Category: Language learning

Soaking up languages like a sponge

By Simon

A report I found today talks about a school in Seattle called sponge which aims to teach babies and children four languages – Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese – through play, songs, stories, etc. They have teachers who are native speakers of the languages they teach and take children from as young 5 months and up to 5 years old.

This sounds like an interesting approach to language teaching and I’m sure that children will benefit from this multilingual environment. I wonder whether they’ll become fluent in all the languages though – they may not get sufficient exposure to each to acquire them fully. Perhaps that isn’t the point of the school.

Say something!

By Simon

When other people discover that you speak a foreign language, they sometimes ask you to say something in that language. You might want to say something complicated thinking it will impress them, but if they don’t speak the language themselves, anything you say will probably do that. But what to say?

Poems, songs, proverbs, sayings or tongue twisters are all possible choices. They will sound impressive, even if you stumble over parts of them. If that happens and you just keep going as if nothing happened, nobody will notice. Simple sentences such as “My name is ….”, “I come from …”, “Isn’t it a nice day today?” or something similar are another possibility. Or if you’re feeling flippant, you could just say the equivalent of “something” or “something in [name of language]”.

When asked to perform in this way I usually just say a few simple sentences, though afterwards I think maybe I should’ve said something along the lines of, “As you don’t speak this language I can say whatever I like and you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. So I just want to mention that my hovercraft is full of eels, as well you know!”. Unfortunately I can’t always manage to construct this kind of thing on the fly.

What do you usually say when asked to say something in a foreign language?

This post was inspired by one on Corcaighist.

Dental fricatives

By Simon

Continuing yesterday’s theme of sounds that can be challenging to pronounce, today we look at the voiceless dental fricative /θ/. This sound is usually written th in English and appears in such words as three [θriː], thought [θɔːt] and thin [θɪn]. In the Spanish of Spain it’s written c (when followed by i or e), as in cien [θien], and z, as in Zaragoza [θaragoθa]. It’s also used in a number of other languages, including Greek – the Greek letter θ (Θήτα/theta) represents this sound in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

The voiced version of this sound is represented in the IPA by the letter ð (eth), which comes from Old English. This sound is written th in English and appears in the [ðə] and though [ðoʊ]. In Welsh it’s written dd; in Icelandic ð; in Albanian, Cornish and Swahili dh, and in Greek δ (Δέλτα/delta). In Spanish d can be pronounced /ð/ when it comes between two vowels, as in nada [‘naða].

These sounds are fairly rare among the world’s languages and can be tricky for speakers of languages which don’t use them. They also tend to be the last sounds acquired by native speakers of English, according to this page.

There’s an explanation of how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative here. You do the same and just let vocal folds vibrate to pronounce the voiced version.

I didn’t learn how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative properly until the age of 23, when a Taiwanese friend who was studying English at university explained it to me. Before that, I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between three and free – I pronounced both with /f/ at the beginning. I still have to make a conscious effort to pronounce this sound sometimes and tend to slip back to the /f/ sound when not concentrating.

I often pronounce the voiced dental fricative as /v/ when it’s not at the beginning of a word, for example in brother. However, since starting to learn Welsh, which makes quite a lot of use of dental fricatives, my ability to pronounce them has improved. Combinations of /ð/ and /v/ can also trip me up, as in swyddfa [sʊɨðva].

Alveolar trills

By Simon

One aspect of Spanish pronunciation that can be tricky to master is the trilled or rolled r, which is also known as an alveolar trill /r/. This sound is also used in Italian and many other languages. Some people seem convinced that if you can’t already make this sound, it’s impossible to learn.

If you are having trouble with the Spanish r, this blog post might help. It breaks it down into a four step process and explains clearly what to do at each stage. There’s another explanation of how to make this sound here.

Once you’re got those r’s rolling, here’s a tongue twister to practise with:

Erre con Erre Cigarro
Erre con Erre Barril
Rápido corre el carro
Repleto do ferro en el ferrocarril

It is possible, in fact, to learn to make any sound used in any language, even the rolled r, and other tricky sounds like the clicks used in some African languages and the back-of-the-throat sounds of Arabic. It takes a lot of listening and practise. An understanding of the mechanics of how the sounds are produced can help as well.

There are online introductions to phonetics and phonology here and here, and this site shows you the relative positions of the tongue, teeth, lips, etc when pronouncing various sounds.

I can usually manage alveolar trills, though sometimes find the double rr in the middle of words such as carro a bit tricky and I have to slow down to get it right.

Irish language resources

By Simon

Here are a couple of online resources I came across today for learning Irish:

Everyday Irish – a series of Irish language lessons by Liam Ó Maonlaí, lead singer of the Hothouse Flowers, and offered for free by the Irish Independent. The lessons are in the form of mp3s with accompanying worksheets in PDF format. They are available for beginners and more advanced students.

Talk Irish – a new Irish language learning project which will offer free Irish word-a-day emails, podcasts and flashcards. At the moment only the word-a-day is available, once you’ve joined the site.

