Category: Language learning

Subtitles

By Simon

The other day I discovered how to add subtitles and speech bubbles to my videos on YouTube. I’ve added them to my latest video in Spanish:

So you can now have the speech bubbles with the dialogue in Spanish, the subtitles in English, or both, or neither. It was quite a fiddly and laborious process to add the speech bubbles, but relatively straightforward to add the subtitles as I used the timing from the speech bubbles (annotations).

Today I saw a post on Fluent in 3 months about this very topic with suggestions on how to do it more easily. This got me thinking and I realised that another way to add the subtitles is to record the sound of a video using Audacity, and to get the timing of each bit of speech from there. You have to have a transcript of the dialogue first, of course, though that wasn’t a problem as I always prepare such transcripts when I make the videos.

I used this method to add subtitles to my video about eel-infested Austrian hovercrafts, and it worked well. I’ve also started adding speech bubbles, but haven’t quite finished that yet.

Half the dialogue is in English and half in German, and the subtitles are in English for the German bits and in German for the English bits. I thought it would be a useful exercise for me to try to translate the English bits into German. If you spot any mistakes, please let me know.

This is what the file for the subtitles (captions) looks like:

0:00:00.0,0:00:00.4
Hello

0:00:00.8,0:00:01.3
Hallo

0:00:01.6,0:00:02.7
How are you?

0:00:03.1,0:00:05.1
Es tut mir leid ich verstehe nicht.

0:00:05.5,0:00:07.0
Spechen Sie über ein Gatter?

0:00:07.4,0:00:10.8
Sprechen. Sie. Englisch?

0:00:11.2,0:00:15.2
Yes, of course. Do. You. Speak. German?

0:00:15.6,0:00:20.1
Äh, meinen Sie damit, daß Sie Englisch sprechen,
und fragen Sie mich, wenn ich Deutsch spreche?

0:00:20.6,0:00:23.4
Yes. You can understand a little German?

0:00:23.7,0:00:28.5
Ja, ich habe in der Schule Deutsch gelernt und
kann ein wenig verstehen, aber ich kann nicht sprechen.

0:00:28.8,0:00:31.8
Seit sehr viele Jahre habe ich es nicht benutzt
und ich bin etwas aus der Übung,

0:00:31.9,0:00:33.8
aber jetzt fängt es zurückzukommen.

0:00:34.1,0:00:35.9
I understand. What’s your name?

0:00:36.3,0:00:39.5
Mein Name? Ich heise Jane. Wie heißen Sie?

0:00:39.9,0:00:42.1
My name is Klaus. Where are you from?

0:00:42.5,0:00:44.9
Ich komme aus Birmingham. Und Sie?

0:00:45.3,0:00:48.0
I’m from Vienna. What do you do?

0:00:48.3,0:00:50.0
Ich bin Bibliothekarin, und Sie?

0:00:50.4,0:00:53.2
I’m a Danube hovercraft company captain.

0:00:53.5,0:00:55.6
Mann, das ist ein ziemlicher Zungenbrecher!

0:00:56.0,0:00:59.5
Genießen Sie arbeit als
Donauluftkissenfahrzeuggesellschaftskapitän
zu tun?

0:00:59.8,0:01:01.4
Yes. I enjoy it very much.

0:01:01.8,0:01:04.1
But the hovercrafts are often full of eels.

0:01:04.7,0:01:08.4
Ja, ich weiß. Diese verteufelten Aale kommen überall hin.

0:01:08.8,0:01:11.4
Yes. It was nice talking to you.

0:01:11.7,0:01:15.0
I must get back to the hovercrafts. Goodbye.

0:01:15.2,0:01:17.7
Ja, es war schön mit Ihr zu reden.

0:01:18.1,0:01:20.7
Viel Glück mit dieser Aal-verseuchten luftkissenfahrzeugen.

0:01:21.2,0:01:21.7
Auf Wiedersehen.

New video

By Simon

I’m currently making a new video in Xtranormal – this time in Spanish. Here’s the script, with English translation:

¡Hola!
Hi

Buena día. ¿En qué puedo ayudarle?
Hello, How can I help you?

Busco trabajo.
I’m looking for work.

¿Qué tipo de trabajo?
What kind of work?

Como payaso y cirujano de cerebro.
As a clown and brain surgeon.

¿En serio? ¿Me está vacilando?
Really!? Are you pulling my leg?

¡No, lo digo en serio!
No, I’m serious!

