Language Trainers Blog

Source: dictionary.com

The word ‘psychopath’ is thrown around plenty on TV, but few may know the true definition of the mental disorder. Essentially, it’s an inability to empathize with others or establish any kind of meaningful relationship. However, this often means that a person exhibiting psychopathic behavior fits a certain pattern of other traits: extreme egocentricity, a failure to learn from experience, and a tendacy to treat other people as a means to further their own ends, rather than individuals in themselves.

Here’s an interesting article on a study recently performed by Jeffrey Hancock, a professor of communications at Cornell University. By analyzing the way convicted murderers speak – the words they use, the most common patterns of speech, etc. – they can build a model of ‘psychopathic’ language, and apply it to the real world. From the article:

They [psychopaths] tend to see people as means to their own ends, rather than as individuals. These emotional abnormalities manifest in their speech patterns in a few interesting ways. The psychopaths who were interviewed tended to use a lot of causal phrases like “so” and “because.” The researchers interpreted this to mean that they were explaining their crimes away as a “logical outcome of a plan (something that ‘had’ to be done to achieve a goal).’” In contrast, other convicted criminals who are not psychopaths tend to use more language around religion and their own guilt when describing their crime. The researchers observed other aberrations in psychopaths’ speech. Psychopaths in the study spoke of basic needs like food and money twice as much as the other subjects in the study, and they also use more disfluencies (phrases like “uh” or “umm”) to break up their speech.

The implications of this study mean that police could be able to build a sound psychological profile of people from the language used in their Facebook statuses or Twitter updates, or any posts on public sites like Craigslist, forums, and the like.

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!

An onomatopoeia is a word that mimics a sound – for example “woof”, “bang”, or “moo”. While they are popular in English (to the point where some onomatopoeias are no longer commonly recognised as such, like the word “bleat” to mimic the sound a sheep makes), they are absolutely rife in Japanese. In fact, unlike English, Japanese has two kinds of onomatopoeia: Giongo (擬音語) are words that directly imitate sounds (there’s a subgroup of these just for animal and human sounds, called Giseigo (擬声語)), and Gitaigo (擬態語) are words that express emotions, actions, or conditions. Both Giongo and Gitaigo always take the form of a doubled word – for example, a dog barking is “wan wan” (ワンワン).

Giongo are like onomatopoeia in English and are pretty self-explanatory. However, Gitaigo, which are symbolic or mimetic words, are more abstract and interesting for foreign speakers. Japanese people litter these throughout their conversation without giving them a second thought, but for non-native learners of Japanese they can often be confusing, difficult to translate, and a pain to learn.

Here are some examples of Gitaigo and what they mean:

giri giri (ギリギリ) – “just barely”, “by the skin of your teeth”

bero bero (べろべろ) – “drunk”

pika pika (ピカピカ) – “sparkling”, “shining brightly”

uzu uzu (ウズウズ) – “eager”, “raring”, “itching to do something”

uki uki (ウキウキ) – “happy”, “in a good mood”

hiso hiso (ヒソヒソ) – “in a whisper”

nita nita (ニタニタ) – “smirking”, “grinning”

Some of these may seem very random, especially since they are classified as onomatopoeia. But if you read closer, some of them reveal their mimetic nature. For example, hiso hiso mimics the sounds of a whisper; it’s almost impossible to form the sounds for uki uki or nita nita without your mouth curling into a smile; and bero bero perhaps mimics an inebriated person slurring their words.

Here’s a great short film by Australian director Brian Fairbairn that has been doing the internet rounds lately. One of its purposes is to show how we can garner so much from just body language and speech intonation, even if we don’t know exactly what people are saying. In 4 minutes of conversation we can’t comprehend the actual dialogue, but we can discern what’s actually happening.

You’ll notice that there are quite a few English words in there – or rather, English phonemes. However, there’s never enough context to understand exactly what the characters are saying. The words used are often random enough to have you guessing, however, at 1:19 you can hear the word ‘crustacean’! It’s strange how the brain tries to make sense of it from the words you can understand, but then gets as lost as it would be if you were listening to another completely foreign language.

This is a little different from another popular video, titled “Prisencolinensinainciusol”, a music video made by an Italian TV show to demonstrate what English sounds like to Italians who can’t speak it.

Source: dialectblog.com

Here’s a great article about the difference between dialect and accent – and why Americans tend to get them mixed up, even though they refer to two very separate linguistic ideas.

