Language Trainers Blog

Lately, I’ve found myself listening to music in foreign languages. Although English is my first language, I’ve never shied away from enjoying music from around the world. Sometimes listening to foreign music soothes my mind a bit easier than listening to an English song.

Why is this? Well for starters, people enjoy listening to tunes in a foreign language because it’s easier to focus on the artists voice and musical instruments. Usually when you listen to music in your own language, your mind focuses on the words rather than the melodic instruments playing or the tones an artist carries in their voice. Some would assume that lyrics need to be understood in order to be enjoyed, but there is actually no truth to that. Many students find it easier to study with foreign music playing in the background because they can enjoy listening passively. While studying, your brain isn’t working to decipher lyrics, instead it’s just enjoying the music playing. So while listening to the music’s core, it’s easy to appreciate the artist’s tone and instruments.

Another benefit of enjoying foreign music is exposing yourself not only to music from different languages but cultures. Often times, you’ll find many similarities between your native music and foreign songs. Language does not limit emotion, and music often carries that sentiment. Listeners are sometimes inspired to learn new languages because of their love for international music. Why not try learning a new language with Language Trainers, and perhaps decipher lyrics to your favorite foreign language song?

Game of Thrones is an epic fantasy series on HBO based off George R.R. Martin books. What’s even cooler than the books being adapted to a television series is the creation of a made-up language called Dothraki. Thanks to the brilliance of David Peterson, a language creator for the Language Creation Society, Dothraki came to life in the Game of Thrones television series.

Dothraki, although a made-up language, has a dictionary with over 3000 words. In the dictionary, readers cannot only learn words but the proper way to form sentences and phrases. This might be quite helpful if you’re trying to pen a Dothraki love poem to someone special or send a unique birthday greeting.

Want to take a try at Dothraki? Here are some popular phrases:

Aena shekhikhi! Good morning!

Asshekhqoyi vezhvena! Happy birthday!

Yer zheanae (sekke). You’re (very) beautiful

So good luck with your Dothraki and please let us know how it goes by adding a comment below. If you fancy a challenge that will actually be useful for you one day (apart from just impressing your friends and yourself), why not try Arabic lessons instead?

Did you know many police dogs are given basic training in foreign languages? The animals are usually brought in from different European countries where they received basic training in the country’s native language. Once brought over to the United States, handlers maintain the original commands as well as English ones. Dogs are adept enough to learn several languages for training and usually become familiar with bilingual commands very quickly. Next time you hear a trainer command a police dog in German to “packen” or “fass,” I would stay clear because you may get bitten!

Why not learn a new language to train your own pets at home? Click here for more information.

Look at the Jobs Market

Do you want to earn a bigger salary? Of course you do, we all do. One of the best ways of increasing your earning power is by picking up more skills. One of the skills which could most help you in your career is the knowledge of a second language. Even if you haven’t yet started studying a foreign tongue then a quick look at a careers website should be enough to show you how good an idea this could be in the long term. If you find yourself wondering where to find a great place to take Chinese lessons in Toronto after doing this then the thought of improving your career can be your motivation to go ahead and do it.

Make It Great Fun

Who said that learning a second language had to be dull? There is absolutely no reason for this to be the case. If you would be best motivated by playing games, watching TV shows or doing something else in your new tongue then this is what you should do. We are all driven on by different things and as long as you are learning and having fun this could be all the motivation you need to keep going. By studying with a firm of professional language experts like Language Trainers you can get the basics right without taking any of the fun out the process.

Talk More

One of the reasons why we don’t always progress with a second language in the way we would like to is that we don’t always talk enough. This is a vital part of the process but one which can be difficult to start. You might be worried about making a mistake but mistakes are part of the learning process and simply can’t be avoided. At some point you need to pluck up the courage to start talking more. The sooner you do this the better and you will find that working with a native speaking teacher from Language Trainers helps you build up your confidence quickly in this respect. Once you get into the habit of speaking a lot in your second language nothing will stop you from improving your linguistic skills.

Try a Different Approach

If what you are doing isn’t working then it might be time to try something else. This sounds like a fairly obvious piece of reasoning but it is something which can really hold back your progress if you don’t consider it early on enough. Maybe you need to adopt a more hands on approach, for instance. It might be that you are learning on your own with a book or on the internet and need to think about taking at least a few more formal classes to get started. If this is the case then you could get started by asking something like; where can I take Chinese classes in Toronto? You might be surprised to see how easy it is to get classes on just about language in just about any city in North America.

