tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55107592518773335772024-03-13T22:44:01.614-07:00The Daily Language LearnerBlogs by John Ronner:
JohnRonner.blogspot.com (Real Estate)
TopAngelNews.blogspot.com
DailyLanguageLearner.blogspot.comThe Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-51051548472567219262014-03-29T17:59:00.000-07:002014-03-29T18:12:32.080-07:00Sacré bleu! Will French become the world's number one language by 2050?<h3>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the early modern era, la belle langue francais was the intellectual world's lingua franca, spoken during the Enlightenment by the aristocrats and thinkers of Europe in their courts from Paris to Berlin to Moscow. During the American Revolution, one of the greatest minds among the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, was dispatched as an envoy to Paris to coax the French into joining our side. Why? Because he was one of the few founding fathers who could speak fluent French. <br /><br /><br />But then, in the 19th Century, there came to the forefront what the French later called "La langue du Coca-Cola" (the language of Coca Cola; i.e. English). At first English seized from French the initiative in the world of commerce, perhaps because of the robust trade under way in the British Empire. Later, French was displaced in most other spheres.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But, voila, just when it seemed as if Voltaire, Rabelais and Moliere would be swept aside by Dickens, Twain and Shakespeare, here rides the French investment bank Natixis to the rescue. C'est merveilleux, n'est-ce pas?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20140326-will-french-be-world-most-spoken-language-2050/">http://www.france24.com/en/20140326-will-french-be-world-most-spoken-language-2050/</a></span></h3>
The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-91823303291369318162013-10-30T21:01:00.000-07:002013-10-30T21:01:35.586-07:00Chinese youth Yu Ming Studies the wrong language before visiting Ireland -- or the right one?<h2>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">Here's a touching nine-minute video about a bored Chinese youth, Yu Ming, who spins a globe and randomly points to a country to escape to. And when the spinning slows, his finger chances to land on Ireland. He wrongly assumes that the Irish language is the dominant language of Ireland and, in China, he studies it to fluency or near-fluency. But when he arrives in the Ould Sod, he gradually realizes that English is everywhere -- and Irish nowhere. In fact, only a small percentage of the Irish still use it in small pockets of the country. Fortunately, Yu Ming chances to run into a native speaker in Dublin. This is the story of a beleagured Celtic language -- under siege in its own country by that eight hundred pound gorilla of languages, English. Here's a link to the video embedded in linguist Donovan Nagel's language-learning blog, The Mezzofanti Guild:</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.mezzoguild.com/2012/01/08/one-of-the-most-powerful-short-language-films-youll-see/">http://www.mezzoguild.com/2012/01/08/one-of-the-most-powerful-short-language-films-youll-see/</a></span></h2>
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The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-4122793654569440172013-09-02T13:07:00.000-07:002013-09-02T13:10:21.379-07:00What does it take to become a speaker of 10 or more languages? Time magazine's Katy Steinmetz discusses the phenomenon of "hyperpolyglottery" with the author of Babel No More<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4wZwEQhgKNk/UiTvDDBaE4I/AAAAAAAAABs/4uXVeNp8dSI/s1600/Babel+No+More+book+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4wZwEQhgKNk/UiTvDDBaE4I/AAAAAAAAABs/4uXVeNp8dSI/s320/Babel+No+More+book+cover.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The hyperpolyglots -- speakers of many, many languages, often 10 or more -- are rapidly populating YouTube with their astonishing videos, delivering short monologues in one tongue after another. The movement has even been begun scheduling its own international conferences. <a href="http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/30/are-you-a-hyperpolyglot-the-secrets-of-language-superlearners/">Here</a>, Time magazine's Katy Steinmetz discusses the growing phenomenon with the author of <i>Babel No More</i>.</span></h2>
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<br />The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-44821463919251275192012-11-03T21:26:00.003-07:002012-11-03T21:41:28.837-07:00The App That Makes Your Smartphone a Powerful Language Tutor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--V2fPPvjfig/UJXx4UDmsII/AAAAAAAAABM/N8Q78MOqbsg/s1600/Google+Translate+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--V2fPPvjfig/UJXx4UDmsII/AAAAAAAAABM/N8Q78MOqbsg/s1600/Google+Translate+logo.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of the most powerful language learning tools is in the palm of your hand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Your smartphone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Thanks to the free downloadable app Google Translate, your smartphone can become an instant bilingual dictionary, a native speaker pronouncing words for you, and an instant personal translator accompanying you as you make your way through a foreign country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Today, I tested Google Translate in English-to-Russian exercises and was astounded at, for the most part, how accurate it was. Since my grasp of Russian is elementary, I experimented by speaking into the microphone simple sentences whose translation into Russian I already knew. The accurate performance was uncanny, like something out of a science fiction movie.