delicious treats on my European holiday). I'm lucky enough to have a personal tutor who is more than happy to focus on the things I need, rather than prescribing a course to me. I decided to start formal lessons again because I am awful at motivating myself and, obviously, it's great to have someone to correct my work and pronunciation in a live setting. I also really need to improve my language skills, because... (Read More).

September 27 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

As someone who studied the classics (Latin & Greek) at university, I'm occasionally reminded of one of my favorite parts of my studies - the mythology. Some of the greatest stories ever told were immortalized in prose or verse in Greek or Latin by some of the greatest writers ever to have lived: take Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or Homer's Odyssey and Iliad as prime examples. True, many of these stories had their roots in the folklore of other civilizations, but most are remembered for their epic retellings in Latin and Greek. There are many words and idioms in English that take... (Read More).

September 27 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

For those of you who feel the way I do about the standards of English going down the drain these days, especially when you see the awful errors made by supposed paid journalists, here is an excerpt from a rant by Gene Weingarten for the Washington Post. The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased... (Read More).

September 24 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

It really doesn't feel like it, but I've just noticed that my last post was the 300th one on this blog (and I guess it could have been more positive, but oh well). Not that the quantity should make a big difference, but I do like nice round numbers. Of course, this post makes 301, so now I have to wait until I've done 99 more. In the meantime, did you know that the OED does quarterly updates of their online dictionary' I didn't. The most recent (and 34th) update was on the 16th of September, and it included a review of the words from rod to rotness, as well as the addition of some... (Read More).

September 21 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm very particular about the English language. I love the language, and I like to see it used properly. I notice even the tiniest of mistakes, and I think the descent into txt speak is abhorrent. Unsurprisingly, I often forget that English hasn't always been what I consider to be correct, and even within my lifetime people have changed the way that they speak English properly. I was reminded of this after reading Alison Flood's recent article on The Guardian's website. She also brought to my attention that dreaded unnecessary abbreviations were in existence 150 years ago, when people were... (Read More).

September 21 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

In the last 12 months, the Russian population of the popular micro-blogging site Twitter have multiplied sixfold, making it the fifth fastest-growing online resource for Russian users. The President, Dmitry Medvedev, signed up for the site last June, and this has inspired many other prominent Russian cabinet ministers and officials to do the same, adding further fuel to the fire. Many believe that this has been a catalyst for Twitter's sudden burst of popularity in Russia. In fact, Twitter has so taken Russia by storm that Russian bloggers are now pushing for a Russian interface for the... (Read More).

September 20 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: washingtonpost.com Here's an amusing (yet semi-serious) column from the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten, who blames the recent slipping of copywriting standards of American newspapers for the death of English. Since in his opinion the American media primarily dictates the standard for correct, up-to-date English language usage, the myriad of mistakes now found in publications across the country are spelling out the demise of the world's lingua franca. In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling 'pronounciation' has been seen in... (Read More).

September 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Since Engrish is always so much fun (when you can understand it), I thought I'd share some more funny photos I've taken while I've been in China. Enjoy! You can click on each thumbnail for the full-sized image. ... (Read More).

September 15 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

There are certain things about learning that we know. Things like how you are supposed to study in a quiet place and how every student has a different learning style. I just read a very interesting article that turns a lot of these established theories on their heads. A study by Californian psychologists has shown that there's no evidence to support teaching to accommodate different learning styles. Even though everybody does prefer getting input in slightly different ways (e.g. visual vs aural), regular teaching is basically equally beneficial to everyone. Another myth is that you... (Read More).

September 15 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Recently I attended this year's EXPO in Shanghai, which was truly as impressive as it was crowded. Tens of thousands of people were milling around the various nations' pavilions, and queues for the more popular pavilions (Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, UK etc.) were 3-4 hours or more. However, it gave me a great choice to enjoy some of the Engrish dotted around the huge purpose-built EXPO area. As far as I could see, the vast majority of the visitors were Chinese, and almost everything was signposted in Chinese and English. As bad as some of the signs were, I shouldn't really complain, and... (Read More).

September 12 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I usually don't have a problem getting around in taxis and having basic conversations in Chinese. Apparently my pronunciation is generally pretty good, even though I sometimes still have problems with differentiating the tones. So I was kind of surprised to find a street name that taxi drivers almost never understand when I tell them. It's not a small street, and it even has a subway station with the same name. It also happens to be the street that I now live on. I said the street name over and over again in my head, looked up the tones to make sure I was getting them right, but no matter... (Read More).

September 09 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: news.yahoo.com A few months back I wrote a short post - like almost every other blogger on the internet interested in the English language in any way - about everyone's favorite Alaskan ex-governor's vocabulary faux-pas. Later she claimed she was coining new words, in the same vein as the great bard, Shakespeare. Well, it seems that Palin's gambit of messily mashing up 'refute' and 'repudiate' has paid off in some way or another - Merriam-Webster have recently revealed that the non-word 'refudiate' as uttered by Palin has been their #1 search term this summer. John Morse,... (Read More).

September 07 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Let's take a break from the norm and go for some random language trivia about our amazing language, English... how many of these things have you ever thought about' There are only 2 words in English where the five vowels (a, e, i, o & u) appear in order: abstemious and facetious There are only 4 words in English ending in -dous: horrendous, tremendous, stupendous and hazardous The only word in English with 3 consecutive double letters is bookkeeper The longest one-syllable word is screeched The only number with the same letters in the word as the number itself is four The shortest... (Read More).

September 07 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

On a recent episode of Mind Your Language, Konnie Huq discusses something that I can relate pretty well to, the losing of your native language to English as you grow up. For me, I lost the majority of my Cantonese around the time my older sister left me alone at kindergarten to start her primary school career. For Konnie Huq, she lost her native Bengali when she started at an English speaking school.  While there are clear advantages to speaking more than one language fluently, are there any advantages to dropping your mother tongue to speak only the local language' Does assimilation... (Read More).

September 05 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Following on from my recent post about bad language delaying the sequel to the popular Dead Rising video game, it seems that bad language has crept into the mainstream news once again - this time sparking off a brawl during the Djokovic-Petzschner game at Flushing Meadows in this year's US Open. ApparentlyApparently, the fight broke out because the man pictured on the left in the photo had a lot of money riding on the outcome of the game, and was venting his frustrations when things weren't going his way by cursing profusely - mostly using the 'F' word. The lady berated him for his... (Read More).

September 03 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm still not 100% sure where I sit on the e-books vs print books issue, and tend to think there is a time and place for both. With the rising popularity of e-book readers and tablets (most notably the Kindle and the iPad), though, it's inevitable that people will be doing more of their reading on the screen rather than on the page. Owning a traditional print dictionary has always made me feel slightly more involved with language, but for logical reasons the print dictionary is becoming very out-of-date. With modern search functions, space saving advantages, and the ability to constantly... (Read More).

September 01 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: news.cnet.com When people use computers, they have to adjust themselves to working within the constraints of the system. Nowadays with the general computer literacy levels of the younger generations, this is an unconscious act - you're doing what the computer wants you to do, so the computer can then do what you want it to do. However, developer Marc Schroeder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - an agency who standardize many online technologies and languages - has started work on EmotionML: a language that allows a computer to adjust to the user instead, by reading and... (Read More).

August 2010:

August 31 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: justpushstart.com The long-awaited sequel to the 2006 kill-fest Dead Rising - a video game where the player takes on the role of a lone man trapped in a shopping mall overrun by zombies - has been pushed back by a month, with the developers Capcom citing the demo version's 'inappropriate language' as the main reason for the delay. Since Dead Rising 2: Case Zero has already been rated M for mature (or the equivalent rating in other countries around the world) and its main focus is slaughtering the undead in all manner of gruesome ways; should players really be so shocked and... (Read More).

August 30 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

It's unsurprising to hear that the USA has the biggest number of English speakers (as it has such a huge population), but it only narrowly beats India.  Numbers from 2000 show that the US has 251,388,301 English speakers, with India at an impressive 232,000,000 (23% of their population).  Nigeria comes in third with 79 million English speakers (about 4 million of them being native speakers), and the UK comes in fourth with 59,600,000. The rest of the top ten are as follows: 5. Philippines (49,800,000) 6. Germany (46,000,000) 7. Canada (25,246,220) 8. France... (Read More).

August 27 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In a country where English is ranked 44th in terms of native languages spoken, male* workers who are proficient in the language can earn, on average, 34% more than their non-English speaking counterparts.  Younger workers in India would also need to have a good level of general education in order for their English skills to give them higher wages (that is, if a person were to do a crash course in English without gaining education in other areas, they would not reap the same benefits as someone who went to university). Even though there are numerous other languages spoken in India, it is... (Read More).

August 26 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: reuters.com Following up from a previous post about Microsoft's decision not to include ASL-enabled technology in their new Kinect product, UW researchers are trying to find a way to allow ASL over video calls on current 3G mobile technology. The issue is that 3G networks are not sufficiently fast enough to broadcast uncompressed video, so the quality is generally not good enough to be able to understand sign language over a standard video call. The new 4G networks that are starting to crop up around the country will aid in this dilemma; but not everyone will immediately have... (Read More).

August 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: thesmokinggun.com I'm not the hippest cat on the street, but this news certainly surprised me. Usually Ebonics is generally classified as a non-standard (or bastardized) form of the language rather than a bona fide dialect, the DEA is actively seeking Ebonics experts to help translate wiretaps and decipher bugged phonecalls. From the original article: The DEA’s need for full-time linguists specializing in Ebonics is detailed in bid documents related to the agency’s mid-May issuance of a request for proposal (RFP) covering the provision of as many as 2100 linguists for the... (Read More).

August 24 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Most people think of language as a way to communicate and describe the world around us, but have you ever considered how much our language affects how we see the world' I read a great article on the Wall Street Journal about just this.  It's not something that I really think about unless it's put in front of me, but language really can affect how we interpret the world. One of the most interesting parts of the article talks about how some cultures (up to a third of languages!) don't have words like left and right, and instead talk about direction in absolute terms (north, south, etc.).... (Read More).

August 19 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

August 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: news.discovery.com I recently read this fascinating article about orangutans in the Borneo rainforest communicating with humans and other apes using mime - an artform rather more associated with third-rate street performers. 'Of course what orangutans do isn't up to Marcel Marceau, but they can certainly fake their own bodily signals, the essence of pantomime, and that opens up a much richer world of communication than we have believed possible,' added Russon, a Glendon College professor of psychology. Russon and colleague Kristin Andrews identified pantomime cases by mining... (Read More).

August 14 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

The blog on MacMillan Dictionary's website has an ongoing campaign called What's your English', which focuses on regional usage of English from all over the world.  Each month is assigned to a different regional English, from native speaking countries as well as countries where it is a major foreign language.  This month is dedicated to Indian English, and past months have explored American English, Chinese English, Russian English, South African English, and more. The campaign relies a lot on user submissions, so if you have a blog post, tweet, word definition, or video to submit about... (Read More).

August 13 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: slashgear.com A while back, Microsoft announced that they were hopeful their new Kinect - a new cordless and controllerless motion sensor add-on for their Xbox 360 line of games consoles - would be shipping with full ASL functionality, enabling deaf people to be able to interact with one another through their consoles. Of course, its primary use will be to use with games, but it still would have been an interesting first for a games console. However, to keep manufacturing costs down while maintaining a reasonably price tag for the finished product, Microsoft have chosen to... (Read More).

