Category: Language learning

Language learning – finding that elusive catalyst

By Simon

Guest post by Rajul Chande

Having found it so tough to learn languages myself, I’ve always been fascinated by how others manage to do it. So I decided to interview people who have learned languages to find those seductive but elusive “short cuts”, if they exist at all!

This project is now taking shape as a book which I’m co-authoring, aiming to “model” useful language learning habits and methods from real case studies.

We’re hoping that the tips from these “language learner biographies” will inspire more people to take on the challenge of learning languages, a challenge supported in such encyclopaedic depth by the Omniglot website.

I remember at school how my motivation was driven by a passion for French cinema.
This taught me about finding deep-seated motivation through something you love doing anyway, where the language offers a gateway to further your enjoyment.

And as I currently scramble along trying to improve my Italian (love of the country), Spanish (love of Latin music) and German (love of my girlfriend!), I’m doing my best to keep this in mind, though progress is nowhere near as smooth as I’d like.

I’m in awe of people like Simon who traverse the boundaries of different language families so courageously.

I hope that as a fellow languages enthusiast reading this you might be tempted to contribute your own “linguistic biography” to the book. Please email me via the contact form at www.getfluentfast.com to receive a short questionnaire.

You might even see your language learning exploits in print when the book is published later this year.

Norwegian (Norsk)

By Simon

Learning Norwegian is apparently quite a challenge, according to an article I came across yesterday. Not only do you have two written forms of Norwegian to wrestle with, but also numerous dialects of spoken Norwegian.

Most Norwegian language courses teach you to read and write Bokmål, the most widely-used of the two standard written forms of Norwegian, and to speak Standard Østnorsk (Standard East Norwegian), which is considered the standard spoken form of Bokmål. Standard Østnorsk is spoken mainly by the middle and upper classes in the cities of eastern Norway, including the capital, Olso, and is closer to Danish than other Norwegian dialects.

When you try to communicate with people from other regions of Norway however, you’ll probably find it difficult to understand their dialects, which tend to be closer to Nynorsk, the other written form of Norwegian. There are also considerable differences in the dialects of different regions, and Norwegians don’t tend to adapt their language to make it easier for learners to understand them, perhaps because relatively few people study Norwegian.

A Norwegian lecturer who specializes in Norwegian as a second language at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is mentioned in the article as “calling for her fellow Norwegians to tone down their dialects, so that non-natives trying to learn Norwegian can hope to understand them”.

There are quite a few other articles about Norwegian in Norwegian, English, German, French and a number of other languages at www.sprakrad.no.

I haven’t got round to learning Norwegian yet. One day I’d like to though.

Are you studying Norwegian? Have you encountered any of the problems discussed in the article?

More on BSL

By Simon

Continuing yesterday’s sign language theme, I’ve been looking for information about British Sign Language (BSL) and have found a number online lessons and courses, as well as some information about the language. I’ve even learned a few signs.

BSL is used by over 70,000 deaf people, and also by some 100,000 hearing people. It was recognised as a language in it’s own right by the UK government on 18 March 2003, but it has no legal protection, so is not an official language of the UK.

According to Wikipedia, BSL is very similar to Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and New Zealand Sign Language, and also to Northern Ireland Sign Language (NISL), though differs significantly from Irish Sign Language (ISL), which, like American Sign Language (ASL), developed from French Sign Language (la langue des signes française / LSF).

There are some BSL lessons here, here, here and here.

I find it fascinating to watch sign language being used and would like learn it one of these days.

Radio Lingua

By Simon

A useful site I found this week is Radio Lingua, which offers podcasts to help you learn Spanish, French and German, or the basics of Polish, Irish, German and Russian in one minute chunks. The one minute podcasts are also available here.

Learning languages a little at a time like this seems to be quite a good way to get started. Most of the language courses I’ve tried tend to throw you straight into quite complex dialogues, which are often about subjects that are of little interest or relevance. However, one of my Irish courses, Irish On Your Own/Now You’re Talking, includes a lot of short dialogues and I found it much more useful.

Irish in New York

By Simon

The other day while listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta, the Irish language radio station, I heard an interview with a guy from New York who has taught himself Irish over the past year or so. He works for the NYPD and has Irish ancestry, hence his interest in the language. He’s never been to Ireland and rarely gets chances to use his Irish, but he speaks it with a fluency that amazed the interviewer. He also sang a song in Irish, and did so very well, but was very modest about his achievement, saying that he still has a lot to learn.

It’s good to hear about successful language learners. It also makes me think I could do better with my studies.

Language and rhythm

By Simon

Language and rhythm are inextricably linked, according to a blog post I found the other day. The post is about reading scripts for theatrical performances, but much of it applies just as much to every day speech.

