Mango Languages

Overcoming the Frustration of Language Learning

There comes a time when you are trying to learn a foreign language that you feel you are not making any progress. You still make mistakes; you do not understand what native speakers tell you; you try to speak in the foreign language and they answer in English because they understand you are a novice and do not want to embarrass you, etc. Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt that however hard you try there is still a lot to learn? Is there a point that you are utterly confused by the information that you have absorbed and do not know what is correct and what is wrong anymore? At that time you get frustrated and lose momentum; you get discouraged and you start thinking of giving up learning the language, which was maybe the dream of your life. Getting frustrated doesn’t help at all.

Language learning goes through stages or phases. At first you’re very happy and enthusiastic with your new free-time occupation. You are satisfied that you can greet, tell your name and talk a bit about yourself. And people around you start congratulating you on your progress. After that, you start working on more challenging stuff, a bit more grammar is involved too, lots of new words. Around that phase comes the frustration I’m talking about. Beyond the basics, you need to express some more complicated ideas but here your knowledge fails you. You know how to form good sentences; you have acquired a good amount of vocab; but sometimes when you try to construct a new sentence with what you know, it’s wrong because you are missing some new grammar rule or because “that’s not the way we speak.” How come? How many things do you still have to learn?  How many more uses do these Japanese particles have? For how long do you still have to strive?

What is the best to do at such moments? Here are some tips:

Re-define your goals: Was your goal to be proficient in a year? This can be possibly achieved if the language you are learning is related to your mother tongue or to another language you are good at or if you learn languages easily, but most of the times this may be far fetched. Language learning takes a lot of time and actually never ends because languages change. Always remember this, because we still learn new words even in our native tongue. I have a friend who teases me on a regular basis by sending me a new word every now and again. At first I thought, “That can’t be true.” But then I thought that it’s only natural.

Try to improve your pronunciation: Try to sound natural. Imitate what you hear and how words and sentences are pronounced. Conquer the difficult sounds. Talk to yourself using the difficult words. Don’t worry if your housemates start thinking you have gone nuts when they see you going from room to room trying to pronounce the Arabic qaf. No native speaker will think of speaking to you in English again!

Listen to a song,  watch a film, or read a book in the language you’re learning: I believe this will boost your morale.  Choose something relatively easy – don’t go straight to the corresponding Shakespeare – and you will see that you understand some things and you can tell more or less what is going on in a song, film, or book. You’ll see how much progress you’ve made. This will keep you motivated.

And of course, Persevere: Our mind needs time to arrange the new information. Once it does, you will experience a real breakthrough. Keep listening and learning; your mind gets all this information, but you do not realize it. When it is ready, you will be able to speak and say whatever you want.

What other tips worked for you when learning a foreign language?

5 Ways to Make Language Learning Work for You

One of our linguist elves, Kimberly Cortes, wrote an article that was published today on www.HowToLearn.com. We are so excited about this!

The five ways to make foreign language learning work for you are listed here:

1. Get exposed!
2. Make it meaningful.
3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
4. Practice active learning.
5. Make it fun!

To read the entire article, click here.

What ways do you make language learning work for you?

Language Theory: UTAH Bound!

In this blog I would like to take a closer look at one of the linguistic theories I began to explain in my most recent blogs, namely: the Uniformity Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH).

Recall from my previous posts that certain words (we will call predicates) require additional material to complete their message. I used the examples of ate and the.  Ate requires at least two additional pieces of material to be complete. That is, someone ate something. And, the requires at least one additional piece of material, the what?

So, the argument behind this hypothesis is that all verbs have specific thematic, or semantic roles that must be assigned to their arguments in a sentence. Let’s look at a new example, the verb “drive.” Drive must have a subject to which it will assign the role of agent as in, “John drives.”  This agent role is an active one.  John is actively responsible for the driving of some vehicle. So drive needs at least one additional piece of material in order to convey a complete message. When a verb has only one “role” to assign we call these intransitive verbs.

