Language Trainers Blog

Source: itchyfeetcomic.com

I think anybody who is in the process of learning another language knows this feeling all too well – you’re at a stage when you can communicate reasonably well, you can express your thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics… and then your confidence is utterly shaken when you’re suddenly faced with a small gap in your vocabulary that suddenly becomes a yawning chasm.

This happens a lot to me here in China, where it seems that I can be doing absolutely fine in a conversation until a word comes up that I don’t understand, and suddenly I lose all sense of context. Only one way to fix it – study more vocabulary!

Credit to the great webcmomic Itchy Feet, which often features comics about language learning and expat life. This comic is talking about German, but it really could be talking about any language! Take a look at all the German classes Vancouver has to offer.

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: 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: 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: 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.

Source: dailywritingtips.com

English is a language famous for borrowing words from other tongues to bolster its own vocabulary, but often, due to a process called semantic shift or semantic change, such words end up changing their meaning from the original word, or mean something much more or less specific than the original word implied. English not only borrows words, but also accepts new meanings as they come into common usage – even if that common usage would otherwise be deemed ‘incorrect’ (e.g. the word ‘literally’ recently had its dictionary definition altered to accommodate the unenlightened people who use the term when they should be using ‘figuratively’).

French is a language English has borrowed heavily from over the centuries, and this article has a nice list of 20 words English has lifted from our cheese-loving trans-Atlantic neighbors, such as ennui, détente, panache, riposte, and savant. Adding them to your vocabulary might make you seem a tad pretentious to some, but at least you’ll be safe in the knowledge you’ll be using them correctly!

Source: greatist.com/happiness

A common complaint among would-be language learners is that they’re too old. Most people know that children pick up languages as easily as anything, their young minds absorbing every nugget of information without them even having to try.

However, this does not mean that adults can’t learn a new language and become just as proficient in it than a child who was raised speaking that same language. Adolescence is certainly not the cut-off point for gaining fluency in another language, as this article on greatist.com states:

[...] the results of this latest research, led by Michael Ullmann and Kara Morgan-Short, leave some hope for us geezers out of high school. The study compared two groups of people (average age mid-20s) learning an artificial language: one through explicit training, similar to standard classroom methods, and the other through implicit training, similar to immersion. After six months, the groups performed equally on proficiency tests. But brain scans revealed something surprising: The group that learned through immersion-like training showed brain activity similar to native speakers, while the group stuck translating “see spot run” didn’t. According to Morgan-Short, these results mean that the immersion group might be able to use the language better in stressful situations (Dónde esta el baño?!) and retain the language better than the explicitly-trained group.

To me these results were incredibly interesting for two distinct reasons. First off, they suggest that it is in fact possible for adults to attain native-like proficiency in a foreign language. And second, they’re evidence that language immersion, or being in a place where people speak only the language you’re learning, may be the absolute most effective way for adults to learn a new language.

Immersion learning has long been considered the best way to learn a language, and it seems this study reflects that fact. I live in China, and have found that the westerners who speak the best Mandarin are often the ones who have found Chinese girlfriends or boyfriends and have the best motivation to be able to communicate clearly on everyday topics.

For adults, the language learning ship has not sailed. This isn’t to say that it’s not hard work to learn a language later on in life, but the excuse of “I’m too old” – well, that won’t fly any more.

I thoroughly recommend reading the full article here.

Source: transparent.com

One of the most boring parts of learning a new language is expanding your vocabulary beyond the standard, basic words that you use daily. However, without having a good, all-rounded vocabulary, improving your general fluency is next to impossible, and you’ll always be limited in your range of conversational topics.

Language resource site transparent.com aims to help people improve their vocabulary by giving you a new word in your target language every day, along with a pronunciation guide, its meaning, and an example of its usage.

The site supports a wide variety of foreign languages, and while one word per day doesn’t seem like much, it all adds up. You’re not going to learn a language overnight, so it pays to have something like this helping you to slowly increase your overall vocabulary.

Source: ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com

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.

Source: forvo.com

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.

If you’re having pronunciation problems, forvo.com is definitely a good place to start!