The main point is that language has inherent rhythms which are crucial because they are where the meaning is found. When you read a text in your mother tongue, you naturally break it up into meaningful chunks and adjust your rhythm as appropriate. If you apply unnatural rhythm to a text, it will be difficult to follow and you may not understand what you’re saying, neither will others.

When learning a foreign language, one of the things you need to acquire is that language’s natural rhythms. If you use the rhythm of your native language when speaking the foreign one, people might find you difficult or impossible to understand, unless they’re used to hearing non-natives speaking their language. Acquiring native-like rhythms takes a lot of listening and mimicery, and even then, you’ll might end up sounding slightly foreign, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Do you have any suggestions on how to acquire the rhythms of a foreign language?

Reinventing yourself

By Simon

Imagine going from working in insurance in Liverpool, to becoming a pop star in China. That’s just what Barry Cox did, according to an article on the BBC News website.

He was bored with his insurance job and wanted to try something different. After a visit to his local Chinese chip shop, he decided to have a go at learning Chinese. So he made friends with the guys in the chip shop, and began to learn Cantonese from them, and also at the Wah Sing Chinese Community Centre in Liverpool. Then he went to work in a Chinese supermarket and a restaurant to work on his language skills.

One of the guys gave him a pile of Cantonese music CDs. Barry found the tunes quite catchy and learnt to sing some of songs, even though he had no musical background and didn’t listen to music much before that.

Before long he was singing regularly at karakoe nights around Chinatown, and eventually moved to Hong Kong to pursue a singing career under the name of Gok Pak-wing. After building up his reputation over a number of years, he was offered a residency at the biggest casino in Macau.

So there you have a slightly unusual reason to learn a language – to become a pop star!

Teacher shortages

By Simon

According to an article I found today, the numbers of students studying Arabic at colleges in the USA has been increasingly significantly since 9-11. At the same time, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the numbers of qualified teachers of Arabic. In some areas, potential students of Arabic have been turned away due to the lack of teachers.

Many colleges are hiring native speakers of Arabic with little or no teaching experience or qualifications. That set up sounds familiar – much of the English as a Foreign Language teaching seems to be set up along similar lines.

Elsewhere, due to popularity of Gaelic-medium education in parts of Scotland, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. There’s also a shortage of Manx-medium teachers in the Isle of Man, of Welsh-medium teachers in Wales, and of Irish-medium teachers in Ireland.

Mandarin learning – a fad?

By Simon

Is the current craze for learning Mandarin Chinese a misguided fad? An article in The Economist I found today suggests that it might be.

Mandarin is now taught at over 400 secondary schools in the UK, and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust would like to see it made part of the national curriculum. Around the world there are some 30 million people studying Mandarin at the moment, and the Chinese government expects that number to rise to 100 million by 2010.

The article argues that for most people, a knowledge of Mandarin is unlikely to result in a better career. A number of factors are put forward to support this statement: the difficultly of learning Mandarin when compared to most other languages, especially European languages, which means that very few who study Mandarin attain a high level of competence in the language. The lack of regard among British employers for languages skills is another factor. Finally the fact that the Chinese are busy learning English means that British people doing business with China are unlikely to need a knowledge of Mandarin.

The article concludes with a comment from a representative of a Beijing employment agency, who says that:

whereas the value of compensation packages for expat executives has been shrinking over the past ten years, the number of Chinese-speaking foreigners she handles has been rising. Better language skills, she reckons, are a product less of market demand than of a general enthusiasm for China. Reason enough, perhaps, to learn the language.

By the way, I don’t agree with the article myself. Learning any language is a worthwhile endeavour, even if you only acquire the basics. While a knowledge of Mandarin might not automatically lead to a job, learning it certainly isn’t a waste of your time and effort.

Concentration

By Simon

When studying a language, or anything else in fact, it’s easy to get distracted as there are often so many other things vying for your attention. If your mind isn’t focused on your studies, you don’t tend to take as much in or to remember it later.

In this interview, Tim Ferriss explains how he does his best studying while on long journeys when there is still else to do. He also suggests that you try to recreate a similar environment at home, or wherever else you study. This could be achieved be switching off televisions, radios, computers and phones, and removing/hiding anything else that you might be tempted to fiddle with or peruse.

On long journeys I tend to take a novel or two in languages I’m studying and/or textbooks for those languages. As I doubt my fellow passengers would appreciate me reading aloud from the novels or textbooks, or repeating the dialogues on the accompanying recordings, I remain silent, which I find less than ideal. I suppose I could pretend to be talking on my phone though. Reading foreign novels without dictionaries, which I don’t usually have with me on such journeys, is a good test of my understanding of the languages, and my powers of determining the meanings of words from the context, and is something I enjoy more then studying.

Do you have any ways for ignoring distractions and maintaining your concentration when studying?