Language Trainers Blog

Source: reuters.com

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.

Thus for the closing ceremony, a mixed English/French rendition of the anthem – re-titled “I Believe / J’imagine” and performed by both Yanofsky and Annie Villeneuve, a performer from Quebec – was recorded at the last minute, and is set to be performed during the Olympics closing ceremony tonight.

From the original article:

But after a firestorm of criticism from Quebec that the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Games paid too little attention to French-speaking Quebec, the CTV-led broadcast consortium assembled Yanofsky, Villeneuve and a backing chorus early Saturday morning at 2 a.m. at a deserted Olympic Cauldron, just west of the International Broadcast Center, for a reshoot.

There have been quite a few last minute changes made by the Olympic Organization Committee to reflect the multilingual nature of Canada, though this looks to be the most major (and probably final) change for the Winter Olympics this year. What a fantastic couple of weeks it has been!

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 ‘cool’ by the majority of Lebanese youths than the traditional Arabic, which is looked down upon as being distinctly out of fashion. There are many reasons for this, though perhaps one of the chief concerns is that the vast majority of Arabic literature does not address or appeal to today’s youth.

Leila Barakat, the World Book Capital programme manager, says “we must support and encourage Arabic literature for young adults, which is today underdeveloped”.

According to various sources and surveys, there were a worryingly large proportion of Lebanese university students who were unable even to recite the Arabic alphabet. If Arabic is spoken, a lot of the time it is a very light, informal “Facebook Arabic”, far removed from the formal version of the language taught in schools, and often punctuated with numbers (2s, 3s and 7s) to mark phonemes that do not exist in the Roman alphabet.

As a result, an organization has been set up to try to preserve Arabic amongst the country’s teenagers – “Fael Ummer”. This organization has recently decided to impose an annual day of celebration on March the 1st to celebrate the Arabic language – an attempt, they claim, to “preserve the heritage of the Arab nation in the face of globalisation”.

However, this is not to say that having a second language is not still considered a great advantage to the Lebanese – Fael Ummer are simply trying to preserve the traditional dialect of the country. In my mind a noble act, but I believe that this organization is certainly going to have its work cut out to promote Arabic throughout the younger generation.

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 hopes to become a US diplomat in the Middle East someday. As he boarded a flight from Philadelphia to California he figured he’d take some of his English-Arabic flashcards on board with him, to help him brush up on his vocabulary during the flight.

Sadly, since Arabic newspapers are rife with this kind of vocabulary these days, George’s flashcards included cards for words such as “terrorism” and “bomb”. This alone was enough to provoke so much suspicion from the TSA that he was handcuffed and was detained for 4 hours, and the offending flashcards were confiscated. He was asked if he was a member of a terrorist or pro-Islamic organization during his detention, to which he replied no, and was later released without an apology.

George is now suing the TSA.

I feel the TSA acts like it has a blank check as long as what it does is in the name of fighting terrorism. Of course, the TSA’s job is to keep us safe – but they have to follow the Constitution and respect rights.

[If the flashcards triggered such deep suspicion] then we’ve got a real 1st Amendment issue here. I have a right to study Arabic.

- Nicholas George, Pamona College student

Personally, I think this is ridiculous. George also admits that the stamps in his passport from Jordan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan (from an overseas semester last year) as well as a book in his carryon that was “critical of US foreign policy” may also have added to the suspicion – but to me this is just another tale of airport authority paranoia.

Happily, this is pretty much the only circumstances I can think of whereby learning a language could land you in this much trouble…

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 phenomenon than you’d expect – many (perfectly normal) children do not speak their first words until 15 or 16 months. While there is no hard and fast solution to get their kid talking earlier, they were recommended to try to teach him the basics of Infant Sign Language – basic terms such as “thirsty”, “hungry”, “blanket”, “pacifier”, etc.

Many daycare centers and preschools now cater to Infant Sign Language to facilitate easier communication – some starting as early as six weeks old. Contrary to what many believe, teaching your children sign language before they can speak will not delay speech even further, but in fact helps to further speech development – baby signers were found usually to start talking earlier than non-signers. Children who are able to communicate their thoughts like this – even at a rudimentary level – are also far less prone to outbursts, since they are able to communicate their needs before they can actually pronounce them.

We are a sociable species, so it makes sense to allow communication as early as possible during a child’s development – it not only helps in ways mentioned above, but it will also serve to reinforce the infant’s vocabulary, as well as stimulating the basic need for socializing and communicating.

So, while the thought of a baby gesturing in sign language is perhaps a little strange to some of us, it certainly seems to have its advantages!

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 possible. He coined several neologisms (‘new words’) in his writings, many of which are still in use today, such as “Big Brother” – and in fact, we sometimes even use the term “Orwellian” to describe something as harmful to a free society.