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The program display has a microphone icon you can press, which enables you to speak into the smartphone what you'd like to say. A translation then appears on the screen. To hear this translation as it would be pronounced by a native speaker, just press an icon resembling a speakerphone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This program also comes in handy in testing your ability to generate sentences in your target language. You speak the English sentence into the phone, look away from the screen and imagine the correct translation, then back look at the displayed translation to check yourself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If you use Google Translate on your desktop computer, rather than a smartphone, the program will autom<span style="line-height: 19.983333587646484px;">atically create a sound file </span><span style="line-height: 19.983333587646484px;">each time the audio </span><span style="line-height: 19.983333587646484px;">of a voice recording is played back. Written input sounded out with the speakerphone icon will also generate a sound file. That audio file</span><span style="line-height: 19.983333587646484px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 19.983333587646484px;">is stored in the drive's Temporary Internet Folder, which can be accessed through this path:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">C:\documents and settings\ (NAME)\Local Settings\ Temp \ Temporary Internet Files</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Once located, the audio file can be transferred to C:\my music, where it will automatically be loaded into your Windows Media Player's library and turned into an MP3 file. Using Windows Media Player, you can then burn that file to a CD to be played in your car if you use drive time for language learning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This opens up the possibility of cutting and pasting entire passages into Google Translate to be rendered into portable audio files for your language learning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">To use Google Translate on your desktop machine or tablet, go to: translate.google.com. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Muchas gracias, merci beaucoup and danke schoen to Google.</span></div>
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The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-21463581048465825142012-10-08T16:24:00.000-07:002012-10-08T16:27:13.493-07:00Parlez-vous francais? New research suggests that learning foreign languages increases the size of the brain's memory center -- the hippocampus -- as well as tissue in the cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain. And, supposedly, it delays the onset of Alzheimer's.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121008082953.htm">Click here to read the Science Daily article.</a><br />
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<br />The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-2055944431846573522012-08-26T20:42:00.000-07:002012-08-26T20:42:35.663-07:00Ancestor of most of today's languages fanned out from Near East 8,000 years ago?A new study published in the journal Science suggests that most of the world's population today is speaking a language descended from a small group of farmers in the Near East 8,000 years ago. This includes languages as diverse as English, German, Russian, and Hindi.<br />
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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/researchers-identify-present-day-turkey-as-origin-of-indo-european-languages/2012/08/23/6133c564-ed3e-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_story.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/researchers-identify-present-day-turkey-as-origin-of-indo-european-languages/2012/08/23/6133c564-ed3e-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_story.html</a>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-68660721406062251552012-03-24T18:27:00.002-07:002012-03-24T18:32:02.564-07:00Key points for learning a language<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SZc-14S9aJ0/T251LFm3ImI/AAAAAAAAABE/v3YaW8F4tjs/s1600/How+to+learn+a+language+video+jpeg+0312.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SZc-14S9aJ0/T251LFm3ImI/AAAAAAAAABE/v3YaW8F4tjs/s320/How+to+learn+a+language+video+jpeg+0312.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
In the following video, I summarize some key points in learning a foreign language. Your methods and your mood will spell the difference between victory and defeat.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9XactvT7UU&context=C42f68beADvjVQa1PpcFNd-2bP6jz7nhbp2Mr1fe5yKPsvcxyfmPM=">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9XactvT7UU&context=C42f68beADvjVQa1PpcFNd-2bP6jz7nhbp2Mr1fe5yKPsvcxyfmPM=</a>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-27130925457772270832012-02-19T19:00:00.000-08:002012-02-19T19:00:13.422-08:00Parallel Translations: Powerful Ammo for the Would-Be Language Learner<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><img src="http://img2.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" style="background-color: #b2b2b2; " class="BLOGGER-object-element tr_noresize tr_placeholder" id="ieooui" data-original-id="ieooui" /> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Are you studying several foreign languages at the same time?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One powerful technique in building reading comprehension is to peruse parallel translations of the same book passage in all your target languages.