¿Tiene Usted algun título y experiencia?
Do you have any qualifications and experience?

¿Sí, por supuesto! Estudié medicina en Madrid, y tengo cerebro y zapatos muy grandes.
Yes, of course! I studied medicine in Madrid, I have a brain, and very large shoes.

Bueno. ¿Cómo piensa combinar la bufonada y la cirugía?
Ok. How do you plan to combine clownery and surgery?

Bueno, podría ayudar a la gente a relajarse antes de la cirugía con mi bufonada.
Well, I could help people to relax before surgery with my clowning.

¡Buena idea! Lamentablemente no tenemos ofertas de empleo para la cirugía del cerebro en el momento.
Good idea! Unfortunately we don’t have any jobs for brain surgeons at the moment.

¡Qué lástima! ¿Tienen ofertas de empleo para los payasos?
What a pity! Do you have any jobs for clowns?

Lo siento, no tenemos. Pero ¿ha contempla la posibilidad de entrar en la política?
Sorry, we don’t, but have you considered going into politics?

¿La política? Pero no tengo ningun experiencia.
Politics!? But I have no experience.

¡No importa! Es como hacer el payaso, pero con menos de tortas de crema.
It doesn’t matter! It’s like clowning, but with fewer custard pies

Bueno. ¡Eso parece ideal! No me gusta las tortas de crema. ¿Quando puedo comencar?
Ok. That sounds ideal! I don’t like custard pies anyway. When can I start?

Hay una elección en unos pocos meses.
There’s an election in a few months.

Tal vez voy a intentarlo.
Maybe I’ll give it a try.

¡Buena suerte!
Good luck!

Muchas gracias.
Thanks a lot.

¡Adíos!
Goodbye.

¡Adíos!
Goodbye.

If you spot any errors or have suggestions for how to make this funnier or sillier, just let me know.

I make these videos mainly for fun, but the process of writing in other languages also helps me to improve my knowledge of them. Making them funny and/or silly makes the vocabulary and grammatical constructions more memorable for me.

It is now possible to up load audio to Xtranormal as well as using the text-to-speech facility, so I could use recordings in any language I know, and plan to do so.

Videos I’ve already made.

[addendum] The video is now finished and available on YouTube. I’ve even worked out how to add speech bubbles and subtitles.

Projects and practice

By Simon

When you learn a language because it’s useful, interesting, fun and/or necessary (all of which are good reasons to do so), the language itself tends to be the main focus, and acquiring the ability to understand, speak, read and/or write it is perhaps the main goal. An alternative approach is to see a language as a means to do others things – to make friends from different countries; to read foreign literature and other material; to understand foreign radio, TV and films; to spend time in other countries, and so on. This kind of project or task-based language learning is almost certainly not a new idea, but I think it’s worth trying.

I find languages themselves fascinating and can spend a lot of time learning about them, and also tend to focus on listening to and reading them. In order to become proficient using them in speech and writing though, I find it helps to set myself specific tasks or projects which give me opportunities to actually use the languages.

For example, when I was gathering material for my MA dissertation, which focused on the Manx Gaelic language, I tried to communicate with Manx speakers in Manx. It took me quite a while to compose emails in Manx, as I had to look up many of the words and check the grammar, but the process of doing this really helped to improve my written Manx. My spoken Manx also improved as I read everything I wrote aloud quite a few times, and did my best to chat in Manx with my informants.

I’ve also found that writing on my multilingual blog in languages I’m learning is very helpful. When I do write things there, which I haven’t done much recently, I tend to write in Welsh, Irish and/or Manx, and sometimes in other languages. I tend to write about my life, though in some ways the process of writing is more important than the content.

Another example: if you’re learning French you might want to learn to make some French dishes. This could be a project you do in French – finding recipes online, learning the relevant words and phrases, then making the dishes. Perhaps you could also invite French-speaking or learning friends to help you to eat what you’ve made, which would be a good opportunity to discuss what you made and how, thus reinforcing what you’ve learnt, both in terms of language and cooking skills. If French cuisine really appeals to you, you could even do a cookery course in France or another French-speaking country.

Do you set yourself tasks and projects to do using foreign languages?

Sign languages

By Simon

I’ve been thinking about which language(s) to focus on this year. My studies of Russian petered out before Christmas, partly because I haven’t any pressing need to learn it. Since then I’ve been trying to decide whether to continue with Russian, to learn a new language, or to work on a language I’ve already studied.

