Tag: languages

A picture of chopped onions and carrots. Cooking - food for the language learning soul as well as the stomach?

Slow Cooking for Languages

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I’m rubbish at cooking.

Don’t get me wrong – I can follow a recipe and whip up something edible if I really have to. But I’ve never had the creativity or passion in the kitchen to be an Ainsley or an Akis. I’m much more of a food-taker than a cake-baker.

It was a bit out of character, then, as I bookmarked scores of cheap, hearty recipes to experiment with lately. I guess it’s a sign of the times, first and foremost. With talk of widespread price rises and shortages, and it just seemed like a canny idea to get a handle on some proper home economics. Out with the ready-made, in with Lentils 101 Ways.

But what has this got to do with language learning? Well, cooking over the past few weeks has one unintended but fantastic side-effect on my studies.

It slowed me down.

Language Learning – Fast and Slow

My concentration when studying can be skittish at the best of times. I put it down to an active, inquisitive brain, serving up a mixture of excitement (for what I’m learning) and impatience (to plough through everything at once). But whatever the cause, it leaves me with an attention span I have to rule with an iron fist, lest it get the better of me.

That makes certain language learning tasks quite difficult, not least listening. Podcasts, for instance, have to be short and snappy (or easily chunkable so I can pause and come back as I need). Hands need to be away from the controls so I don’t resist the urge to skip or switch (the language podcast equivalent of sofa-bound channel-hopping). And I need to step away from the computer screen and all its tangential distractions. That will start innocently enough, of course. I’ll look up word in an online dictionary, mid-podcast. But then, I’ll fall down a rabbit hole of links as I completely forget the episode playing in the background.

So, imagine my discomfort when rustling up some lentil gratin on Wednesday evening. I switch on a podcast to listen to while I prepare dinner, and settle into my prep. Deep into chopping and prepping, I feel that urge to jump on – but I can’t. Nope; hands covered in garlic and onions, I’m bound to the chopping board. A captive audience. All I can do is take a deep breath, and stifle that urge. 

Kitchen activities, it turns out, are a fantastic aid to my concentration when working with audio materials. You’ve heard of slow cooking – well, this was slow language learning (in the best possible sense). And, what’s more, it works with all those audio books I’ve downloaded and not found time to listen to yet, too.

Sometimes all we need is to slow down and smell the cooking.

What slows you down and trains your focus? Let us know in the comments!

A Short and Easy Modern Greek Grammar (Gardner 1892). Dense, but thorough descriptions!

Feeling Dense When It Don’t Make Sense

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When I first started learning Greek many years ago, as a very inexperienced polyglot-in-the-making, I remember trying to get to grips with an interesting quirk of pronunciation – and feeling a little dense when it didn’t make sense at first.

It was all about stress placement. Specifically, something a bit funny can happen in Greek when a little word like μου (mou – my) follows a polysyllabic word. The longer word gets an extra stress accent – very strange considering the fact that Greek words usually only have a single stressed syllable.

το διαμέρισμα (to diamérisma – the flat)
το διαμέρισμά μου (to diamérismá mou – my flat)

I remember reading this in some dusty old grammar I got from the library, and not quite getting it. I made a mental note that the stress can sometimes change under certain circumstances, and left it at that, feeling ever so slightly befuddled (but undeterred!).

With time, of course, I came across lots of examples of this happening in Greek texts and speech. And with that exposure, my hit-and-miss attempts at reproducing it, and my eventual improvement, came a kind of instinct for where it takes place.

Getting Technical

Wind forward a good twenty years, and I’m leafing through a Modern Greek grammar primer from 1892 (as you do). A Short and Easy Modern Greek Grammar was an introductory text originally penned by German Karl Wied, and released in a translation by Mary Gardner in 1892. As it’s such an old, copyright-expired book, it’s quite easy to get a PDF scan of it, such as this 1910 edition at the Internet Archive.

I love these texts for the insight they give into how the target language itself has changed in recent years. But they also offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of foreign language education. How things have changed in a hundred-and-twenty years! But then again, how they stay the same. The technical descriptions aren’t vastly different from the thorough explanations you’ll find in a Routledge Comprehensive Grammar. Well, maybe a little extra Victorian bombast, but the format has remained surprisingly static over a century.

