Language Museum Blog

A Japanese company claims to have invented the first robots that can chat with people.

Specifically designed for English language learners, the “chatbots” are accessed online. The online characters use high-speed speech recognition technology which allows them to interact in real time with students. Students can also participate in the chatbots’ virtual world.
Interestingly, the level of conversation can be adjusted depending on the student’s needs, and dialogue also appears on screen in English.

According to the Telegraph:

The “chatbots” are currently targeting Japanese students learning English however the company is planning to expand internationally.
The concept was inspired by the lack of opportunity for many Japanese students unable to afford costly lessons to practice speaking native English, according to SpeakGlobal.

“The percentage of Japanese who can actually speak English freely is in the low single digits,” added the company.

“This is due to the lack of opportunities to practice speaking with native English speakers. While many English conversation schools and online schools exist, some simply cannot afford this luxury.” (Source: Telegraph)

I’m not sure how I’d feel about interacting with a “chatbot”, but I suppose it is less scary than practicing your language skills with a live person – robots can’t judge you after all (yet!).

The Noun Project is a great idea with a simple mission: “sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world’s visual language”.

The project “collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way” with the aim of being able to communicate across cultures through visual imagery. All the symbols featured on their site are free, as the founders are excited by the idea of being able to communicate through simple representations as well as their artistic merits.

In August the project hosted an “Iconathon” to design symbols for concepts of food and nutrition. The idea behind it was to “facilitate better and easier communication between communities and the food organizations working to improve consumption of healthy, nutritious, locally grown foods”. Whilst not all the symbols are yet available on their website, the project does have symbols for both cake and cupcake already!

If you’re interested, take a look at their website, or follow @NounProject on Twitter.

I hope everyone is enjoying a great Bank Holiday weekend (we’ll ignore the weather). I found a blog post of 15 words with no English equivalent that I thought I’d share.

Here are my favourites from the list:

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
The Yiddish have scores of words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.

15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

You can see the full list here.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea if these are all real words, but they sound fun anyway!)

I always find it slightly disconcerting (but cool!) when I hear someone speak in a different language, when I’m used to hearing them speak English.

It’s especially odd when that person is a celebrity and you’d never have guessed they were fluent in a second language. So this feature from People magazine is really fun – videos of celebrities speaking in their second languages. Did you know Natalie Portman is fluent in Hebrew and French? I love the video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as he to me he looks like a Frenchman!

What’s really interesting though is that most of the celebrities learned their second language through immersion programmes whilst at school. They seem to have retained the language learned through adulthood (Bradley Cooper for example). So perhaps a period of immersion is good for your language skills long-term?

A new series of Fry’s English Delight is back on BBC Radio 4.

The first programme, titled ‘The Mouth’ talks about the origins of speech and language. Stephen Fry asks “if you were an intelligent designer, would you combine the food processor and the word processor in the same unit?”

The programme also hears from

Ventriloquist Nina Conti explains how she has learned to over-rule the automatic functions of her mouth. A facial surgeon gives us the tour of the inside of the mouth and a psychologist discusses humanity’s earliest form of happy oral communication – or language. (Source: BBC)

The new series is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday’s and also available on iPlayer.

Now that I have (begrudgingly) returned from Croatia, time for an update on my language efforts.

Unfortunately this will be a short post, as it seems that the English language has invaded Croatia. Almost everyone that we talked to had a grasp of English, even if only some simple words or sentences. This is unsurprising as tourism is their primary industry, but a little disappointing as I was hoping to pick up more Croatian than I did. Another surprise was the number of people who speak German as a second or third language – although apparently the Germans have known about Croatia as a tourist destination for a lot longer than English-speakers.

What I did pick up was useful – dobar dan (good day) was particularly helpful as people would often greet us in the street. Hvala (pronounced ‘hwala’, thanks) was another good one, although often people would say ‘thank you’ to me anyway! Molim (please) was the other most frequently used word. I did pick up some pronunciation tips as well – hv seems to be said as “hw” and Brac (with an accent on the c) as ‘Bratch’. In this sense I didn’t find phrasebooks helpful as it is difficult to get a sense of how something is said just by reading it. It was only after listening to native speakers say words numerous times that I managed to imitate words.

Anyway, I can highly recommend a visit to Croatia – it’s incredibly beautiful and very easy to travel around!

According to a new study, Danish is more difficult for children to learn than languages such as Croatian, American English and Galician.

Dorthe Bleses, a linguist at the Center for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark, found that because of the high number of vowels in spoken Danish, it is more difficult for children to pick up. Danish babies at 15 months old have on average a vocabulary of 84 words, compared to 150 for a Croatian child of the same age.

