Angelina Jolie recently proclaimed her love for the Russian language, but language learning isn’t just for A-list movie stars – as footballers from Manchester City recently showed.
Whilst Jolie learned Russian for her new movie, Salt, the footballers picked up some Arabic for the launch of a website in the United Arab Emirates. The Sun reports they had varying degrees of success, with the club’s Arabic media executive saying “I was surprised how fast some of the players picked it up. Adebayor was especially good.”
The footballers and Jolie had a common purpose for their learning – it was required for their work. And whilst they might not be fluent in the languages, they definitely made an effort.
Angelina also pinpoints one of the reasons for her success – practice!
I just had to practice over and over and over and I was told that I was getting it wrong a bunch of times and I had to keep practicing. (Source: US Weekly)
With the football World Cup starting tomorrow, it’s time to take a look at some South African slang.
The slang is taken from South Africa’s 11 different languages, which all have constitutionally guaranteed equal status. These languages reflect the diversity of the country, and are:
In addition a number of other languages are spoken including Khoi, Nama and San languages, sign language, and some indigenous creoles and pidgins.
Here are some examples of slang – I particularly like ‘chips! Chips!’:
Babbelas (bub-a-lars). Hangover – usually rather a bad one. From the isiZulu word for hangover isibhabhalazi. “Hello, hello. Great party last night. How’s your head? Are you a bit babbelas?”
Bra (brah) or bru. Nothing to do with underwear at all, but an informal term for “my friend” or “mate”, deriving from “brother”. ‘He’s my bra but that team he supports is rubbish.” Bru stems from the Afrikaans for brother, broer.
Chips! Chips!. Nothing you’ll find in the kebab shop around the corner but an expression of alarm or warning. “Chips! Chips! He’s off-side”
I came across a new site that looks useful and thought I’d share. Called RhinoSpike, the site offers users the chance to record audio in their native language and upload it for others, but also request recordings in a wide variety of languages.
It can be difficult to find interesting audio content in the language you are studying, and RhinoSpike offers a solution to this – you can request the speaker to record any text you wish, from your favourite book to a conversation (probably best to make sure the book’s not too long though!).
The best thing about the site is it’s free. All the content is contributed by users of the site and the community is encouraged – if you contribute recordings you will move up the queue for the recordings you request. As the site says, “Give and you shall receive!”
It’s good to see that important issues are being debated in the British Parliament. The war in Afghanistan, MPs’ expenses … and grammar?
A recent debate, an extract of which was published in Hansard’s19th January issue, shows two MP’s having a tiff over the correct plural of ‘referendum’.
Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab): [. . . ] There is no country keener on referendums than Switzerland.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con): Referenda.
Mr MacShane: Referendums. It is a gerund.
Mr Fabricant: It is a gerundive.
Mr MacShane: It is a gerund. Keep your hair on. [. . . ]
Michael Fabricant: [later in the debate, after checking in the dictionary] The right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr.MacShane) may have inadvertently misled the House earlier, and I am sure that he would wish to retract that. As the word “referendum” means “things to be referred”, according to the “Oxford English Dictionary”, it is indeed a gerundive and therefore the plural should be “referenda”. “Referendums” is acceptable in modern usage, though wrong.
But, should you need to ask, Mr Mount confirms that a gerund has no plural form in Latin, therefore if “referendum” were a gerund, you could not say “referenda”, but since it is in fact a gerundive, “referenda” is correct. Correct, if a little pretentious. But I expect you already knew that.
Repetition is a great way to improve your language skills and familiarise yourself with your chosen language. In class, a teacher will often go over the same words in different ways – so you are hearing and repeating the words often and hopefully fixing them in your brain (creating neural pathways, if you want to be scientific about it!).
Outside of class, it’s also helpful to use this technique. You could repeat vocabulary lists to yourself, or write them down, but this may soon become boring. When you are bored, you stop noticing things, and stop learning.
Try listening to audio books, radio, music and television in the language you are learning. Some content may be more appealing than others. Find some things you like a repeat them over and over. You will soon find yourself recognising more words and sentences. Once you are bored or think you have learned all you can, switch to something different.