August 13 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Seit einigen Monaten helfe ich jemandem sich Schritt für Schritt an die deutsche Sprache heran zu tasten. Die Idee lautete, dass ich jeden Tag eine deutschen Satz oder ein deutsche Vokabel kommuniziere. Was anfangs ein kleiner Gag schien, entpuppt sich mittlerweile als beachtliche Ansammlung von Wörtern, Floskeln und Formulierungen. Der Umfang hört sich gering an und der schiere Sprachschatz des Deutschen, sollte Grundlage genug bieten, täglich etwas anzulernen. Wo fängt man jedoch an, wenn man bei Null startet' Der Schwerpunkt lag und liegt nachwievor darin, Deutsch lediglich... (Read More).

August 11 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

As you may have noticed, I am pretty passionate about languages in general, and over the years have heard many misconceptions thrown around the place when the topic has come up in discussion. Here are three interesting linguistic myths, and why I (and many others) believe them to be myths... 1. The Eskimo language has a hundred words for snow. You've probably heard this one, and you probably believed it the first time you heard it. I know I did. It's a very old misconception, and has even been mentioned in several text books by academics who should perhaps have known better. The truth... (Read More).

August 10 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I was reading through some of the great posts on English with Rae recently (if you are learning English, or would just like some topics to write or speak about in your target language, definitely check it out), and came across one that mentioned going back to basics.  This is a pen talks about how even though these basic sentences are easy, and learning them might be boring, they are crucial as the building blocks for more complicated conversations.  You may not think that knowing how to say 'this is my new ruler' is going to come in handy, but you do have to walk before you can run... (Read More).

August 09 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Ich wurde vergangene Woche von einer Kollegin auf einen amüsanten Videoclip bei Youtube aufmerksam gemacht. Bei dem Video handelt es sich um einen niederländischen Werbespot mit dem generischen Titel „The worlds funniest commercial“. Soweit diese Aussage doch im Auge des Betrachters liegt, muss ich zugeben, dass der 42-Sekunden Spot doch zumindest ein Schmunzeln auf die Lippen zaubert. Die Synopsis lautet wie folgt: Eine Familie mit 2 Kindern steigt in ihr Auto und der Vater schaltet das Radio an. Aus dem Radio erschallt obszöne Musik. Dies meint man zumindest, bevor die gesamte... (Read More).

August 06 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've had a bit of a change in my schedule lately which means that I have a much longer commute than before.  I hate getting up early in the morning, but I've been trying to look at the upside - I have more time before and after work to listen to music, catch up on news, watch TV, or, most importantly, work on my language study.  I've been flicking through some flashcards on the subway, and also listening to some language podcasts (right now I'm listening to Chinese Lessons by Serge Melnyk and lessons from Popup Chinese). I've never really taken advantage of the speed adjustment on my... (Read More).

August 06 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: Associated Press A recent Associated Press-Univision poll shows that for Latino students in American schools, sometimes the English immersion can do more harm than good. While the children's English thrives under the immersion conditions of US schools, many find that their Spanish-speaking parents are unable to help them with homework, as well as communicate effectively with the school faculty on the kids' behalf. From the article: The poll says just 20 percent of mainly Spanish-speaking parents say they are able to communicate 'extremely well' with their child's school,... (Read More).

August 04 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

La India es un país de una diversidad que muchas veces se esconde detrás de un conocimiento superficial que raya el tópico. La importancia del Ganges, Gandhi, el sistema de castas y los colores vivos es lo primero que se nos viene a la cabeza cuando pensamos en el país que se encuentra al sur de la larga sombra del Himalaya. Y es que a la hora de pensar en la India nos la imaginamos con una homogeneidad que no corresponde a la realidad. Así se nos puede pasar de largo  muchas veces la gran riqueza que se da en este país.  La India es el segundo país más poblado del mundo, una de... (Read More).

August 04 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

You may not be aware already, but we have our own Language Trainers account on Twitter, which updates every time a new blog entry is posted here. However, recently we've decided to start running a 'Word of the Day' tweet. Every weekday we are posting a word and its definition, so if you follow us you'll be able to expand your English vocabulary with ease (as well as be the first to know when the blog is updated!). So, if you'd like to subscribe to our Twitter feed, simply visit our page while logged in to your Twitter account, and click the 'Follow'... (Read More).

August 03 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I recently stumbled across Digital Dialects, a website providing vocabulary-learning games for not just one, but 60 different languages.  These range from Afrikaans to Zazaki, a few of which I hadn't even heard of (including the latter, which is spoken in eastern Turkey).   The games are simple and focus on basic word categories like numbers, food, and animals.  Each game has images and many have sound, as well as options such as choosing to read a word or listen to it.  Each language has a different combination of games depending on the vocabulary, and I think they would be suitable for... (Read More).

August 02 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: telegraph.co.uk An interesting story from a newspaper across the Atlantic Ocean - the British government's communication chief, Jean Gross, has warned against parents using in-car TVs, but not over concerns for safety. Instead, she fears that children would not be using the time to learn new vocabulary from interacting with their parents on the road, and playing spotting games in the car like 'I Spy' - all of which means that parents aiming to keep the kids quiet during long car journeys could be doing just that, and having an adverse effect on their speech development. From the... (Read More).

August 01 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

In den vergangenen Wochen habe ich mich vorwiegend Themen gewidmet, die sich mit den zusätzlichen Vorteilen beschäftigen, welche das Erlernen einer Fremdsprache mit sich bringt. Auch für den heutigen Blogeintrag habe ich etwas gefunden, was mich in meiner allgemeinen positiven Einstellung gegenüber Fremdsprachen bestätigt. Eine gemeinschaftliche Studie an britischen und einer finnischen Universität haben interessante Ergebnisse hervorgebracht. Wie Cinthia Briseno in ihrem Artikel über Hirnforschung auf Spiegel Online zusammenfasst. Anhand von Analysen mit 872 Gehirnen von Verstorbenen... (Read More).

July 2010:

July 31 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

China isn't well known for its free speech policies, but occasionally there are big enough issues that the people have to say something.  The most recent uproar in southern China was over language.  Over a thousand outraged protesters came together to oppose a local politician's push to ban the Cantonese language on a major television network in favour of broadcasting solely in the national language Mandarin. Cantonese is widely spoken as a first language in Hong Kong, Guangdong province, and in many expat Chinese communities around the world.  Hong Kong's considerable film and pop... (Read More).

July 29 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Related to a recent post about the Chinese government's somewhat unpopular phasing out of local Cantonese dialects to be replaced by Mandarin, recently the older Indonesian generations have voiced their concerns that the native Indonesian tongue - Bahasa Indonesia - is being sidelined by youths in favor of a more fluent grasp of English. As the world's unofficial lingua franca (and certainly the international language of business), English has permeated into countless cultures worldwide, but it is the prospering Indonesian middle and upper classes who are responsible for the sharp increase... (Read More).

July 28 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

La presencia árabe en la península ibérica a lo largo de ocho siglos tuvo una influencia muy marcada en la evolución de lo hoy en día llamamos España. Sería imposible entender la historia española sin la influencia árabe, tanto desde el punto de vista político, como desde el económico y también el cultural. Aspectos como la agricultura de regadío importada y desarrollada en zonas como la cuenca levantina o distintos vocablos españoles, ejemplifican este hecho.  Desde topónimos como Albacete, Alicante o Guadalquivir, hasta palabras como aljibe o almohada. Incluso un vocablo... (Read More).

July 28 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: msnbc.msn.com American astronaut aboard the International Space Station, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, has recorded a six minute video to deaf children, in American Sign Language. This is the first time ASL has been used on board the ISS, and possibly the first time in outer space - despite it being the 4th most commonly used language in the USA. The purpose of the video was to encourage deaf children not to feel like there are certain things that they can't do, and to pursue a career science if that is what they want. Caldwell Dyson herself says 'the only thing deaf people can't do is... (Read More).

July 28 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

For the most part, the kind of foreign language you learn is practical or theoretical.  The kind of things you'll need to know to get around a foreign city, write a meeting agenda, or buy fruit at the market.  Getting into complex literature usually takes a pretty high language level, but what about kids' books'  Surely they'd be much simpler' High school student Charlie Anderson has written a great piece about reading her first piece of children's literature entirely in French.  She discusses the very valid point that even when written for kids, literature has a totally different... (Read More).

July 26 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Languages slowly dying out is always something I feel a little sad about, but as mentioned in previous posts, this seems to be the direction the world is taking. Recently, people have taken to the streets in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, in protest of the local Cantonese dialect being ever more replaced by Mandarin. The specific issue that sparked the protest - numbering around 10,000 people, according to reports - was the majority of the TV stations switching to broadcasting in Mandarin. For decades, pressure from Beijing to adopt Mandarin as the national language of China... (Read More).

July 24 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Ein wenig Allgemeinwissen, dass niemanden überraschen sollte, lautet wie folgt: Menschen, welche ein Instrument spielen, haben ein besseres und aufmerksameres Gehör. Soweit so gut. Was hat das mit Sprachen zu tun fragen Sie sich jetzt. Ein Artikel in der Süddeutschen Zeitung berichtet von einer Studie an einer amerikanischen Universität, welche belegt, dass die kontinuierliche Verbesserung des Gehörsinns durch das Spielen eines Instrumentes, ebenso zusätzliche kognitive Merkmale belebt. Im gewöhnlichen Alltag wissen sich somit Musiker besser akustische Informationen zuzuordnen und zu... (Read More).

July 22 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

One thing I've always found a bit awkward with friends who are learning English is the part where they ask me to correct their English whenever they make a mistake.  I always feel a bit weird about this, not least because I notice pretty much every mistake anybody makes (especially me).  I have no problem at all answering direct questions, or checking particular pieces of work, but if someone asks me to correct them while they're speaking, I feel quite uncomfortable. I've come up against this problem from the other side as well, where I both want and don't want people to directly correct... (Read More).

July 21 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: blog.forbes.com Sarah Palin is one of my favorite public figures. Hate her or love her, you can't but help enjoy her little snafus. Lately it's been this word 'refudiate', first laid down in a tweet written by Palin concerning plans to build a mosque within 2 blocks of Ground Zero. Did she mean 'refute'' Or 'repudiate'' Did she mean a mixture of the two' Is this clumsy ignorance on her part' Or is she, as she claims, finding time within the confines of a sensitive argument to coin new English words in the same way that Shakespeare did' Who knows. But I can't but help enjoy... (Read More).

July 18 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

El primer dato que se suele dar a la hora de hablar sobre la variedad lingüística en el mundo es la existencia de multitud de idiomas, la cual sobrepasa los seis mil. Según datos de la UNESCO publicados en el año 2002, este número se vería reducido en un tiempo no muy lejano casi a la mitad. Normalmente, a la hora de hablar de lenguas muertas se toma como ejemplo al latín y la forma en la que dio lugar a las lenguas romances, desde el portugués hasta el rumano. Sin embargo muchas lenguas desaparecerán de una manera más traumática. El fenómeno de la extinción es una... (Read More).

July 18 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

More often known nowadays for his love of gadgets (the iPhone in particular), Stephen Fry has got to be one of my favorite British comedians. His material is always very clever, and his passion for language shines through. He was a star of A Bit of Fry And Laurie, Blackadder, Jeeves & Worcester, and several other great British comedy series. The English panel show he hosts, QI ('Quite Interesting'), is worth checking out if you ever get the chance. Recently it was reported that Fry would be making a series of shows about the English language, to be shown on BBC2. This seems like a must... (Read More).