Strangely enough, it often seems to be linked with race rather than area – Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader during the 2008 Presidential elections, famously said that Obama spoke “with no negro dialect” – the article’s author argues that “I doubt he would have mentioned a candidate’s ‘Tennessee dialect’ or ‘New York dialect’ (he probably would have used ‘accent’)”.

If you find yourself being confused between the two terms, remember that dialect is much more all-encompassing than accent. A dialect varies from others by grammar (sentence structure), vocabulary (words used) and phonology (sound). An accent simply refers to the pronunciation.

Kanji are the Japanese forms of the traditional Chinese characters that were first used as far back as 8,000 years ago. Many countries in Asia use some form of traditional Chinese pictograms: variants are present in the written languages of Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as mainland China and Japan.

Frustratingly hard to learn for westerners, a competent Kanji reader can identify at least 2,000 different characters, though there are apparently around 50,000 different characters in all. However, most of those are archaic, technical or very rarely used.

Some of the most basic forms of Kanji are straight pictograms – characters that are used to express literal things. The kanji for “tree” (木) looks a little like a tree, but many Kanji that are expressing even simple ideas seem pretty far removed from their real-life meanings. The main reason for this is that the script has changed somewhat in the last 8,000 years. Here’s a table from Wikipedia, showing how some simple characters have evolved over time from forms that closer resemble their meanings. Click it for the full size version.

For learners of Kanji or any other Chinese-inspired characters, there are great sites like memrise.com, which have interactive flashcards and quizzes that can really speed up your learning. Memrise in particular brings a small gaming element into your character learning, by introducing characters to you as ‘seeds’, and having you ‘water’ them into becoming fully-fledged ‘plants’ by repeatedly recognizing, translating and transliterating them correctly. However, with so many characters, it’s truly a long-term goal – which just goes to show how learning Japanese can be a truly challenging task, especially if you want to get a real grip on Kanji.

Source: merriam-webster.com

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary’s definition for “literally” now includes a note on the ‘incorrect’ usage of the word:

2. : in effect : virtually

Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.

I know people who will literally start foaming at the mouth (hah) when people confuse the word “literally” with “figuratively”. However, this is English, and common usage dictates dictionary definitions – even if common usage is ‘wrong’. That being said, I’m surprised that the reason the definition was changed is claimed as “use of pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis” – people say “I’m starving” if they’re very hungry, but the dictionary definition remains untouched for that word.

In the spirit of the English language, here are three more common words that used to have very the opposite meanings from their 21st century versions:

Terrific used to mean “horrible” or “frightful” (from the Latin verb terrere, ‘to frighten’. Nowadays it means the exact opposite – “great” or “wonderful”.

Manufactured used to mean “made by hand” explicitly. Again, from Latin manus (“hand”) and facere (“to make”). Nowadays it just means “made”, whether by hand or by machinery.

Awful used to mean, as the word itself implies, “full of awe” – as in, inspiring awe in a good way. Nowadays the word has a purely bad connotation – at some point, the word’s meaning remained the same but the connotation changed. The only way it has preserved its original meaning is mostly used in British English, as in “he has an awful lot of money“.

So, it just goes to show – sometimes English likes to mess with you.

Source: newscientist.com

Here’s a truly interesting article written by social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, on those little words that we never put much thought into – pronouns. Pronouns are the short words that we often substitute for other nouns – “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “they”, “we”, etc. What started as a study into how we use pronouns and other ‘function words’ – especially when talking about dramatic or traumatic events – became a life’s work for Pennebaker.

‘Function words’ (pronouns, articles (‘a/an’ and ‘the’), prepositions (like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘from’, etc.), auxiliary verbs (like ‘is’ or ‘has’), conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, etc.), quantifiers like ‘few’ or ‘many’, and basic adverbs like ‘really’ or ‘very’) are those small words that don’t mean much by themselves, but are processed by the brain in a different way from ‘content words’ (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).

Here’s an excerpt – you can find the full article here.

By understanding language style, we gain a far clearer sense of the social and psychological processes affecting our behaviours.

What do I mean by style? In any given sentence, there are two basic types of word. The first is content words, which provide meaning. [...] The other type are “function” words. These serve quieter, supporting roles – connecting, shaping and organising the content words. They are what determines style.

Why make such a big deal about these [function] words? Because they are the keys to the soul. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but bear with me.

Function words are psychologically very revealing. They are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently than content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly. It’s about time that these forgettable little words got their due.

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.”