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">With most books, compiling all your languages on one sheet using translation sites and cut-and-paste commands would be time-consuming. But with sacred texts, such as The Bible, the work has already been done for you – in the form of parallel translation Web sites.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Biola University, for example, has a site called The Unbound Bible -- <cite><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">unbound</span></b></cite><cite><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.biola.edu</span></b></cite><cite><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> – which offers the user a large collection of searchable online Bibles in dozens of languages, both ancient and modern. Their wide range of choices includes Manx Gaelic, Tagalog and Swahili.</span></cite></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><cite><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The site visitor can display on the computer screen a searched Bible passage in up to nine parallel languages. For fun, I choose Modern Greek, Norwegian, Esperanto, Italian, Icelandic, Romanian, Portuguese, Russian and </span></cite><cite><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Czech.</span></cite><cite><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"></span></cite></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><cite><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Being able to instantly see parallels in related languages, such as Dutch and German in the Germanic family, or Spanish and Portuguese in the Romance family, speeds learning.</span></cite></div>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-12014828362216366352011-03-28T19:43:00.000-07:002011-03-28T19:43:29.795-07:00Speed up your foreign language learning with Google's new add-on Ming-a-Ling<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</style> <![endif]--> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RdsWGeAZIA8/TZFGch8R3aI/AAAAAAAAABA/1HhMaLgR2zQ/s1600/Ming-a-Ling+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RdsWGeAZIA8/TZFGch8R3aI/AAAAAAAAABA/1HhMaLgR2zQ/s1600/Ming-a-Ling+logo.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>Want to speed up your acquisition of vocabulary in the foreign language you’re learning. Try the new browser add-on “Ming-a-Ling” from Google, which substitutes foreign words or phrases in the text of English language articles you read while you surf the Web.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Tell Ming-a-Ling which words and phrases you want to add to your list, and they will start showing up in their native glory on your English-language Web pages. Submit to Ming-a-Ling, for example, the German word “Wasser” (water). You may then find yourself reading an article in Yahoo News in a sentence which suddenly reads: “The boat gradually sank into the Wasser.” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">If you forget a word or phrase, you can drag your cursor over it, and a small pop up box will remind you of the English definition. What if you get tired of this weirdness after your learning time? Just turn off the software.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">This groundbreaking program, in fact, might become revolutionary if the developers were to add a feature that allowed the user to input all at once the most common 1,000 words in a foreign language. Then the next 500 most common. I could envision the English gradually melting away from your screen over the course of a few months as your vocabulary climbed.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">You will have to exercise a little caution. Ming-a-Ling relies on software that is not infallible. It’s still weak on distinguishing between identically spelled words like “bark” (tree bark) and “bark” (the howl of a dog), so you may get some mistranslations. However, the software is expected to get smarter over time.</span></div>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-90935747766170041242011-03-19T22:19:00.000-07:002011-03-19T22:39:25.182-07:00Why Stop with 2 Languages? How to Become a “Polyglot,” a Speaker of Many Languages -– Even Without Limitless hero Eddie Morra’s Pill.<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-nP2G4JQVUXE/TYWQ1UT8ZDI/AAAAAAAAAA8/gQULOCkcFiU/s1600/Bradley+Cooper+and+Robert+DeNiro+Limitless.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-nP2G4JQVUXE/TYWQ1UT8ZDI/AAAAAAAAAA8/gQULOCkcFiU/s320/Bradley+Cooper+and+Robert+DeNiro+Limitless.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In this week’s new movie <i>Limitless</i>, clumsy loser Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) pops a smart pill that in 30 seconds turns him into a suave mental giant with a “four-digit I.Q.” He wins back his ex-girlfriend, impresses her by ordering their restaurant meals in fluent Italian and Chinese, and engages in other intellectual displays ranging from instant martial arts expertise to Warren Buffet-style money management that makes him a multi-millionaire in a matter of days. It's a mental zero to hero story.