Language Trainers Blog

Source: pagef30.com

I read an interesting article today about how Persian is a deceptively easy language to learn – far easier, in fact, than most western European languages that are the staple of many schools’ foreign language courses (e.g. French, Spanish, German etc.).

Check out the blog entry on pagef30.com for the full article, but here are the two main reasons why people think Persian is hard, or automatically dismiss it when considering what language they would like to learn:

• It uses the Arabic alphabet
• Persian speakers are not as numerous or as widely spread as users of more popular languages like Spanish or French

However, some of the details that make it easier than you’d think include:

• Verbs conjugate very easily, and are very regular in form – fewer irregularities mean much less to learn
• Nouns don’t require articles (the, the definite article, and a/an, the indefinite article)
• Nouns and pronouns also don’t require cases
• Adjectives are the same in form as adverbs – “you did good” is the same as “you did well”
• Persian is agglutinative – that is, longer, more complex words are formed by sticking together shorter words

So there you have it. Check out the full article for more detail. But if you’ve always wanted to pick up a Middle Eastern language but you’re worried of the difficulty curve, perhaps Persian is one to consider.

OK, so I might go a little overboard with my grammar Nazism sometimes (which I guess can be seen in a lot of my “annoyances” posts).

However, the only thing worse than a pedant is an incorrect pedant – a stickler to the rules that is not aware of the correct rules themselves.

English is a constantly evolving language, as you so often hear, so rules that were once considered solid can be eroded over time – for example, the hyphenation and/or capitalization of words like E-mail (or if you want to go much further back, good-bye). Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to see email and goodbye.

However, there are some ‘rules’ that have permeated into the English language which simply have no basis in fact. Here are my top three:

1. “Irregardless” is not a word.
As much as it pains me to admit it, this hideous travesty of a word is actually included in most editions of most English dictionaries, in the ‘non-standard’ section. This, for all intents and purposes, makes it a word.

However, this does not mean that you should ever use it. “Regardless” is fine by itself – there is simply no need to add the ‘ir-’ to the beginning. I assume this started because people wanted to combine the words “regardless” and “irrespective”, and thus the bastard son “irregardless” was born.

Similarly, words such as “bootylicious” are also in the non-standard section of some dictionaries, but this doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable to use… in polite company, anyway!

2. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.
I always find myself trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition wherever possible, but I recently found out that you don’t necessarily have to.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you have free license to add prepositions to sentences that already make sense. “That’s what I’m talking about” is fine (you simply can’t rephrase that to avoid the preposition being at the end and have the sentence come out sounding natural – “that is about which I am talking” just sounds silly). However, saying “That’s where it’s at” is incorrect, because you can remove the preposition from the end and still have a sentence that makes perfect sense: “That’s where it is”. Of course, both these sentences have a basis in slang, which makes it harder to apply rules to them anyway.

The rule shouldn’t be “don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, but more like “don’t use unnecessary prepositions”!

3. It’s incorrect to split your infinitives.
For those of you unaware of what a split infinitive is, the infinitive is the form of any verb which is prefaced with the word “to”. For example, “to play”, “to love”, “to see”, etc.

To split an infinitive is to put a word inbetween the “to” and the verb – the most famous split infinitive in history is probably the tagline to Star Trek – “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.

The reason grammarians often tell people not to split their infinitives goes all the way back to good old Latin and Ancient Greek – the founding languages of much of the English language. In Latin and Greek, infinitives are one word: “to play” in Latin is ludere, “to love” is amare, “to see” is videre.

Thus the split infinitive rule is a throwback to English’s roots – but English splits the infinitive anyway, by dividing it into two words. However, it is still considered a single part of speech, and is an issue that will no doubt continue to divide anal retentives for centuries.

English being English, there are some situations where refusing to split the infinitive will actually change the meaning of a sentence. For example, “I told my sister to quickly get off the bus” means that my sister should get off the bus quickly; but “I told my sister quickly to get off the bus” coupld imply that I spoke rapidly, or my telling her was a fast reaction to a previous event.

Personally, I always try to avoid splitting infinitives wherever possible – to me it just sounds inherently wrong – but I don’t correct others when they do… because it just isn’t a hard and fast rule.

I suppose that this one is going out of fashion, since I’m seeing more and more ‘txtspk’ online these days, with people simply replacing any instance of the words ‘to’ or ‘too’ with the number 2… but it still annoys me anyway!

“Too” can either mean ‘in addition’ or ‘to an excessive degree’. For example, “I’m going there too” (i.e. “I am also going there”), or “I’ve had too much food”, or “You’re standing too close to the fire”.

For pretty much everything else, you use “to”, which is a word that usually expresses motion towards something (e.g. “I am going to work”, “The plant has grown to six feet”, “Give it to me”, etc.). It has many other meanings, too – which is probably why it is occasionally confused.