“The number of vowels has big significance for how difficult it is to learn a language. Many vowels makes a difficult language,” Bleses told Weekendavisen newspaper recently.

The official number of vowels in Danish is nine: a, e, i, o, u, æ, ø, å and y.

“‘Y’ isn’t a vowel,” you say? Well, in Danish it is. In Danish, even consonants are vowels.

But written Danish is not the issue. The problems start when Danes speak. In spoken speech, Danish actually has some 40 vowel sounds, says Bleses, depending upon where the vowels are placed in words and sentence strings.

To make matters worse, modern Danes ‘swallow’ lots of the remaining consonants that would create more audible definition, or annunciation, between words. Linguists call it ‘reduction’ or ‘ellision’. It is how ‘probably’ becomes ‘probly’ in American English. In Danish, it is how ‘spændende’ becomes ‘spen-nă’, and how a simple, little sentence like ‘Det er det’ becomes ‘dā-ă-dā’. (Source: Copenhagen Post)

But there is good news for Danish parents – the difference doesn’t persist and children ‘crack the code’ of the Danish language by the time they are nine or ten.

Often I see websites proclaiming that you can “learn a language in a year” or “learn a language in three months”. But this has got to be a first – a language teacher in London is claiming to be able to teach a language in just two days.

Mandarin is reputed to be one of the toughest languages to learn, mainly because it is tonal. It’s a challenge for non-speakers who live in China to learn the language, as a friend of mine has discovered. So what can a beginner pick up in two days?

As a writer from The Guardian discovered, quite a lot:

Day one begins in the present tense, progresses to questions and then on to the past and future. By day two I am playing fast and loose with pronouns, possessives and conditionals, albeit with a very limited vocabulary.
(Source: The Guardian)

The process is apparently meant to “emphasise relaxation and experimentation, [but] there are rules. Writing anything down is banned, as is all technical jargon”. This is in line with the language trainer’s belief that languages are a practical subject that you need to be trained in.

The writer tested his language skills at a Mandarin restaurant. The verdict?

There are obvious deficiencies in what I have learned. Chief among them the fact that I know so few nouns; not even, for example, numbers, or months, or farmyard animals, which school language classes had conditioned me to think of as essential. I can, however, convert a verb into the past and future tenses, and say that I, you, we, they, he or she did it, and add an if, a but or a because, and offer, when the situation demands, to buy a stranger’s mother or sell them a photographer. Which is more than I ever managed in five years of French at school. Have I really learned Mandarin in just two days? Well, yes and no. Mostly no, but sort of. Hao.

As you read this blog post, I will hopefully be enjoying the sun in beautiful Croatia. I’ve never been to the country before and have not encountered the language either.

This had me wondering – how much of a language should you try and learn before a holiday?

In the past I’ve learned bits of Vietnamese, German, Greek and Malay whilst on holiday. Whilst on the plane to Vietnam, I listed to a beginners guide to the language in the form of a podcast. When trying to speak and listen to the language, however, I found I had forgotten most of what I had heard.

With other languages I have picked up phrases whilst in country. These were enough to get by, along with liberal doses of sign language. As a native English speaker, I try and avoid the assumption that others will speak my language, but find that a lot of the time, they do!
Before going to Croatia I will pick up a phrasebook and try and learn some basic phrases and greetings. These websites seem to be a good start for travellers to the country. Obviously it’s not possible for me to become fluent in Croatian in a couple of weeks, but I will make some effort.

How much of the language do you learn before going on holiday?

Learning by rote seems an old-fashioned idea, something that was done in the Victorian era, when canes were used liberally.

But it is still used in schools today, if in a different way. Part of the education process is learning how to remember chunks of information, whether for an after-school play or an exam. Some argue that in our information age, there is no need to remember anything as the answer is just a few short clicks away.

This misses the point though. Whilst information is more easily accessible today, nothing quite beats having the answer to hand, an automatic response from the depths of your brain. When you’re in a conversation in your second language, there is no time to stop and look up a word you don’t have. It would break the flow and you may lose more words.

So how do you keep those words in your brain? London black-cab drivers are a good example – they need to learn ‘The Knowledge’:

London black-cab drivers need a detailed knowledge of a six-mile radius of Charing Cross station. They learn 320 routes, and all the landmarks and places of interest along the way. The process can take three to five years, and dropout rates are said to be around 80%.

Nick O’Connor, from Essex, is making good progress after 22 months of study. He says: “It doesn’t need a specific person or a specific brain. It’s just about being structured and having the motivation to get up every single day and go out on the bike [to research the routes]. I’d say anyone could do it.” (Source: BBC News)

Structure and motivation. Learn a little bit of your target language every day. Make sure you put some time aside to do it. Soon you will have ‘The Knowledge’!