When learning a foreign language, you sometimes encounter false friends: words that sound like words in your native language, but which don’t mean the same thing. For example, the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible. The French for sensible is prudent or sage. A Rathaus is not a home for German rats but a town hall. The Irish word for food, bia, sounds like beer – but beer is beoir or leann. The word pan means bread in Spanish and Japanese, and sir or mister in Polish and Ukrainian. And remember not to try to borrow books from a French or Portuguese librairie, a Spanish librería or an Italian libreria – these words all mean book shop. A library is a biblioteca in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and a bibliothèque in French.

Some foreign words sound like rude words in your language. For example, the German words Fahrt (ride, journey) and Fach (panel, case, subject) cause much amusement among English-speaking students of German. As do the Irish words faic (nothing), as in faic na fride (not one jot), and feic (to see/see!).

Fortunately quite a few words are international and are used in many different languages, often with some adjustments for the spelling, writing and pronunciation conventions of each language. International words include telephone, television, taxi, hotel, restaurant, airport, etc.

You can find a longer list of false friends here.

I came across an very interesting website today, lyrikline, which features poetry in many different languages from Albanian to Welsh. It also has recordings of the poets reading their their poetry aloud, biographical information about the poets, details of their publications, plus translations of the poems into German, and, in some cases, English. The site itself is in German, English, French, Slovenian and Arabic.

This looks like an excellent resource for poetry lovers and language learners, and I’ll certainly be spending some time exploring it.

I’ve had a request from Justin K, who would like to ask if you have any recommendations for films (movies) that are good for learning languages. Justin is currently studying Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin), Arabic and Hindi. I’d also be interested in your suggestions.

When I watch a film in a foreign language with subtitles, I can’t help myself reading the subtitles. If there are no subtitles, I concentrate more on the spoken dialogue and find I can understand more of it because my attention isn’t divided. If the subtitles are in the same language as the dialogue, as is the case with TV and films in Taiwan, I find I can understand even more.

Recently I registered with the language exchange site, Mixxer. This is a free service hosted by Dickinson College where you enter some information about yourself, particularly the languages you want to practise, and can then search for native speakers of those languages who want to practise speaking and/or writing your mother tongue. You can then contact them via Skype. Language tutors and teachers can also use the site to find students.

This is a great idea and seems to work well – since I joined the site, I’ve chatted with people from Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Japan, Spain and Taiwan, practised my Chinese, Japanese and Spanish, and have learnt some more Russian and a bit of Bulgarian.

Have you tried this site or any similar sites?

According to an article in The Boston Globe, the Korean spoken in North Korea has drifted apart from the Korean spoken in South Korea. This is hardly surpising as there has been very little contact between the two sides for over 60 years. They both jam each other’s radio signals, and it used to be a serious crime in the South to watch television, read literature or to communicate with people from the other side. It still is in the North.

Some words have different meanings on each side of the border. For example, if you ask a North Korean how they are, they’ll probably say ‘ilupsopneda’, which literally means ‘not much’ and is the equivalent of ‘I’m fine, thanks’. In South Korea this phrase means ‘Mind your own business!’, which goes some way to explaining why South Koreans think North Koreans are quite rude.

In order to prevent the language drifting further apart, the authorities in both Koreas are currently working on a unified dictionary.

There’s a lot of interesting discussion on the forum at How-to-learn-any-language.com about the extreme polyglot, Ziad Fazah, who lives in Brazil and speaks 58 languages. Some of those involved in the discussion are sceptical about the existence of this person, don’t believe that he speaks so many languages, or don’t think he could he learnt so many languages in his native Lebannon, due to lack of materials. Later on the discussion is joined by someone who actually knows Ziad, meets him regularly and can confirm that he really does know all those languages. Ziad’s contact details are given and a number of people mention that they have spoken to him and confirm that he speaks their language well, and that he has plenty advice to offer on language learning.

I find the whole discussion interesting on a number of levels: the fact that this man speaks so many languages so well is incredible. The understandable scepticism about his abilities and even his existence is also interesting, as is the way the discussion develops with some participants refusing to believe the claims of those who know the man in question.

One comment, apparently from Ziad himself, that rings true with me is that there’s not a lot of money in being a polyglot, and that someone who speaks 10, 20 or 50 languages doesn’t usually get paid more than someone who speaks two or three. When I tell people that I know many languages, they sometimes ask me why I’m not rich and famous. To which I usually reply that I learn languages mainly for fun rather than for profit.

Do you know or know of any extreme polyglots?

In an interview I found the other day, Barry Farber, author of How to Learn Any Language, mentions how he learns a new Tibetan word or phrase from the Tibetan woman who works in a nearby local grocery store every time he goes there. He also hopes to use the same method to learn some Moray from a man from Burkina Faso who works in his local liquor store. He says that there’s a big difference between knowing nothing of a language and knowing a little – if you know a little, you can greet people in their mother tongue and have very basic conversations with them, and that this is a great way to break the ice and to make new friends.

I’m definitely going to try this – the next time I take my laundry to the laundrette, for example, I’ll see if I can learn a word or phrase in Hindi. At the office I can learn phrases in Catalan, Polish, Arabic, Hungarian and Norwegian. Elsewhere I can learn bits of Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Dutch, Farsi and probably a few others. Maybe I’ll also write the phrases down in a notebook and/or record them on my mp3 player. This will be fun!

Another point Barry discusses is how to explain which languages you ‘speak’. In fact, he advises that you say something like “I have studied/am studying X number of languages” or “I am a student of X number of languages” rather than saying, as I tend to do, “I speak 10/12/15 languages, with varying degrees of fluency.” or “I speak English and Mandarin fluently, have a good knowledge of 8 other languages and a basic knowledge of 10 more”. Instead, I will say that I’m am student of 20 languages, 15 of which I’ve studied in some depth.

There was an interesting piece in The Times yesterday about a new book, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World by Charles Yang of the University of Pennsylvania, in which he argues that babies are born with templates for the grammatical structures of all languages in their brains, but gradually forget them as they become familiar with the structure of their mother tongue.

Professor Yang, who’s theories are based on Noam Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar, suggests that when babies babble, they are trying out the various templates until they find one that ‘works’, i.e. that earns them encouragement and praise from their parents and others. So the strange word order or constructions young children use, might be correct in other languages. For example, the sentence ‘I want ball’ is ungrammatical in English but perfectly grammatical in Russian, Chinese and other languages which do not have articles.