Back when I first learned this rule, I remembered it as there being “too many Os in ‘too’”. This helped me remember only to use the word when I wanted to express that there was an excess or something.

Here’s another mistake that I hear almost every day, but has become so widespread that it is now considered correct by many. Of course, English is constantly evolving, but that does not mean that the rules should be completely ignored due to ignorance!

A conditional clause in English requires a couple of things – the word if, on one side of the sentence – and then a verb in the conditional tense (for example, “I would have seen”, or “I would go”) on the other. Let’s look at an example:

In this (correct) sentence, the second part of the sentence is hypothetical – since I did not enter the competition, I did not win.

However, often in American English you hear:

This may sound correct due to the fact that you hear it so often, but you should not have a conditional verb on both sides.

A similar error involving conditional sentences is the difference between “would have” and “would of”. It is quite easy to see how this mistake comes about – since “would have” is so often shortened in conversation to “would’ve” (see my earlier post about apostrophes to see why it contracts like this), it can sound a lot like “would of”.

For example:

When written out like this, it is easier to see that the first sentence (“would have”) is correct, and the second (“would of”) is incorrect. “Would of” means nothing, since “would” modifies the verb that follows, and “of” is, of course, not a verb.

The very same applies to “should have”/”should of”, “will have”/”will of”, and “could have”/”could of”. In all instances, “have” is correct.

Whilst there is only one word for more, there are two words for its opposite – fewer and less, and they are sometimes used incorrectly.

Happily this is a very simple error, with a very simple rule to prevent yourself from falling into the trap.

Use fewer when you are talking about things that can be counted. For example:

Use less when you are talking about things that can’t be counted in the traditional way. For example:

Hopefully if you learn this rule, you will make fewer mistakes, and find yourself less susceptible to making this error!

Here’s a rare educational post!

It is a fairly well known fact that English borrows words and word roots from a variety of sources. Wikipedia states that that majority of English roots come from Latin and French (Old Norman), though the 100 most frequently used words are all Germanic in origin. This graph demonstrates a full breakdown, taken from a sample of 80,000 words from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

Although we have a rich vocabulary (by far the widest of all languages, with some 2 million words at last count), the English language treats nouns and verbs (and, to an extent, adjectives and pronouns) rather differently from the Romance languages from which it borrows heavily. One of the main differences is in the morphology of words – that is, how they change depending on gender and number (for nouns and adjectives), and person, mood, voice, and tense (for verbs). Verbs in English, for example, do not change in form much, usually adding an ‘s’ in the third person singular. For example, the verb “to see”:

In the future tense, the verb form (or inflection) itself does not change at all – instead, we use the auxiliary verb “to be” in its future tense, and the present participle of the verb (in this case, “see”). For example:

This makes learning regular English verbs pretty easy. Making a “verb table” like this seems a little pointless in English, since there are only two different forms in the present tense for this particular verb. This process is also known as conjugating a verb.

Let’s compare our relatively simple English verb table (the top one, indicating the present tense) with the French equivalent, then – the French verb to see is voir:

There are 5 different forms here. The future tense in French has another 6 different forms (je verrai, tu verras, il verra, nous verrons, vous verrez, ils verront), meaning that there’s a whole lot more learning to do.

Likewise, nouns in English have a singular and plural form – we don’t have to worry about gender or case, which explains why these are seen as new and slightly unusual concepts when it comes to learning a language like Spanish, French or German.

Let’s take the word ‘table’ as an example (since above I listed two ‘verb tables’) – in English, you either have a table, or you have several tables. Singular and plural – simple, right? Let’s compare the Latin word for ‘table’ (mensa, which happens to be a 1st declension feminine noun) and see how many forms it has (listing the different forms for a noun is also known as declining):

You can safely avoid the case names for now (though you may recognize a few), but straight away you can see that there are far more noun forms in Latin than in English (in this case, 7 different inflections in Latin vs. only 2 in English). Latin is perhaps an extreme example here, since it is an extremely inflective language and relies on the inflections of the words to ‘fill in’ the rest of the words in a sentence far more than English does. Moreover, this is just how you decline 1st declension feminine nouns in Latin – there are 5 groups of nouns, most of which have several genders, and there are all kinds of identical and similar forms across the groups, meaning that you really have to know your word endings to understand what is going on.

This is just a short demonstration of morphology at work, and barely begins to touch on the subject. However, if you’re thinking of learning another language (especially if it’s a Romance language), then it’s useful to see what you’re going to be up against. Learning your nouns and verbs in all their forms early on in your studying – especially the irregular ones – will put you in a much better position once your vocabulary expands and you start learning more complicated constructions and idioms, which sometimes combine several forms to create different or subtler meanings.

Sorry for all the technical talk – I hope this was useful to some!