July 17 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

(Or, Angelina Jolie does it too.) I don't usually keep up with tabloids, but I noticed a story about Angelina Jolie's love for the Russian language, and had to see what was going on.  She's had to learn the language for upcoming film Salt, and says that while she struggled with getting the difficult pronunciation right, she loves the sound of the language, as well as loving to speak it.  'I find it a very interesting sound because it can be so hard and strong and also very sensual and very beautiful,' she said. While some commenters bring up the sort-of-justified point that she's only... (Read More).

July 16 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Die Fussball-Weltmeisterschaft ist vorbei und viele Zeitungen und ihre respektiven Internetpräsenzen werden vermutlich wieder ruhiger, wenn es darum geht die ausländische Presse zu zitieren. Bei sportlichen Großturnieren ist es ein beliebtes Mittel, um Meinungen und Stimmen aus anderen Ländern einzufangen und dabei, wie der letzte Eintrag erläuterte, eine andere Perspektive auf ein bekanntes Licht zu werfen. Selbstverständlich handelt es sich hierbei um eine zügige Prozessabwicklung, damit idealerweise schon am gleichen Tag mit den deutschen Schlagzeilen, die internationalen Zeilen zum... (Read More).

July 13 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

As I've said many times before, one of the best ways to get exposure to a foreign language is by listening to it, a lot.  An even better way is to make sure that the material is relevant to you, something you're interested in, or something you've written yourself.  Not everybody is lucky enough to have a native speaking friend or teacher to record audio for them, though, and that's where RhinoSpike comes in. The website provides a free platform for users to both request audio in the language they're learning, and provide recordings for other language learners.  It's as simple as pasting... (Read More).

July 12 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: pcworld.com With speech-to-text fast becoming a standard on Android smartphones, it was a matter of time until some clever people came along and created practical speech-to-sign software for deaf people. A team from Thailand has done just that - and for their efforts have won the central category of the Imagine Cup, a student software development competition sponsored by Microsoft. The award netted them $25,000 as well as the prestige associated with being the top project from some 325,000 students. From the article: The Thai team's software, EyeFeel, combines speech... (Read More).

July 09 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

La tercera ley de Newton es una de las leyes científicas de mayor calado. Cualquier  objeto al entrar en contacto con otro crea una reacción proporcional y contraria. Generalizando este principio, cualquier acción tiene una consecuencia, independientemente de si es contraria o no. Y ello no es menos cierto a la hora de hablar de los idiomas. Tal y como pasa con cualquier elemento que en un determinado ámbito tiende a imponerse, el inglés se ha convertido en el idioma a aprender y, a la vez, el idioma al que resistirse. Por un lado, la importancia que ha adquirido... (Read More).

July 09 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Es wurde zuletzt eine Studie der Amerikanischen Universität in Sharjah (Vereinigte Arabische Emirate) veröffentlicht, welche unter der Obhut von Anatoliy Kharkhurin zeigt, wie die kreative Leistung von mehrsprachig sprechenden Testpersonen, die von einsprachigen übersteigt. Die Eigenschaft zwei oder mehr Sprachen sprechen zu können (in der eigentlichen Studie wurden Bilinguale gegen Monolinguale verglichen, s. Hier) fruchtet in innovativere und schärfere Problemlösung. Dabei sind es vor allem die zusätzlichen kognitiven Fähigkeiten, erlernt und vorhanden durch die zusätzliche... (Read More).

July 09 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

There are many words in other languages that don't translate directly into English, or succinctly describe a thing or situation which would take far more words to say if I tried to do it.  A new website is collecting these 'untranslatable' words and presenting them to the world daily.  Better Than English is taking user submissions (and I guess a few submissions by the admin/s) and discussing words from all over the world.  Here are some of my favourites: Zechpreller - a German word to describe someone who leaves a restaurant or a bar without paying the bill. Utepils - a Norwegian word... (Read More).

July 06 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I was just listening to a 60 Minutes podcast and there was a really interesting story about a woman who has been studying the same group of African elephants for almost two decades.  American scientist Andrea Turkalo has been studying their behaviour, and focusing particularly on the way they communicate.  She can now identify not only what different sounds mean (including greetings, sadness, anger, and all clear), but can even tell the animals apart by their voices.  Turkalo's long years of research are leading towards a greater understanding of elephant behaviour and social... (Read More).

July 05 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Apologies for the subject matter of this post, but I thought it was interesting from a linguistic point of view! I've known for a while that the wonderful English word diarrhea (or diarrhoea) comes from the ancient Greek word diarroia (διαρροια), a participle form of the verb diarrein (διαρρειν). The 'dia' (δια) prefix literally means 'through', and the verb 'rein' (ρειν) means 'to rush' or 'to flow'. Therefore the literal translation of διαρροια means 'a rushing through' - a very accurate description of the condition itself! However, I only realised... (Read More).

July 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I just read a great story about a deaf couple who are raising their hearing son to communicate in both English and American Sign Language (ASL).  Both parents have very limited hearing, but their 1-year-old son is just starting to speak English.  They can't hear when he talks to them, and they communicate mostly with hand signals and touch, although as he gets older they will spend more time speaking and signing at the same time. Usually a child will grow up speaking the same language as its parents, so it's interesting to see what happens when there is another element introduced, where... (Read More).

July 01 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Something I learned today from Marie, one of my German friends - in 1996, there was a policy instituted in German grammar by which some compound nouns contained three consecutive consonants. This is due to the ever-so-German habit of joining together words (Komposita), resulting in insanely long words such as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz ('beef labelling supervision duty assignment law'). The word Marie was talking to me about was Rollladen - meaning shutters or blinds for windows. I had assumed the triple L was a typo, but later learned that the word... (Read More).

June 2010:

June 29 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Though it is finding fewer and fewer students in its native India, the ancient language of Sanskrit is finding young enthusiasts in the UK. Student enrolment in the Sanskrit program has been increasing at St James Junior School in London.  Teachers are very supportive of the course, which has been running since 1975.  Although the language itself is rarely spoken any more, it has formed the basis for many Indian classical writings, and teachers say that these provide philosophical and inspirational materials for children to learn from.  Speaking the language, even though it may be quite... (Read More).

June 26 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

…or, by being around other people who are doing. During my short visit to Milan, I got to have the fun experience of being in a small car with three Italian girls who weren’t 100% sure where they were going. Typically, Italians are exuberant in their speech, and talk a lot with their hands, and these girls were no exception. Although they spoke almost entirely in Italian, I managed to work out quite a few words just by what we were doing. We made a lot of left turns (yes, we got a bit lost), so I learned that sinistra means left. It took me a while to work out that Magenta was a town,... (Read More).

June 25 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Beim Versuch meine Französischkenntnisse auch außerhalb der Universität weiter zu verbessern, habe ich über die Gesamtlernsituation reflektiert und mir ist aufgefallen, dass es durchaus möglich ist seine Sprachkenntnisse aufzuwerten und dabei die einer weiteren zu verfeinern. In meinem Fall zum Beispiel, habe ich die vergangenen Jahre Französisch in einem englischen Sprachumfeld gelernt. Beides Fremdsprachen für mich, so ermöglichten meine besseren Englischkenntnisse jedoch diese Situation. Das interessante dabei ist, dass ich somit nicht nur wie geplant kontinuierlich mein... (Read More).

June 24 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

One interesting thing I’ve found about Italians is that they speak less English than their western European neighbours (e.g. Switzerland, Austria, Germany). I’m not sure why there isn’t as much focus on English as in other countries, but it may be because Italy, like Spain, already has multiple dialects within the fairly small country (click on the image to see the full size). Whatever the reason, and they are often a bit self-deprecating about their abilities (even though I really have had no trouble understanding them). I met one guy (an Italian rapper, no less) who spoke... (Read More).

June 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: lamebook.com Whilst not a website that is particularly safe for work given the language and images contained therein, Lamebook.com is a dazzling showcase of 'the funniest and lamest of Facebook' - and it certainly lives up to its tagline. My (least) favorite category would have to be the 'TypOH!s' section, where, along with an avalanche of unintented typing errors, the poor spelling and grammar that is ubiquitous on everybody's favorite social networking site is celebrated. Some of the posts are next to incomprehensible. Nevertheless, the site is still great for a laugh... (Read More).

June 21 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I’ve been listening to Italians speak to each other for the last couple of days and I love the ups and downs of the language that are the result of putting the stress on specific syllables in the word. In fact, if you don’t put the stress on the correct part of the word, some people may not understand you at all, even if you do get the actual word right. Most of the time, the stress is on the second to last syllable of the word, even with long words, e.g. cappuccino, panino. There’s also a lot of ‘r’ rolling, which may be hard for some people to get used to. It may be especially... (Read More).

June 21 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

My Austrian friends have been giving me some great German tongue twisters to try, and in exchange I've been introducing them to some of the more famous English ones... suffice to say, we were both pretty terrible at them. How easily can you say these three times fast' English Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked' How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood' Six sick hicks nick six slick bricks... (Read More).

June 19 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: latimes.com This is quite an interesting development I found today in the LA Times: starting this week, Disneyland will be making sign language interpreters available to all - without prior booking, as was the case until now. From the article: The sign language interpreters will be on hand to interpret the stories told in such attractions as Jungle Cruise, Jedi Training Academy, Storybook Land Canal Boats, Celebrate: A Street Party, Billy Hill & The Hillbillies, Turtle Talk with Crush, 'High School Musical 3: Senior Year' and eventually at 'Aladdin -- A Musical... (Read More).

June 18 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Ein höchst interessanter Artikel erschien diese Woche auf der Guardian Webseite, hochwertige britische Tageszeitung, und ich empfehle jedem der Englisch spricht, sich diesen einmal durchzulesen. Der Journalist und Autor des Buches „Who are we – and should it matter in the 21st century'” Gary Younge diskutiert die Signifikanz von Sprachen während der letzten und auch diesem Jahrhundert. Ausgangspunkt des Artikels ist die kürzliche Parlamentswahl in Belgien, welche die nationalistische Neu-Flämische Allianz (NVA) als stärkste politische Kraft etablierte. Hauptagendapunkt der NVA ist... (Read More).

June 18 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I was watching a group of Chinese people operating a train ticket machine in Milan today, and they were struggling a little bit.  Oddly, they kept choosing Italian as the language, when there was also English, German, and a few other languages (although not Chinese).  They managed to operate it in the end*, but I wondered why they didn’t choose English as the operating language.  It’s very possible that they didn’t know much English either (and maybe they did know more Italian then English, although I think it’s unlikely).  But it brought up the question – if all of the... (Read More).

June 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

With the noise of the crowd in every World Cup soccer match being drowned out by these irritating horns, to most people they are an annoyance. But Neil van Schalkwy, the man who mass-marketed the ear-piercing 130+ decibel horn to the country starting 10 years ago, heralds the vuvuzela's tone as something of an 'international language' in the multi-lingual country of South Africa. Since the competition began, the vuvuzela has been criticized by many not only for drowning out the noise of the crowd, but also for being the only thing you can hear on TV during the game, disrupting the coaches'... (Read More).

June 16 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

When both the Oxford English dictionary and Merriam-Webster added the verb 'google' to their pages in 2006, Google were surprisingly irked at the development. They felt that they had to protect their brand, and even made a blog post to that effect, saying that people should only describe it as 'googling' when they were specifically using the Google search engine - not simply as a general word for searching the internet for a particular term. However, contrary to their wishes, four years later the word has become something of a universal term for searching. While most people -myself... (Read More).