When a verb can assign more than one role, as in, “John drives the car” we call these transitive verbs. In the second sentence we can see that drive assigns two thematic roles, one to the subject, “John,” and the other to the object, “the car.”  Since the subject here is playing an active role we already determined that “John” receives the role of agent.  However, “the car” (the object of the sentence) receives the thematic role of theme.   A theme is the element which undergoes physical movement because of the verb.  Therefore, with verbs such as “fell” or “disappeared,” which only require one thematic role to be assigned, this role would be a theme since  “to fall” or “to disappear” happens to someone and is not the result of the subject actively causing a change.

Other verbs can assign more than two thematic roles.  These verbs are referred to as ditransitives. Gave is an example of such a verb: “I gave the book to my son.”  In this sentence, “I” is the agent, “the book” is the theme, and “my son” is assigned the role of the goal.

Can you determine the thematic roles for this sentence:

When did she place the order of supplies for your department?

New Language, New Perspective on Life

To have another language is to possess a second soul. –Charlemagne

The soul of a person is the essence of who that person is.  That essence is shaped by life experiences and cultural norms.  Language provides us with a way to organize and symbolically represent all of the experiences and cultural influences that define who we are.  When we acquire another language something amazing happens.  We open up wonderful opportunities that would have never been available to us in the past.  We open up the possibility of meeting new and interesting people from other countries with different life experiences and different cultural norms.  We learn to think in new ways thereby deeply enriching our lives with new and amazing experiences.  This fresh way of thinking is uniquely born from understanding a new language and culture.  When I speak another language, I take on many of the characteristics of native speakers of that language including hand gestures and body language.  I feel like a new person.  I feel like a different person.  I feel like a person with a second soul.

How do YOU understand Charlemagne’s quote?

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by Learning Irish… for Free!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The Irish have been celebrating this holiday for over a thousand years. Today, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by people of all backgrounds in the United States, Canada and Australia as well as in other parts of the world.

Pubs will be open all day and night, there will be parades held across the country, and rivers will be dyed. From hunter to electric, the variety of shades of green will not disappoint today as people celebrate this Irish holiday.

History.com provides a ton of cool information about St. Patrick’s Day: everything from explanations of the symbols and traditions to recipes and places to celebrate across the country.  Check out these fascinating St. Patrick’s Day facts:

• Corned beef and cabbage is a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dish. In 2009, roughly 26.1 billion pounds of beef and 2.3 billion pounds of cabbage were produced in the United States.
• More than 100 St. Patrick’s Day parades are held across the United States. New York City and Boston are home to the largest celebrations.
• There are four places in the United States named after the shamrock, the floral emblem of Ireland: Mount Gay-Shamrock, WV; Shamrock, TX; Shamrock Lakes, IN; and Shamrock, OK.
• There are 36.9 million U.S. residents with Irish roots. This number is more than eight times the population of Ireland itself (4.5 million).
• There are approximately 122,000 current U.S. residents who were born in Ireland.
• Irish soda bread gets its name and distinctive character from the use of baking soda rather than yeast as a leavening agent.

As you are picking out your favorite green attire, selecting a pub to go to, and loading up on corned beef and cabbage, don’t forget to brush up on your Irish.

Mango Languages is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by providing a FREE Irish course.

This course will allow you to connect with your Irish traditions to the fullest. You’ll be able to ask the bartender for a refreshing and authentic Irish beverage, impress your friends with your knowledge of just who the heck St. Patrick is, what he did to deserve his own day, and engage in all sorts of practical St. Patrick’s Day conversations.

Click here to get your FREE Irish Course!