Page from a Short and Easy Modern Greek Grammar (Gardner 1892). Dense, but thorough descriptions!

A Short and Easy Modern Greek Grammar (Gardner, after Wied, 1892)

Right there, on page eight, is that accent phenomenon I struggled with as a youth. The description is given in quite traditionalist, grammatical language. It explains that the stress-jumping occurs with enclitics, snippets of words so short that they lack an accent of their own and almost merge into the preceding word.

It’s a technically accurate and comprehensive explanation. But I probably wouldn’t have had a clue if I’d read it there first!

A Time and a Place

There are two points to make here. First, don’t be fazed if you struggle to get difficult grammatical points in traditional texts. With enough exposure to real language, you’ll develop your own instinct for these intricacies. There’s a time and a place for comprehensive, formal grammars, and it’s probably not at the very start of your journey (as much as I love to geek out with hundred-year-old tomes).

Secondly, it’s not that such resources are not useful at all. It’s just that they’re perhaps better used when you have a bit of a handle on the language already, and you are ready for the why as well as the how. It’s also a nice reminder that a little time and experience can make a huge difference with language learning.

What first seemed dense and inaccessible can make complete sense when you revisit it with some street-learned smarts.

Polyglotised Products

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I keep coming across what you might call polyglotised products lately. You know the kind of thing: emblazoned with motivational or humorous snippets in a number of languages, usually achingly corny and twee, and all too often containing a few errors to create some associated unintended comedy. From the welcome to… artwork at airports to that multilingual Christmas cross-stitch that comes out once a year, you can find multilingual cheesiness in all sorts of places.

As naff as they can be, there is something snugly positive about these chintzy embellishments. For the wistful polyglots, they’re a nod to the world beyond. For the philosophical, they acknowledge that despite language differences, humans tend to express the same kinds of everyday thoughts the world over. And for the rest of us, they’re just plain fun. I think they deserve to be celebrated whenever we see them in our otherwise blandly monolingual societies.

Corny polyglot fun

I spotted a corker of one recently: a polyglot ashtray, sitting incongruously outside a café pub in the city centre. It’s all the sweeter for the fact that it looks homemade, and well-loved, judging by the wear around the edges. There’s that folk irony there too, a hint of sarcasm, with the – ahem – hilarious decision to adorn an ashtray with “I will quit tomorrow”. Firmly in the “my other car’s a Lamborghini” tradition. Just glorious.

In any case, these things bring a dash of light-hearted silliness to a sometimes dark world, not to mention a smile to the face of those that understand a snatch of their target language in them.

Three polyglot cheers for cheese!

Have you come across any nice specimens on your travels? What are your favourites? Let us know in the comments!

Close-up of daydreaming eye, full of wistfulness. Image from FreeImages.com

The Power of Wistfulness : Misty-Eyed Language Learning

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Sometimes, a distant goal can exert a greater pull than an immediate one. It’s all down to the mysterious power of wistfulness.

I’ve been learning Gaelic for a few years now. It’s always been at a fairly steady, casual pace, never rushed or urgent. That’s probably because it’s always felt like a sociable endeavour rather than an academic one; classes and chat clubs are a chance to catch up with friends as much as learn a language.

It’s when I’m away from that environment that the nature of that changes dramatically. And it’s particularly strong when I’m very far away.

I clocked it this week, at the tail-end of the post-August grind-back-into-gear. For many of us, there’s been a big break from classes over summer, and Gaelic was no exception out of term-time. Chat groups have been quiet too, what with folk off on their hols and such like. That’s a whole month and beyond without any structured language learning.

The result? I’ve started kicking off each day with “Alexa, play BBC Radio nan Gàidheal“. I’ve plunged into some proper reading at last, giving a new translation of Animal Farm a go (even though it’s a wee bit tough for my level). BBC Alba is my current go-to on iPlayer of an evening. And I’ve been dipping into an Old Irish primer to fill in the historical gaps. Distance has been like a lightning rod to my motivation!

The Power of Wistfulness

What’s happened? Well, I’d call it the power of wistfulness. When something treasured or important becomes distant, people tend to grow wistful and nostalgic for it. And that, in turn, multiplies the joy that comes from immersing yourself in it, from revelling in it, even, as a source of comfort. It explains in part why a (formal) learning break can sometimes work wonders.