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">But the fact is, you actually don’t need a pill or even genius to become a <i>polyglot,</i> a speaker of many languages (say, five or more). Just a strong desire and regular time devoted to studying each of your target languages several times a week in incidental moments that might be wasted, anyway, on pop music or just standing in line. Here are ten steps to becoming a linguistic Eddie Morra, without worrying about losing the pills, as he did in the movie:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Win the mental game, or you’ll lose before you begin. The idea of polyglottery being utterly impossible for “ordinary” people keeps talented individuals from setting this lofty but achievable goal. Mogul Henry Ford who introduced the automobile assembly line, once said, "If <i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal;">you think you can</span></i>, or if<i> </i><i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal;">you think you can't</span></i>, <i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal;">either way</span></i><i>, </i><i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal;">you</span></i><i>'</i><i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: normal;">re right</span></i><i>.</i>" Remember: The third language is far, far easier than the second if you stick to the same language family (see Step 2), and the fourth much, much easier than the third. This is because all the related languages will share the bulk of their vocabulary and grammar with easily manageable differences. <i><br />
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</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Pick the right languages. All tongues are not created equal. If you speak English as your mother language, it will be much, much easier to learn other languages in the “Germanic” family, such as Dutch, German or Norwegian. In fact, Dutch and most of the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) are particularly easy, because their vocabularies and pronunciation are so similar to English and their grammars are simple.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">3.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Choose your language learning material wisely. There are, alas, some poorly conceived products that you might spend a lifetime on without learning much. Among the best, however, are the Pimsleur courses, Learn in Your Car and Living Language. Pimsleur is exceptional for thorough teaching that forces you to interact with the CD and completely master the material. Learn in Your Car is strong for building vocabulary and speaking ability. Living Language, I find, is useful for developing comprehension.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">4.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Use your car intensively. Maximize commuting time and short trips by listening to your language CDs. Keep in your car four or five separate portable CD players dedicated to each of your target languages. Many people will find that all the dead time spent alone in the car will suffice for the language listening time they need to devote to a polyglottery project.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">5.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Start reading primers and children’s books and move up gradually through graded readers, as you did in English. When you get to a fifth or sixth grade level, use a dictionary and begin reading original materials in the target languages that you would ordinarily want to read in English, anyway. If you’re a fan of science fiction novels or romances, then get those works in the target languages and use a dictionary to look up words. I’m currently reading Ray Bradbury’s <i>Fahrenheit 451</i> in Spanish, Philip Jose Farmer’s <i>Lavalite World</i> in French, George Orwell’s <i>Animal Farm</i> in Dutch, and Michael Grant’s <i>Caesar</i> in German. Regular reading rapidly builds vocabulary, which will begin showing up in your spoken sentences. <br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">6.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Check Meetup.com for language clubs in your city and attend the weekly meetings in your target languages. These clubs often meet over supper, and generally they only have one rule: No English!<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">7.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Find native speakers in your target languages who want to improve their English. You and they can meet in person regularly to spend, say, 30 minutes over lunch talking English, and the remaining 30 speaking your desired language.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">8.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Use Web sites that bring together language learners. Select a few individuals, then make use of the Web-based Skype service to set up free international internet calls for further practice with these native speakers. If you like, get a Web cam to turn the call into a video conference.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">9.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span>Make a game of expressing everyday sentences in all of your target languages. If you’re thinking at the grocery store: “Man, this cashier is slow” – then ask yourself how that would be said in your various target languages. My daughters and I have a game called Super Language Club that we occasionally enjoy over cups of coffee at Starbucks. One of us makes up a sentence, and we each take turns translating that sentence into the half dozen languages we are interested in.<br />
