Working for a foreign language learning company has its benefits. We are surrounded by the characters and sounds of many foreign languages on a daily basis.
I am always reading foreign language learning articles and ran across this fun exercise.
Can you name that foreign language? Click here to play!
See if you can guess which sentences are which language. Please post a comment and let me know how many you got right!
Put in very simple words, in order to construct a sentence we retrieve from a mental lexicon the words we need and then we arrange them in meaningful sentences following certain rules.
This mental lexicon contains the words, their synonyms, etc., just like the dictionaries we know, but moreover, it contains all our knowledge, encyclopedic or other, and personal experiences that are associated with a specific word. For example, the word “flood” primarily means “an overflowing of a large amount of water beyond its normal confines.” For some people, this word may bring India to their mind, as we know from our encyclopedic knowledge that India suffers from floods, or it may bring to their mind a mishap they had, or a nice touching book they read about a flood-hit village, a nice painting, or a horror film, etc. “Lemon” may mean something sour or may bring to the mind a nice fragrance, a wedding, etc. One word therefore is associated with many others and with various mental images, and they form little groups.
Here is where the success of humor lies: the narrator creates an atmosphere where the interlocutor(s) expect words or phrases of a certain group to be uttered, words or phrases that have to do with the image the narrator is creating and belong to the same group. And… the narrator utters a word that belongs to a different group and this unexpected association makes us laugh. Or what the narrator says makes the interlocutor expect a certain development due to common sense or to common beliefs, but the narrator brings things upside down and changes direction. For example, the narrator says
I didn’t sleep with my wife before we married. Did you?
The logical and natural interpretation of the elliptic sentence at the end is, “Did you sleep with your wife before you married?” So, here comes the unexpected answer:
Hmm…I don’t remember. What’s her name?
Like I said, this is a simplified analysis because in the unexpected association of words and phrases lies the power of poetry, but in poetry this association makes us stand in awe before the wonder of mind.
iPad, as you may know, is the new product of Apple. But unfortunately, the word “pad” belongs to another group of words and images too, and therefore the name has been associated with a hygienic product. It is not the unexpected here that causes laughter; it is just the association with the other group of words. This has brought about a series of jokes – no laughing matter though!
Other blunders that have to do with mistranslations or with unfortunate naming of products is the German toilet paper brand name called BUM, or the Swedish one called Krapp, which bring smiles to the English speakers’ faces. Or an ad for America of a Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux that goes, “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
Do you know of any other mistranslations or naming of products?
One aspect of language that all languages have in common is constituents. All languages are organized in constituents, allowing more complex units to enter structures where simpler ones are also possible. The following examples in English illustrate constituents (in italics).
She sat down
The smart woman sat down
The tall, smart woman with the bright orange sweater sat down
Constituents can be replaced by other constituents and can be moved if you move the complete constituent. The complete constituent “the tall, smart woman with the bright orange sweater” can be replaced by the pronoun “she.” In the examples above, the constituent is the subject of the sentence but it can also be in the predicate of the sentence.
I saw the tall, smart woman with the bright orange sweater
I saw her
Can you find the constituents in the next sentence?
The black and white squirrel that looks like a skunk ran up the tree.
Those of you who have seen the all-time classic film The Remains of the Day, with Antony Hopkins and Emma Thomson, may remember the “book” scene, in which she tries to grab a book from his hand. In this scene, you can unmistakably “hear” their feelings although neither of them speaks.
Language is considered by many as a means of communication. Nevertheless, verbal communication sometimes hides true feelings and thoughts: what we utter has gone through a filter and when it surfaces it may not represent exactly what we want to say and what we really think; as if our id is hindered by our superego, in Freudian terms. There is, however, another form of communication, the nonverbal, also called body language: it consists of our facial expressions, gestures and body movements, which we use in order to send out information about how we feel. When we listen to someone, we always try to discern what they really mean by watching their face or gestures.
The good, or bad, thing is that we cannot hide our feelings. We may say one thing, but our body language won’t hide what we really mean, which oftentimes may be the opposite of what we say. Like Stevens, we may be able to control our voice but our body will betray what we think and how we feel. Stevens and Kenton never exchanged a tender word but their body language expressed what they meant behind their typical “Mr.” and “Miss.” (Both Hopkins and Thompson proved what great artists they are here.)
Gestures are part of the body language and they are important in learning a language. While you may be used to accompanying your speech with gestures, you may need to be very careful when using the same gestures in a foreign country to accompany and boost your newly acquired phrases. Along with learning a language, try to learn these differences.
In Greece, for example, to say “no” you toss your head upward moving slightly the chin forward while clicking your tongue against the alveolar ridge (no, it’s not as complicated as it may sound) or you just raise your eyebrows doing the same click! (By the way, the Greek “no” sounds like Ok, so it may be difficult to say “no” in Greek either way!) In other countries, to say “no” you move your head right to left and left to right, which in Greece suggests that you feel pity for someone. Or, in Greece, extending your hand with the fingers apart is very insulting. However well you apologize, being proficient in Greek may not solve the issue!