Source: yourdailygerman.wordpress.com

As a keen language learner I love reading blogs about learning languages, even if I’m not studying the language in question. I have taken German classes in Washington and have worked with many German people over the years, but my German is still fairly terrible out of lack of practice.

However, one thing I will say about German is that I always found it fairly simple to learn once you understood the rules. Compared with English’s hundreds of grammatical and syntactical rules (and then its penchant for breaking them at the drop of a hat), the German language works in a fairly logical way.

So I am always pretty delighted to read the long and informative posts on one of my favourite blogs, Your Daily German. The best thing about this blog is the author’s great sense of humor and the tendency to learn actual day-to-day German – the kind of German that German people actually speak – rather than simply learning as you would from a text book at school.

The most recent entry discusses another reason why German is easy in many ways: prefixes. Whereas in many languages there are certainly plenty of verbs that are related, the tendency for agglutination (that is, adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words to alter their meanings) in German means that once you learn the base word, it’s very easy to learn what all the agglutinated forms will mean.

The example they use is the verb haben, which means “to have”. It’s a simple, fairly regular verb in German, and is pretty much always used to denote possession (unlike in English when it can also denote consumption, e.g. “I had a burger for lunch”).

By knowing that haben means “have”, you can then use your knowledge of common prefixes to recognize other forms of the verb: for example, mithaben (mit (“with) + haben (“to have”)) means “to have with”, as in to have something with you or on you. Sometimes the prefix has a more idiomatic meaning, like vorhaben (vor (“in front of”) + haben (“to have”)) means “to plan” or “to intend”.

The blog lists many other reasons why German can be easy to learn (though it often intentionally omits the reasons why it can be difficult!), so I definitely recommend checking it out if you’re learning German or, like me, are just interested in other languages!

Source: martinamor.dk

Following on from an earlier blog post about learning to read and write Korean in 15 minutes, I recently found this entry on software programmer and keen traveler Martin Amor’s blog about learning to read Thai script in 24 hours (over a period of a week).

Martin, who describes himself as “the direct opposite of a language buff”, was originally overwhelmed with the thought of learning Thai, but was pleasantly surprised to find that he made very fast progress once he set his mind to it.

Though it’s generally known as the “Thai alphabet”, the language is in fact an abugida: which is a writing system in which every consonant may invoke an inherent or implied vowel sound.

Martin’s technique for learning to read and write Thai script involves learning the consonants – of which there are 44 – in groups of 7. Once he was comfortable with reading and writing those, he moved on to the 8 vowels in the Thai script, taking great care to learn how to pronounce them properly.

Like several Asian languages like Mandarin, Thai is a tonal language, so Martin’s next step was to practice what he had learned so far and combine that with the correct intonations, learning each of the 5 tones.

This sounds like a lot of work, but Martin – a self-confessed beginner with little to no language aptitude – achieved it in less than 24 hours over a period of a week. The end of the week involved him being able to read through a children’s book in Thai – a very satisfying experience for somebody so new to such an unfamiliar script!

For the full story on Martin’s first week of learning Thai, check out his blog.

My own experience of learning to read Mandarin is a different case – it takes a long time to learn to read and write Chinese characters, as each one represents its own object, concept or thought, and you also need to learn how to pronounce it along with the character, as the character itself gives no clue. I took Chinese lessons in Toronto and found them very useful. Canadians considering going through the same experience should take a look at some of the Chinese lessons Vancouver has to offer!

Source: itunes.apple.com

Claiming to “change the way people learn languages”, Duolingo has been running for a while, and has been lauded as an “elegant solution” to 2 problems – helping people learn languages, and translating foreign language texts on the web.

For example, if you’re a native English speaker who wants to learn Spanish, it gives you Spanish sentences from around the web that are relevant to your level, along with a crib sheet of words that you may not know. After you’ve finished, it then highlights words that you had trouble with and gives you more real-world examples of their usage. As you translate more sentences, you not only learn new vocabulary, but you’re also helping out with translating Spanish websites into English!

Now the iPhone app is out, and like the website, it is 100% free.