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</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: large;">10.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span> Practice your language skills at every random opportunity. If you run into a native speaker on the bus, at the supermarket or in the office, trot out some sentences. Be bold like English-learning Europeans who take full advantage of their encounters with English-speaking tourists.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">To sum up, read and listen a lot every day. The speaking will come naturally, as long as you discipline yourself not to be too shy to speak up when you have a chance with a native speaker.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Put these ten principles into practice, and you won't need a smart pill or four-digit I.Q. to get to six languages. But watch out: language learning is exhilarating and addictive. You may be tempted to eventually aim for “hyper-polyglottery.”</span></div>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-81043661930227887882011-03-13T21:37:00.000-07:002011-03-16T21:11:12.275-07:00Rescuers Fight to Save the Dying Irish Language<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-DLjEyf8AKMY/TX2dwLmvuSI/AAAAAAAAAA4/biWxM3l8ts4/s1600/Early+modern+map+of+Ireland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-DLjEyf8AKMY/TX2dwLmvuSI/AAAAAAAAAA4/biWxM3l8ts4/s320/Early+modern+map+of+Ireland.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On St. Patrick’s Day four days from today, far more Irish may be spoken from parade floats or podiums than would ever actually be heard on the streets of many Irish cities or towns. That’s because the Celtic tongue used by St. Patrick to Christianize the Emerald Isle during the twilight years of the Roman Empire has been slowly dying out for three centuries. Irish is now among 632 “definitely endangered languages” in the United Nations’ <i>Atlas of World Languages in Danger</i>.<br />
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Out of 4.4 million Irishmen, probably no more than one or two per cent are fluent now, so badly beaten down has Irish been by that 800-pound gorilla of world languages, English.<br />
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The downward slide for Irish began in earnest in the 1600s when an English army conquered the Island. While English influence spread slowly through imperial policy favoring English and banning Irish in some contexts, a turning point occurred when the Irish Potato Famine hit in 1845. That great hunger halved the island’s population, either through death or emigration. Most of the 1 million who died were Irish speakers.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Irish never recovered. By the time Ireland got its independence from Britain just after World War I, less than 15 per cent of the Irish were speaking their own tongue.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">The new Irish government made Irish a mandatory subject in schools. But teaching methods were often so backward, tedious and ineffectual that many Irish students came to hate the language, rather than love it. Large numbers, some writers say most, never achieved competence, even after 14 years of study.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">Meanwhile, mixed marriages of English and Irish speakers continued, cross-migration in and out of Irish-speaking enclaves picked up as people followed jobs, and many Irish parents encouraged their kids to abandon the Celtic language for English, perceiving a business and career advantage. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">All this caused the “Gaeltacht,” the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, to shrink further in geography and in their numbers of regular Irish speakers. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">All told, from the early 1920s to today, the population of fluent Irish speakers has dropped about 90 % from 250,000 to an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 today out of a total island population of 4.4 million.<br />
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</span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">But, as </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Newton</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> said, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Efforts to rescue one of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s most ancient written languages, the tongue of the Celtic story-telling bards and mystic Druid priests, have stepped up.</span></span><br />
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Activists have recently tried to fix the education problem by replacing the idea of teaching Irish as a single, boring subject in an otherwise English-language school. Instead, so-called “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelscoil" title="Gaelscoil"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">Gaelscoileanna</span></a>,” (Irish schools) have been established by the hundreds in which the medium of instruction for all academic subjects is Irish.<br />
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More students from these Irish-only schools are going on to college than their counterparts in regular schools. Some believe there is already an expanding contingent of Irish speakers in cities that may form the nucleus of a future urban minority of well-educated, middle-class individuals who regularly use Irish among themselves.<br />
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Also, 26,000 students annually spend three weeks in 47 Irish-language Gaeltacht area summer schools called <i>coláistí samhraidh</i> for immersion in the Irish language. While surrounded by Irish, they also live with local families to obtain continual language practice. <br />
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Perhaps too little, too late, but rescuers will not surrender. As an Irish proverb itself puts it, “<a href="http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/proverbs/proverb1_ga-ir.mp3">Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam</a>” (<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">A country without a language is a country without a soul).</span></i></span></span>The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-63728117824926413612011-01-10T20:13:00.000-08:002011-01-10T20:13:41.715-08:00Learn a Foreign Language Faster: 10 Tips1. Overcome fear and perfectionism. It stops you from talking. To learn to talk, you must talk. To learn to understand, you must listen.<br />
