Language Trainers Blog

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 learning more interesting, a company have released Fridgelingo in Chinese, a range of fridge magnets that you can rearrange to make phrases.

Very similar to those fridge magnet poetry sets, these magnets have the Chinese character, the pinyin so you know how to pronounce it, and the English translation. There are 3 sets, and each one is tailored to a specific topic (food, talking to your ayi (maid), and sex). The magnets can even be used to leave messages for your maid (“please wash the dishes and make the bed”) or start a shopping list.

Since these are the kinds of things that people like to play around with, and since the fridge is an indispensible part of the house, these magnets help make it a little more fun and interesting to learn Chinese characters.

All 3 sets of magnets are available to order from fridgelingo.com or iwantone.cn.

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, excellent, submerged, countless, dwindle, hurry and hint – words without which it would be quite difficult to imagine present-day English. While it’s true that he lived in an era when the English language was going through something of a growth spurt, with new terms and ideas being invented constantly; it’s still an amazing achievement to have made such a major contribution to the language’s evolution.

He also coined many phrases throughout his plays, for example “in a pickle”, “all that glitters is not gold”, “foregone conclusion”, “one fell swoop”, “heart’s content”, “up in arms”, “vanish into thin air”, “pound of flesh” and “in the twinkling of an eye”. Perhaps it’s more a testament to his skill not so much that he invented such phrases, but that these phrases have survived to modern times.

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 decipherable for anybody who has ever learned French), but some etymologies are truly fascinating.

The study of where places got their names from is known as toponymic etymology. The site gives some further insight into how most places got their names:

Many geographical names are clearly rooted in Man’s observation of his natural environment; the physical location of a settlement: “At the Foot of the Mountain” – Piedmont, the character of an important water course: “The Gentle One” – The Seine, or even just the local vegetation: “Under the Oaks” – Potsdam.

Unsurprisingly, countries and landscapes often derive their names from the characteristics of the people who lived there: “Great Land of the Tattooed” – Great Britain, whilst local mythology and regional rulers also frequently leave their legacy: “Isle of the Monster’s Eye” – Peleponnese, or “Illustrious Emperor” – Zaragoza.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the origins of countries, regions and cities, you can order separate fold-out maps of the USA, Europe or the UK for £4.99 (around $7.50) directly from the site, or a wall poster of the world or the USA for £14.99 (around $23).

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 joined them later, and the Anglo-Saxon language later flourished, but it was not finished there. The Vikings brought their language to the islanders, and even later the French, and all the time the English language continued to grow, develop and evolve with all the new vocabulary and linguistic influences.

Nowadays, it’s very difficult even to speak English without using words borrowed from other sources – a great deal of English vocabulary comes from Latin, Greek, German, French and other languages besides, and even extremely common vocabulary like street, wine, marriage, take and husband are non-Anglish in origin.

However, Anglish – a name coined by Paul Jennings writing a series of articles for Punch in 1966 which riffed on how English would have developed without the Norman conquests – still exists, even if it is a purposeful return to the language’s roots. The Anglish Moot is a wiki-type site composed wholly in a form of modern English without any loanwords at all. While it can be a little work to get through, Anglish is pretty mutually comphrensible with modern-day English speakers. Howver, it does give you something of a new appreciation for just how many loanwords English uses on a daily basis.

take the first few paragraphs of the article for the USA, for example (or as it is known in Anglish, The Banded Folkdoms of Americksland (BFA):

The Banded Folkdoms of Americksland (BFA) is the most dwelt-in land in the landstretch of North Americksland. Its makeup is that of an evenly banded rike, with three branches of rike: the Leaderly, the Lawmootly, and the Lawlordly. The foremost tongue in the land is English, though some Spanish is spoken also.

Americksland, its shortened name, has the greatest landgeld and warband in the world, and is thought to be the world’s lone overrike, since the fall of the Band of Workermootly Kithish Commonwealths (BWKC).

Americksland was banded with England until the Americkish Uprising, which began with the Saying Forth of the Selfhood of the Banded Folkdoms of Americksland in 1776. Americksland has since fought other wars, namely: the War of 1812, its war with Mexico, the Americkish Kith War, its war with Spain, and the two World Wars.

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 is known as a meme: an image or concept that spreads rapidly from user to user over the internet (also known as a “macro image”). There are many of these, and to the unfamiliar their names seem very odd indeed, for example: “socially awkward penguin”, “good guy Greg”, “nope! Chuck Testa”, and “internet husband”. Confused? Luckily there is a site that seeks to help out those dazed and confused by the huge variety of memes that have gained popularity or notoriety – knowyourmeme.com.

However, it seems that in the 5 years since the meme first became popular online and spawned thousands of copycats (sorry), there is more to “lolspeak” than meets the eye. So much so, in fact, that Jordan Lefler, a student at the Louisiana State University, has published a 129-page thesis entitled “I can has thesis?: A linguistic analysis of lolspeak”. In the thesis she explores “lolspeak” from its very roots as an image meme, to its evolving linguistic properties. While it may seem to be a randomly warped version of English, it turns out that “lolspeak” – kind of like ebonics – is an artificial dialect in its own right, and actually has its own syntax, formulas and punctuation rules, the proof being that there is enough structure there for somebody to write an entire thesis about it.

You can read the entire thesis for free on the lsu.edu site.

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 their native tongue when uttering profanities due to surprise or pain, but with the help of Swearport you can also become proficient in expressing yourself in an intense way in your non-native language.

The app’s marketing blurb claims that “Swearport lets you become a global swearing master”, and not only gives you a list of rude words, but even an audio pronunciation for each term from a native speaker. It even gives an “intensity rating” for each word, letting you know just how offensive each term is considered to native speakers.

This is one app that you may need to be a little careful with…

• Swearport for iOS
• Swearport for Android

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 long since” (or rather, “a long time ago”).

Here’s the full song, with a modern English translation:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne* ?

CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my jo (or my dear),
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

English translation:

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS