Language Trainers Blog

Source: waywardclassics.blogspot.com

I found this hilarious post today about badly translated Latin tattoos (some NSFW language).

Why would anybody permanently mark their body with a slogan without making sure the translation was correct first? Some of them even leave English words in – a nice juxtaposition of modern parlance and a 2000+ year old language, or pretentious and lazy? You decide.

People – if you feel the need to get a tattoo of something in another language… never ever trust that Google Translate is going to be up for the job. Check with a native speaker!

This isn’t so much of an annoyance, but in the age of the internet it seems to be such a common error that it’s worth a mention. Of course, 99.9% of people could not care less if the correct form of the word is used, but what kind of pedant would I be if I let it go unchecked? Answer: a very poor one.

So, disc vs disk – which is which? The answer is actually simpler than you might think.

A compact disc (CD) are read using a laser – that is to say, optically. A hard disk, on the other hand, is read magnetically. And believe it or not, that is it.

So, if data is reproduced optically, it’s disc with a C; and if magnetically, disk with a K. Therefore, it’s compact disc, but floppy disk.

I suppose this makes British author Terry Pratchet’s Discworld series syntactically correct – since you read the books with your eyes!

Learning a new language can be helped by your own understanding of English grammar – most people who have English as their primary language learn it ‘as-is’ – that is, without truly ever being explained the grammatical or morphological reasons behind things.

I studied Latin and Ancient Greek since a young age. While this doesn’t exactly make me immediately popular at parties, it has helped me recognise word forms, even if I hadn’t seen a word before.

One of the things that helps the most is recognising prefixes – those bits that are commonly attached to the beginning of words which give you a clue to their meaning (if you know what they mean, of course). Due to English’s wealth of linguistic sources, we tend to use a lot of prefixes – but the vast majority come from Latin or Ancient Greek.

You may be familiar with most of the numerical prefixes, such as kilo- for thousand (Gk. chilioi / χιλιοι), mega- for million (Gk. μέγας – “large”), cent- for hundred (Lat. centum), or nano- for a billionth (Gk. νᾶνος – “dwarf”).

A pretty comprehensive list of prefixes (and other word bases) can be found here, if you’d like to learn more.

So then, the first time I heard one of my all-time favourite words, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – which, even though it is basically something of a linguistic hoax, is referred to in the Oxford English Dictionary – it sounded pretty much like nonsense. But once I saw it written down I noticed that it was basically a bunch of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes thrown together to make one long word. Break it down into its parts and you get:

pneu- Gk. meaning “breath”
-mono- Gk. meaning “one/alone”
-ultra- Lat. meaning “beyond”
-micro- Gk. meaning “small”
-scopic- Gk. meaning “looking”
-silico- Gk. meaning “rock/sand”
-volcano- Lat. meaning “volcano” (from Vulcan, the God of fire)
-coni- Gk. meaning “dust” (from konis)
-osis Gk. meaning “condition”

So when I found out that the word was supposed to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs”, it almost made sense.

Making up and telling stories is a good way to practise using the language you’re learning. During the process of composing the stories you will need to think about how to structure your sentences, how to apply the grammar, and which words to use. As you’ll be using new words in context they’re more likely to stay in your memory than if you just try to learn them on their own. The same is true of the grammar.

Writing out the stories can be a good way to practise writing or typing the language, and by telling your stories to others you could practise reading and speaking the language.

If you need inspiration you could go around your home or office and choose a number of objects, and then try to use them in a story, either with their normal functions, or with completely different functions.

You could do something similar with photos. For example, you could choose photos of people, animals, places and other things and try to link them together in a story.

If you want to focus on a particular aspect of a language or on a particular subject, you could choose objects or photos related to that subject or which could help you practise that aspect of the language.

There are various techniques you could try to get vocabulary to stay in your memory. Some work well for some people but not for others, but they’re all worth a try. Perhaps one of the following, or a combination of them will work for you:

Flashcards involve writing the words or phrases you want to learn on one side of a card, and putting the meaning, definition and/or translation on the other. They might be physical cards or virtual electronic cards and both types have advantages and disadvantages. You can carry the physical cards around with you and pull them out to look through whenever you have a spare moment. The process with writing the words and meanings can also help you to remember them. While the electronic ones can include audio, video and spaced repetition systems which test you on the words at increasing intervals and bring up the ones you find difficult more frequently.

Associations – a method of making connections between new words and ones your already know, either in your native language or in other languages you know. For example, to remember the Russian word for juice, сок (sok), you could imagine drinking juice through a sock. The stranger and funnier the images, the better you’ll remember the words, and once the words are in your long-term memory, you probably won’t need the associations.

Rhymes – another possible way to remember lists of related words, such as days of the week, colours, numbers, etc, is to recite them regularly with a particular rhythm. You probably have a rhyme for remembering how many days there are in each month in your native language (e.g thirty days hath September, etc), and you could use similar kinds of rhymes for other groups of words. Or you could take their initial letters and make a mnemonic like “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” = red orange yellow green blue indigo violet (colours of the rainbow).