It’s similar to the effect you get after coming back from a trip to your target language country. You just know you’ll get a mini boost to your learning for a good few weeks after your return. It’s because absence really can make the heart grow fonder, as you crave anything that restores that warm connection. There’s almost an irony there, of course; after returning from a trip, I’ll sometimes study the language more than in the lead-up to it!

So, here I am, listening to solemn choral music on Gaelic radio, feeling all sorts of longing for roves around the Scottish Highlands. Twee, I know, and I’m sure I’ll return to lazy ways when the calendar ramps up again. But who’s complaining when it’s driving some progress? I’ve probably immersed myself more in past couple of weeks than I have since I started Gaelic. And that morning radio in the target language is fast becoming a healthy language-learning habit I hope to continue.

The power of wistfulness can do funny things.

 

Books, glorious books. And you can pick most of them up for a bargain price at Wob, too.

Wob, Two, Three, It’s Second-Hand Books for Me

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Loads of language books? Check. Great prices and free postage? Check. Social conscience? Check. All reasons why Wob (formerly World of Books) is my latest second-hand bookseller of choice.

As you might know, I’ve become a bit of a second-hand book fiend of late. I’m positively gobbling them up. It’s a combination of the great value and the nostalgia for me. For a couple of pounds, I can get great resources that take me right back to those analogue days when I first got hooked on languages. And sometimes, the oldies really are the goodies!

Wob You Lookin’ At?

The thing is, when you’re looking through pages and pages of second-hand book listings with stock photos, it’s hard to gauge their quality. To help with this, most market sites, like eBay, AbeBooks and Amazon Marketplace, use a set of fairly standard quality descriptors: like new, very good, good, acceptable / well-read and such like. As you can’t look at the book before you buy it, you’re relying on the honesty of the seller here.

This is the main reason I like Wob so much. Out of all the sellers I’ve bought from, their descriptions have tended to be the most honest and reliable of all. Unsurprisingly, great quality control is a point they drive home in their marketing, and it certainly seems to differentiate them from other sellers. As a result, it’s a pleasure to wait for books in the post that won’t require too much aggressive DIY book restoration!

Daylight Wobbery? Far From It!

It goes without saying that price is always a big plus point when buying second-hand. Like most used book outlets these days, Wob appears to use dynamic pricing software to set those price tags. This gauges all sorts of things, like supply, demand, click interest and so on, adjusting prices accordingly in real time. For that reason, if you have your eye on a book, it’s a good idea to favourite it, then check back regularly to see if you can grab it at a more bargainous price.

There’s another trick to leap on a best price, too. Wob, like many other eCommerce sites, also sells via other channels, notably eBay and AbeBooks. It’s always worth looking up the same book on those alternative storefronts before buying, as the prices can be quite different. Whether that’s due to completely different dynamic pricing algorithms or whatever, I’m not sure. But it does mean that site-hopping for a bargain pays dividends.

A wee, timely tip: they do quite a nice 5% off two books offer on their eBay store at the moment.

We Only Have Wob Planet

Last, but certainly not least, Wob also makes environmental concerns a central thrust of its business ethos. The company is a certified member of the B Corp movement, a benchmark for sustainability in commerce. Arguably all second-hand booksellers are environmentally responsible in similar ways, at least in terms of encouraging reuse, and minimising over-consumption and waste, but it’s nice to see it celebrated!

So there you have it. So many reasons to say three cheers for Wob. And so many excuses to buy lots more books (as if I needed them).

 

A rose in black and white, in memory of Queen Elizabeth II. Image from freeimages.com

Queen Elizabeth II and the Power of Language

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The UK entered a period of national mourning this week, after the sad passing of Queen Elizabeth II. As the world reflects on her qualities, it’s worth noting one very close to our own hearts: she understood the bridge-building power of language.

It’s a little-celebrated fact that the Queen was a talented linguist herself, fluent in French. Her language abilities are a side the British public heard precious little of; perhaps the spectacle of a monarch speaking anything other than Queen’s English never chimed well with the patriotic symbolism the figurehead is supposed to espouse.

But perhaps this kind of patriotism is one that travels better than home-bound nationalism. It’s the patriotism of faithfully representing your own community, while giving respect to others. Queen Elizabeth II employed this to great effect while supporting British diplomacy abroad.