Are there any gestures that are a no-no in your country?
There are many languages that are written in a completely different direction than English. Actually, the script is what decides directionality.
This can cause lots of confusion when learning a language. When entering text, most of our computers won’t allow for changing text directions unless you create special settings.
Some examples of Right to Left Languages include:
1. Arabic
2. Hebrew
3. Farsi
4. Pashto
5. Urdu
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are also challenging as they can be written either way depending on usage.
When learning a new language, be sure that you understand which direction the language should be written.
What other languages have interesting direction issues?
Why do I love Irish?
The answer to this question is “I don’t know.”
The reason why you like a language is very subjective, so I will just present some facts of Irish that I find fascinating, and which I learned after 4 lessons of Irish, thanks to our developer Colin Parmar and our editor Loig Cheveau.
• Irish employs some phonological processes that change the sounds at word boundaries to show the role of these words in the sentence. So, while Tom is Tomás in Irish, when you want to call him, you say, “A Thomáis ” (“a” is like “o” in “O Lord”). Another example: “a” (not the “a” mentioned above) means “his,” “her,” or “their” depending on the change that comes after it.
So:
a chat, a athair = his cat, his father
a cat, a hathair = her cat, her father
a gcat, a n-athair = their cat, their father
You can’t say what “a” means before you hear the following word. The language plays games with our mind.
• There is no verb “to have” in Irish; when you want to say “I have a pen” you literally say, “a pen is at me.” The same holds true for when you want to say that you speak a language: to say “I speak Irish” you say “Irish is at me.”
• The affirmative in Irish begins with the verb. So, to say “Irish is at me” you say “Is Irish at me”; this is not a question in Irish. How do you ask questions? Well …
• There are two “to be’s.” Similar to Spanish, but a bit different in use. So, you have to know which “to be” to use to say “Is Irish at me.” Moreover, there are different ways to form a question depending on which “to be” you use. So, it’s not a simple matter to say “Is Irish at me.”
• Another source of fascination is the number system: to say “fifteen books” in Irish, you not only separate “five” from “teen” and put “books” in a sandwich, but you do not even say “books” – you say “book” – no plurals! So “fifteen books” is the Irish equivalent of “five book teen.” Does this sound like Arabic? Is there a connection between Irish and Arabic? There is a theory … Ok, so you learned how to say “fifteen books”; can you now say “twelve boys”? You will probably say the Irish equivalent of “two boy teen” right? Wrong! For counting people there is a another whole set of numerals up to twelve.
• There are no words for “yes” or “no” in Irish. If you want to say “yes” you repeat the verb of the question that you were asked.
For example:
Q: “Are you American?”
A: “Am”
And the full answer is: “Am, am American I” – Isn’t it tricky?
This is only a sample of what Irish is about. I’ve never been to Ireland, but with all this plus the insular inscription on road signs, I bet that at every corner in Ireland you’d expect to come face to face with some druid and his golden sickle on his way to cut the mistletoe.
Let’s also learn what is said on St. Patrick’s Day:
Éire go brágh! (transliteration – Eire goh brah, meaning – Ireland for ever!)
Irish is the language of Ireland.
A Short Linguistic History
Irish has two names: its official name in English is “Irish”; in Standard Irish the official name of the language is Gaeilge. Irish belongs to the same greater language family as English – the Indo-European. It is, however, more related to the Celts, who lived in England before the Germanic phyla conquered the island and English was developed. To be more precise, it is the Celtic language spoken by the “brothers” of the Celts of England. Together with Scottish Gaelic and Manx (an extinct language under a process of revival spoken on the Isle of Man), Irish forms the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages; the other branch is the Brythonic, which comprises Welsh, Breton, and Cornish (spoken in Cornwall, also under a process of revival). Breton is spoken in an area in France, across the channel; it was brought there by the Celts of England.
A Short Historical Background
The Celtic polytheistic society left us a rich mythology with gods and goddesses, leprechauns, elves, and fairies. In this religion, the predominant figure was the druid, or the knowledgeable priest. Around 400 AD, St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland who is celebrated worldwide on March 17th, brought Christianity and the Latin alphabet to the island. He is also said to have banished snakes from the country. A variant of the Latin alphabet, the insular script (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_script — a majuscule script with rounded unjoined letters), was used in Ireland until quite recently and you can still see it in road signs and public notices everywhere in Ireland.
In the mid-16th to early 17th century, the British decided to colonize the Emerald Isle. They confiscated land, gave it to settlers, banned Catholicism, and most significantly, they banned the Irish language from every aspect of everyday life. Even the Irish, being a poor people, prompted their children to learn English, as they saw in it the only future for their offspring. And thus began the so-called language-shift, the abandonment of one’s own native tongue and the adoption of a foreign language.