Duolingo certainly is a practical and elegant way to learn a new language, though whether it’s the most effective technique for learning a language is doubtful. However, it “gameifies” the language learning process, by making it more fun and interactive, and allowing you to “level up”, compete with your friends, and generally give the user an addictive way to improve their language skills. The fact that it also has the side effect of helping translate the web is a huge bonus.

You can learn more about Duolingo by watching this video:

While you’re at it, have a look at some of our Spanish classes Miami is hosting!

Source: youtube.com

A few weeks ago I made a post about the hyper-polgylot Richard Simcott, who speaks an almost unbelievable 16 languages, most of which are at a fluent or near-fluent level. His skills come from constant use and working in a job that affords him a great deal of time to practice and improve his skills.

Well, just to make us all feel a little worse about their own language learning… Here’s another hyper-polyglot – Timothy Doner, a 16-year-old American who currently speaks around 20 languages (though the level of fluency fluctuates a lot, and most of them are nowhere near the level of Simcott). However, the variety of languages is incredible, ranging from more ‘standard’ languages such as French, Dutch and Italian, to Middle Eastern and Asian languages like Farsi, Arabic, Yiddish, Hebrew, Mandarin, all the way to African languages such as the “clicky” South African language of Xhosa, Ojibwe, and Swahili! Languages from almost every continent is featured in his repertoire, which is no small achievement for a 16-year-old.

He switches between them with surprising ease, and what really comes across is not so much his undeniable talent for languages, but his passion for them. You can tell that he really enjoys learning about so many different languages and cultures, and making friends from all around the world in doing so. As my old Chinese teacher always said, “interesting is the best teacher”, and it certainly seems to be working for Doner. You can see more of his videos on his YouTube channel.

If you think you can do better than his Italian, you should check out some of the Italian lessons New York has going on at the moment!

Source: quora.com

As a learner of Mandarin myself, one question that fellow Mandarin users often have is in marking the difference between 2 words that Chinese people use to describe foreign people: laowai (老外) and waiguoren (外国人).

Due to China’s history of isolationism, many Chinese people still see people in black or white terms: either they are “Chinese” or “not Chinese”. They don’t particularly differentiate, say, an American from a French person. Both of them are waiguoren, both of them are laowai. But the two words do actually conjure up slightly different nuances of meaning.

Many foreigners who have not had much experience of Mandarin think laowai is a perjorative term, since it literally means “old outsider” (whereas waiguoren simply means “foreign country person”). However, in Chinese, lao is actually used as an honorific to describe people that you have known a long time and know well enough to refer to them in such a way. This isn’t to say that laowai cannot be used as an insult, however – like so many things in Chinese (and languages in general), it depends entirely on context.

This reply to the very same question on quora.com, a crowd-sourced Q&A website, has more information:

Whether or not laowai 老外 is pejorative depends on context.

Many Chinese will argue that it’s not pejorative at all. Lao 老, after all, is an honorific denoting seniority and informality, such as when used with a surname: Lao Liu 老刘, “Old Liu”. Laowai is often used in a similar way to demonstrate informality, with the feeling that terms like waiguoren are too formal and stuffy. In certain circumstances, however, this informality can be interpreted as showing a lack of appropriate respect. If one were to refer to Hu Jintao, President of China, as Lao Hu, this would normally be interpreted as a lack of respect. In the same way, laowai can be interpreted as slightly disrespectful rather than as a term of endearment.

In some uses, laowai is clearly pejorative, for instance when used as an adjective. “You are too laowai” 你太老外了 literally means “You are too foreign”, but in fact carries the meaning “You are ignorant”.

Perhaps the best measure of whether a word is pejorative or not is to gauge what the subject himself/herself perceives. In my experience, most foreigners do not like being referred to as laowai except in the most informal of surroundings and by close friends who may use the term in a joking manner, similar to the way one might refer to a close Caucasian friend as a “honky” without causing offense.

Personally, I never use laowai to refer to myself or other foreigners.

There is nothing negative about the word itself; it’s all about how the word is used. In this sense it’s similar to “Chinaman”. There is nothing inherently pejorative about this term; it simply denotes “a man from China”. However, through widespread misuse this term became recognized as being racist. Laowai is nowhere near “Chinaman” in terms of negative connotation, but through misuse has also gained a certain pejorative sense.

Live in the City of Brotherly Love and need to improve your Mandarin? Take a look at some of the Chinese lessons Philadelphia has to offer.