Even though Orwell’s love for the clarity of language was well-founded, Nineteen Eighty Four sees the totalitarian government adopt a new, obfuscating form of language – Newspeak – which does away with all synonyms (words that mean the same as another word) and antonyms (words that mean the opposite) to create a vocabulary of simple dichotomies – good and ungood, pleasure and pain, etc..

The effect of this Newspeak is that it forcefully removes from the English language all ideas of freedom and rebellion against the state. If you can’t say something, it makes it a lot harder to think it – which brings the government one step closer towards controlling the thoughts of its populace, thus demonstrating the total dominance of the ruling regime.

Whilst Orwell of course never condones Newspeak in reality (though it was a brilliantly effective literary device), he also was never fond of the opposite extreme. In one of his most prominent essays – Politics and the English Language, he draws up six rules of good writing, which we nowadays perhaps might deem as common sense:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word when a short word will do.
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
4. Use the active rather than passive voice.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

It’s fair to say that Orwell will mostly be remembered for the political statements made through his writing, but it is slightly less known just how much of an effect he had on the English language itself!

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 translate into the handset and have a live translation, anywhere.

We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.

Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.

- Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services

Since they seem to have a pretty good footing in the speech-to-text translation, but it could still be better. I’m looking forward to when we have universal translation with the whole Babelfish-on-your-phone setting, but I wonder how it will affect language learning in general – will people still want to learn German for a vacation to Germany if they can just use their phones to get directions, order in a restaurant, and deal with pretty much any other situation?

Probably not. But even early implementations of this software will be a great failsafe if you need direct translation, then and there. Google does it again…

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 disadvantage!

Source: muturzikin.com

I stumbled upon this fascinating site recently – muturzikin.com – the webmaster of which draws linguistic maps displaying different languages and dialects across continents. I always knew that there were plenty of different American English dialects across our country, but I didn’t expect quite so much detail on a map of the USA. Click on the image below to see the full sized version – be warned, however, the full sized .png is huge (3567×1878, 301Kb), so you might want to open it and then right click -> save it to your computer and view it that way.

So here, it is, a map of indigenous languages, dialects and accents in the USA:

It’s amazing to see just how many Native American languages and dialects remain around the nation. This must have taken a long while to put together, but it was clearly well worth it!

Today marks Zamenhof Day, the 150th birthday of Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (December 15th, 1859), the inventor of the Esperanto language.

Zamenhof’s hope (giving the language its name: the word esperanto is Esperanto for “one who hopes) was that Esperanto would become a universal second language to the world, and would enable anybody, no matter where they were from, to communicate with one another. The international Esperanto-speaking community is estimated at anywhere between 100,000 and 2 million speakers – though they are mainly spread around eastern Europe (in particular the former nations of the old Soviet Union), and in East Asia, particularly mainland China. This has given it something of a reputation of a ‘communist’ language, even though the tongue has no intended affiliation at all.

The language itself is in many ways in a category of its own – being a planned language (that is, one that was created rather than evolved over time), it does not derive from any particular cultural or ethnic group. There are no regional accents or dialects to worry about, and the grammar is without exceptions – that is, everything follows the rules. Like Spanish, the writing system is entirely phonetic, so if you can speak it, you can read and write it. Even learning vocabulary is made easy due to the ‘root’ system and the way smaller words are combined to create longer, more specific terms (agglutination) – by learning around 500 root words of vocabulary, you can still have fairly complex and in-depth conversation.

Studies have also shown that a working knowledge of Esperanto is a great advantage if you want to learn another language – mainly due to the simple yet versatile way in which its grammar works.

Happy birthday, Dr. Zamenhof!

I’ve been visiting China for a month, and have been having a darn good time. In my (mostly fruitless) efforts to learn a bit of survival Chinese, I quickly realised that Mandarin is an extremely complex language, and is perhaps as far away from English as you could ever get.

The main difficulty is the tonal system. Whilst this is something ingrained in Chinese people from infancy, to native English speakers it can take a lot of getting used to. Getting the right word is only half the battle – depending on how you say the word (that is, the intonation of your voice), a word can have wildly different meanings.

Take, for example, the single syllable ‘ma’:

• 媽/妈 (mā) “mother” — high level
• 麻 (má) “hemp” or “torpid”— high rising
• 馬/马 (mǎ) “horse” — low falling-rising
• 罵/骂 (mà) “scold” — high falling
• 嗎/吗 (ma) “question particle” — neutral

There’s a fine line, then, between describing your mother and describing your horse!

The age of the Chinese language means that it has to adapt itself to new concepts and ideas. For example, Mandarin for ‘train’ is 火车 (huǒ chē), which literally means “fire car”. Likewise, a computer – 计算机 (jì suàn jī) – is an “electric brain”; and a helicopter – 直升机 (zhí shēng jī) – is a “straight-rising machine”.

These all make a certain amount of sense, of course – I guess Chinese isn’t as ‘lucky’ as English is, in that we can simply steal words from other languages (e.g. karaoke, Japanese for “empty orchestra”), or make our own from Latin/Greek roots.