Language Trainers Blog

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: 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.

Idioms are funny things. In my efforts to get better at Mandarin, I have found that there are some things I can work out on my own, and some things that – even if I look them up and find out the meaning – completely flummox me until they’re explained to me by a native speaker.

One thing I recently discovered that is heavily in the latter category is the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú). It literally means “fried squid”, 炒 being a very common word in the world of food for any fried dish, and 鱿鱼 simply meaning “squid”. However, after I heard the phrase come up several times in a conversation having seemingly nothing at all to do with food, I had to ask, why the fried squid?

As it turns out – and much to the amusement of my Chinese friends – their conversation had nothing to do with food at all. They were talking about an ex-colleague who had recently been sacked from their job. As it turns out, in Chinese the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) is an idiomatic phrase meaning ‘to be fired’.

It was only when they explained how this phrase came to be that I started to understand what was going on. To my surprise, the etymology has nothing to do with squid or frying, but more the shape of a fried squid. As anybody who has had fried calamari will know, squid curls into a little coil when you fry it, just like in the picture above. This is a reference to a long time ago in China, when itinerant workers would be provided lodgings by whoever employed them, and so if they were fired they would have to go back to the house, roll up their bed covers (卷铺盖 juǎn pū gài), and move out. Over time, due to the similarity between rolling up bedrolls and the shape of fried squid, the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) came to mean ‘to be fired’.

Mandarin certainly is an amazing language, but sometimes I feel like the more I learn, the more I realise just how much there is to take in!

The word ambidextrous is familiar to most people: it describes somebody who is be able to use both hands (and sometimes, in the case of soccer, feet) equally well. The word comes from the Latin words ambi meaning “both” (the same root for words like ambivolent) and dexter, meaning “right-handed” or simply “right”. Therefore the literal meaning is “to be right-handed in both hands”.

Since the majority of people are right-handed, being left-handed was often seen as contrary or against the norm. Since a mostly right-handed populace generally means that a society will use tools and implements primarily suited to right-handed people, anything to do with the left side was seen as unfavorable, and even potentially injurious.

This eventually gave rise to the Latin word for “left-handed” or “left”, sinister, having a rather more negative meaning in modern-day English. We use to word to describe a wicked, evil or troublesome person or deed, when the original root word simply refers to a direction.

However, this also means that ambidextrous has a wonderful, if little-known, antonym: ambisinistrous. This means to be equally clumsy or unskilled with both hands!

British comedian David Mitchell, best known for his role in cult British TV show Peep Show as well as being a frequent guest on panel quiz shows, is also famous for his wit and bile-fuelled rants about society in general. His “David Mitchell’s Soap Box” series has gained quite a bit of fame on YouTube.

Though he seems like the kind of person who would have only distaste for American culture, he is actually pretty forgiving of the intricacies of American English and the liberties Americans have taken with the Brits’ precious language. However, there are some that (in my opinion quite justifiably) fuel his ire, namely “I could care less”, and “hold down the fort”. Take a look at the video for yourself:

I actually made the exact same point (as have many other bloggers) about “could care less” in a previous post. Please, let’s all band together and eradicate this pointless, nonsensical warped phrase from the English language!

Now, everybody’s heard of the great bard, William Shakespeare, but perhaps not everybody knows that he was much more than just a prodigious playwright. The English language has Shakespeare to thank for a great deal more than Macbeth, Hamlet, et al.: he also invented a great number of words and phrases.

According to painstaking calculations, Shakespeare used 17,667 different words throughout all his works, and at least 1 in 10 of these words had never been used before. That’s somewhere in the region of 2,000 words that Shakespere coined himself. Among them are common terms such as lonely, excellent, submerged, countless, dwindle, hurry and hint – words without which it would be quite difficult to imagine present-day English. While it’s true that he lived in an era when the English language was going through something of a growth spurt, with new terms and ideas being invented constantly; it’s still an amazing achievement to have made such a major contribution to the language’s evolution.

He also coined many phrases throughout his plays, for example “in a pickle”, “all that glitters is not gold”, “foregone conclusion”, “one fell swoop”, “heart’s content”, “up in arms”, “vanish into thin air”, “pound of flesh” and “in the twinkling of an eye”. Perhaps it’s more a testament to his skill not so much that he invented such phrases, but that these phrases have survived to modern times.

Here’s a fantastic web site if you’re learning a language and need some help with vocabulary (or in the case of langauges with different scripts, flashcards). After selecting the language you’re learning, memrise.com helps you learn with a gardening metaphor – it teaches you new words as ‘seeds’. These ‘seeds’ are then ‘watered’ through you testing yourself via a mixture of multiple choice questions and user input. Once your ‘seeds’ are ‘watered’ enough to become ‘plants’, you’ll have to keep them blossoming by revisiting the site and redoing the tests to prove that you recognize the words/characters you’ve learned up until that point, as well as adding new ‘seeds’ to your garden. Leave your ‘plants’ alone too long and they’ll wilt.

From there, you can ‘harvest’ new ‘seeds’ (i.e. learn new words/characters) and add them to your garden. Gradually your garden grows in size, and you’ll have to keep all the plants watered by continually re-testing yourself.

This novel flashcard concept brings an element of gaming into your study, and also enables you to track your progress in a rather unique way. More importantly, the site has a community of people who can assist your learning by providing helpful mnemonics and aide-memoires if you’re having trouble committing certain words or characters to memory.