June 15 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Un idioma es la consecuencia de una forma de vivir. Y por ello se convierte en un ser vivo. Con su propio nacimiento, su propia vida y en cierta forma su propia muerte. Naturalmente dadas las características de cualquier idioma, cada evento citado no tiene un momento concreto y definido. Se diluye en un pozo de grises que solamente nos permite distinguir cada estadio después de cierto tiempo. Podemos pensar en muchos ejemplos, pero pocos tan claros como el latín. Después de su nacimiento y su auge  paralelo al poder del imperio romano, el latín evolucionó de manera tan drástica em... (Read More).

June 11 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Ich bin vor kurzem auf eine Initiative von der Daimler AG und Robert Bosch Stiftung in Kollaboration mit der Föderation Deutsch-Französischer Häuser aufmerksam geworden. Die Initiative nennt sich DeutschMobil und schickt junge Rektoren mit Stern-Vans durch Frankreich, um an französischen Schulen das Erlernen der deutschen Sprache zu promoten. Seit 9 Jahren findet diese Aktion jährlich statt und laut eigenen Angaben sind inzwischen 7.500 Schulen besucht worden und 460.000 Schüler haben dank der engagierten, angehenden Deutschlehrern durch Spiele, Videos und dergleichen die deutsche... (Read More).

June 10 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I’ll freely admit that I don’t speak much German.  Of course, I can work out a lot of the words’ meanings if they are similar to English, but this can sometimes lead to false friends.  I learned that Ausgang means exit, so when I saw a sign in Vienna that said Notausgang, I didn’t really think much about it.  I just thought it meant that I couldn’t go through that door.  I guess if I had taken a minute, I would have probably guessed that not doesn’t mean the same thing in English and German. It wasn’t until I was looking at a sign on a train window some time later... (Read More).

June 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

One thing that angers me about the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico is BP's constant use of euphemisms to downplay the severity of the disaster. The main - and most anger-inducing - one of these is continually referring to it as an 'oil spill'. It is most certainly not a spill. According to dictionary.com, a 'spill' is: spill verb (of a liquid, loose particles, etc.) to run or escape from a container, esp. by accident or in careless handling. This is not oil escaping from a container - this is oil escaping from a well. Pedants may argue that a well is a container or sorts,... (Read More).

June 07 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Die Debatte, ob Kinder schon in frühen Jahren Fremdsprachen lauschen sollen, um somit bilingual oder sogar trilingual aufzuwachsen gibt es schon seit Ewigkeiten. Während Sozialpsychologen davon ausgehen, dass Kinder sprachneutral zur Welt kommen und jede Sprache umgehend erlernen können, welche ihre Umwelt hergibt, sind manche Kinderpsychologen und Sprachwissenschaftler sich uneinig, ob die Aussetzung zu mehreren Sprachen in jungen Jahren nicht zu Verwirrung führt. So sollen beispielsweise die ersten Laute die Babys hergeben ein Durcheinander aus allen Sprachen sein, welche anschließend... (Read More).

June 06 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Dentro de 5 días comienza la copa del mundo de fútbol. Uno de los eventos deportivos más importantes del mundo, que tiene lugar este mes de junio y julio en el país del arco iris. Este calificativo le viene a Suráfrica como anillo al dedo. No solamente por la gama de colores que deleita al visitante, sino también por la variedad racial y de origen de los habitantes del país más meridional del continente africano.  Y ello lógicamente se ve reflejado  en los idiomas que se hablan en la República de Suráfrica. La constitución surafricana reconoce igualdad de condiciones entre... (Read More).

June 05 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

My European journey will soon take me to Austria, where German is the spoken language (although, as you might imagine, the dialect and vocabulary differs from the German spoken in Germany itself). While brushing up on my German, I came upon some interesting German idioms - some of which have similar sayings in English, but others are a little odd for English speakers to comprehend. Here are some examples! Schwein haben - literally 'to have a pig' - means 'to be lucky' Blech reden - literally 'to talk brass' - means 'to talk nonsense' auf 180 sein - literally 'to be on 180' - means... (Read More).

June 03 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I’m on holiday this month, and travelling through six different countries (with six different languages) in less than three weeks can be a bit confusing when it comes to speaking*. I’ve talked before about the things I think it’s necessary to learn when travelling to new places, but I’ve come to the conclusion that you really don’t need much besides hello, thank you, and a smile on your face while you point at things. Of course, a bit more than this is useful, but politeness will get you by, especially if the other person speaks a bit of English too. I guess this post is just to... (Read More).

June 02 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

A while ago I posted a link to a site called Translation Party, a site that used machine translation to translate your given phrase back and forth from English into Japanese, until it reached 'equilibrium', when both translations came back the same. This usually resulted in a totally garbled translation of the original phrase. Sadly, this site seems to be down now, but I recently came across Bad Translator - it's a similar concept, except that it translates to and from English through a variety of different languages, further warping the original phrase... too often, way beyond... (Read More).

June 01 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

This is an old video, but I thought it was still funny, and related to my previous post about slang. Hugh Laurie - better known to us as Dr. House from the hit TV show, has a little friendly quiz with Ellen Degeneres on her show to see who knows more of one another's culture's slang... (Read More).

May 2010:

May 31 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

One of the exercises my teacher likes to do with me is to get me to tell her about my day, or my weekend, or what I want to do in the near future.  It helps me practice speaking and writing (i.e., creating output) about things that are relevant and familiar to me, as well as focusing on useful language and grammar.Talking about what you did on the weekend helps with past tenses, next week is for future, current habits practice present continuous.  You can use the subjunctive (if... situations) by imagining what you would have done if you had made a different choice or if something... (Read More).

May 29 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In my last post I wrote about native speakers not knowing that language learners are not fluent.  I've experienced it many times when I have learned basic phrases in a language to be polite, and then have found myself apologising for not actually being able to speak the language. So, is it beneficial for beginners to speak with a strong accent'  It gives the listener an instant clue that the speaker is not a native, and they can then (hopefully) modulate their language to suit the speaker's level.  This saves you from having to explain that you are a student or that you don't... (Read More).

May 29 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: smbc-comics.com One of my favourite webcomics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, recently updated with a brilliant strip relating to this particular annoyance. To be honest, this one doesn't particularly bother me. The key is in the difference between the nominative and objective cases for nouns in English - and in 99.9% of circumstances, words in either case have exactly the same form. However, there is in fact a relatively easy way to know whether you should be using who or whom in any particular sentence: If you can replace the person in question with 'he/she',... (Read More).

May 28 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Endlich zeigt sich die Sonne quer über Europa wieder etwas regelmäißger und man kann mit Sicherheit sagen, dass der Sommer nun da ist. Sommer heisst: längere Tage draußen, Grillabende, Picknicks in Parks, Schwimmbad-Saison, Fahrradtouren, Treffen in Biergärten und Cafés und natürlich Urlaub. Ob zu Hause, beim Wochenend-Trip oder im Ausland, so gehört der Kaffee an großen öffentlichen Plätzen für viele Menschen zum Sommer dazu. Draussen sitzen, sich der Sonne erfreuen, das Stadtleben bewundern und dabei einen Cappuccino oder Latte macchiato genießen. B ei der Kaffeebestellung... (Read More).

May 27 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: orlandosentinel.com The Orlando Health institute in Florida has added another notch to its caring roster - by realising that drugs and surgery are not everything when it comes to looking after their patients; appropriate bedside manner plays a large part, too. This doesn't just mean having a smile on your face and treating your patients with a certain level of respect, however. Marisol Romany, the manager of Language Services and Cultural Development at the institute, has invented her own 'cultural toolkit' to aid doctors and nurses in dealing appropriate care to patients of... (Read More).

May 26 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

At the beginning of a conversation with a native speaker, it's not always apparent to them that you are a learner.  If your pronunciation is good, then they may not know from the basic greetings that you won't understand what they have to say next.  So, if they launch into something that's too long or too complicated for you to process, ask them to repeat it. This way, they will probably rephrase or repeat more slowly so you will have more time to process what they said and formulate your answer.  I often have that 'ohhh' moment right after I've asked people to repeat themselves (I... (Read More).

May 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

While I would not describe myself as a fan of the TV show LOST (or as the hardcore fans call themselves, 'Losties'), I generally follow the old adage of 'I've started, so I'll finish'. Thus, thanks to my weird obsessive compulsive personality in this regard, I've been watching from around the middle of the second season without really enjoying the show - just eager for it to finish so I can have some kind of closure. Don't worry - there aren't going to be any spoilers in this post. Just a quick note on the use of Latin in the show. In a recent episode ('Across the Sea - season 6, episode... (Read More).

May 23 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

No se trata de un link a una página web, ni siquiera es el resultado de un fallo en el teclado del ordenador. Es la que está considerada la palabra más larga en el idioma alemán. La traducción de la misma al español sería “póliza de seguro para viudas de capitanes de barcos a vapor en el Danubio”. Así pues, para definir esta palabra en español hacen falta catorce palabras. Sin embargo, no podemos dejarnos llevar por este ejemplo, ya que no es del todo fidedigno y puede inducir a error, o para quien quiera comenzar a aprender alemán, horror. En realidad no todas las... (Read More).

May 23 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Language learning can be challenging at the best of times, but what about learning a third language in your second language' I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who are doing this very thing, and they have my utmost respect.  Living in China, they are learning Chinese in English, even though their native languages are French, German, Spanish, and others.  Some Chinese language teachers speak Japanese, French, and a few other languages, but they the minority (and their English is usually better than the third and fourth languages). This works out fine if both parties have a... (Read More).

May 21 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Es ist noch nicht ganz so weit. 20 Tage sind wir noch entfernt vom sportlichen Supereignis des Jahres – der Fussballweltmeisterschaft 2010 in Südafrika. Während sich die Spieler und Trainer längst in Ihre Trainingslager begeben haben, wird es so langsam auch für uns Fans Zeit, sich vorzubereiten auf 4 Wochen Fussballkunst und tagtägliche Diskussionen über Abseitstore Tore am Abend zu vor oder Aufstellungen für das kommende Spiel. Dank internatioaler werdenden Stadtbildern oder eigenen Reisen in die Fremde während des Sommers, werden solche Gespräche nicht nur in Deutsch, sondern... (Read More).

May 20 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

De vez en cuando, la actualidad nos lleva a través de los medios de comunicación a lugares recónditos. Lugares con sonidos más o menos exóticos y distanciados en mayor o menor medida de nosotros. Hay veces que las noticias nos trasladan a lugares en los que por un motivo u otro no nos habíamos fijado con anterioridad. Lugares como Haití, Timor Oriental o las islas Feroes, por citar algunos ejemplos. Y naturalmente esto nos acerca a sus gentes y sus idiomas. Desde el mes de marzo de este año 2010 le ha tocado el turno a Islandia. Gracias a la actividad del volcán situado en los... (Read More).

May 20 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

It's commonly known that immersion learning is the best way to learn a new language from scratch. If you want to learn Spanish, head to a place where it's spoken natively and you'll find yourself picking it up much faster. With our Spanish neighbors to the south there are no shortages of places to learn Spanish in New York, but one locale that might not spring to mind immediately is the bullpen of the New York Mets. Hisanori Takahashi, a Mets relief pitcher from Japan, has told the New York Times in a recent interview that even though he studied English in preparation for making the leap... (Read More).

May 18 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I have a lot of embarrassing things happen to me when I'm trying to speak in other languages.  Thankfully, I haven't yet had any permanent damage (like accidentally asking for the wrong haircut), and I find that sharing these stories with other learners can help ease the embarrassment a little bit. So, let me tell you a story.  I was in a cafe one day, and wanted to know what the wifi password was.  I knew the word for password, and I had just learned the word for wireless internet from a podcast I was listening to.  I was all set.  I called the waitress over and asked her what the... (Read More).