Flashcards

By Simon

When I was at university I used flashcards quite a lot to learn Chinese characters and vocabulary in Chinese and Japanese. After I’d learnt each character, I stuck the cards on the wall and eventually they covered almost ever inch of wallspace. Since then however, I’ve rarely used flashcards. They are quite effective, if you look at them regularly, but for various reasons I thought they weren’t for me.

Recently I’ve decided to give them another chance. This time I’m using Mnemosyne, a downloadable flashcard program, rather than paper flashcards. Some flashcard programs, including Mnemosyne, have a built-in spaced repetition system which
tests you after different periods of time depending on your assessment of how well you know the word/phrase/sentence. This apparently helps you to commit the information to your long-term memory.

So far I’ve entered quite a few sentences in Irish from articles on Beo, an online Irish language magazine. I’m using sentences rather than individual words because this enables me to see how the words and grammar is used in context. I plan to add many more sentences and phrases in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and maybe other languages.

I found a useful site today, the FlashcardExchange, which provides readymade online flashcards for many languages, as well as for other subjects. You can also make your own cards and share them with your friends. Most of this is free, but a one-off fee is payable for some of the services on the site.

Do you use flashcards or flashcard programs? Do you know of any flashcard programs which you can add sound to?

Word of the day – timeboxing

By Simon

I came across the term timeboxing today on this blog. When I first read it, it conjured up images of someone boxing with a clock. Now I know that it’s a technique for managing your time that’s often used for software development projects. It involves setting yourself set ‘boxes’ of time to do things, but not worrying about completing them. Instead you just do as much as you can as well as you can in the time available. Then you use as many more timeboxes as you need to complete the tasks. The aim is to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a time limit and to avoid overcommiting to a task.

The author of the blog post mentions that he finds it easier to make a start on tedious tasks because he has decided in advance that he’ll stop after a set time. Once he’s conquered the initial inertia of getting started and becomes more focused and interested in the tasks, he might spend longer than originally intended working on them.

This technique could be applied to language learning. You could set yourself a box or boxes of time each day when you’ll study, and study as much as you can manage in that/those time(s). While you might find it difficult to study a whole lesson in the time available, studying part of a lesson is still a useful thing to do.

One of the commenters on the post mentions that he rewards himself each time he completes a period of study. He finds that he rewarding himself in small doses at regular intervals helps him get a lot more done. This idea could be applied to language learning as well – the rewards could be doing something you really enjoy in the language, such as listening to or singing a song or watching a video.

More information about timeboxing.

ECpod

By Simon

Ecpod is a language learning site I found the other day that’s designed to teach you conversational English and Mandarin Chinese. It contains videos made by members, some of which feature everyday activities such as cooking, shopping or playing; others focus on particularly aspects of English or Chinese. There are also funny videos, cartoons, and a variety of others. The videos are vetted by language tutors commissioned by the site, who sometimes also add transcriptions.

It’s free, but you have to join to site to submit your own videos.

This sounds like a good idea. Do you know of similar sites for other languages?

Time

By Simon

Finding time to study languages isn’t always easy what with all the other things you have to do. You can probably find moments during the day when you could study a bit, each of which might be only short. This doesn’t matter as long as you manage to accumulate a sufficient number of moments.

Some people advise you to fill every spare moment with language-related activity. This is all very well if you’re the kind of diligent person who carries around textbooks, dictionaries, flashcards and other language learning paraphernalia which you can whip out whenever the opportunity arises. If, like me, you don’t always have such things to hand, you can practice your language(s) by thinking of the words for the things you see around you, trying to describe the appearance and actions of any people and or animals you encounter, or just talking to yourself.

While I do try to use my spare moments to practise my languages, quite often I spend them just daydreaming or letting my mind wander instead. Sometimes my daydreams are in other languages though.

Last week Geoff B over on Confessions of a Language Addict wrote a good post about planning your studies – he suggests that when planning language study, it’s better to find times that fit into your routine and make them part of your routine, rather than thinking something like ‘I’ll study for an hour every evening’, then failing to do so.

He goes on to comment:

“Too often when we formulate our language learning plans, we are making them not for ourselves but for our idealized version of a dedicated language learner. Then we beat ourselves up for not being motivated enough to stick to it. In laying out your language learning plans, think about how you live your life and how you do things. Try to lay out some routines you can actually see yourself sticking to.”

Languages Quick Fix

By Simon

Languages Quick Fix is a very useful site I discovered today. It includes words, phrases, and idioms in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German, plus a basic introduction to each language. There are recordings of the words, phrases, and idioms in all the languages – in the case of Chinese, the recordings are in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese. There are also links to news stories, dictionaries, and Chinese paintings (in the Learn Chinese – One At a Time section).

Another useful site I came across today is SmallMarble, a multilingual phrase book to which anyone can contribute. At the moment it has Spanish translations of most of the phrases, but few translations in other languages.