The key here though, is to not switch too much. You need to find a balance between what you find interesting and acquiring the knowledge or creating the pathways in your brain.
I hope everyone had very happy holidays, and welcome to 2010 at Language Museum!
Normally I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I think this year it’s time to make one that will benefit me not just this year but in years to come. Last year I started to learn Spanish, and this year I think it’s time to accelerate that learning.
So, I’m rededicating myself to the cause, and plan to improve both my language learning skills, and my knowledge of the language itself.
To this end, I’ve set myself some goals.
1) To attend Spanish classes at a beginner level.
2) Aim to move to beginner-intermediate level classes by the end of the year.
3) Outside of class, complete homework to the best of my ability.
4) Practice speaking the language at every opportunity.
5) Seek out opportunities to use Spanish – listening, speaking, reading and writing.
6) Learn to read basic texts – children’s books, short stories, newspaper articles.
Hopefully it will help to write down my goals, review and revise them throughout the year. Goal setting is a great way to measure your progress in learning a language, whether you do this individually or in conjunction with a teacher.
It’s also a good idea to have both short-term and long-term goals – for instance, one of my long-term goals is to read Carlos Ruiz Zafon’sThe Shadow of the Wind in the original. To achieve this goal though, I have set myself the short and medium-term goals listed above. They are the steps I will take to get to the bigger goal.
What are your language learning goals? What is your long-term ambition?
Yesterday I posted about Christmas songs in different languages, and now it’s time to wish you a very happy Christmas, again in a few different languages! So….
Christmas is pretty ubiquitous in the Western world, with Christmas songs being especially difficult to avoid.
Having spent the last few Christmases overseas, I’ve been interested to hear songs in different languages. For example, in New Zealand there are Maori versions of many traditional carols, such as Märie te pö (Silent Night). Another popular favourite is A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree (sung to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas).
In Spain, carols are called villancicos. As well as many songs that have been translated from English, traditional Spanish villancicos include Campana Sobre Campana. Another more modern popular song is Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano.
Songs are a great way to pick up new vocabulary, and this is a great way to get into the festive spirit as well as learning more about cultural aspects of your chosen language.
Yesterday I posted about a language, Na’vi, that was created for a movie.
Invented languages aren’t the only ones you can learn from films though – they’re a great way to improve your skills in your chosen language, be it Spanish, German or Japanese.
There’s a huge range of movies out there in every genre, so there’s something to interest everyone – from big budget Hollywood blockbusters to Japanese anime flicks. Sometimes the accents are a problem though, or perhaps the words are too unfamiliar to completely follow the plot.
That’s where subtitles become useful. A new study has shown that second-language listening ability can be improved by watching movies with subtitles in the second language. The research, published in the online science journal PLoS One, shows that foreign subtitles can help with speech perception, whilst native language subtitles may hinder this. The written word appears to help the learner perceive the speech more accurately as they can draw on previous knowledge of similar words.
So, next time you’re watching a foreign language movie, why not try switching the subtitles?
Yesterday I posted the news that ‘Twitter’ was made Word of the Year.
So I thought it may be interesting to show how far its reach extends now: there’s a Twittonary, or a Twitter Dictionary, providing “explanations of Twitter related words”.
The content of the dictionary is user-generated, and users can also vote on the entries and definitions submitted. A lot of the words seem to include some variety on the words twitter and tweet, such as beetweet and neweeter. The president of the Global Language Monitor claimed language would evolve based on words from Twitter – let’s hope we don’t develop a language based purely on those two words!
You probably know that a ‘tweet’ can be only 140 characters long, so the dictionary may be helpful to you in keeping your message short and sweet.
It could also help you develop language skills – try tweeting short sentences like “I’m going to the shop” to get you used to writing the language you’re learning.
Angelina Jolie recently proclaimed her love for the Russian language, but language learning isn’t just for A-list movie stars – as footballers from Manchester City recently showed.
With the football World Cup starting tomorrow, it’s time to take a look at some South African slang.
I came across a new site that looks useful and thought I’d share. Called 
I hope everyone had very happy holidays, and welcome to 2010 at 
Yesterday I posted about Christmas songs in different languages, and now it’s time to wish you a very happy Christmas, again in a few different languages! So….
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