Language Trainers Blog

I discovered this fascinating infographic this morning, which was created by Kaplan International but for some reason has since been removed from their site. The subject matter is how non-native English speakers learn English.

Unsurprisingly, immersion learning is the most popular form of learning English – 65% of people asked said that the best way to learn English is to move to an English-speaking country and take lessons there.

It’s interesting how much the media helps non-native English speakers improve their English – a large percentage of English learners are aided by popular sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother, and movies like the Harry Potter series. It just goes to show that most media in your target language – TV shows, movies, radio, and even comic books and video games – can really help improve your day-to-day comprehension.

Here’s the full infographic – hope you all find it as interesting as I did!

Source: princeston.edu/~lingclub

The University of Oregon have come up with a fascinating selection of linguistic puzzles, and they’re free to play! While certainly challenging your brain, they may also introduce you to a few lesser-known minority languages.

The vast majority are basically linguistic logic puzzles – after being given a few examples of vocabulary from that language, you are then asked to render some other words in the target language.

The very first language is Agta, an endangered language from a northern island in the Philippines. With only around 600 speakers, the vast majority of English speakers have never heard (and probably will never hear) of it, but its morphology and word formation happen to work well for this kind of logic puzzle.

Agta is just one of around 30 languages featured in the linguistic challenges. Check them out for yourself here – test your linguistic side and see how well you do!

Source: chrome.google.com/webstore

Here’s a great little tool that takes a novel approach to learning a new language – in fact, it’s rather similar to the approach taken by the author of the Harry Potter book that gradually teaches you Swedish I posted about earlier this month.

Flewent is an extension for Chrome that takes whatever English website you happen to be browsing, and translates certain words into your target language, depending on the level you choose. You set the target language and a percentage, and Flewent does the rest. If you don’t understand a word, you can simply hover over it for its English translation.

This kind of passive learning can greatly help build vocabulary, and is a great auxiliary aid to standard rote learning. Since you’re reading anyway, you might as well use the opportunity to bolster your knowledge in the language you’re learning. The more vocabulary you learn, the higher you can set the threshold for translated words, until you’re eventually browsing in your target language!

Due to the machine translation nature of the extension (using Google Translate), sometimes the translated words aren’t perfect – occasionally they will misunderstand the word’s context, or give you a word that doesn’t have quite the right nuance of meaning – but generally speaking, it’s a great unstructured way to improve your vocabulary. The latest update even allows you to listen to the translated words, helping you both cement the new word in your mind as well as helping you with pronunciation.

As somebody who often browses primarily text-based websites like Reddit, I think this kind of tool is a fantastic idea!

Flewent is a free extension, and only works with Google Chrome.

Source: techcrunch.com

While not specifically about learning languages, I still thought that this language-related tidbit was worth posting. A recent article on tech blog Techcrunch, somewhat dramatically titled “Putting an end to the biggest lie on the internet”, discusses something that we all both find familiar and yet instantly gloss over – terms of service.

When signing up to any web site (or installing most applications on your computer), it’s perfectly normal to be greeted by a wall of text, often in hard to navigate legalese or otherwise official sounding language, delineating the terms and conditions of using that site or application. Most people do not have an hour and a half to dedicate to reading and understanding each word of the T&C, and so just blithely click “I agree” in order to use the service.

However, companies know this just as well as users do, and some will occasionally hide rather less than savory conditions in there – for example, popular image host Twitpic.com takes credit for your content, and reserves the right to sell your images on to news agencies without giving any credit or money to the photographer.

However, there is a new service that aims to help people wade through the terms and conditions and receive a bullet-point list of what exactly clicking “I agree” entails: the aptly-named TOS;DR (a play on the popular internet abbreviation TL;DR – “too long; didn’t read”).

TOS;DR summarizes terms and conditions for you, and then rates sites, services and apps on a scale from A (the best) to E (the worst). Twitpic is, unsurprisingly, rated an E.

So, next time you’re faced with a list of terms and conditions as long as your arm just to use a particular site, check out TOS;DR and see what you’re really signing away when you click that “I agree” button.

Source: reddit.com/r/languagelearning

Everybody likes to take different approaches to their language learning, and besides immersion learning one technique that has proven to work (and is repeated ad nauseam by my Chinese teacher) is “interesting is the best teacher”. There is a lot of truth in this maxim, as people are far more inclined to stick with something if they find it interesting or fun, rather than straight up rote learning.

So, Reddit user abcd_z came up with an idea to create a version of the first Harry Potter book to help teach people Swedish. The method is pretty clever – the book starts out with only one Swedish word (och, meaning “and”) amongst the usual English; but with every page of the book, more and more words start appearing in the Swedish language rather than English. Gradually, more and more Swedish words are introduced, highlighted, and translated in the margin. The aim is, by the end of the book, virtually the entire page will be in Swedish. You can see the first four pages here, as an example.

The simplicity of J.K. Rowling’s writing helps keep things relatively easy, and you can just focus on the vocabulary. Pretty ingenious, really! While it won’t help much with learning grammar, the vocabulary that the reader will pick up throughout the book will definitely benefit anybody who is either currently learning Swedish, or is thinking of picking it up.

Source: dynamo.dictionary.com

dictionary.com remains my favorite online dictionary – not only because it contains definitions from several different dictionaries and details etymology, but also because they have a sense of fun. The English language is wonderfully quirky, especially when it comes to its vocabulary, and while it is so often the target of complaint from native and non-native speakers both, it is also no small source of fun.

This little flashcard game celebrates that, giving you a 12-question vocabulary quiz on words that you are never very likely to use in any conversation; words like ort, flibbertigibbet, gobo and slumgullion.

If you think your English vocabulary is well-rounded, try it out for yourself and see how you score.

Source: mezzoguild.com

I read this fascinating article recently on how our current method of learning languages is essentially ‘broken’, in that it focuses way too much on learning grammar and not enough on actually immersing yourself in the language.

There are plenty of parts of the article I could quote, but the one that really stuck with me is this sentence:

Grammar rules are what fluent speakers use to describe what they already know.

Think about it: how many native English speakers actually have a good knowledge of grammar, unless they have learned a foreign language to a reasonably high level at some point? How many would be able to describe the difference between the active and passive voice, or the indicative or subjunctive mood? When you learn a language natively, you learn the grammar afterwards, and it gives context to the framework you have already learned. Learning grammar helps with reading and writing, but if you’re learning a language with the primary focus of speaking and listening, the importance of grammar falls by the wayside.

For anybody who is currently learning a foreign language, I really recommend reading the whole article.

So there it is – don’t get caught up in all the grammar – it’ll help with your all round linguistic knowledge and help you contextualize what you’ve already learned; but if you want to learn the language, you should get practicing your speaking, listening, reading and writing.