In fact, she understood something even more fundamental about the power of language. She understood that it only takes a few words to build a bridge. Fluency isn’t essential.

One particular story that came to light this week spotlights that beautifully. In 2011, the Queen made an unprecedented state visit to Ireland, the first since the Republic gained its hard-fought independence. Surprising officials who had advised against it, she opened her speech to gathered dignitaries with an address as Gaeilge:

A Uachtaráin, agus a chairde
(to the president and friends)

Just five words, but the significance was huge. Former President Mary McAleese, at her side, summed it up with a simple wow.

Languages are powerful, and that power can be used for good.

A few words can’t erase history. But they can begin to clear a path to the future. To understand this is the hallmark of a true diplomat.

Sport and languages - the Sandwell swimming venue for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

Languages and Sport : Cast the Net Wide!

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It’s not all about the languages. Sometimes, something else comes along to catch my attention, and this last ten days, it’s been sport. The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games have transformed my home city in a bustling hub of joy. And, as ever, there’s a way to bend it back to languages. Bear with me…

After a stint as a volunteer performer in the Opening Ceremony, I was lucky enough to have a games pass to attend the sports. Now, as someone who was rubbish at PE at school, I didn’t know where to start. Since those difficult childhood years, I’ve made up for it a little bit. I gym now and again. And of course, I do the obligatory big of flag-waving sport, when there’s a big international tournament on. Surprise, surprise – anything with flags gets the Eurovision fan in me going.

But beyond that, I haven’t a clue.

So, to make the most of my sporty fumblings in the dark, the approach I adopted was a bit of everything. The aim? To cast the net wide, and see what I liked. And I liked a lot… 3×3 Basketball, Beach Volleyball, Hockey, Powerlifting… it turns out that there’s a lot more to sport than school football and cross-country running!

The thing with ‘sport dipping’ is that it’s a lot like my approach to languages: exploration and dabbling. Like watching lots of new sport, you might call language dabbling a spectator-driven approach. You take in bits and pieces here and there to build up a very broad picture of what’s out there. After that, you can choose to go big and become a superfan of one or two, if the fancy grabs you.

In any case, I’ve come out of this week feeling vindicated in that approach to new things, whether sport or languages. My language brain is impatient for some attention, having been in maintenance mode during the Summer madness. But it can take it now and again.

It’s a good sport, after all.

Languages and sport : Beach volleyball at the Smithfield site for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

Beach volleyball at the Smithfield site for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games : Birmingham and Rwanda gearing up for the bronze medal match on Sunday 7th August

Sport and Languages : Adam Peaty in the line-up for the 100m men's breaststroke at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

Adam Peaty in the line-up for England in the 100m men’s breaststroke

3x3 Basketball at the Smithfield site for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

Sri Lanka and Australia battle it out in the 3×3 Basketball at the Smithfield site

A sign for the internet. TikTok, this way! Image from FreeImages.com

Have a Break? Have a TikTok!

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I’m always looking for five-minute language learning boosters here and there. If you’ve missed the hundred and one other times I’ve been saying it (I blame the excitement), I’ve been a bit busy of late. And it’s at our busiest moments that we need a bit of that quick fix magic.

Cue…. TikTok. Those who still resist, I hear your groans. I must admit that I was a bit late to TikTok myself, a reluctant infinity-scroller. I’m probably a little off its target demographic, too, although the great and mystic algorithm tends to take care of that, and pen you in with like-minded folk.

But once that (granted, a little unsettling) read-your-mind hocus pocus had happened, my For You tab was filled with a stream of mini language lessons. Some decidedly better than others, of course; TikTok’s a very mixed bag. But some content creators are churning out admirably witty and thoughtful learning snippets you won’t find in the textbooks.

Many of these are just clear, plain facts, delivered with welcome simplicity. But the best are done with a dash of humour, and since that gets the likes, there are more and more of them popping up. It’s the self-motivated, individual creators, rather than the big, organisational accounts, that are best at this, and subsequently the most personable and fun to fill your feed with.

Here’s a selection of some of my favourite TikTok lingua-creators!

French

The epitome of short and snappy, @Madame_angol’s videos feature all sorts of vocab and grammar tidbits. On the other hand, if it’s a bit of Québecois you’re after, @french.canadian.nicolas exudes francophone cool from every pore.