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2. If possible, find a native speaker who speaks little or no English - or is willing not to speak English -- and practice routinely your target language.<br />
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3. Memorize the lyrics of catchy songs in the foreign language and sing them privately to yourself (Russian students might enjoy memorizing the words to the theme song of The Hunt for Red October, for example.)<br />
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4. Join or create a language learning club meeting weekly over lunch or supper at a restaurant, whose primary rule is that anything goes except English.<br />
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5. Start practicing the reading of familiar Bible passages or passages in the Scriptures of other religions you may be familiar with. The language is often simple. The entire Gospel of John has a vocabulary of no more than 1,000 words.<br />
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6. Once you can read the Gospel of John or some similar material, graduate up to fairy tales, which have slightly more complex, but still simple vocabulary. The next step up would be tabloid newspaper articles.<br />
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7. Get a CD for your car's player and start using otherwise dead time for listening. The Learn in Your Car and Teach Yourself Series are among the best. Listen to individual lessons over and over until you master the material before moving on. By mastery, I mean this: you hear the English and can generate the translation in the pause before the CD furnishes it.<br />
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8. It's trite, but vocabulary cards really do work. Buy a set containing a basic vocabulary of 1,000 words and commit them to memory.<br />
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9. If you have no background in the target language whatsoever, an excellent starter CD is one using the Pimsleur method. Pimsleur is one of the best courses, but unfortunately the intermediate and advanced level CDs are for many learners prohibitively expensive. The beginner's CD is affordable and starts you off with a thorough grounding in 150 words. You will definitely be able to express yourself in every conceivable manner using that limited vocabulary if you complete the beginner's Pimsleur CDs.<br />
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10. Constantly ask yourself throughout the day how something you're thinking of might be expressed in the target language. And most important: remember that, with a limited vocabulary, you will usually need to simplify the thought in order to express it. If you're thinking in English, "This is absolutely captivating!" - you may have to simply say: "I like this a lot."<br />
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Good luck. Bon chance. Ich wuensche dir Glueck.The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510759251877333577.post-86354321141631184362010-11-30T18:45:00.000-08:002010-12-04T09:44:54.335-08:00Become Bilingual? Yes, you can: And here's a key tool for learning that second languageOne of the best tools for jump-starting a project to learn a second language is linguist Barry M. Farber's <i>Learn Any Language</i> (1991), a very tightly written, engrossing book loaded with tips and inspirational anecdotes.<br />
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Farber is a "polyglot", a speaker of many languages. His love of languages heated up after he almost flunked Latin in high school. At that point, he started reading a Mandarin Chinese language learning book. And soon after, he chanced to meet Chinese sailers training in Miami during World War II and made strong progress chatting with these native speakers.<br />
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Farber went on to study or sample 25 languages, including French, Spanish, Norwegian and Russian, which he studied in depth. He learned Hungarian while helping refugees flee Communism during the Hungarian Revolution. He picked up Indonesian as a young man while killing time with native speakers on a long boat trip.<br />
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At one point in <i>Learn Any Language</i>, Farber mentions that after entering the U.S. Army in 1952, he was "tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages"<br />
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Farber's book methodically shows a language learner how to pick a foreign language, maintain the enthusiasm necessary to put in the study time, and wisely choose the tools and materials for learning. That last step is critical, since language learning materials are so vastly uneven in quality.<br />
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Some of the book's most valuable advice concerns how to exploit short, idle periods of time for language learning, like the commute to work, or standing in line. <br />
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One chapter delves into the use of memory-enhancing techniques or "mnemonics" to boost recall.<br />
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Farber's main point, however, is that anyone can become bilingual. It's the strength of the desire and the way one goes about it that make the difference.The Daily Language Learnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00618469873461180086noreply@blogger.com0