Mango Languages

Cockney Rhyming Slang

Last week I was having an interesting conversion with a good friend of mine about languages and how people express themselves. We got to the topic of Britain, and how even though they speak English many times it seems like they speak a foreign language. They have so many alternative words for every day things that it’s really hard to understand what is being said. Eventually our discussion led to to Cockney Rhyming Slang, which I knew nothing about. I was fascinated with what I learned.

Cockney Rhyming Slang phrases are created from taking an expression that rhymes with a singular word and using that expression instead of the word. In many cases the rhyming word word isn’t said.

Here’s an example, the word “keys” rhymes with “macaroni cheese.” Using Cockney Rhyming Slang, instead of saying, “Have you seen me keys?” One would say, “Have you seen me Macaronis?”  So cool.

Cockney Rhyming Slang is a collection of phrases used by Cockneys and other Londoners.. Someone who is a true Cockney is one who is born close to St. Mary-le-Bow Church in Cheapside, London.  Nowadays, the term Cockney is used to describe people born outside this area as long as they have a “Cockney” accent or a Cockney heritage.

I came across this awesome website that is all about Cockney Rhyming Slang and has many examples.

Here are examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang for parts of the body:

“Feet” rhymes with “Plates of meat” -> “I have size 7 plates.”

“Head” rhymes with “Loaf of bread” -> “Use your loaf!”

Today Cockney Rhyming Slang is used more than ever. Modern Cockney Rhyming Slang is now being developed using the names of celebrities and famous people.

“Cup of Tea” rhymes with “Jay-Z” -> “Make me a Jay-Z.”

I found it amazing how much creativity goes into what seems like a different language.

Using Cockney Rhyming Slang, can you think of alternative ways to say common phrases?

Let’s Talk About Organic Learning!

When I was trying to learn a foreign language in the past, there always seemed to be a rude awakening at the end of the course.  I could no longer acquire new information as soon as the course book ended, the audio tape finished, or the class was over. It was frustrating to know that I spent so much time trying to learn a language and couldn’t continue to build on what I knew after the intense learning method was over.

I wish Organic Learning was incorporated into the different language learning methods I used to try.

Mango’s organic learning lessons are designed to help users continue increasing their vocabulary and cultural insights outside of the Mango lessons! These lessons are focused on teaching you to ask a variety of useful questions and use vital communications that allow users to ask about a word they don’t know, request additional information about any given subject, get clarification from the person they are speaking to, and more. The more you implement organic learning, the more you’ll be able to learn after the end of the course!

Intuitive Language Construction integrates vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, culture, as well as comprehension and retention strategies into organic learning to make Mango a fun, easy, and incredibly effective resource for foreign language and ESL users!

We can’t teach you every single one of the thousands of vocabulary words that make up a certain language, but we can teach you how to find out this information as you use the language. For example, you may find yourself in Spain and not know the name for a specific fruit you want to buy at a farmer’s market.  After using Mango, you would be able to point to the fruit and say, “Come se dice (point to object) en Español?” which means, how do you say (this) in Spanish? (Literal traslation: What is this called in Spanish). Not only will you now learn the appropriate word, but this technique will allow you to engage in conversations and grow more confident in your communication skills.  It’s a win-win, if you ask me.

See it in action – try a lesson for free!

Also, watch our methodology video to see all the unique features of Mango Languages courses.

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?

Learning ESL: Who Knew “Knife” had a “K”?

As someone whose first or second language was not English, I decided to focus on the most widely-spoken language in the world and the difficulties I had while learning it.

It’s true what they say: kids are like sponges, they soak up all kinds of information rather quickly. This is also true for languages. You place a child in a new environment and they will pick up the culture, slang, pronunciation, etc., in a timely manner. I know this because I was one of those kids. My family and I moved to the United States when I was nine years old, and besides it being the land of McDonald’s and the phrase “I’ll be back,” which I learned from watching American movies starring fellow European native Arnold Schwartzeneggar, I didn’t know anything about the American culture or the English language.

Fast forward nine months later when I tested out of my ESL classroom to a regular 4th grade class. I had American friends, I knew the cool 90′s slang, I felt like I fit in. By that time, most people wouldn’t even be able to tell that I was not a native speaker. However, I still had (and still do have) many questions about the English language.  Fifteen years later after learning four languages, I still believe English is an interesting and at times difficult language to learn.

Examples:

-English has the weirdest spelling. Who knew that knife had a “k”? I didn’t (lost a spelling bee because of this, still bitter). What’s up with the random “g” or “gh” in words such as foreigner or night?

-There, their, and they’re, all have different meanings but sound the same. Enough said.

-I use to avoid telling people what I did in the past because it was much easier to stick to the present. Go becomes went; eat becomes ate, and depending on the subject, eaten; teach becomes taught; and so on and so forth. You realize pretty quickly that you can develop incredible memorization skills.