May 18 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: webmd.com In some ways the findings of this research seem strange, but in another way, it makes sense. Children with hearing loss in one ear have lower speech-language scores than siblings with normal hearing, new research shows. A team of scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recruited 74 children from the St. Louis region between the ages of 6 and 12 with one-sided hearing loss. Each child was compared to a sibling with normal hearing. This allowed the researchers to take into account the possible effects of environmental and genetic... (Read More).

May 17 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: sciencedaily.com Here is an interesting article I read today: Dutch researcher Lotte Henrichs followed the linguistic development of 150 children between the ages of 3-6 for three years, and found that those whose parents addressed them as equal conversational partners were much faster to develop a foundation for 'academic language'. From the article: Academic language is not an independent, new language, but is the language that teachers use and expect from the pupils. It enables children to understand instructions and to demonstrate their knowledge in an efficient manner.... (Read More).

May 15 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

One of my Chinese teacher's favourite things to tell me is that you have to 'lose your face' if you want to progress with any kind language learning.  You need to try to express yourself, even if you aren't 100% sure, and even if there is a chance that someone will correct you (and/or have a pretty good laugh at your expense). Face is a very important concept in China, more so than in most places in the world.  There are a lot of ways that people can lose it, and a lot of things are done in order to maintain it.  Things which you and I might not find embarrassing could be mortifying for... (Read More).

May 14 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Ein interessanter Artikel von Brigitte Jostes im Tagesspiegel thematisiert Deutsch als Fremdsprache vor dem Hintergrund der Wordkreation „Adoptivsprache“ als Analogie für Fremdsprachenerwerb. Während sich die Autorin vorwiegend mit dem Deutschen auseinander setzt und dabei an eine bessere Identifikation mit der eigenen Sprache zu Gunsten der Außendarstellung und Werbefähigkeit appelliert, habe ich großen Gefallen an der Metapher „Adoptivsprache“ gefallen und mich damit näher befasst. Offensichtliches Ziel der Wörtschöpfung war es, das Konzept des Erlernens von... (Read More).

May 12 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: pagef30.com I read an interesting article today about how Persian is a deceptively easy language to learn - far easier, in fact, than most western European languages that are the staple of many schools' foreign language courses (e.g. French, Spanish, German etc.). Check out the blog entry on pagef30.com for the full article, but here are the two main reasons why people think Persian is hard, or automatically dismiss it when considering what language they would like to learn: It uses the Arabic alphabet Persian speakers are not as numerous or as widely spread as users of... (Read More).

May 12 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I was booking some tickets for a trip to Europe recently when I stumbled across a hilarious yet useful free service provided by the airline Emirates.  Their iLingual iPhone application not only provides you with lots of useful phrases in French, Arabic, and German, but it lets you do it with your own mouth. Hilariously, the first thing you need to do is take a picture of your own mouth, and calibrate it.  You can choose between male and female voices, and even change the pitch to make it sound higher or lower.  Then, you simply select the phrase you want, and hold your phone in front of... (Read More).

May 10 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

May 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: spellingsociety.org See how well you native English speakers can tackle this one - read it out loud and count how many times you have to go back and correct yourself! When the English tongue we speak. Why is break not rhymed with freak' Will you tell me why it's true We say sew but likewise few' And the maker of the verse, Cannot rhyme his horse with worse' Beard is not the same as heard Cord is different from word. Cow is cow but low is low Shoe is never rhymed with foe. Think of hose, dose,and lose And think of goose and yet with choose Think of comb, tomb and... (Read More).

May 07 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Vergangene Woche bin ich über einen Online-Artikel in der Aachener Zeitung gestolpert, der das Comenius-Programm der EU anhand des teilnehmenden Inda-Gymnasiums in Kornelimünster beschreibt. Anhand des Artikels kann das Programm am besten als Riesenschüleraustausch definiert werden. Innerhalb von nur zwei Jahren besuchen sich sechs Schulen aus fünf verschiedenen Ländern Europas. Nicht nur Fremdsprachenkenntnisse werden verbessert und neue interkulturelle Freundschaften werden geschlossen, sondern fremde, innereuropäische Kulturen werden ebenfalls besser kennen gelernt. Im offiziellen... (Read More).

May 07 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: themoneytimes.com Now this is seriously cool. Google Goggles has been around for a little while for Android-powered cellphones. The basic concept is that instead of typing in your search terms, you take a photo of it using the phone's built-in camera. Take a picture of the Washington Monument, and it'll recognize it and bring up the relevant search results. Likewise, it will realize what you want to know when you snap a picture of the Mona Lisa, or a product logo, or even the cover of a book. Very, very clever. The most recent update to Goggles has now given the application the... (Read More).

May 06 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Every year around the Cinco de Mayo holiday, the Phoenix Suns basketball team don jerseys emblazoned with 'Los Suns', to celebrate the NBA's 'Noche Latina' as well as honor the Latino community of the city, the state, and the country as a whole. This year, however, in the light of the recent Arizona state law that allows police officers to stop and detain anyone if they have a 'reasonable suspicion' that they may be an illegal immigrant, a Suns marketing gimmick became something of a political message in support of those who believe the law endangers civil liberties, encourages racial... (Read More).

May 02 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Desde el comienzo de la historia, el poderío político y económico ha tenido una gran influencia en el conocimiento de un idioma determinado. Uno de los ejemplos mas claros es el caso de Roma y el latín. La expansión de Roma trajo consigo no solo que el latín se hablase en todo el imperio, sino que dió origen a las lenguas romances y que se mantuviese como lengua franca durante casi dos milenios. Así pues cabe destacar la posterior importancia del latín en toda la administración y diplomacia europea, hasta que el francés tomó su lugar. El francés le dió paso al inglés, que hoy... (Read More).

April 2010:

April 30 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Nächste Woche steigt die 9. Konferenz für Fremdsprachen & Business Kommunikation in der internationalen Wirtschaft im Lindner Congress Hotel Düsseldorf vom 3. – 5. Mai. Die Schwerpunkte des Kongresses liegen wie jedes Jahr auf interkultureller Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit und das nicht nur Europaweit, sondern weltweit mit speziellem Hinblick auf den Mittleren Osten, China und Lateinamerika. Zusätzliches Augenmerk wird auf das Internet und die Möglichkeiten der Sprachenweiterbildung im digitalen Bereich gelegt. Podiumsdiskussionen wie z.B. „Total digital' Die Zukunft des... (Read More).

April 29 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

April 27 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: newkerala.com Following on from previous posts on the Na'Vi language from the massive box office hit Avatar (and my subsequent disappointment after watching it that, having spent all that effort creating an entire language, it wasn't a larger part of the movie itself), I suppose this was always going to happen at some point. An American linguistics student living in Edinburgh, Richard Littauer, has become so obsessed with the movie (he claims to have seen it around 17 times at the theatre) that he has compiled his own Na'Vi dictionary to help others learn the language. Littauer,... (Read More).

April 24 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In the kind of news story that you wouldn't even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines. She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below).  Unfortunately there's no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like. Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the... (Read More).

April 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

As somebody who studied Latin and Ancient Greek, I've always been interested in etymology - the study of where words come from. This image caught my attention whilst browsing the other day, showing the foundations of the English word 'mother'. Click it to see the full sized version: It's a little confusing at first, being that it's an approximate map of Europe with a big tree on it - but if you start from the right hand side and work your way along the tree's roots, you can see how the stem worked its way across Europe and how the word for 'mother' in each language eventually took... (Read More).

April 23 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

In einer Grundschule in Frankfurt wird seit neuestem Chinesisch unterrichtet. Wie einem Bericht der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung zu entnehmen ist, haben Erstklässler die Möglichkeit Chinesisch zu lernen und zusätzlich gibt es eine Chinesisch-AG für Dritt-und Viertklässler. Die Begeisterung an der außergewöhnlichen Sprache mitsamt seiner Zeichen und Aussprache wird im Artikel von Friederike Haupt durch ein Gespräch mit einer 10-Jährigen deutlich: „Außer ‚Hallo‘ sagen kann ich jetzt auch schon bis 19 zählen. Das haben wir bis jetzt erst gelernt – wobei: Was heißt hier... (Read More).

April 22 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've heard anecdotal evidence that English language programs for school students are being removed or seriously cut down in some places in Inner Mongolia.  The apparent reasoning for this is that the Chinese government doesn't want kids there to have the opportunity to learn the language.  I can't find any information to back this up at this point, but the whole concept of removing opportunities from students is just abhorrent to me.  I can understand if there are simply no resources to provide education in certain areas, but to actively remove important programs just seems unnecessary and... (Read More).

April 21 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: calgaryherald.com According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, Canadians have truly embraced the medium of text messaging, having sent 35.3 billion texts in 2009 - an increase of around 70% from 2008. That's 122 million text messages per day! Apparently, this has also birthed a new set of vocabulary to do with texting - most infamously sexting, meaning to send X-rated messages, images and videos from phone to phone. Also added to the new texting lexicon are portmanteaus like drexting (drinking and texting), chexting (cheating on your significant other... (Read More).

April 19 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

Los distintos idiomas que se dan a lo largo y ancho de la tierra probablemente sean uno de los aspectos más interesantes de la cultura  humana. Cada idioma es el resultado de una sociedad en concreto. Tanto de su evolución histórica como del entorno geográfico en el que se desarrolla. Por ejemplo podemos destacar la presencia en la lengua esquimal de decenas de términos que describen la nieve, según las características que presenta. El término de evolución histórica es bastante más amplio y nos referimos no solo a la historia de una cierta cultura, sino también a cualquier... (Read More).

April 18 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

I read a very interesting article today about American Sign Language in the Chicago Tribune about the status of the language at Northern Illinois University, where it has recently been classified as an official foreign language - but to some controversy. Distinct as it is from any spoken language, ASL is still considered an indigenous language to the USA, and therefore cannot be 'foreign'. But since the language is so far removed from English - not only in terms of the non-verbal way it is expressed, but also in its structure and syntax - from a purely linguistic point of view, many argue... (Read More).

April 16 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Laut einem Spiegel-Online Artikel lernen aktuell lediglich 15 Millionen Menschen auf der Welt Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Kolumnist Bastian Sick erörtert die Vorurteile gegenüber der Deutschen Sprache und interviewte Deutschlernende zwecks ihrer Motivation. Komplizierte Grammatik und unharmonische Aussprache stehen dabei klassischer Musik und Studiumangebot gegenüber. Speziell die Verbreitung der deutschen Sprache scheint auf dem ersten Blick eine sofortige Einschränkung zu sein (wie hier zu sehen). Neben Deutschland selber, Österreich und der Schweiz ist die Sprache nirgends wo... (Read More).

April 16 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

April 15 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

OK, so I might go a little overboard with my grammar Nazism sometimes (which I guess can be seen in a lot of my 'annoyances' posts). However, the only thing worse than a pedant is an incorrect pedant - a stickler to the rules that is not aware of the correct rules themselves. English is a constantly evolving language, as you so often hear, so rules that were once considered solid can be eroded over time - for example, the hyphenation and/or capitalization of words like E-mail (or if you want to go much further back, good-bye). Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to see email and... (Read More).

April 13 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I came across a post on English Cafe (check/link) which talked about iPractice Obama English, an English learning service based entirely around Barack Obama's presidential and senatorial speeches.  The post on English Cafe was a little bit incredulous, for the valid reason that the kind of language used in formal speeches like this is probably not what your average English learner will ever need to use in real life. I thought I'd check it out, though, just to see what it was about.  They have a fairly good interface (in a downloadable program) which helps with reading and listening... (Read More).