The most effective why to learn vocabulary seems to be learning it in context – i.e. by reading and listening to lots of material in the language you’re learning and by doing your best to learn the new words you encounter, and also by trying to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words from the context. Maybe the first time you read or hear particular words they will mean nothing to you, but if you hear them again several times in different contexts you might be able to guess their meaning. If you can guess the meanings of words you’re likely to remember them better than if you use a dictionary.

One useful exercise is to take a particular text or recording and to study it in detail. You could make sure that you know the meaning of all the words, that you understand the grammar and word order, and that you can pronounce everything. With recordings it might help to make a transcription, and with written texts it might help to have a native speaker record it for you, if possible, or to at least read them aloud to check your pronunciation.

Once you have a in-depth understand of the material, you could take individual words from it and find related ones – synonyms (words with a similar meaning), homonyms (words with a similar sound but a different meaning), antonyms (words with the opposite meaning, e.g. up / down, in / out, etc), and words with related meanings (e.g. car, bus, train, etc). This will help build your vocabulary in a fairly systematic way, and is something you can dip into when the urge takes you rather than trying to do it all at once.

Source: www.bztoons.com

One way to practise using the language you’re learning and to learn more vocabulary in context is with pictures or cartoons. You could choose any picture and try to describe what you see in it. If you choose cartoons the descriptions are likely to be amusing, which will make them more memorable.

You could describe what people look like, what they’re wearing, where they are, what they’re doing, where they come from and where they’re going, and so on. You could also focus on particular aspects of the picture such as colours, shapes, or the location of different bits in relations to others. Alternatively you could make up a story about the picture – e.g. what happened before and after it, and how are the people in it connected.

The descriptions could be as simple or as complex as you like – at first maybe you can only manage a simple description, but as your knowledge of the language improves, you will be able to go back to add more details.

When describing the above cartoon, for example, you could focus on the people – their appearance, clothes, relationship, back story, what they’re saying to each other, etc; the setting; the colours and/or shapes; or even the duck.

By tracing the origins or etymology of words you can often uncover interesting stories. Many words in English, for example, come from other languages, and some took a very meandering path to get there, while the meanings of others has changed completely over time.

Walnuts have nothing to do with walls, instead their name comes from the Old English wealh-hnutu, meaning “foreign nut”. The word Welsh and the -wall in Cornwall come from the same root (wealh), which was used by Anglo-Saxons and other speakers of Germanic languages to refer to speakers of others Celtic languages and Latin. It is also the root of such names as Walloon, Vlach and the names of a number of other places and peoples in Europe. In Welsh walnuts are known as cneuen ffrengig (French nuts).

The practice of naming unfamiliar things as “foreign” or including their country of origin in their name is quite common in many different languages. In Thai, for example, tomato is มะเขือเทศ (ma-khuea thet), “foreign eggplant”, lemon is มะนาวเทศ (manao thet) “foreign lime”, and ostrich is นกกระจอกเทศ (nok kracok thet), “foreign sparrow”, while the English word peach comes from the Latin malum persicum or persian apple, and the Mandarin Chinese for walnut is 胡桃 (hútāo) or “barbarian peach”.

You never know what you’re going to discovering when you look into the origins of words, and being familiar with the roots of foreign words can help you to remember them.

English has absorbed vocabulary from a many different languages over the course of its history, including quite a lot from Arabic. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, list more than 900 Arabic words that are used in English, some are obscure and rarely used, while others are more common.

Some words have come directly from Arabic, others have arrived via other languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Urdu or Persian. The pronunciation of these words often changes in the course of transmission from one language to another so many don’t resemble the original Arabic versions. Their meanings have also changed, for example algebra, from the Arabic لجبر al-jabr, originally meant “bone setting”.

In recent years quite a few new words of Arabic origin have entered the English language, including imam (leader), al-Jazeera (lit. “the peninsula”), al-Qaeda (lit. “the base”), jihad (lit. “struggle”) and hijab (lit. “curtain/cover”).

Some Arabic loanwords in English start with the Arabic definite article, al (sounds like el in Spanish), which has become attached to them. These include albatross, alchemy, alcohol, alcove, alfalfa, algebra, algorithm, alkali and almanac.

Others, which aren’t so easy to spot, include: apricot, arsenal, average, azure, barbican, calico, carat, cheque, cipher, cotton, elixir, gazelle, giraffe, henna, jasmine, mattress, monsoon, marzipan, orange, saffron, sugar, syrup, tabby, tariff and zero.

Today’s word, prisa, is the Spanish for hurry, haste, speed or (a sense of) urgency. It is used in quite a few expressions, including:

• tener prisa / estar de prisa – to be in a hurry
• darse prisa – to hurry (up), or literally, “to give oneself hurry”
• dar/meter prisa a uno – to hurry someone else up
• voy con mucha prisa / tengo mucha prisa – I’m in a great hurry
• temporada de más prisa – busy period
• a prisa / de prisa – quickly, hurriedly
• a toda prisa – as quickly as possibly
• ¡date prisa! – hurry up! get a move on!
• sin prisa pero sin pausa – in an unhurried way (without hurrying but without pausing)

Interestingly the word for hurry in Welsh (prysur) sounds similar to like the Spanish word prisa. You never know when you might find unexpected connections between languages like this.