Source: langladder.com

I recently stumbled upon LangLadder, a super useful extension for the Firefox web browser which has an array of features to help intermediate and advanced level language learners reinforce your vocabulary while you browse the web. By merging the learning experience with how many people spend the bulk of their free time (statistics have shown that the average person spends around 2 hours a day on the internet), it creates a fun way to practice your target language in context. By browsing foreign language sites, you can add words you don’t know to a vocabulary list that pops up in your sidebar, which gives you definitions as you go using Google Translate. You can later test yourself with the plugin’s built-in flashcard system, which tracks your progress as you improve.

You can learn more about how LangLadder works from its creator, Erik Larson, by watching this video:

I love when technology can legitimately aid your language studies – this is a simple yet great idea for those who want to sharpen up their skills. Check out langladder.com to download the plugin, and for more information. It works on both PC and Mac; all you’ll need is the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Jetpack plugin, plus the LangLadder add-on.

Source: kttc.com

Another baby-related post today – it has been found by a team of psychological scientists at the University of British Colombia in Canada that babies born from bilingual families seem more likely to have more of a penchant for picking up spoken languages later on.

Quite how they found the correlation between babies’ “sucking reflexes” and their stimulus for languages, I don’t really understand… but since they’re wearing white lab coats, I am tempted to believe them.

From the article:

A team of psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in France, watched the sucking reflexes of newborns born to either monolingual English-speaking women, or women who spoke both English and Tagalog, a language native to the Philippines.

The researchers explained that increased sucking behavior indicates newborns’ interest in a particular stimulus, including spoken language.

The team found that babies born to monolingual mothers exhibited increased sucking behaviors when they heard English, but not Tagalog, while infants born to the bilingual mothers showed interest, regardless of which of the two languages was being spoken.

I’ve always wished that I had been brought up bilingual!

Another annoyance post today – this time concerning the phrase “beg the question”. This is now such a common error that you can see it everywhere – television, newspapers, advertisements – the whole nine yards.

In basic terms, to beg the question does not mean the same as to “raise the question”. For example:

“I don’t like strawberries; which begs the question, why do I love strawberry Pop Tarts?”

This is quite simply wrong, no matter how many times you have heard the phrase being used in this sense. You should be raising the question here.

“Begging the question” actually refers to a type of logical fallacy, also known as petitio principii (Latin: “assuming the initial point”). Begging the question is a fallacy in which you make a claim, but have no evidence as to whether this claim is true or false other than the statement itself. For example:

“I don’t trust her, because she’s untrustworthy.”

Describing her as ‘untrustworthy’ does not actually explain why you don’t trust her, as they both mean the same thing. This is an example of somebody begging the question, thus creating a logical fallacy.

This, perhaps, raises the question: why is this error so often made? It seems to have slipped under the radar a long time ago, and now the incorrect meaning has simply been introduced into modern usage.

You can find out more at begthequestion.info, who give the following statement as to why they feel the error should be corrected:

While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous “modern” usage. This is why we fight.

As a bit of a pedant myself, I completely agree. So remember, don’t beg questions – raise them.

Source: latimes.com

When I’m trying to learn a new language, I’ll often use flashcards. For me, it isn’t just the flashcard itself, but the process of making the flashcards that makes them such a great learning aid. I find that I learn best when I go over everything several times, and writing out vocabulary – especially if the language uses a different alphabet or writing system, like Japanese – really helps hammer the words into my brain.

However, they didn’t prove to be such a great aid for 22 year old Pamona College physics major Nicholas George, who is studying Arabic to aid his hopes to become a US diplomat in the Middle East someday. As he boarded a flight from Philadelphia to California he figured he’d take some of his English-Arabic flashcards on board with him, to help him brush up on his vocabulary during the flight.

Sadly, since Arabic newspapers are rife with this kind of vocabulary these days, George’s flashcards included cards for words such as “terrorism” and “bomb”. This alone was enough to provoke so much suspicion from the TSA that he was handcuffed and was detained for 4 hours, and the offending flashcards were confiscated. He was asked if he was a member of a terrorist or pro-Islamic organization during his detention, to which he replied no, and was later released without an apology.

George is now suing the TSA.

I feel the TSA acts like it has a blank check as long as what it does is in the name of fighting terrorism. Of course, the TSA’s job is to keep us safe – but they have to follow the Constitution and respect rights.

[If the flashcards triggered such deep suspicion] then we’ve got a real 1st Amendment issue here. I have a right to study Arabic.

- Nicholas George, Pamona College student

Personally, I think this is ridiculous. George also admits that the stamps in his passport from Jordan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan (from an overseas semester last year) as well as a book in his carryon that was “critical of US foreign policy” may also have added to the suspicion – but to me this is just another tale of airport authority paranoia.

Happily, this is pretty much the only circumstances I can think of whereby learning a language could land you in this much trouble…