April 12 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

I suppose that this one is going out of fashion, since I'm seeing more and more 'txtspk' online these days, with people simply replacing any instance of the words 'to' or 'too' with the number 2... but it still annoys me anyway! 'Too' can either mean 'in addition' or 'to an excessive degree'. For example, 'I'm going there too' (i.e. 'I am also going there'), or 'I've had too much food', or 'You're standing too close to the fire'. For pretty much everything else, you use 'to', which is a word that usually expresses motion towards something (e.g. 'I am going to work', 'The plant has grown... (Read More).

April 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

My latest travels have brought me to Ukraine, an eastern European republic with a rich cultural history - though in recent years it is too often only recognized for the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Whilst I have been here, I have attempted to learn some Ukrainian in order to get by. This has of course involved learning the Cyrillic alphabet, which dates back to around the 9th century. There are elements of the Greek alphabet in there, which has helped me - letters such as ф (еф) for the f sound (identical to the Greek phi), п (пе) for p (or Greek pi), and р (ер) for r (or Greek... (Read More).

April 08 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Recently it was announced that the rules of Scrabble were changing, and players would in future be able to use proper nouns in the game, which has never been allowed before.  The change would mean that previously-illegal proper nouns, including celebrity names, brands, and company names would be acceptable.  The justification from game company Mattel was that they wanted to attract players from younger generations, and thought that allowing players to use names would achieve this end.  I was a little bit unsure of how I felt about this, because I'm sure I've had occasions where I wanted to... (Read More).

April 07 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's another mistake that I hear almost every day, but has become so widespread that it is now considered correct by many. Of course, English is constantly evolving, but that does not mean that the rules should be completely ignored due to ignorance! A conditional clause in English requires a couple of things - the word if, on one side of the sentence - and then a verb in the conditional tense (for example, 'I would have seen', or 'I would go') on the other. Let's look at an example: If I had entered the competition, I would have won. In this (correct) sentence, the second part of... (Read More).

April 06 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Die Gebrüder Schroeter sind auf einer ehrenwerten und für alle Sprachenlernenden interessanten Mission. Sie haben sich zum Ziel gesetzt im Internet das größte Wörterbuch der Welt zu erstellen. Laut einem Bericht der Deutschen Welle sollen die insgesamt 5 Millionen Nutzer des Internetportals bab.la mithelfen dieses Riesenprojekt zu meistern. Getauft als das Internetportal für Sprachliebhaber kommt babla eigentlich aus dem schwedischen, eine der Sprachen mit denen die Schroeters aufgewachsen sind, und bedeutet „schwätzen“. Neben dem sich kontinuierlich entwickelnden Wörterbuch,... (Read More).

April 04 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Whilst there is only one word for more, there are two words for its opposite - fewer and less, and they are sometimes used incorrectly. Happily this is a very simple error, with a very simple rule to prevent yourself from falling into the trap. Use fewer when you are talking about things that can be counted. For example: There are fewer people here than I thought. He has fewer classes than me this semester. Use less when you are talking about things that can't be counted in the traditional way. For example: I prefer my coffee with a little less milk. I have less... (Read More).

April 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I wrote a recent post about touch screen learning applications, so it's a little humbling to watch this video.  The BBC has reported on classrooms in Kenya that have to move around frequently and use what little they have as learning resources, even goat droppings. The Kenyan government has launched a mobile school program that allows children in nomadic herding tribes to be educated, despite not having a permanent place to live.  The children tend to the goats every day, but have a few hours where they learn in the classroom.  The classroom consists of not much more than a blackboard,... (Read More).

April 01 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Ever wanted to know what your beloved pet budgie was really trying to tell you'  Now, with the help of an Android-compatible phone, you might be able to find out. Technology giant Google has finally released what animal lovers everywhere have been waiting for - Google Translate for Animals. Using their huge language database and state of the art technology, Google is able to help everyday people understand their pets, and many other animals they might meet.  Google Translate for Animals is now available in cat, dog, bird, rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, tortoise, horse, chicken, sheep,... (Read More).

March 2010:

March 30 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I didn't realise that the comments feature on the blog has been out of order for a little while, so thanks to reader Paolo for bringing it to my attention.  I thought that it had been kind of quiet around here!  My apologies to anyone who has been desperate to throw in their two pence worth!  The web guys have been notified and it will hopefully be up and running again very soon. In the meantime, you can get in touch with me about any of the posts (or anything you might think I'd be interested in reading) by emailing Language Trainers. Looking forward to hearing from... (Read More).

March 28 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

March 28 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

At one time, Latin was the official academic language in Europe. Until the early 18th century, the vast majority of all academic and scientific texts were written in Latin. This was primarily due to Latin's traditional status as a language for educated people, but also because the nature of the language allowed both accuracy and simplicity - the perfect language for explaining concepts both simple and complex. As Latin's popularity faded, academics started to write in their native language instead, but since there were many set phrases in Latin that were both convenient and well-known, a... (Read More).

March 26 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Kürzlich wurde Louis van Gaal, Trainer des Fussballvereins FC Bayern München, mit dem dritten Platz der Sprachwahrer 2009 ausgezeichnet. Der Verein der Sprachpflege, welcher diese Ehrung jährlich durchführt, empfand lediglich Karl-Theoder zu Guttenberg (1.) und Ulrich Wickert (2.) für besser geeignet. Die Überraschung hierbei ist, dass es sich mit Van Gaal nicht nur um einen Niederländer handelt, der für die Erhaltung der deutschen Sprache gelobt wird, sondern zusätzlich einen Fussballehrer einer internationalen Spitzenmannschaft mit Spielern aus ganz Europa und auch Südamerika.... (Read More).

March 25 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I don't have children myself, but I'd like to think that if I did, I would expose them to as many learning opportunities as possible.  I was speaking to an expat teacher the other day and she said that at one British school in Shanghai (which her children are no longer attending), children only receive Chinese instruction for two hours a week.  Apparently most parents don't anticipate their kids being in China for long enough for it to be of value. Do you agree with this'  I can sort of see why parents would think something like that (especially if they were going to send their kids... (Read More).

March 24 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Vice president Joe Biden was never really known for his ability to be anything but conspicuous, but during the recent signing ceremony at the White House for the new health care legislation voted in this week he was overheard (thanks to the podium microphone) telling president Obama, 'This is a big f***ing deal'. To be honest, I completely agree with him. The new healthcare legislation is certainly the first step in the right direction, and it was such a momentous victory that it was almost worth the expletive. Whilst I'm not particularly offended by his use of coarse language (you could... (Read More).

March 23 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Here's a rare educational post! It is a fairly well known fact that English borrows words and word roots from a variety of sources. Wikipedia states that that majority of English roots come from Latin and French (Old Norman), though the 100 most frequently used words are all Germanic in origin. This graph demonstrates a full breakdown, taken from a sample of 80,000 words from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary: Although we have a rich vocabulary (by far the widest of all languages, with some 2 million words at last count), the English language treats nouns and verbs (and, to an extent,... (Read More).

March 22 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I went to a toy market this weekend and came home with a couple of boxes of Chinese character flashcards.  They're great for helping me with character recognition and writing.  I am considering putting a few up on my bedroom wall to look at every day. I also have a couple of children's books and CDs, as well as some exercise books to practice my writing.  Some people might be a bit ashamed to be using such elementary materials, but I will happily admit that a five-year-old native speaker speaks better Chinese than I do. If you are a beginner or elementary language learner and can... (Read More).

March 19 2010 (Language Trainers Germany)

Suchmaschinen wie Google oder Yahoo/Babelfish bieten bereits seit Jahren an, Texte oder Webseiteninhalte zu übersetzen. Was in vergangenen Jahren jedoch noch als Unterhaltungsmedium für profilierte Übersetzer galt, gewinnt mittlerweile immer mehr an Potenz und Genauigkeit. Vor allem Google hat sich zuletzt seinen Translator vorgenommen und viel Geld, Kompetenz und Arbeit in das Übersetzungsprogramm gesteckt. Es sind nunmehr Übersetzungen in 52 Sprachen möglich und ein kürzlicher Artikel in der New York Times berichtet über die Verbesserungen und stellt den Deutschen... (Read More).

March 18 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've talked about free translation services recently, but there are a few other types of translations out there, from live interpretation to specialised technical translation.  Arguably the most difficult, though, is translation of artistic writing, such as poetry or fiction. Often, translators aren't given that much credit for the jobs that they do, and sometimes people think that it's a simple task that anyone who speaks two languages could do.  Especially for artistic translators, I have to disagree.  Can anyone who speaks and writes a language become an author or a poet'  Not... (Read More).

March 15 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

A lot of phrases in English are understatements, as if we don't want to commit too much to what we're saying.  One of them that springs to mind is easy on the eyes, which is another way to say someone is good looking, sexy, beautiful. In Chinese, there is the opposite.  The word they use for 'ugly' is 难看 (nánkàn), which is, literally, hard to look at. Ouch. The Japanese also have the word バックシャン (bakku-shan) for someone who appears hot from behind, but not from the front. Do you know any other interesting phrases for someone who's not so easy on the eyes' *Note:... (Read More).

March 12 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In my opinion, yes.  Google has an amazing ability to search and compare a whole lot more data than any other company in the business, and offers translations between a lot more languages.  Read on for some history and some interesting possible applications. In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed. The message said Google was a favorite search engine, but the result read: 'The sliced... (Read More).

March 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

I hope I'm not showing my age here, but when I was younger I stumbled across a British TV show called Mr Bean, starring Rowan Atkinson. The original TV show followed the story of an eccentric, hapless, mute man getting himself into scrapes whilst attempting to do everyday things like cook a roast dinner, go to church, or paint his apartment. A concept that was interesting to me at the time was the fact that Mr Bean never spoke - and if he did, it was an easily distinguishable sound like a scared shriek, an unhappy groan, or an elated 'whee'. This gave it an international quality, so even... (Read More).

March 09 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Quentin Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds taught us all the important lesson that the wrong hand signal could well get you killed (if you were pretending to be a Nazi in the wrong place and time).  In the film, someone gets gunned down because he uses the wrong hand signal for the number three. 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... (Read More).

March 06 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

So I guess I don't have my finger on the pulse, because March 4th was National Grammar Day, and I had no idea it was happening until it already had*.  The day, a chance to celebrate grammar and language in general, was started in 2008 by the founder of SPOGG (Society for the Protection of Good Grammar), and hosted by Mignon Fogarty (also known as Grammar Girl, who brings us the brilliant Quick and Dirty Tips). 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.... (Read More).

March 05 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: langladder.com I recently stumbled upon LangLadder, a super useful extension for the Firefox web browser which has an array of features to help intermediate and advanced level language learners reinforce your vocabulary while you browse the web. By merging the learning experience with how many people spend the bulk of their free time (statistics have shown that the average person spends around 2 hours a day on the internet), it creates a fun way to practice your target language in context. By browsing foreign language sites, you can add words you don't know to a vocabulary list... (Read More).

March 02 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: sentex.net Here are a few interesting language facts... Did you know that English is the only language that capitalises the first person singular (I)' No other language does this. Does anybody know why this is' Did you know that there are more English speakers in China than in the USA' Sometimes I forget just how many people there are in China! Did you know that in almost every language in the world, the word for 'mother' begins with an m sound' Is this because it's often a baby's first sound' Did you know that in some Eskimo languages, a single noun can have around... (Read More).