How do YOU celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

Ja makin’ me crazy

On vacation, I thought I was leaving behind my Mango friends and going to have a break from language learning. I love languages. I always want to know what folks are saying if I hear a foreign tongue. Lucky for me…I learned about a whole new language while on vacation. One of the crew members on my cruise last week was Jamaican. He was in charge of many of the activities on board. I heard him speak all week and he was easily understood, then I witnessed him speaking to a co-worker and didn’t understand but a few words. I was excited because I thought it sounded like creole and he confirmed it. But what I didn’t know was that there is such a language called Jamaican. Yep, I know…crazy!

Per wikipedia: “Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa) or Jamaican, and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-lexified creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. It is not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of English. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English, Scots and Hiberno English.”

Just goes to show that even a language loving gal like myself can learn a few things everyday! So cool.

What languages have you encountered that you didn’t even know existed?

The Power of Language: Afterthought

In this post I would like to write about some thoughts I had while reading the previous post, The Power of Language. The article mentioned in the blog post “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” was not new to me; I had come across it when it was published, and here is my opinion.

I will start with the assumption that when we talk to other people, we want to be understood as clearly as possible and as fast as possible: we do not spend our time in lengthy exchanges of vague propositions, at least this is what I observe when I see two people talking. Even when our propositions are vague, this is sometimes done on purpose because we want to imply certain things, which again we believe that our interlocutor will “get.” (I have already discussed that in another post.) So for example, in the first article, I read that the Chinese can understand the concept of time but “they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.” How true is this? Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no tenses in English and the same form of the verb “talk” is used for “I’m talking,” “I talk,” “I will talk,” and so on. If I want to express the concept that “Tomorrow I will talk to my boss”; instead I will say, “I talk to my boss” since there is only this one form.  However, because I want you to understand what I mean, I do not want you to be confused and wonder, “Will she talk to her boss? Or Has she talked to her boss? Or what?” I need to make sure that you understand that “I will talk to my boss.” I do not want to spend all my time trying to convey the meaning of futurity, as this is not what happens in real life.

Even though the  Chinese do not have different tense forms for verbs, they understand each other immediately and do not ask for clarifications every time the other person says something. How is this done? If I do not use verbal tense, I use some other means, like adverbs (e.g. “tomorrow”), aspectual particles, and so on, and I say, “I talk to my boss tomorrow.”  This is what the Chinese do.  They think about it and make sure that the time reference is clearly conveyed via a linguistic device other than verb tense.  So, they are still obliged to think about timing, perhaps not in the sense of verbal tense but of an adverb; they are obliged to think of the means they will use to make timing clear. Of course, this “thinking” is done in no time, but that is another story!

Let me now tackle gender. When I first read the article, I was intrigued and decided to do an experiment myself. I asked my guinea pigs, my husband, and my daughter, to complete a questionnaire. I wrote down a list of randomly selected nouns that referred to objects that were masculine, feminine, and neuter.  (As a side note, in Greek, grammatical gender is arbitrary–for example the fork is neuter and the chair is feminine, and there is no reason why this is so).  Then I asked them to assign human voices to them, just like the experiment in the article. Some results were the same, e.g. the “bulb” (we have two words for it, one masculine and one feminine) was assigned a child’s voice by both; the “car” (neuter gender) was assigned a man’s voice; “Harley” (feminine gender) was assigned a man’s voice; and “camera” (feminine gender) was assigned a man’s voice.

There were some differences, like the “table” (neuter gender) was assigned a man’s voice by my daughter and a woman’s voice by my husband; the sofa (masculine gender) was assigned a man’s voice by my daughter and a woman’s voice by my husband. More relevant to the experiment, few were the cases in which the gender coincided with the assigned voice (masculine gender – male voice).  My conclusion was that in general other things interfered with the decision of voice assignment: machines (Harley and camera) were assigned a man’s voice because machines are considered by our society to be a masculine hobbies; the bulb is small so it was assigned a child’s voice, and so forth.  Our general perceptions of the world play an important role here.

In Linguistics we distinguish between competence (what we subconsciously know about language) and performance (what we actually utter) and we work on competence in order to understand how language works. Most of what the article described was about performance.

