Learning Chinese is difficult for many reasons, but one of my main weaknesses is learning hanzi, the Chinese pictographic characters. Although some of them make sense (e.g. 川 [chuān], meaning “river”, looks kind of like a river; or 门 [mén], meaning “gate”, looks like a gate), some are a little more cryptic, and some require leaping a few mental hurdles to remember consistently.

While sites like memrise.com are very helpful in committing characters to memory, after a while it gets a little stale. In an effort to make rote learning more interesting, a company have released Fridgelingo in Chinese, a range of fridge magnets that you can rearrange to make phrases.

Very similar to those fridge magnet poetry sets, these magnets have the Chinese character, the pinyin so you know how to pronounce it, and the English translation. There are 3 sets, and each one is tailored to a specific topic (food, talking to your ayi (maid), and sex). The magnets can even be used to leave messages for your maid (“please wash the dishes and make the bed”) or start a shopping list.

Since these are the kinds of things that people like to play around with, and since the fridge is an indispensible part of the house, these magnets help make it a little more fun and interesting to learn Chinese characters.

All 3 sets of magnets are available to order from fridgelingo.com or iwantone.cn.

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!

I found this brilliant blog post a few days ago, and had to share it here. My father’s native tongue is Arabic, but I was brought up speaking English – something I regret deeply, as it would have been great to have been raised a bilingualist. I picked up bits here and there growing up, but have little understanding of the grammar and syntax of modern Arabic, so this post really opened my eyes to what a complex language it is. In this blog entry, they give 11 reasons why Arabic is such a varied and interesting language, though sadly this goes hand-in-hand with it being difficult for native English speakers to learn.

Here’s an excerpt – you can read the whole entry here.

Broken Plurals

In English, you make most words plural by adding a suffix, except for a very small number of words (like ‘feet’) where there is a vowel change instead. Arabic does this the other way around. There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

kitaab -> kutub (book)
ustaath -> asaatitha (teacher)
maqha -> maqaahi (café)
dukkan -> dakaakiin (store)
ahdar -> hudur (green)

This holds even for borrowed words:

film -> aflaam
jaakit -> jawaakat

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

The Writing System

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some “words” consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ييي ععع ههه ككك للل

You can easily master Arabic writing without learning the language (here is a great book for it if you’re interested); it will take you about two weeks. Go to the museum and impress your date with your ability to appreciate Arabic calligraphy on a deeper level!

Voxy do make some interesting infographics – I previously posted about their detailing the use of Beatles songs in ESL classes. This time they’ve created a diagram that gives lots of great information about the difficulties of learning various languages as a native English speaker. Languages are ranked in three levels: rather simplistically labelled “easy”, “medium” and “hard”. Each language is broken down into the number of native speakers, with harder languages given reasons for their difficulty. Click to make it bigger:

It seems that the primary criterion by which they have rated the difficulty of a language is just how similar it is to English – three of the four hardest languages are Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). While this may be a good rule of thumb, I don’t agree that it is a completely accurate way to judge it. With the right motivation and the ability to train your mind to think in the target language (and living in a country where it is the native language helps), it is not such a great disability for your native language to be far removed from the one you are learning.

Japanese, in particular, may be difficult to read and write due to having to learn thousands of kanji, the characters borrowed from Chinese – yet one could argue that this is more in the realms of ‘tedious’ than innately ‘difficult’. However, learning to speak and understand to a competent level is not notably harder than many other languages, given that Japanese pronunciation, syntax and grammar is not significantly more difficult than languages without such a fearsome reputation.

However, despite my small grievances (German is mysteriously missing from the graph), I think this infographic gives an excellent overview of the difficulty of various languages, as well as how long it will take in class to gain some level of proficiency.

I found an interesting article recently about the “switch” in the brain that occurs when you achieve fluency in another language. Everybody’s brain can train itself to the point of achieving this “switch”, which allows you to start thinking in the target language, allowing you to achieve fluency faster.

The trick, as with any other skill, is practice – and a lot of it. The article talks about learning Irish Gaelic and Icelandic – two languages with relatively few speakers – but the same rules and techniques hold true for any language that you want to learn.

From the article:

The language switch is not built, it is trained. As Vince Lombardi said, Perfect practice makes perfect. Keep on drilling standard phrases. For example, something I usually do is saying to myself Komdu sæll og blessaður! when I pass a man by the street and komdu sæl og blessuð! when I pass a woman. These are two common greetings in Icelandic, and you need to get used to the correct form for men and women. The best way to make it part of you is just to drill it in some funny way like this, until it is as natural as saying Hello!

You can also use old business cards (or here in Spain train tickets, which are credit card sized) to practise verb conjugation. Write in the blank side of one the conjugation of ‘to be’ (in Icelandic, að vera, in Irish bí) and put it in your pocket. Whenever you have a few spare seconds, like waiting in queue to pay at the store or waiting for the street light to turn green (as a pedestrian), take a look at it and repeat them to yourself. You will be amazed how easily this hard-wires constructs into your brain.