March 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Today was rainy, cold, and I was late for work. I jumped into a taxi to take me a relatively short distance in the hideous traffic, and it actually made my morning. I had a lovely little chat with the taxi driver, especially after he slowed it down a bit when he realised I wasn't a native speaker. 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... (Read More).

February 2010:

February 28 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

If you're anything like me, you may have been enjoying the recent action from the Winter Olympics, hosted in Vancouver. The American and Canadian teams have been cleaning up most of the medals, with 37 (9 gold) and 26 (14 gold) respectively. The opening ceremony was as flashy and impressive as ever, but apparently has enraged residents of Quebec, who thought that the Olympic anthem 'I Believe', originally performed entirely in English by Canadian teen singer Nikki Yanofsky, did not represent or give appropriate consideration to the Francophone population of Quebec. [...] after a firestorm... (Read More).

February 27 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Is it easier to learn additional foreign languages if they're similar to the one(s) you already know'  For example, if you already speak Spanish as a second language, will it help you learn Italian'  In my experience, knowing a similar language already can be both a help and a hindrance. 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... (Read More).

February 26 2010 (Language Trainers Spain)

El español es la segunda lengua más hablada detrás del inglés, y quizás uno de los idiomas más complejos para los no nativos. Sin embargo, cada vez más actores y actrices anglosajones o con raíces latinas desean o necesitan aprender español por alguna razón en particular. Y para muestra, basta un botón. Para su próxima película, el actor Johnny Depp conocido por films ya clásicos como “Eduardo manostijeras” o “Piratas del Caribe” necesitará de un profesor nativo de español para poder interpretar con gracia al líder revolucionario mexicano Pancho Villa. Pero... (Read More).

February 25 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I'm sure you've considered a day when you would be interacting with humanoid robots on a daily basis, right'  Well, that day is coming up soon in South Korea.  The government will spend about 45 million USD on an 'R-Learning' program that will put English-speaking robot teachers into preschools and kindergartens nationwide by next year. 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... (Read More).

February 25 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Lebanon is a very small yet multi-cultural country on the border of the Mediterranean and Middle East, and prides itself on the multi-lingual nature of its residents. A common Lebanese greeting (now a popular T-shirt and bumper sticker slogan) goes 'Hi, kifak' Ça va'' ('Hi, how's it going' OK'') - a mixture of English, Arabic and French in just four words. It seems that most of the young people in the cities, however, have dropped the local Arabic dialect in daily conversation almost entirely, relying instead on English and French. These Western languages are considered to be far more... (Read More).

February 23 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

A quick search for visualisation and success brings up nearly four million results about how to improve your life just by visualising yourself doing something successfully.  It's a common topic in self-help seminars, but using this method can also help in your language learning. You don't need to be sitting in the lotus position with your eyes closed for this to work, either.  You can use visualisation to imagine yourself having an upcoming conversation, or successfully getting through a day speaking only your target language. The more long-term visualisations are things like... (Read More).

February 22 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: kttc.com Another baby-related post today - it has been found by a team of psychological scientists at the University of British Colombia in Canada that babies born from bilingual families seem more likely to have more of a penchant for picking up spoken languages later on. Quite how they found the correlation between babies' 'sucking reflexes' and their stimulus for languages, I don't really understand... but since they're wearing white lab coats, I am tempted to believe them. From the article: A team of psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia,... (Read More).

February 20 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Another annoyance post today - this time concerning the phrase 'beg the question'. This is now such a common error that you can see it everywhere - television, newspapers, advertisements - the whole nine yards. In basic terms, to beg the question does not mean the same as to 'raise the question'. For example: 'I don't like strawberries; which begs the question, why do I love strawberry Pop Tarts'' This is quite simply wrong, no matter how many times you have heard the phrase being used in this sense. You should be raising the question here. 'Begging the question' actually refers... (Read More).

February 20 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I had quite a strange dream this morning, part of which involved being made to write my signature in a jellylike substance with a knife (I have no idea why - new technology').  This was difficult and unwieldy and led to something that didn't match what I had on my ID at all.  I have one of those signatures that no longer looks anything like my name, and often when I'm stopped in the middle of it (someone interrupts me, or my pen stops working), I have no idea what the next part is.  The action has become fluid and unconscious, and now, when I think about it too hard, I don't know what all... (Read More).

February 18 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: latimes.com When I'm trying to learn a new language, I'll often use flashcards. For me, it isn't just the flashcard itself, but the process of making the flashcards that makes them such a great learning aid. I find that I learn best when I go over everything several times, and writing out vocabulary - especially if the language uses a different alphabet or writing system, like Japanese - really helps hammer the words into my brain. However, they didn't prove to be such a great aid for 22 year old Pamona College physics major Nicholas George, who is studying Arabic to aid his... (Read More).

February 17 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've just read an article about the often difficult practices of apologising in Japan.  The article itself is focussed mainly on corporate responsibility-taking, but it talks about some interesting facets of Japanese apologies, which are of many different degrees, including the depth of bow accompanying them. 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... (Read More).

February 16 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Two friends of mine had a child together a couple of years ago, and I'm happy to say they're still going strong. The boy, however, was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to speaking - he hit two years old a few months back, but had still barely said anything more than 'dada' and 'momma'. This of course led to a certain degree of frustration and concern when trying to find out why he was crying when he was upset or unhappy, since he was unable to communicate at all. A little worried, my friends did some research online and through their doctor, and found that this is a more common... (Read More).

February 14 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

In the same way that I'm fascinated by westerners getting terrible Asian character tattoos, I am deeply interested in the reasons that Chinese people pick their English names (or anyone who chooses a name in another language, actually).  Of course, not everybody has an English name, but it's rare that you find a younger person who does not. 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... (Read More).

February 12 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the death of George Orwell (1903-1950), a British writer most famous for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four. Orwell wasn't just a novelist, however - he wrote hundreds of essays, articles and studies during his lifetime, in addition to the six novels he penned. His focus in writing was often on his ardent passion against totalitarianism and social injustices, and part of this focus involved clarity of language - that is to say, transmitting your message in as few words as is necessary, so that it can be understood by as many people as... (Read More).

February 10 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: allgov.com This is kinda sad... a whole language dies along with the last survivor of a tribe from the Andaman Islands. Her name was Boa Sr, and was the last remaining member of the Bo tribe, and was the last speaker of an ancient tongue - the Bo language has been around for over 65,000 years! It's amazing to think - with her, a whole language is wiped out. Sadly, her final years were mostly spent feeling isolated, since she had nobody else to talk to in her native language. The only other indigenous tribe in that region are the Sentilinese, who are aggressive to all... (Read More).

February 09 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I was looking over some things at work today, and realised that the word 画 (huà) had been used as the translation for both draw and paint.  I brought it up with the author of the document, and she said that there was no difference in Chinese, and asked if there was a difference in English.  I told her it was quite a big difference (draw being associated with pens, pencils, crayons, etc., and paint being done with, well, paint).  She discussed this with another colleague for a while, and I looked up 画 in the dictionary. It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means... (Read More).

February 08 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: The Times (UK) This sounds pretty cool to me. I got the opportunity to play around with a friend's Nexus One cellphone the other day, and one of the best features was that at any point there was a keyboard on the screen, I could choose to press a little microphone button and speak what I wanted to type. It wasn't exactly foolproof, but it seemed like an excellent integration of speech-to-text. However, Google are now claiming that soon they will have finished developing speech-to-speech translation software for mobile devices; which will enable users to speak what they want to... (Read More).

February 07 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I've just done this quiz on Sporcle.com, and gotten a fairly sad 12/20.  Granted, I didn't know that it included dialects (so now you know), although I don't think that would have helped me much. A couple of these languages I hadn't even heard of prior to doing this quiz, so perhaps that should be my impetus to get out and learn a bit more about the world.  I was pretty glad to see that Language Trainers covers most of the widely-known ones, though! How did you do' Image from Flickr Creative... (Read More).

February 05 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

It sounds like a normal-enough story: a 3-year-old born to Chinese parents in America is brought back to China and so needs a Chinese teacher because she only understands English. The odd part' The 'child' is a giant panda. 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... (Read More).

February 04 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: tvnz.co.nz In the cuter side of today's news, I found an article about Mei Lan - a three year old American-born giant panda - who is arriving in China this week. Since Mei Lan has only ever heard English before, zookeepers at the Chengdu Panda Centre (Sichuan province) are advertising for a Chinese tutor to familiarize the panda with the language and 'teach her basic phrases'. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to help Mei Lan, but I suppose learning a second language is never a... (Read More).

February 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Punctuation is important. It can change the meaning of simple phrases, and is especially important these days, when so many more people are communicating via text, whether it be SMS, email, online forums, or blogs.  A famous example is the difference between 'a woman without her man is nothing' and 'a woman: without her, man is nothing'. I do have an affection for the combination question and exclamation mark, the interrobang (‽), and I've already talked about outdated (but useful) characters like the thorn (Þ).  People are frequently using combinations of punctuation to form... (Read More).

February 01 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

I'm a big fan of punctuation - correctly used, of course. The interrobang is a favourite of mine - ‽ - which is used as a combination of the exclamation (!) and question (') marks, when you are posing a question in an excited or disbelieving way. For years I had been using separate punctuation marks to denote my incredulity, but when I discovered the interrobang I felt richly rewarded. However, when I first heard about the 'sarcmark' - a new punctuation mark to denote sarcasm, used in the same way as a question mark denotes the preceding sentence as a question - I was more than a little... (Read More).

January 2010:

January 31 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I recently wrote about enthusiasts of Na'vi, the constructed language (or conlang) from the recent film Avatar.  Today I read a news story that claimed that over 12,000 people are learning the language in Australia alone*. This made me wonder about the number of people speaking minority languages around the world.  According to Wikipedia, of the 6-7,000 languages spoken in the world, around half of them have less than 3,000 speakers.  It is anticipated that in the next 50-100 years, sadly, most of these languages will become extinct. So, in a few short months, Na'vi has overtaken... (Read More).

January 29 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

From recent personal experience*, I can say that the answer is: sort of.  It's not unsurprising that a few quiet drinks will lessen the fears of embarrassment, and also give the impression that you are speaking a lot better than you normally do (mistakes are skimmed over and might be forgotten in the morning). Drinking doesn't make you any better in itself, but it may make practising easier, which will definitely help you out. As long as you don't drink until you're incomprehensible in any language, alcohol can help smooth the way to more free-flowing speech, which can then lead to... (Read More).

January 27 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: youtube.com A pretty witty 3 and a half minute skit about the importance (or impotence) of proofreading - possibly not safe for work (a little bit of coarse language), but very funny! 'Do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice: one, there is no prostitute for careful editing of your own work - no prostitute whatsoever; and three, when it comes to proofreading, the red penis your friend.' There's a serious point here - always proofread your work! You can sometimes be surprised at the avoidable errors you can find just by reading something through for a... (Read More).

January 25 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

So it's that time of year again - when the northern half of the world is cold, and the days are short and often uninspiring.  Nobody can be blamed for being a little bit unmotivated or behind in their studies, but that doesn't mean that your brain should needs to hibernate.  Take advantage of the cold and depressing weather by staying indoors and learning some new language points, or add a linguistic twist to your favourite winter hobbies. Here are a few ideas: Learn new vocabulary by making word lists based around winter themes (snow sports, winter clothing, cold weather), or things... (Read More).

