Tag: language hacking

Aeroplane

Language travels on a shoestring

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Despite brill online face-to-face services like iTalki for practising and learning languages with native speakers, you can’t beat time spent in the country as the best way to immerse yourself in your chosen language. Seems like an expensive way to fluency, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t have to be, with a range of web tools for sourcing super-cheap travel to your target language country.

Top of the list, and indispensable to the travelling linguist, is Google Flights Explore. It’s not particularly well signposted online – in fact, it’s practically clandestine, and you have to be told by someone else ‘in the know’ before you can find it! Why the experimental extension to Google’s flight search is not promoted more is a mystery, but it’s second-to-none at sourcing cheap flight offers with very general search terms (and I mean very – you can pop in ‘Scandinavia’ or ‘Eastern Europe’, and it will check the lot!).

For instance, say you’re learning Polish. Enter your preferred airport of origin, then Poland as the destination. You can adjust the length of the trip if you like, but the default 3-5 days is a good short break duration if you’re looking for a cheap getaway to practise your language skills. You don’t even need to add a date, as when you select your start and end points, you’ll be presented with a list of destinations along with time charts of the cheapest flights to each. It will even order them, with the cheapest, on average, at the top.

The example below shows that I can get to Warsaw from Edinburgh for as little as around £20 return (USD$25, although prices in your local currency appear when you click through to one of the flights on the time chart).

Google Flights Explore example

Google Flights Explore

Switching to a traditionally more expensive flight destination, such as Norway, still yields great results; a quick search today threw out some £30 returns on London-Oslo routes. It’s just as handy for longer-haul flights, too; flying from New York, Norwegian students can get to the country for under USD$300 return in a sample search made at the time of writing.

But how to minimise costs when you get there? Accommodation will be perhaps the biggest expense on the tick-list. It’s no big secret that, for value, you can’t really beat private rental services like AirBnB. Combining with the sample Polish flight search above, you could add a private room in a shared house for just £11 a night at the time of writing. That amounts to less than £100 for a 5-night stay, flights and accommodation included.

But there are more benefits to using these services like this than low rates. For a linguist / cultural explorer, a private rental property will likely:

  • come with a direct contact, and so more opportunity to meet a local and practise a bit of language as soon as you’re off the plane
  • give you a more authentic experience of what it’s like to live in the target language country, especially as it’s more likely to be self-catering (think of all that shopping vocab you can practise!)
  • give you day-to-day, lived experience of the language if you’re in a shared property / room in someone’s home

Compare that to the often sterile, internationalised hotel reception experience, and private accommodation offers big boons for the language traveller!

There are ways to minimise living costs while you’re there, too. They may not be glamorous – buying food supplies at supermarkets rather than going out to eat, grabbing a cheap pølser i brød (hotdog) at an Oslo kiosk for tea – but again, they bring you into direct contact with the target language, rather than sanitising your experience through safe, familiar settings like restaurants.

It might seem an extreme measure – and, intuitively, an outrageously unaffordable one – to ‘pop abroad’ when you need some target language practice. But it needn’t be bank-breaking, if you know where to look. Commit to a cheap cultural scouting trip once every month, or at least couple of months, setting yourself a tiny budget and seeing what you can do with it. Your inner linguist will thank you!

The Globe

Tips from a language junkie

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I admit it – I’m a language junkie. I’m perennially curious, always looking for something new to learn. New languages are pretty, shiny objects and I’m a restless polyglot magpie.

Not surprisingly, a question I’m asked a lot is “Don’t you get mixed up learning all those languages?”. It’s an understandable question, to which I’d reply, first off: have faith in your brain! It’s more adept than you realise at keeping things separated. Children brought up bilingually manage it neatly, so why shouldn’t your mature, adult brain?

There are a number of things you can do to help keep things compartmentalised, though. For instance, users of Anki might want to take advantage of custom cards, so you can colour-code those belonging to your different languages. There’s a good beginners’ guide on doing this on YouTube at this link. Here are a couple of mine; the key is to make your different language cards as distinctive as possible (I like to use flags):

A customised Icelandic card in Anki

A customised Norwegian card in Anki

If you prefer to keep your lists the offline way, you might think about colour-coding your vocab notes by language, too.

Secondly, there are several reasons why learning more than one language can be more effective and beneficial than just learning one.

I try to pick just one language within a major group to focus on (for instance, Norwegian from North Germanic, and Spanish from the Italic languages). That’s not to preclude others from that group completely – it’s just that the main focus language will become the ‘anchor’ for that group. Instead of learning Icelandic (another North Germanic language) from scratch, for example, I’ll relate it to Norwegian as my base language.

Take the Norwegian word dør (door), for example – in Icelandic, this is dyr. Contrasting and comparing cognates like this gives you a real feel for the language group as a whole. This way, you can build up an instinct for the regular patterns of change and difference between languages, which deepens your understanding of each one.

Be a bluffer!