After the wars of colonization, 1/3 of the population was either dead or in exile. A famine in 1740-41 hit a disproportionately high number of Irish speakers, and about 400,000 died and 150,000 emigrated. Even worse was the Great Famine, due to a potato disease, in 1845-52 that left its indelible mark on the island and changed it forever. Its death toll is estimated to be between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 people. An additional 1,000,000 people emigrated. In short, the population of the island, and the number of Irish speakers, was greatly diminished. Irish was prohibited until 1871, but even then the social stigma of speaking Irish hindered people from trying to revive their native tongue.
Irish today
Nowadays, Irish is spoken mainly in the Gaeltacht area in the west part of the island, and even there it is scattered. The rest of the population speaks a variant of English, called Hiberno-English, which is highly influenced by the grammar of Irish. The variants of Irish are all grouped in three major dialects: the Ulster dialect, spoken in the north, the Munster dialect, spoken in Kerry and Cork, and the Connacht dialect, spoken in Connemara and the Aran Islands (famous for their knitted handicrafts). In an effort to unite these dialects and offer a simplified version of the language, Standard Irish was created, which is now taught at schools. There have been several efforts to make people practice and learn Irish, and the issue is still open.
If you had to guess, which language do you think is the hardest to learn? Many people have said that English is the most difficult but “English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.” Says, The Economist when they explored this idea last month in an article entitled: Difficult languages, Tongue twisters, In search of the world’s hardest language.
The article explores several of the most difficult words/concepts to learn in many languages. A few things to think about. Is it:
1. Pronunciation?
2. Cases or conjugation?
3. Gender of words?
4. Understanding complex concepts put into a single word?
5. Tones, clicks and unfamiliar sounds?
6. Grammar?
7. Encoding information that does not translate at all?
So out of 6,000 languages, what is the world’s hardest foreign language? The Economist suggests that the Tuyuca language from the eastern Amazon is the most challenging. Not in pronunciation but in concept and structure. The crazy thing? There are only 1,000 people in the world who speak this language.
What do you think?
Over the weekend, I had the misfortune of being kept up yet again by my persistent friend, insomnia. Generally, I wouldn’t consider him much of a friend at all, but sometimes I must give credit where credit is due.
By way of a preface, let me say that I have been a Japanese language student for some number of years now (it is my major), and I often watch streaming Japanese television on my laptop during these tiring nights of no sleep. There are no subtitles, and I very certainly cannot understand all, or even half, of what is being said on these programs. It was then, in the middle of some kind of criminal drama, that I realized something very important: the power of critical thinking. How, without some subconscious adlib, could I sit and watch a foreign television show, take in small bits and pieces of conversation, and know what was going in the story beyond what I could infer from the images alone?
This shows the importance of critical thinking within language learning, the ability to piece together whole thoughts and concepts without actually knowing or having been introduced to every part of speech being used. Through specific slides and exercises, Mango has really focused on this aspect of language learning, as it is crucial to actually functioning in your new language. For instance, when you go to a foreign country, you will most definitely be unable to understand everything a native speaker is saying to you. It is your critical thinking that will get you through these situations, not just stock phrases such as “Hi, how are you?”, or “May I have another?” In this way, you can begin to bridge the gap between language learning and language learned.
So, while I still haven’t gotten any sleep, I’ve at least managed to crack a foreign murder mystery using a bit of my brain.
Do you have any experiences where critical thinking helped you through a language barrier?
Working for a company in the Detroit area means we are neighbors with Canada. We can look across the Detroit River and see Windsor (it is actually south Detroit – if you know the song, which is weird).
I remember as a little girl going across the bridge or through the tunnel and being able to spend my money on candy and get way more for my buck due to the exchange rate. Going to Canada is a big part of our culture because it is so accessible. We actually drive through Canada to get to New York. Every year we share our Independence Day with Windsor and have an awesome spectacle of fire works!
We love Canada. It is a geographically vast and ethnically diverse country. Canadian culture has also been greatly influenced by immigration from all over the world. The Vancouver Olympics are certainly a great way to see how welcoming they are.
Canada’s two official languages are English and French. Both have equal status in federal courts, Parliament, and in all federal institutions.
According to Wikipedia: English and French are the mother tongues of 59.7% and 23.2% of the population respectively, and the languages most spoken at home by 68.3% and 22.3% of the population respectively. 98.5% of Canadians speak English or French (67.5% speak English only, 13.3% speak French only, and 17.7% speak both).
Although more than 85% of French-speaking Canadians live in Quebec (French is the official language there), there are substantial Francophone populations in Ontario, Alberta, and southern Manitoba. Ontario has the largest French-speaking population outside Quebec.
Have you been to Canada? Share your experience?