January 25 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

Source: waywardclassics.blogspot.com I found this hilarious post today about badly translated Latin tattoos (some NSFW language). Why would anybody permanently mark their body with a slogan without making sure the translation was correct first' Some of them even leave English words in - a nice juxtaposition of modern parlance and a 2000+ year old language, or pretentious and lazy' You decide. People - if you feel the need to get a tattoo of something in another language... never ever trust that Google Translate is going to be up for the job. Check with a native... (Read More).

January 21 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

January 17 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

I think most language learners have been in the situation where they realise that the textbook or dialogue they are learning from is not at all relevant to anything they would need to use in real life.  Of course, there are some fantastically-written learning materials out there, but there are also the ones that try to teach obscure terms that most people would never need to know.  I remember a lesson where my teacher taught us the translation for double income no kids families, as well as a term which means a mistress whose rich boss boyfriend pays to raise her bastard baby.  I guess that... (Read More).

January 14 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

The immensely popular blockbuster Avatar has garnered both rave and scathing reviews, but what it has produced, besides a lot of money at cinemas, is a large group of language devotees, dedicated to learning the constructed language of 'the people', Na'vi. The language was created especially for the film by Paul Frommer, a professor at USC in California.  There are already over three thousand members posting on the forums on the Learn Na'vi site, and that's just one fan site.  As with other popular created languages (Klingon, from Star Trek, and Elvish, from J. R. R. Tolkien's books),... (Read More).

January 13 2010 (Language Trainers USA)

As somebody who has studied a lot of Latin, this one annoys me more than it should, and seems extremely avoidable. You see the two confused far too often! Both are direct abbreviations of short Latin phrases, and both are used to clarify a preceding statement - one by giving examples, the other by explaining something further. But which is which' e.g. stands for exempli gratia (literally 'for the sake of example'), and should be used when giving an example or several examples of something. For example: 'I love eating fruit - e.g. apples, oranges, and mangoes.' i.e. stands for id est... (Read More).

January 11 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary in the UK, has said that every secondary school student should have the opportunity to learn Mandarin, and other 'up and coming' languages. With mandatory language study for seven-to-11-year-olds coming into effect next year, this recommendation will no doubt spread to primary schools. Even though students will by no means be forced to study Chinese (any language will do), there have been a lot of arguments against attempting to make the language accessible to every student.  For a start, where will these teachers come from'  There are very few students... (Read More).

January 09 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

Something that my language teacher tries to make me do, and something that I also try to emphasise with my students, is actually speaking.  It may sound silly, but many students try to learn strictly from books (and sometimes listening to audio or watching videos).  These methods help with understanding, but what will you do when someone actually wants to have a conversation with you' Repeating words and sentences in your head may help to a certain degree, but there are a lot of reasons that students should open their mouths.  Even if you fully understand a written sentence, you may not... (Read More).

January 07 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

For the new year, give your acquaintances the gift of pronouncing their names correctly.  It's a basic courtesy, but it's not uncommon to come across a name you've never heard before, and it's often uncomfortable to have to ask someone how to pronounce their name (especially if you have communicated by email or other written communication). Hear Names has a large database of names from all over the world, sorted by language or region.  If you come across an unfamiliar name through the course of your work day, through study, or in a newspaper, look it up on Hear Names, see its origin, and... (Read More).

January 02 2010 (Language Trainers UK)

...are they a good idea' Welcome to a new year!  Most people also consider it a new decade.  Right now is the traditional time for reflection as well as a time to look ahead and make plans for coming months, and even years.  If you have been studying a language for a while, how do you think you are doing so far'  What do you think you might achieve in 2010' As with any resolution, chances of success dramatically increase if the promises are actually achievable.  Deciding to make a small change that you can continue on a regular basis will be much more realistic than a one-off big... (Read More).

December 2009:

December 30 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

I recently read a great article from the Boston Globe about the demise of the simple you're welcome. Granted, the author possibly has even higher expectations of people than I do, but she brings up a good point.  When did it become the norm for people to reply to a genuine thank you with a flippant no problem, or an equally dismissive no worries (or the Scottish nae bother)' Etiquette is changing faster than I'd like these days, but I suppose I will admit that you're welcome seems a bit formal for things passing someone a coffee cup.  In business dealings and customer service sectors,... (Read More).

December 27 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

Germany is not generally associated with comedy, but the BBC has teamed up with a German stand-up comedian to produce a series of short language videos called What's so funny about German'.  Henning Wehn, 'the German comedy ambassador to the United Kingdom', takes learners of German through some basic points about his native language, with more than a few comedic examples and observations.  I learned that a Bodybag is not for cadavers, but is a backpack with one strap.  Check out the videos for more interesting German language... (Read More).

December 24 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

I stumbled across a learning resource for deaf students and learners of sign language, and an interesting section is the NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language) Signed Songs.  The page lists some traditional Maori and older pop songs, as well as a couple of Christmas ones.  Each song is presented in a  Flash format and has audio as well as video of a signer. Just in time for Christmas, here's James Townshend signing Santa Claus is Coming to Town. ... (Read More).

December 20 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

Once again, President Obama and his wife (sometimes dubbed Mobama) have led the way in terms of most-used words of this year.  They were only eclipsed by Twitter, and nearly by King of Pop Michael Jackson.  I guess it's unsurprising that other top words of 2009 were H1N1 (or swine flu), and stimulus, but I am a bit sad that vampire came in at number 5.  I can only assume that it was related to the popularity of recent films from the Twilight franchise. Click for the top words of 2009, and, if you're interested, the top words of the decade (including Global Warming, 9/11,... (Read More).

December 14 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

I was sent a link to a typing test recently, and because of my competitive nature, decided to try it out.  I was pleasantly surprised by the simple test provided by 10-fast-fingers.com, not only because it was easy to use, but it uses simple, common words, and provides tests in 33 different languages, including such disparate languages as Malaysian, Serbian, and Korean, and even dialects like Galician.  The results tell you how many words you got correct, and incorrect, in 60 seconds, and you can easily post these to your website or favourite social networking site. Even if you're... (Read More).

December 12 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

December 10 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

It may be a last resort to some people, but hand gestures and miming go a long way towards getting your point across.  Looking like a bit of a fool for a few seconds may save you a lot of time spent searching for vocabulary.  And you may not even look so silly; many people are 'hand talkers' and use gestures to go along with everyday speech. Especially when you're a beginner, and in a foreign country, gesturing and pointing can be a great help when you don't know specific vocabulary.  I did have a friend who had to mime some unfortunate bodily functions at a hospital once, but hopefully... (Read More).

December 07 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

One of my favourite things about the English language is the abundance of odd collective nouns, especially for animals.  For those who can't remember back to their school days, collective nouns are those given to a group of things, such as a pride for lions, or a flock for birds.  Some of my favourites have always been a murder of crows and a parliament of owls. I stumbled across a website called All Sorts today, which is collecting user-generated collective nouns via Twitter.  It keeps track of all the tweets containing the hashtag #collectivenouns and puts them in handy list... (Read More).

December 04 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

I was having a full body massage the other day (yes, lucky me!), and, as it tends to do, my mind started wandering.  I thought about things I wanted to blog about, and then I started thinking of the translations for body parts that were being worked on.  I couldn't remember the word for 'ankle', but I realised that this was a good way to pass the time in a way that's still not very stressful on your mind. So, for any time that you would otherwise be letting your mind wander (at the hairdresser, on the bus, waiting in any kind of queue), try to focus on some learning revision.  Some... (Read More).

December 02 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

If you're studying Chinese, are interested in the culture, or just want a new name in a new language, check out the Chinese Name Generator.  It takes your name and interests and generates a name based on the sounds of your name. I put in my details and got 王文寜 (wáng wén níng), with wáng meaning 'king', wén to do with language and culture, and níng meaning 'serenity'.  Not bad, and kind of appropriate, especially for this blog!  If I hadn't been given a Chinese name at birth, though, I think I would have called myself 问题 (wèn tí), which sounds kind of like my English... (Read More).

November 2009:

November 30 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

Often people don't think too much about the commonest words in their own language.  Prepositions and pronouns are just there, do their jobs, and don't get in our way very much.  I just did this quiz on Sporcle, and sadly only got 65% of the most common English words.  It was surprisingly difficult to think of the words that fit in between all the content words in everyday life.  I'd gotten up to 50 or so before I remembered 'and'! Have a go at the test and see if you can do better than me!  I'm sure it won't be difficult, as I'm a bit embarrassed by my result.  If you are an English... (Read More).

November 27 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

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... (Read More).

November 25 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

Since its beginnings, the Internet has been held mainly in the realm of languages that are able to be written in the English alphabet.  Sure, there are plenty of websites available in every language imaginable, but their domain names (or URLs, URIs) have had to be written in anglicised form.  You may not think that this small part of a site has that much impact on users, but for those who are unused to reading or writing English, even transliterations of their own language can be difficult.  Imagine seeing http://语言培训.com and trying to remember it to put into your browser. So... (Read More).

November 23 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

One example of text-speak and slang being seen as a completely separate language: Library | California, USA (We have an older patron who comes into the library to use the Internet. She’s around 65 and not computer literate, so we help her out whenever she needs us.) Patron: “Miss, could you help me' I don’t understand what is happening.” Me: “What’s the problem'” Patron: “I think I had a stroke or something!” Me: “Oh my God, what do you feel'” Patron: “Well, I can’t understand the words on the computer. It doesn’t make any sense! I’m so... (Read More).

November 21 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

In a recent language class, I found myself lacking a pocket dictionary, and I have considered several options in the last few months. I haven't come to a conclusion yet, but I have thought about the following: Paper dictionaries - The traditional dictionary is still in widespread use, and, if you can find a comprehensive pocket-sized one, can be great for use in lessons and to keep close at hand. The downsides of these are size, and the fact that updating requires buying a whole new dictionary. Some dictionaries (for example, Chinese to English) may also take some getting used to before... (Read More).

November 18 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

Google has once again come through with an extremely useful tool for anyone needing to use or study Chinese, Japanese, or other languages that don't use a romanised alphabet. The latest update to Google Translate includes a very useful option to show or hide romanisation, which will be great news for people like me who can't read characters but use a character-based language. For Chinese, Google Translate provides a result in pinyin, the standardised romanisation system for Mandarin Chinese, which helps with both pronunciation and reading. Previously, I could look up the translation for... (Read More).

November 14 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

It's a widespread (but not entirely correct) notion that British people don't really bother learning new languages. Of course, there are countries which have worse reputations when it comes to foreign language learning, but I won't point the finger at anyone. A recent article has claimed that with British people love to travel to far-flung and exotic destinations, they are very unlikely to pick up any of the local language, and not just that they don't, but that they refuse to. The survey by travelsupermarket.com revealed that over 10% of respondents said that they don't believe it's... (Read More).

November 11 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

One of the leading English language education companies, Pearson, has fully automated International English examinations that overseas students must take before being accepted into university.  While computers have been used to grade multiple choice and short answer questions successfully, many people have doubts about the ability of computers to really grasp long answers and complicated concepts. From The Guardian: John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said that computers could be useful in many areas of assessment but cautioned against their use in English... (Read More).

November 06 2009 (Language Trainers UK)

I came across this digital media blog post about a charity organisation called Literacy Bridge that is using budget technology to try to make a difference to the lives of people in developing countries. Literacy Bridge is utilising easy-to-use, low-cost voice recorders to help spread information and increase literacy levels in rural Ghana, where knowledge is still primarily spread via word of mouth.  The Talking Books, designed to cost around 10USD each, are already being used to help understaffed schools teach their children, and spread knowledge and news through remote... (Read More).