Language Trainers Blog

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 with Google Translate, Goggles can provide an instant (machine) translation. I was excited over this development, because it seemed like the first steps of something similar to Douglas Adams’ Babelfish from his genius Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books.

Apple users can now rejoice, as Google Goggles has recently hit the iPhone, via the Google app. You can grab it from the iTunes store here.

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, no matter what your native language!

Of course, since we have no surviving ancient Romans around and there were no audio recording capabilities in those days, we are not entirely sure just how Latin was spoken (though we are sure that it was not in a thick American accent as in later episodes of the TV show LOST). However, from piecing together various ancient texts on the subject of Latin rhetoric and grammar, modern day experts have some idea – though there are, of course, some models of pronunciation that not everybody agrees with. Then, of course, there is the common issue of how exactly to render modern inventions such as “computer”, “internet”, etc. in a language with no notion of the concepts.

Evan says in the course description:

The course is taught in Latin, based primarily on the work of J.A. Comenius (1657) and J.G. Adler (1856). This is not a translation course, the goal is to get you reading and writing and thinking in Latin. A version of the restored classical pronunciation of Latin is used.

Suitable for beginners, Latin is taught slowly from the ground up, using spoken Latin, while keeping a firm grip on grammar. The first 2 lessons have some English. The rest are only in Latin. You will need to study the course in sequence, as each lesson follows the preceding one in a progressive order.

As the course is taught totally in Latin, you need no other language.

You can access the videos on his YouTube profile. There are For anybody who has ever wanted to study Latin, this could be a very interesting (and more importantly, free!) way of fulfilling that aim. To date, Evan has made 323 videos, so you may have a little catching up to do!

There is also an audio-only version of the course available in podcast format.

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 explicitly another language (such as English or Tibetan language classes).

The Chinese constitution claims to protect the rights of its inhabitants, and the Free Tibet organization has said that “the use of Tibetan is being systematically wiped out as part of China’s strategy to cement its occupation of Tibet”.

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 were born long ago, taken from other languages (in the case of English, mainly from Latin, Ancient Greek, and German).

The word “etymology” itself has a very literal origin, from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumologia). The ἔτυμον part means “true sense”, and -λογία comes from the word λόγος, which among its many meanings are “word”, “speech”, and “reason”.

However, due to the fact that English loves to borrow words from other languages, some modern words have rather more interesting origins.

Take, for example, the word “quarantine”. This word comes from the French word quarantaine, meaning “about forty” (quarante = forty, -aine suffix = about). Originally this word was used when ships would arrive in port which were suspected of carrying some kind of contagious disease from its country of origin, and so the cargo and crew of the ship would be forbidden from any kind of contact with those onshore for around 40 days.

Likewise, the word “assassin” has an unexpected source. During the era of the Holy Crusades in the Middle East, certain Muslim sects and organizations would contract murderers to kill some of their key Christian enemies, to undermine and weaken their invaders. Due to the fact that these killers would commit the murders under the influence of the drug hashish, they became known as hashshashin, literally meaning “those who smoke hashish”. This has since evolved into the English word “assassin”.

However, there are some words that although amazingly commonplace, still have unknown origins. Take, for example, the words “big” and “dog”. These words are used daily throughout the English-speaking world, and yet their origins are utterly unknown.

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 steady change over a long period of time, that translating from one to another just isn’t as simple as replacing each word in a sentence with its counterpart in the target language. This is why professional translation agencies still enjoy a roaring trade, despite the ease and convenience of machine translation services.

However, machine translation isn’t as simple as all that. Contextual translation has come in leaps and bounds over the past decade or so, where translation algorithms analyze a huge corpus of texts (aided in recent years by the vast amounts of text available on the internet) and start to work out patterns and shapes in which the target language is used. Thus homonyms such as “strike” (a word with 88 different definitions in some dictionaries) can be translated contextually by cross-referencing texts written by humans, enabling the machine translation to give an accurate translation instead of simply guessing at the correct equivalent in the target language.

This has enabled services such as Google Translate to perform well enough to do basic translation for foreign language websites – you may still find plenty of broken English, but at least you can understand the basic gist of the text.

While you may not think that machine translation’s complexity and accuracy being at the equivalent of a 10 year old’s standard is not particularly impressive, it is certainly leaps and bounds ahead of what we had only a decade ago:

The algorithm’s understanding of language “has moved from a 2-year-old infant to something close to an 8 or 10-year-old child,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, an honorific reserved for the company’s top engineers. “They’re still not approaching the conversations you’d have as a teenager.”

You can read the whole article here.

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 Delgado, Guillermo Rojo and Mercedes Sanchez.

English is the language with the greatest online presence, with about one billion pages, followed by Chinese, with more than 800 million pages.

Spanish is a great language to learn, given that there are over 500 million speakers worldwide, and the language is spoken in more than 20 countries. Learning Spanish gives you access to much of Central and South America, as well as Spain. And even in some US cities like Miami, it’s a more-than-useful skill to have under your belt.

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 to carry on a little further.

Bilingualism doesn’t delay dementia – it simply provides the brain with that ‘reserve tank’ to find ways to deal with the early symptoms of the slowing down of one’s mental faculties. It is similar to the mental gymnastics of doing a daily crossword or Su Doku puzzle, or anything to keep the brain active – though there is no hard evidence to determine whether this does in fact help stave off dementia.

From the article:

Dr. Bialystok began her decades-long research by studying how children learn a second language.

In 2004, she and her colleague Fergus Craik shifted to conduct three studies looking at the cognitive effects in some 150 monolingual and bilingual people between 30 and 80 years old. They found that in both middle and old age, the bilingual subjects were better able to block out distracting information than the single-language speakers in a series of computerized tests. The advantage was even more pronounced in the older subjects.

Dr. Bialystok says other research also shows better performance from bilingual people on tests requiring cognitive control, such as when they are instructed to determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, even if the content doesn’t make sense. For example, in distinguishing, “apples grow on trees” from “apple trees on grow” and “apples grow on noses,” the third sentence requires people to focus on the structure and suppress paying attention to the meaning of the words.

The findings from the 2004 study led Dr. Bialystok to wonder whether these benefits might help older people compensate for age-related losses in learning.

She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 228 memory-clinic patients who had been diagnosed with different kinds of dementia, two-thirds with Alzheimer’s disease. The results, published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2007, suggested that bilingual patients exhibit problematic memory problems later than those who only spoke one language.

Bilingual patients were, on average, four years older than single-language speakers when their families first noticed memory problems, or when the patient first came to the clinic seeking treatment.

So, all you bilingual speakers out there – it really helps to use both your languages regularly. Your future self will thank you one day!

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 Psychiatry shows that brothers and sisters of autistic children have been found to have similar difficulties, showing slower than usual development in problem areas associated with autism. From the article:

Researchers looked at data from nearly 3,000 children in the United States from more than 1,200 families. These families are in the Interactive Autism Network, a web-based tool to help advance autism research through sharing information.

They found that 20 percent of siblings had some kind of language delay or speech problems early in life, and half of those children had problems that were autistic in nature. Speech patterns characteristic of autism include pronoun reversal – switching “you” and “I,” for instance – and invented words.

This isn’t to say that autism is in any way contagious, but it shows that during those important early years of development, proximity to autism has an affect on a child’s behavior, even if they are not autistic.

Since they are not sufferers themselves, speech therapy can do much more to help the non-autistic siblings outgrow these initial language development issues, but the study’s results certainly demonstrate an interesting trend, and one that just may end up helping scientists better understand the disorder.

You can read the whole article here.