Our North American neighbor, Canada, is often the butt of American jokes. I’m no better than my countrymen when Canadian relatives visit and their slang evokes pure hilarity. Fortunately, my relatives and most Canadians could care less about American’s poking fun at them. Because French and English are the two official languages, Canada has it’s very own slang:
Aboot: Canada’s pronunciation for the word “about.” - “What’s all your hollering aboot?”
Canuck: a nickname for Canadians. - “I have only love for my fellow Canucks.”
Washroom: bathroom without a bath in the room. -“Excuse me, can I use your washroom?”
Loonie: Canadian dollar coin. As a hilarious accompaniment, Toonie is their two dollar coin. - “Since my cookie cost just one loonie, I decided to purchase a second with a toonie.”
Eh?: you’re a true Canadian when this word is added to the end of a sentence. It means “don’t you agree?” - “Americans are quite crazy, eh?”
Pop: soft drinks like Coke or Pepsi. - “Waitress, I’d like a pop to drink please.”
Hydro: electricity - “No lights today so the hydro is probably off.”
Serviette: napkin - “I spilled a glass of pop all over me, so a serviette would be helpful!”
Most slang originated from Canadians speaking both English and French. In Toronto, a city in the province of Ontario, Canadians fluent in French benefit from the mix of slang terms because those who solely speak English can understand them easier. Why not try some English classes the next time you visit Toronto? Canucks will surely appreciate your ability to understand their slang!
Learning a second language is something which should be fun. In fact, you will probably enjoy the process of learning but you may also come across a few low points in which your resolve is tested.
This kind of issue happens to everyone who learns anything new over a long period of time and if you want to keep up the good work then you might want to consider some of the following secret motivation techniques.
Plan a Trip
There are few better incentives for improving your current pace of learning than the thought of a trip to somewhere they speak the tongue you are studying. Can you imagine how good it will feel to chat to the locals and to feel right at home speaking a foreign language in a place where others speak it as their mother tongue? The good news is that it might not even involve a long and costly trip abroad if you don’t want it to. For example, you could practice your Spanish taking classes in Miami! With a bit of imagination you could have a great time and put your lessons into practice without spending a fortune.
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!
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”).
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?
Claiming to “change the way people learn languages”, Duolingo has been running for a while, and has been lauded as an “elegant solution” to 2 problems – helping people learn languages, and translating foreign language texts on the web.
For example, if you’re a native English speaker who wants to learn Spanish, it gives you Spanish sentences from around the web that are relevant to your level, along with a crib sheet of words that you may not know. After you’ve finished, it then highlights words that you had trouble with and gives you more real-world examples of their usage. As you translate more sentences, you not only learn new vocabulary, but you’re also helping out with translating Spanish websites into English!
Now the iPhone app is out, and like the website, it is 100% free.
Duolingo certainly is a practical and elegant way to learn a new language, though whether it’s the most effective technique for learning a language is doubtful. However, it “gameifies” the language learning process, by making it more fun and interactive, and allowing you to “level up”, compete with your friends, and generally give the user an addictive way to improve their language skills. The fact that it also has the side effect of helping translate the web is a huge bonus.
You can learn more about Duolingo by watching this video:
This one’s a slightly different kind of language post, but still interesting I feel. Tech company Apple has been heavily involved in plenty of litigation over the past few years, most recently over claims that other phone manufacturers (namely Samsung) have modeled – or straight up copied – their devices’ designs. Whichever side you take in that particular debate, it’s clear that Apple’s penchant for trying to sue everybody is starting to grate. Thankfully, judges are also getting annoyed by it.
Apple lawyers have been arguing that “App Store” is a trademarked phrase, and it has the right to stop others from using similar phrases. That includes Amazon, which was sued by Apple in March 2011, shortly after it opened the Amazon Appstore for Android.
Now, some of those issues are finally coming to a head in public. At a hearing today in an Oakland federal court, it became clear that while Apple may have a lot of fury and passion behind this lawsuit, it has run into trouble in the form of a very skeptical judge. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton showed great doubt that Apple will be able to prove that consumers were confused or deceived by Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore.” At this point, it’s somewhat remarkable that the company hasn’t dropped this suit, since Hamilton indicated a year ago that she was unimpressed by Apple’s arguments and denied a preliminary injunction.
Arguing over the intellectual property ownership of elements of your phones and tablets is one thing, but trying to trademark a generic term like “App Store” reeks of arrogance in my opinion, and I for one am glad that judge Phyllis Hamilton seems to agree. The arrogance is only reinforced when Apple claim that it’s not so much about the words themselves, but the fact that Apple ‘set the benchmark’ and they feel that customers would be cheated by an inferior product with a similar name.
“They [Amazon employees] admit they targeted Apple customers, because Apple set the benchmark for what consumers expected,” said Eberhart. “When you combine that with our evidence consumers associate the term ‘app store’ with Apple,” it’s enough evidence to warrant a trial.
“Everyone who uses a smartphone knows the difference between the Apple iOS system and the Android system,” responded Hamilton. “Where’s the confusion? There’s some suggestion [by Apple] that if Amazon is using the ‘Appstore’ term someone might think they have as many apps as Apple does. Well, why? And how, in fact, does that contribute to any deception on the part of Amazon?”
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.
October 26, 2012 at 6:56 am
· Filed under technology, vocabulary · Posted by admin
A recent article on CNET discusses this year’s “25 worst passwords of the year” list, with the top 3 unchanged from last year: “password”, “123456″ and “12345678″. However, new entries to the list such as “Jesus”, “password1″ and “welcome” show that on the whole, people still aren’t getting to grips with the fact that these kinds of passwords are easily crackable.
Making a strong password is not difficult, and requires only a tiny bit more effort. A password that is easy to remember doesn’t necessarily have to be easy to guess. Language learners can use words from several languages in order to confuse brute-force hacking efforts, which use a dictionary to try every word or every combination of numbers until they gain access.
From the article:
Security experts suggest picking long passwords (the longer, the better) that include as many different characters as possible while excluding anything that can be personally linked, such as birthdates or names of relatives. Choosing passwords that include words found in common dictionaries is also discouraged.
However, popular nerd and math based webcomic XKCD has its own take on making memorable yet strong passwords. Comic creator Randall Monroe muses, “through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess”. His solution is the opposite of that of the security experts above, and uses math to form a password that is easy to remember but has enough entropy that it will take centuries for a computer to guess: use 4 common yet unrelated words, and remember a situation the involves all 4 of them. His example, “correcthorsebatterystaple” is a much stronger password than “Tr0ub4dor&3″, even if it seems like it wouldn’t be.
I sometimes use a combination of common English and Chinese words for my passwords – they’re certainly memorable to me, and I’d be very impressed if there was an algorithm out there that could guess it!
Still, maybe if computers could take some of Chinese lessons Miami has to offer, they might have the required vocabulary…
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.
Our North American neighbor, Canada, is often the butt of American jokes. I’m no better than my countrymen when Canadian relatives visit and their slang evokes pure hilarity. Fortunately, my relatives and most Canadians could care less about American’s poking fun at them. Because French and English are the two official languages, Canada has it’s very own slang:
Plan a Trip
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