What’s more, learning patterns like this can give you some productive rules for ‘guessing’ or ‘bluffing’ in other languages. To take Spanish as an example, with a little learning you can learn how to ‘Portuguesify’ your Castilian, and fake enough Portuguese to get by in simple situations. You’ll spot that Spanish initial ll-, for instance, is often ch- in Portuguese, so you can guess that llegar (to arrive) in Spanish is chegar in Portuguese. You might also see that Spanish diphthongises a vowel (sticks two or more vowel sounds together) where Portuguese doesn’t, so huevo (egg) in Spanish is ovo in Portuguese. It doesn’t always work, but pattern-spotting is definitely a good way to get a working version of a new language up and running, based on something you already know.

Cross-reference your vocab

I also like to use my stronger languages to check for gaps in my nascent ones. If I learn a new word in, say, Norwegian, I’ll check whether I know that word in my other languages too. My OCD streak dictates that I hate gaps and imbalances in my knowledge, but it’s not hard to look up the missing words and make a note of them (in Anki, in my case). At the simplest level, you could do this in a vocab notebook or Excel spreadsheet:

English German Spanish Norwegian Polish
dog der Hund el perro en hund pies
cat die Katze el gato en katt kot

It’s also a great way to start spotting similarities and relationships between the languages you’re learning.

The underlying message of this post is: you don’t have to settle for just one foreign language if you have the time and motivation! Have faith that your mind is more than equipped to deal with multiple tracks, and enjoy the extra benefits that learning more than one can give you.

Parrots chatting

Conversation fillers

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A common frustration when you’re moving from beginner to intermediate level in a language (A1/A2 to B1/B2 using the CEFR scale) is the stilted nature of the language you produce – short, functional, clipped and often isolated sentences that make for pretty boring conversations.

One way round this is to work on ‘conversation fillers’ – common little phrases or language snippets that instantly lend a bit of colour and flow to what you’re saying. Think about how you speak your native language; it’s rarely a sequence of straightforward, affirmative sentences, but peppered with padding like “well”, “I see”, “actually”, “anyway” and such like. They give what we’re saying flow and hue, and make us sound less like automata and more like the interesting, messy and complicated human beings we are.

A lot has been written on the topic already, not least this excellent article by polyglot Benny Lewis. I’ve returned to the topic myself as I’m on a language-improving trip to Norway this weekend, and have been digging all my old vocab lists out to brush up on them.

From my experience learning Norwegian and other languages, these are my top tips for reusable padding / flow phrases in your target language. I’ve deliberately limited them to just a few, as it’s important not to overload yourself, and focus on getting a manageable amount of them under your belt. Look them up / get a native speaker to translate them for you, and try and ease them into future conversations. It’ll be a little parrot-fashion at first, but after a while, they’ll become part of your natural repertoire. A great way to sound a little less stilted and more natural, even if you’re still managing that transition from beginner to intermediate.

  • Well…
  • In fact…
  • I see / understand
  • True / definitely / probably
  • I get the impression that…
  • I can imagine that…
  • It seems that…
  • I agree / you’re right
  • You know?
  • …isn’t it?
  • On the other hand…
  • Interesting!
dictionary

Getting lost in languages: finding your flow

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How often do we hear others dismiss language learning as “too hard” to bother?

In my own long and varied experience with MFL, it’s a charge I’ve heard frequently levelled at languages, as much from frustrated students as from family and friends. “I’d love to learn a language, but I’m just no good at it” is such a common defence; “I’ve got a terrible memory for languages” is another.

But what if expending too much effort is part of the problem? This isn’t to say that there’s some magic, easy method to acquire a working knowledge of a language in a short amount of time. No subliminal headphones-while-you-sleep shortcuts, I’m afraid.

Rather, we should be challenging the over-serious, head-breaking, traditional model of language learning; that slightly authoritarian, sit-down-and-learn-your-grammar reputation that MFL has (rightly or wrongly) earnt over the decades.

Recently I’ve been working on interactive resources in Maori and Latvian, two languages I know next to nothing about. A lot of the groundwork for this involved pretty repetitive copy-pasting to create resource files for apps. However, despite the fairly automatic nature of the task, I found myself noticing and picking up language patterns almost subconsciously  during the process. After more than 100 Latvian verb conjugations, for example, you start to recognise present tense endings like -u/-i/-a/-m/-t/-a and other groups more or less instinctively.

In the zone

Not only that, but turning into a bit of a copy-paste automaton for an hour or so was an easy – even relaxing – experience. Talking about it with a  colleague, I likened it to ‘taking a stroll’ through the language. I’d entered that mindful state of ‘being in the zone’, or flow, as described by positive psychologists like Csíkszentmihályi. I had, in effect, created the perfect mind conditions to enjoy and absorb working within the foreign language, almost without any conscious effort.

I do this kind of task very often in my line of work, unsurprisingly, it’s led me to a head chock full of vocab and grammar snippets that I never really intended to learn, but somehow, fortuitously, did anyway. It leads me to re-evaluate the kinds of learning task that we often dismiss in MFL, those that seem to have little worth on the surface, like word searches and simple matching activities. I’ve often a guilty ‘word search snob’ myself, but it’s likely worth rethinking their poor reputation amongst MFL educators in this light. Food for thought when considering whether to include such ‘low-level’ tasks in your language learning regime or resources!

If they’re engaging enough to spark a little of that flow, contain a fair amount of language patterns and paradigms with clear meaning,  then maybe, just maybe, ‘grunt’ language learning tasks have a valuable place in learning.