Learning Chinese characters is occasionally very interesting, but mostly an arduous process, and Memrise has really helped me expand my vocabulary. When you get something wrong, it brings up the information page on the character in question, complete with tips on how to remember it next time. It also keeps track of all the characters I’m having trouble remembering, and gives them a little more emphasis during testing. Most importantly, it forces you to reinforce your knowledge by testing yourself before your plants wilt and die.

Try it out for yourself at memrise.com!

The legendary Giacomo Casanova

This is a fantastic article about sexual eponyms – an eponym is a word derived from somebody’s name, or a place. There are hundreds of them in English, and we use them without ever thinking about their origins: for example, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is named after physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. Likewise, a mausoleum is named after the ancient Carian leader Mausolus (Μαύσωλος), who had a huge tomb built for him by his sister and widow: now the word mausoleum refers to any grand tomb.

These eponyms, however, are more sexual in nature – words like sadism, masochism, and casanova are commonly used eponymous words, though most people simply use the words without being aware of their roots.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, interestingly-titled “the pervs behind the words” – you can read the whole article here.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

The words: masochism, sadomasochism

The obverse of a sadist is a masochist – someone who gets off on being abused – and no one could possibly deserve this label more than the person who inspired it, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Besides having a sexual fetish named after him, Sacher-Masoch is best known for writing Venus in Furs, a 19th century novel about a man’s willing submission to a cruel woman who treats him as her slave. It was based on a true story – his own. In 1869, Sacher-Masoch actually signed a contract with his mistress in which he agreed to be her slave for six months (with the stipulation that she had to allow him time to write).

The term masochism was coined during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime, and he was understandably not pleased. The man was a great writer, feminist, and opponent of antisemitism, and yet this is how he goes down in history. It was a form of abuse that was not to his liking.

As someone who is currently learning Mandarin, I find the language very challenging – both to speak and to write – as well as extremely quirky. It is, however, a very satisfying language to learn, as it’s almost impossible to learn to speak Chinese without learning a little about Chinese culture.

One element I find especially interesting is the way Chinese combines words to form new words or phrases. A much earlier post touches on this, discussing how Chinese has to combine ideas to give names to modern concepts like the computer:

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 – 电脑 (diànnǎo) – is an “electric brain”; and a helicopter – 直升机 (zhí shēng jī) – is a “straight-rising machine”.

However, Chinese also mixes together everyday words to bring a new meaning to the combination. Two good examples of this actually concern combining words with opposite meanings: zuǒyòu (左右) and dōngxi (东西).

On their own, zuǒ (左) and yòu (右) mean “left” and “right” respectively. Put them together, however, and you get the word for ‘about’ or ‘around’. For example, when Chinese people ask me how long I’ve been living in China, I reply “Yī nián zuǒyòu” (一年左右) – “about one year”.

Onto the second example – the individual words dōng (东) and xī (西) mean “east” and “west”, but together they form a multi-purpose word for ‘thing’. My first few months in China were plagued with me pointing at food and other objects in shops, and not knowing the word for that object, asking the shopkeeper “Zhège dōngxi shì duōshǎo qián?” (这个东西是多少钱) – “how much is this thing?”. It’s a word that I still often use, and so do most Chinese people.

The strange thing is, both of these combinations make a certain amount of sense. Sure, it’s not as literal as saying hónglǜdēng (红绿灯) for “traffic light” (literally “red green light”), but there’s a certain degree of poetry to the words.

Recently, having started learning Chinese characters, a few realizations have hit me. One of these was the word mǎshàng, which means “soon”. I never gave much thought to the word until I learned the characters: 马上. The second character, shàng (上) is a very common character with many meanings, but usually means ‘on’ or ‘next to’ (for example, the city in which I live, Shànghǎi (上海), means “next to the sea”). The first character, mǎ (马), means “horse” – so the word literally means “on a horse”.

Presumably, in ancient China, since horse was the fastest method of travel, anybody on a horse would be arriving soon. I don’t know if that’s the actual etymology, but I really want it to be!

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

“John’s chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day ‘cos he wanted to jam with his bred’rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.”

Be honest, how much of that did you understand? If the answer is ‘not much’, then don’t worry – you’re not alone.

A while ago, the BBC performed a small study on the slang terms used by children from schools across the United Kingdom, and found that the vocabulary used varied even more than they thought it would.

With England being such a small country in comparison to the USA, it’s often amazing to learn that their cultural and linguistic variation is just as pronounced – if not more pronounced – than on our side of the Atlantic. While a New Yorker and somebody from Alabama can understand one another without too much difficulty, the devil is in the details. Particular terms, words and phrases are the giveaway and often the obstacle that prevents total comprehension.

With children now growing up as part of the “Facebook generation”, there is even more opportunity for words and phrases to spread. Sites like Twitter can spread ideas around even faster and more efficiently than TV or music ever could. While there are many ‘universal’ phrases that have penetrated adolescent slang (for example, “LOL”), the regional differences of the slang terms most often used is surprising, and occasionally makes it extremely difficult to follow even simple conversations.

For those still curious, here’s the ‘translation’ of the above paragraph into plain English – the same paragraph was rendered using the slang of the 5 schools participating in the study. If you want to see the other 4 ‘translations’.

“John’s girlfriend is really pretty. But she got mad with him the other day because he wanted to hang out with his friends rather than take her to the cinema. She got really angry and stormed off. It was very funny.”