As I was given Teach Yourself British Sign Language for Christmas, I’ve decided to have another go at it. The book and accompanying DVD seem to be clear and well put together, and cover not just signs, but also grammar, Deaf culture and etiquette. I might also learn some more Spanish.

In other sign language-related news, it is now possible to learn Icelandic Sign Language (íslenskt táknmál) online on SignWiki, if you already know Icelandic. Icelandic Sign Language developed from Danish Sign Language (Dansk Tegnsprog) and was officially recognised in Icelandic in May 2011, according to the IceNews website.

Handwriting and typing Cyrillic

By Simon

I finally finished learning the handwritten cursive version of the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian today – I’ve been learning it a few letters at a time, so it has taken a while. Now I can write down the Russian words and phrases I’m learning more easily – writing the printed versions of the letters seems decidedly awkward to me. I might even investigate Russian calligraphy.

Now I just need to map my fingers to the Russian keyboard layout so that I can type Russian as well, instead of picking the letters one at a time from BabelMap, as I’ve been doing. I just found an online typing tutor that helps you learn various keyboard layouts for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. There’s a similar site with even more keyboard layouts here.

After many years of trial and error, I can touch type English fairly well, and type the other Western European languages I know as well. I can also type Chinese using pinyin, and Japanese using romaji. When typing Czech though (not something I do very often), I get accented letters like ě, č, ů and ž from BabelMap.

When learning a new language, especially a new alphabet, do you usually learn how to type it?

Doxastic

By Simon

I came across the word doxastic (/dɒkˈsæstɪk/) today in Being Wrong – Adventures in the Margin of Error by Katryn Schulz. It means “pertaining to beliefs” and appears in the expression used in philosophy, ‘First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation’, or as Schulz terms it ”Cuz It’s True Constraint’. It means that we have only a limited number of ways to explain why we believe what we do.

We often believe things to be self-evidently true without necessarily being explain why or to provide reasons. For example, you might be convinced that your method or system for learning languages works and anybody who doesn’t agree just needs to be convinced of this. You might have invested a lot of time and money to develop and promote your system, so it’s in your interest to believe that the system works. You might not be consciously aware of this, but such things are often obvious in methods and systems developed by others.

Doxastic comes from the Greek δοξαστικ-ός (forming opinion, conjectural), from δοξαστής (conjecturer), from δοξάζ-ειν (to conjecture) [source].

The dox part, from the Greek δόξα (opinion, glory), also appears in such words as paradox – para comes from the Greek παρά (by the side of, beside, past, beyond), so it means ‘beyond belief’, and orthodox – ortho comes from the Greek ὀρθο- (straight, right), so it means ‘right belief’.

Dox is also internet slang for personal details (name, address, etc) that are visible online.

Russian

By Simon

I’ve been concentrating on Russian for a week now and am making some progress. I listen to Russian language radio in the mornings while working on Omniglot, so my attention isn’t entirely focused on what they’re saying, but even so I am becoming more familiar with the sounds and rhythyms of the language. The names of people and places, the many recognisable international words, and the other words I recognise help me to get the gist of news reports.

I learn or revise phrases in language101.com every day, and can remember many of them. The phrases I learnt so far a mostly basic ones like ‘hello’, ‘how are you?’, ‘where are you from?’ and so on, with a few longer ones like ‘Russian is a beautiful language’.

Yesterday I started practising writing Russian letters in cursive style. I have tried this before, but have since forgotten how to write quite a few of them. The cursive versions of some of the letters look quite different to their printed forms (the same is true of Latin letters), for example a cursive upper case Д (D) looks like a Latin D, while the lower case д looks like a cursive Latin g.

There are tutorials on how to write cursive style Russian here and here.

With practice I’ll get used to the printed and handwritten versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, but I think it will take quite a while before I’m able to read it as easily as I can the Latin alphabet.

Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах

By Simon

Camels

A few years ago I tried to learn Russian just using Rosetta Stone Russian to test how well it worked. I chose Russian because I hadn’t studied before and because I thought it would be an interesting and useful language learn. At that time I also needed to put together web pages in Russian from time to time, so I thought being able to at least read the language a bit would be handy.