-Learning English in America doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to understand what is being said to you in Australia, England, or New Zealand.

Earlier last week I came across an article, 10 Reasons Why English Is a Hard Language, and absolutely loved reading all the things that I struggled with as an ESL learner. The article actually goes in depth about the difficulties of learning English but also explains the reasoning behind some of the wacky rules of English. I was very glad to find out that I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. Very informative. Click here for the full article.

This is all to say that learning ANY language is tough, including English. Each language has it’s own rules, forms, pronunciation, and culture behind it. But no matter how confusing it gets, you still learn a lot along the way and it’s a wonderful feeling when you can communicate with others in your new language.

What are some interesting facts/rules about other languages you have studied/learned?

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?

The What and Who of Headedness

Hello again! My last syntax blog left off in the middle of a discussion of how some words draw other words to them in order to form a more complete thought. Recall the verb ate.  Ate has to draw to it “the someone” who did the eating and “the something” that was eaten, in order to be a complete thought. You may wonder why ate is the element that draws the others to it.  Well, ate, as we discussed before, describes a relationship between something and someone, that is, something was eaten by someone.  Apple, on the other hand, does not describe a relationship or anything for that matter.  Apple is a just a noun.  We could say, “The apple is red” or “I ate the apple.” The same logic applies to any other noun.

We also briefly discussed the definite article the and how it also draws other elements to it in order to be complete. The begs the question, “The what?” Similar to how ate begs the question, “Who/What ate what?”  I hope this better clarifies why certain types of words do the drawing, or assigning of thematic roles, while others do not.  Remember, thematic roles are simple: the jobs that need to be filled by some word in order for the predicate, or word/phrase doing the assigning, to be a more complete thought.

In these syntax blogs, we have determined that some groups of words belong together, and we call these groups constituents. We have explored that within constituents there are even smaller groups referred to as phrases.  I mentioned the names of some phrases–determiner phrases, verb phrases, etc.–and I also briefly mentioned that phrases are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. So, we now return to this question: How do we determine the head of a phrase?  The head of a phrase is the element that assigns thematic roles, or selects other words to complete it, and consequently causes movement of these words to merge with it. This is why in the phrase “ate the apple,” ate is the head.  Ate selected the argument “the apple.” Or, said in a different way, ate assigned a thematic role to “the apple.” Additionally, the is the head of the phrase “the apple” because it selected its argument,  apple.

Can you figure out which is the head of the following phrases: Cindy’s mother; blue house; small annoying child?

Celebrate Greek Carnival

Halloween and dressing up occurs in October in the United States, but in Europe and South America (Rio) it is in February. So here are some things about how we celebrate it in Greece, including a bit of linguistics, folklore, and religion.

According to one view, the word “carnival” comes from early Italian carve + levare, which means “take away the meat” (carne). The Greek word for it is apokreea (stress on the last -a-), which again means “away from meat.” In both Orthodox and Catholic religions, the focus is on eating what meat is left in the house before Lent (the traditional period of fasting before Easter) starts.

Greek carnival is a combination of religious and pagan festivities. Following the Church, there are three weeks dedicated to gradually reducing the consumption of certain foods up to the beginning of Lent. In these three weeks people should also celebrate and have a good time before starting the fast, a period of repentance. Two are the high points of this season: the Thursday of the first week, which is dedicated to eating meat, is called tseeknopemptee: pemptee is the name of the day (Thursday or the fifth day of the week) and tseekna refers to the smell of charcoaled meat, what you smell at barbecues. On that Thursday night people go out to tavernas to celebrate and drink and have a good time; you can smell tseekna everywhere.

The last of the three weeks is dedicated to the consumption of dairy products and fish and the Monday just after it is called Clean Monday, something like Shrove Monday, which marks the beginning of Lent. On this Monday we should not eat meat or dairy products – we should be “clean” of all that.  Only shellfish is allowed, and people go out to the countryside and have picnics and fly kites since the weather is usually permitting .  During these weeks people dress up and play pranks.  Parades are held in all the cities. Dressing up is a pagan custom that has to do with scaring away the evil winter spirits before spring comes.

How all this is connected to the way people lived:

According to Professor N.S. Margaris, all these traditions are closely related to the way people lived. Sheep and goats usually breed in January. Because there was lots of snow on the ground,  shepherds could not take them out to the pastures and were forced to reduce their number: tsiknopemptee is a relic of this tradition. After that, spring comes and there is plenty of grass; eating meat is thus forbidden up to Easter so that sheep and goats can grow.

Another tidbit:

On two of the Saturdays during this period people honor the dead. In many places in Greece people cook pasta. Now, the food that is given to those who come to wake the dead is called makareea, which means “blessing.” According to one view, the word “macaroni,” a kind of pasta, derives from makareea, or makareea + (e)oni(a) [eon] = “eternal blessing.” And all this time you thought that pasta was Italian?

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?