All this is not to deny that language and culture are intertwined; people need to express their everyday needs, desires and what have you, in a precise way so as to avoid misunderstandings as much as possible.

What are your thoughts about this topic? About verb tense? Gender? Culture?

Lost in Traslation – Language and Culture

Hello Everyone!

I came across a really interesting article, Lost in Traslation in the Wall Street Journal, about the influence that foreign languages have on how people see the world . The author uses a few languages as examples to show that people express themselves differently when talking about the same thing because of the structure of the language. This brings up questions about the definition of “meaning.” Does the meaning change due to the language you use?

In the article the author, Lera Boroditsky, quotes Emperor of the Romans, Charlemagne, saying that “to have a second language is to have a second soul.” This is a very deep and intricate thought. While reading this article, as a person who speaks more than one language, I realized that even though speaking different languages comes naturally to me, the make up of each language has its own structure, which in turn creates a unique approach to the way a person will use it to express their thoughts.

In any language that you are fluent in you can easily put together greetings, complete sentences, questions, etc. But when comparing these in different languages you see that the structure is not the same. For example, in the article it mentions that in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, to say hello, one actually say, “Where are you going?” If you don’t know that they don’t even use terms like “left” or “right” you would have a very hard time responding to the greeting. This particular community uses a different approach for greetings than English speakers do.

The article continues, with a focus on space, time, and gender when comparing different languages. The author goes to say, “the structures that exist in our language profundity shape how we construct reality, and helps make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.” I couldn’t help and connect this to our understanding of culture. The world we live in is so diverse with so much to offer in cultural learning, what makes them all so different? To me, it’s languages, the way we express ourselves. In some languages gender is a major part of being able to communicate in other it is the idea of space and time, this all plays a major role in how people think in those languages, which in turn establishes that unique culture.

“Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?”

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the author?

Is Cheese plural for Choose?

Hello All,
As an individual whose first language isn’t English, I thought I would take this opportunity and use this blog to express how funny (and at times hard) the English language can be. I am sure that other people who learned English as a second or even third language would agree with me.

I was very happy to come across the list below which includes words and phrases that have made me scratch my head in confusion on numerous occasions. I have been speaking English for 14 years, and to this day I come across sayings that just don’ t seem to make sense. If I learned anything, it’s that sometimes you just need to just accept things just the way they are… especially when it comes words and phrases in the English language.

Here are some examples…  you tell me…

There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in  pineapple…
Is cheese the plural of choose?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
In what language do people recite at a play, and play at a recital?
Ship by truck, and send cargo by ship?
Have noses that run and feet that smell?
Park on driveways and drive on parkways?
Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which  aren’t sweet, are meat.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce, and hammers don’t ham?
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth,  beeth?
One goose, 2 geese.  So, one moose, 2 meese?
One index, two indices?
When a house burns up, it burns down.
You fill in a form by filling it out, and an alarm clock goes off by going on.
When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?
English muffins were not invented in England or French fries in France

How can ‘slim chance and fat chance’ be the same, while ‘wise man and a wise guy’ are opposites?

We take English for granted.  But if we  explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly,  boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

Personally, I’ve had a really hard time understanding why the word knife is spelled with a ‘k’. That’s just me.

Waht deos taht sya?

Happy Monday!

A good friend of mine came across this and thought it would be a great idea to write a blog post about it, I couldn’t agree with him more.

Please read the following paragraph:

I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt!

When I first saw this, I thought it was pretty cool. But, is it true what they say? Does the order of the letters not matter as long as the first and last are the same as the original word?

Some disagree. Maybe it’s not the letters that matter but what the word looks like that makes it easier to read.

These letter transformations break up the pattern of ascending and descending letters that are supposedly used when recognizing word shapes. If anything the myth suggests that word shapes are not important because we can still readily recognize the words despite their change in word shape.

Reading psychologists have come to the consensus that we use a parallel letter recognition model to recognize words.

What are your thoughts on this?