I spent over six months studying every day and in all that time I didn’t learn any phrases like Здравствуйте (Hello), Как дела? (How are you?) or Спасибо (thank you), but I did learn colours, numbers, a variety or nouns like мальчик (boy), девушка (girl), лошадь (horse), слон (elephant) and самолет (aeroplane), and ‘useful’ phrases like, Лошадь не настоящая (The horse is not real), Тигр сидит на стене (The tiger is sitting on the wall), and Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах (The camel is standing on three legs).

Rosetta Stone is designed to teach you entirely through the language you’re learning using photos and recordings. It’s not always clear exactly what the photos are supposed to represent, and when you’re asked to match photos to written or spoken words and phrases, it’s possible to do so without really understanding the words and phrases. The choice of phrases may seem somewhat strange, though many language courses, especially older ones, use similar kinds of phrases to teach you vocabulary and to illustrate various grammatical constructions.

Last week I started learning Russian again using Language101.com, which provides online courses in French, German, Danish, Spanish, Irish, Canadian French and Russian. It uses a spaced repetition system (SRS) with recordings, and contains thousands of phrases for each language. Over the past few days I’ve learnt more practical and useful Russian phrases than I did in six months with Rosetta Stone, and I’ll be writing a review of the site soon.

I plan to focus mainly on Russian for the next two months using such courses as Language101.com, WikiTranslate.org, A Spoonful of Russian and Language Bridge. I’ll also listen Russian language radio every day (at the moment I’m listening to Радио Голос России).

One word I recognised while listening to Russian radio yesterday was верблюд (camel) – I think they were talking about camels in Tajikistan. I remembered it because of the phrase from Rosetta Stone. This got me thinking that while you would rarely use phrases like верблюд стоит на трёх ногах, unless you happened to live in a camel-infested Russian-speaking region, such as Tajikistan, that phrase is very memorable because it’s unusual and funny.

Perhaps that’s the point – learning phrases like this helps you to remember ordinary words like stand, three and legs, as well as camel, and it shows you how to put them together. The more unusual and funny or silly the phrase, the more likely you are to remember it. It works for me at least. So I plan to try constructing similarly unusual, funny, silly and ridiculous sentences in Russian and other languages to help me remember vocabulary and grammatical patterns. I might even make some videos like the ones on my YouTube channel featuring these phrases.

Do you have any suggestions for suitably silly phrases?

[Addendum] Here’s my Language101.com review.

Cvičení dělá mistra / Practice makes perfect

By Simon

When learning a language I usually spend a lot of time listening to and reading it, and as a result become at least reasonably proficient at understanding it in speech and writing. In most cases though, I don’t spend as much time speaking and writing it, so my speaking and writing abilities tend to lag behind my reading and listening skills.

For example, I can remember quite a few of the phrases and even whole chunks of dialogue from my language courses, and can recognise and understand them when I hear them or read them, and perhaps also use them in speech and writing, if the context permits. When I try to talk about things not covered by the courses though, I quickly find that my vocabulary runs out and I struggle to construct my own sentences.

Of course I can look up any words I don’t know in a dictionary, or ask a native speaker, if one is available, and this is fine for isolating languages like Mandarin as you can just stick the words in the appropriate place in your sentence, as long as you know that place. In synthetic languages like Czech and Russian though, you have to apply the appropriate inflections to the words, at least you do if you want to speak and write them correctly and to be understood, as I do.

So I think I need to do a lot more practise making my own sentences in the languages I’m working on – currently Czech and Breton. I could start with simple sentences from my language courses and other sources and change and/or add bits. For example, a simple sentence from my Czech course (Colloquial Czech) is Jsem student (I’m a student). I could change the person of the verb: Jsi student (You are a student), the number: Jsme studenti (We are students), or the tense: Byli jsme studenti (We were students). I could change the noun: Jsem lingvista (I’m a linguist), and add over words to the sentence: Jsem líný lingvista (I’m a lazy linguist), Jsem líný lingvista z Anglie (I’m a lazy linguist from England).

I can check these sentences by searching for them in Google to see if anyone else has used them, or something similar. That’s also a good way to find texts related to what you’re writing / talking about.

It’s probably best to start with simple sentences, and once I can construct them fairly well, I could try linking them together. Another exercise that might be useful is to take a paragraph in one of the languages I’m learning and to focus on one particularly type of word – nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. I could just try to identify each type, or change things – for example, the tense of the verbs.

Do you do anything similar when learning languages?

This post was inspired by a video on the FluentCzech channel on YouTube which discusses a similar way to learn languages – constructing simple sentences in your L2, translating them to your L1, then back to your L2.