You can extend these “cheap ‘n easy” drilling techniques to harder stuff like conditional forms, future, colors, numbers and whatever just by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit. Throw a few dices and say the number they spell. Count your pocket money in Irish. Plan your weekend in Icelandic. Be creative! If what you really want is being able to communicate, being playful is a must.

As my Chinese teacher so often tells me, “interesting is the best teacher”. If you make your language learning as fun and interesting as you can, with plenty of regular practice anybody can achieve fluency. It’s certainly a daunting prospect, but it’s certainly the best way of going about the task at hand.

Simply put, no. The word “while” can act as both a preposition (e.g. “While I was walking down the street, I saw a fox”) and a noun (e.g. “It took a long while to finish”).

“Whilst” is simply an older version of the preposition form of the word “while”. It is more often seen in British English, which explains why it is mostly seen in literature, but rarely (if ever) in American publications.

While you may not end up ever using the word “whilst” yourself, it’s still good to know that it means exactly the same thing.

Do note that “whilst” doesn’t replace the noun form of “while” – that is to say, you can say “Whilst I was walking down the street, I saw a fox”, but not “It took a long whilst to finish”.

Of course, since we have no surviving ancient Romans around and there were no audio recording capabilities in those days, we are not entirely sure just how Latin was spoken (though we are sure that it was not in a thick American accent as in later episodes of the TV show LOST). However, from piecing together various ancient texts on the subject of Latin rhetoric and grammar, modern day experts have some idea – though there are, of course, some models of pronunciation that not everybody agrees with. Then, of course, there is the common issue of how exactly to render modern inventions such as “computer”, “internet”, etc. in a language with no notion of the concepts.

Evan says in the course description:

The course is taught in Latin, based primarily on the work of J.A. Comenius (1657) and J.G. Adler (1856). This is not a translation course, the goal is to get you reading and writing and thinking in Latin. A version of the restored classical pronunciation of Latin is used.

Suitable for beginners, Latin is taught slowly from the ground up, using spoken Latin, while keeping a firm grip on grammar. The first 2 lessons have some English. The rest are only in Latin. You will need to study the course in sequence, as each lesson follows the preceding one in a progressive order.

As the course is taught totally in Latin, you need no other language.

You can access the videos on his YouTube profile. There are For anybody who has ever wanted to study Latin, this could be a very interesting (and more importantly, free!) way of fulfilling that aim. To date, Evan has made 323 videos, so you may have a little catching up to do!

There is also an audio-only version of the course available in podcast format.

An interesting story from a newspaper across the Atlantic Ocean – the British government’s communication chief, Jean Gross, has warned against parents using in-car TVs, but not over concerns for safety. Instead, she fears that children would not be using the time to learn new vocabulary from interacting with their parents on the road, and playing spotting games in the car like “I Spy” – all of which means that parents aiming to keep the kids quiet during long car journeys could be doing just that, and having an adverse effect on their speech development.

From the article:

[Gross] said that long car journeys were opportunities to “double their vocabulary” and warned that children of wealthy families were most at risk because they were likely to have the latest technology.

“I remember [when my children were little] we did spotting games in the car, but with the Nintendo DS and other hand-held video games it’s going to be more affluent parents whose children have problems learning to speak, not just those from poorer homes who have less exposure to a wide range of language,” Mrs Gross told The Times.

Personally I feel like this is going a little over the top, but I do see where the concern is coming from. Children absorb new information so easily during formative years that it is a shame to waste hours of possible interaction during a journey where their changing surroundings are almost guaranteed to show them something new.

However, surely a compromise would be to let the children watch the TV in the car, but give them Sesame Street to watch?

One of my favourite webcomics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, recently updated with a brilliant strip relating to this particular annoyance.

To be honest, this one doesn’t particularly bother me. The key is in the difference between the nominative and objective cases for nouns in English – and in 99.9% of circumstances, words in either case have exactly the same form.

However, there is in fact a relatively easy way to know whether you should be using who or whom in any particular sentence:

If you can replace the person in question with “he/she”, use who. If you have to use “him/her”, use whom.

For example:

He went to Florida for the weekend: Who went to Florida for the weekend?

The bell tolls for him: For whom does the bell toll?

So there you go: who is to whom as he is to him. Replace the words in a sentence and see which one sounds right.

In some ways the findings of this research seem strange, but in another way, it makes sense.

Children with hearing loss in one ear have lower speech-language scores than siblings with normal hearing, new research shows.

A team of scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recruited 74 children from the St. Louis region between the ages of 6 and 12 with one-sided hearing loss. Each child was compared to a sibling with normal hearing.

This allowed the researchers to take into account the possible effects of environmental and genetic factors on language skills.

The research showed that the siblings who were deaf in one ear had poorer oral language skills than their aurally fit siblings.

“The effect of hearing loss in one ear may be subtle”, says Judith E C Lieu MD, a a Washington University professor and ear, nose and throat specialist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “These children may shun large group situations because the noise overwhelms them, and they have a hard time understanding speech.”

Deafness in only one ear also affects a child’s ability to play team sports, since it’s much harder to locate the source of calls and other noises, and depending on which way they’re facing, they might not be able to hear some calls at all.

Estimates from the research conducted showed than as many as 1 in 50 school-aged children in the US have only partial hearing in one ear.