Artist and traveller Ryan Estrada recently created a comic that claims to teach readers how to read the Korean alphabet – known to Koreans as Hangul – in around 15 minutes. Obviously practice will help you remember what you’ve learned, but the basis for the ease of learning is that Korean’s alphabet is actually extremely simple.
Though users of the Roman alphabet tend to freak out when they see a different writing system – for example Chinese characters, Thai script, or the Cyrillic alphabet – the Korean alphabet has one thing other writing systems don’t: 100% logic.
As opposed to every other writing system, the Korean alphabet was thought up by a single person, who had simplicity in mind. Thanks to this, the Korean alphabet is not only simple and logical, but is very regular: that is to say, if you know that a character is pronounced a certain way, you know that it will always be pronounced that way.
Head over to Ryan Estrada’s Tumblr page to read the comic. Of course, being able to read Korean doesn’t mean you can understand what any of it says, but for those of us interested in learning different alphabets it’s a great find.
Dallas-based pizza chain Pizza Patron is spearheading a promotion whereby if you order a pizza in Spanish – whether you’re a fluent speaker or it’s your first time speaking – you get it for free.
The promotion is slated to start on June 5th, from 5pm to 8pm.
Why are they doing this? Is it a statement against the immigration reform that is currently a hot topic for debate in several southern states? Or simply an effort to raise awareness of the chain among their primary customer base?
According to Andrew Gamm, Pizza Patron’s brand director, “Because we sell a $4.99 large pizza, many people presume it’s not good. So, sampling is one of the most successful mechanisms we have to build our customer base.” 80,000 pizzas are expected to be given away.
However, the promotion has been met with a certain amount of criticism: some believe that it’s discrimination, and one conservative group has come out saying that it should be promoting the use of English in America, rather than Spanish.
Personally, I think it’s a great idea. If you’re in delivery range of a Pizza Patron on June 5th, I’d heartily recommend giving it a try, even if you’ve never spoken Spanish before! I’m sure they’re expecting to get many stumbling order in broken Spanish on the day.
May 23, 2012 at 5:42 am
· Filed under vocabulary · Posted by Matthew Fallon
One of the wonderful things about English is that thanks to the host of languages it ‘borrows’ and derives words from, there is pretty much a word for everything. True, there are some facets of meaning that English cannot describe in a single word (such as the Pascuense word tingo, meaning “to gradually borrow items from somebody else’s house until they are left with nothing”), but with an estimated 1 million plus words in the English language, there’s usually a word to fit the occasion.
So it is when I wanted to describe “somebody with wavy hair” in a single word, and came upon the word cymotrichous (pronounced “sy-MO-trik-us”), which literally means “wavy-haired”. Like many other English words, it comes from ancient Greek: κῦμα (kuma, meaning “wave”), and τριχ- (trikh, a form of θρίξ (thrix), meaning “hair”).
Cymotrichous might not be a word that most people will have ever heard before, but that doesn’t make it any less legitimate!
For those learning to speak a new language, pronunciation can often be a hurdle. For example, stress is very important in Italian, and learners need to be very clear on which syllable(s) they stress. While most words follow the rules, there are always exceptions, and getting the stress right may be the difference between being understood by a native speaker and being greeted with a look of incomprehension.
While the claim of “all the words in the world, pronounced” is a pretty bold claim, forvo.com is undeniably a pretty impressive achievement. It’s an excellent idea for a website: a crowd-sourced pronunciation guide. Users ask for words they are not sure about to be pronounced, and other users provide recordings demonstrating exactly how they should be said. The recordings are then saved to the site’s database, so if anybody else searches for the same word, they’re taken to the entries that already exist. It’s rather ingenious, and using the site is simple as pie.
In the case of multiple dialects or versions of a language (for example, US vs UK English), the user’s nationality is listed along with the recording, so you can easily distinguish them.
Sometimes great ideas are born, and sometimes they are just clever combinations of existing great ideas. The Language Immersion plugin for Chrome is in the latter category, combining the existing technology of Google Translate and the individual user’s browsing habits to aid language learners.
So, how does it work? The method is actually extremely simple: you tell it what language you want to learn (of the 64 currently supported by Google Translate) and your current familiarity with that language. In turn, when you browse your regular websites the plugin will take specific words or phrases and translate them into the language that you’re learning. This way, you’re learning vocabulary while you browse. If you don’t know the translated word, you can click it to translate it back to English. You can also change the level of immersion on the fly.
While it works better for some languages than for others, this is still a wonderful idea, and a very simple (almost effortless) implementation.
Here’s a video demonstrating the plugin in a little more detail. Download it here. You’ll need to be using Google Chrome as your browser.
Thankfully verbs in Chinese don’t conjugate depending on who’s doing them, so the memories of hours and hours spent learning verb conjugation tables are still a fairly distant memory for me. However, learners of other languages – particularly romance languages – are not so lucky. These languages not only have different verb endings depending on the subject of the verb, but several different verb types. Let’s take French as an example: it has -er, -re, -ir verbs, as well as irregular and reflexive verbs. Now multiply all these verb types by the number of different verb tenses for each one (present, passé composé, imparfait, futur simple, etc.) as well as the indicative and subjunctive moods for each type and tense… you suddenly have yourself a pretty lengthy list of verb stems and endings that you simply need to know in order to communicate effectively.
The most effective way to learn these types of things is simply rote learning. However, that doesn’t mean you have to do it by mind-numbingly reading and reciting verb tables over and over again to drill them into your mind – and this is where Conjuguemos comes in.
Conjuguemos is a web site that gives you a verb, a pronoun and a tense, and asks you to compile the correct form of the verb from those clues. You can tailor your testing so it only asks you for specific verbs, specific pronouns or specific tenses. They also have flashcards for learning vocabulary, as well as vocabulary lists to help increase the number of words you know along with perfecting your verb conjugations.
The site includes tests for French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. It also includes Latin tests, but these are unfortunately not available for free users. The site does, however, work via an ‘honor system’ of sorts, in that teachers and schools can pay what they think is a fair price for unlimited use of the site.
Rote learning is never fun, but making it into some kind of game like this really does help you with your language drills. I have also mentioned memrise.com on this blog before, which is another great way to make otherwise dull drills more fun.
Back at school I had a French teacher who wasn’t a native French speaker, but still spoke the language fluently. His grammar was perfect, he had a wide vocabulary, but many students just could not take him seriously. Why? Well, he spoke French in what can only be described as a broad British accent. While a French person wouldn’t have much difficulty in understanding what he was saying, he never at any point sounded like a French speaker.
However, it is important when learning another language to learn the accent along with it. As this article says, an accent will help you in many ways – namely, improving your clarity, as well as fostering intimacy and promoting respect.
As regular readers will know, I’m currently learning Mandarin Chinese, and am in contact with others who are also learning the language. Many native American English speakers I know who learn Chinese make very little effort to affect a Mandarin accent when they speak, which is a much larger problem with Mandarin since it is a tonal language, and when speaking a tonal language in an atonal accent, it’s much harder to distinguish what tones the speaker is using.
Likewise, I know many foreigners who have learned English, and while many of them have around the same level of fluency, some have worked on their English accent so much that they are almost indistinguishable from native English speakers, while others still sound like a foreigner speaking English (albeit very well!).
So, don’t be afraid to emphasize your target language’s accent when speaking it. Of course, conversing with native speakers (or perhaps watching movies and TV shows in the language) will help you master the intricacies of the accent.
Rose Ramraj languagetrainers.com
Rose is a Blogger of all things fascinating. Her educational background is in writing and business studies. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and two mischievous toy poodles.
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