When you learn a new language it can make a huge difference to many aspects to your life. The most exciting thing of all is that you won’t know until you do it exactly what will change and in what way. It is like opening a door in your life which leads you off in new and unexpected directions. When it comes to the Spanish language there are a few possible outcomes we could look at here, although these aren’t the only ones.
Make New Friends
If you live in a city with a big Spanish speaking population then you are severely restricted in your number of potential friendships by not knowing the language. Once you pick up the basics you will find that you are keen to talk to some native speakers and expand your conversational skills. You might also see that doing this opens up a whole social circle and trips to cultural events which you have never been aware of before. If there is one piece of advice worth listening to it is to always take Spanish lessons in New York!
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!
Here’s an interesting map showing some of the main writing systems used throughout the world, with the word “Wikipedia” written in each alphabet.
The source website is in Japanese, but you can still see the wide variety of writing systems used, from the Latin alphabet in North and South America and most of Europe, to the various pictograms and syllabic systems used in Asia (Chinese Hanyu, Korean Hangul, Japanese Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana), to Arabic scripts in the Middle East, to Cyrillic alphabets used in Russia and Eastern Europe, and many others besides.
Click on the image below to get the full sized version.
It’s amazing to see how many different scripts are used on the Indian subcontinent, where different (but similar) alphabets are used depending on where you are and which particular Indian language or dialect you use, including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and several others. Considering that both North and South America essentially only use the Latin alphabet, it’s interesting to see how some smaller regions have several scripts while huge areas use a single alphabet across many different languages!
Blogger M. Asher Cantrell from mentalfloss.com recently put up a very interesting post on 12 letters that have at some point existed in the English alphabet, but have since been phased out.
Among them are familiar symbols such as the ampersand (&), ash (æ) and ethel (œ), which are still seen today, though not considered part of the Latin alphabet.
An interesting one is the letter thorn (Þ), which was used in the word “ye”, an old English form of “the”. Contrary to popular belief, the ‘y’ was actually a Þ, and was pronounced ‘th’ – so those people who try to sound old-timesy by saying “ye” this and “ye” that are actually wrong!
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!
Reddit user imkharn took an interesting approach in making a map of the USA – he used the literal English translations of the etymology for each state name.
For each item I followed the etymology back until it was translatable to English. For some states this meant more then one step.
Louisiana comes from Louis which comes from the Frankish word hluda wiga which means heard of or Famous War.
Washington comes from Old English and means estate of a man named Wassa. Wassa in turn is an Anglo-Saxon name for Genius of the Woods.
While it isn’t perfect (other users have already poked holes in imkharn’s etymological derivations), the result is a very interesting version of a map with which we’re all intimately familiar. While some places have simpler and understandable derivations (e.g. Oregon meaning “beautiful”, Texas meaning “friend”, or Maine meaning “mainland”), some go through numerous derivations and become pretty surreal (for example Washington becomes “estate of the genius of the woods”, and Florida becomes “flowery Easter”).
It’s easy to forget our trans-Atlantic cousins in Europe speak a huge variety of languages throughout the 50 countries that make up the continent. Given the prevalence of English, it being Europe’s (and the rest of the world’s) lingua franca, it would also be easy to assume that English makes up the largest part of this multitude of different languages.
However, the truth is a little different. Blogger Russian Sphinx is something of a dataphile – her blog features a wide variety of charts, maps and graphs of a wide variety of interesting sources of data. One of her posts maps the languages of native speakers of Europe by number of speakers, and the results speak for themselves. English finishes noticeably behind Russian, German and French. Click the image below to see the full version.
However, thinking in terms of native speakers, this result may not be as surprising as English-centric north Americans would think – the only countries in Europe with English as their official first language are the UK, Ireland and Malta. Therefore, even though English may be the most popular second language by far in Europe, it has a way to go before it becomes the most-spoken native tongue.
French is renowned for being a language closely associated with love and romance – but why? Is it just our mental projections of fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, or is it simply an aural association with the lyrical, soothing accent and how it is often portrayed in popular culture?
Well, this isn’t an easy question to answer. But the French language definitely has a few grammatical and syntactical features that could be interpreted as strikingly romantic – at least to me, anyway.
For example, the phrase “I miss you” in English is fairly straightforward. When you render the same thought in French, however, it turns around. You don’t say “je manque toi” (literally “I miss you”), but instead you say “tu me manques”: “you are missing from me”. This conjures up a much deeper image than the English version of the phrase – the French rendition implies that you are a part of me, and that part is currently missing – a very romantic idea!
French has a wide variety of terms of endearment, almost all of which include a possessive pronoun, which once again implies a deeper sense of togetherness. Standards include mon amour (“my love”), mon cœur (“my heart”) and ma belle (“my beautiful”); but there are many other terms, many of which relate to animals – especially farm animals. For example, mon cochon (“my pig”), ma loutre (“my otter”), mon loup (“my wolf”), mon poulet (“my chicken”), mon canard (“my duck”), and even ma puce (“my flea”)!
We also get a lot of words in the syntactical field of love almost directly from French: fiancé and fiancée are verbatim, and it’s hard to ignore the obvious etymology of words like “marriage” (Fr. mariage) and “anniversary” (Fr. anniversaire).
There are many more reasons why French is so often considered to be la langue d’amour – the language of love! French Canadians would certainly agree, and if you’d like to see whether they’re right or not, why not take a look at some of the French lessons Toronto has to offer?
What with all the election fever going on around the US at the moment, I thought it might be nice to take a look at a red/blue map more suited to our happy little language blog… click the image for the full size version!
Seems like in general the northern states favor “pop”, the south favors “Coke”, and the east and west are “soda” junkies.
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!
Rose Ramraj languagetrainers.com
Rose is a Blogger of all things fascinating. Her educational background is in writing and business studies. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and two mischievous toy poodles.
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