German

You can tell the dedicated from the dabbling content creators straight away, and @germanwithniklas is firmly in the former camp. He has loads of fun content, and post reassuringly regularly. Similarly, for a dash of German everyday life and language, @liamcarps is worth a gander.

Spanish

A language teacher that just gets 30-second humour, @patry.ruiz stands head and shoulders above most of the Spanish content creators on TikTok. Another favourite, covering loads of mainstream classroom topics, is @learnspanishathome. Solid, but plenty of laughs too!

Best of the Rest

I’d be here all day if I could cover everything in a short post like this. But other favourites include @caldamac, who features a mix of Gaelic and wholesome outdoorsy content. Then there’s @seamboyseam, who could put together a whole comedy show with his material on the Irish language. Seriously worth a look even if you have a passing interest in the language.

TikTok Back Control

Of course, the quick fix element is a moot point if you don’t control the beast. Pruning and honing your social media is a vital skill to avoid scrollsome insanity. But if you hold the reins, and carefully fashion the TikTok behemoth to your own needs, it can really help bridge those busy weeks.

What are your go-to micro-lesson accounts? Let us know in the comments!

Incidentally, feel free to follow @richardwestsoley! I’m no master TikTokker myself, but it would be lovely to spot some of you there.

The French flag flying in front of a town hall. Parlez-vous français ou anglais?

Great French Resources for False Beginners

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French and I had a pretty good start. It was the first language I learnt at school, and I wasn’t bad at it at all. It was my first taste of language learning proper, and it gave me a taste for it. By the end of school I was taking my school-leaving exams in it, along with German and Spanish. 

Yet it fell by the wayside shortly after. For whatever reason, I just left it behind, only taking German and Spanish onwards to sixth-form college. It wouldn’t be long before I’d say, quite seriously, oh no, I don’t speak French, despite getting an A in that exam.

It wasn’t for lack of opportunities. With France and Belgium on the doorstep, I’ve enjoyed and felt welcomed in francophone countries all of my life. I just got by on what I had, without bothering to make it more serviceable.

My missed chances get even more glaring that that. I’ve had a French boss and colleague for nearly 20 years, which you might think would be a green light for a language lover to go wild. But we’ve always simply used English in the office, and I’ve shied from inflicting my French on him. After all, I thought, who wants to speak with their colleague in a terrible, broken version of their native language? (Fear of mistakes – workplace edition.)

Imperfectly Perfect

I’ve got a reason to brush it up now. I have a couple of trips booked to French-speaking countries later this year. Nothing new, you might ask, we’ve been here before! If you didn’t brush up to visit then, why now?

Well, it’s partly a matter of a more mature attitude towards learning. I’m now less likely to dismiss partial knowledge; I’m less of a perfectionist. Any level of foreign language skill, no matter how scrappy, is absolutely precious. I have some French, so I’d better start looking after it!

There’s a word for this level, of course: the false beginner. That covers anything from a little knowledge, learned long ago, to a handful of holiday phrases learned here and there over the years. So where do you start as a French false beginner? Here are the most helpful ‘brush up your French books’ I’ve been using lately.

50 French Coffee Breaks

Coffee Break French was amongst the very first language podcasts when the genre started to take off. The team behind it have recently come up with a whole series of books in French, German, Italian and Spanish, all of which are perfect for those who want to brush up.

Each one features a set of short, to-the-point chapters revising both basic and intermediate grammar and vocabulary. Activities come in 5-, 10- and 15-minute flavours, making it ideal to leaf through in your spare moments. French reactivation with little time outlay.

French In Three Months

I was a big fan of Hugo’s In Three Months series back in the day. They were very clear and concise, almost doing double time as quick reference books. Nonetheless, they introduce the whole gamut of grammar, and a good deal of vocabulary too.

Now it’s DK who is flying the flag for them with a brand new look and a slightly reduced language selection. But they’re still just as snappy, and ideal for getting back into a language you might feel a bit wobbly on.

Mot à mot

Three books will be very well known to anyone who has taken A-Level French, German or Spanish in the past twenty years or so: Mot à mot, Palabra por palabra and Wort für Wort. They thematic vocabulary guides that cover a bunch of really useful conversation topics. 

But beyond that, they contain plenty of very general, useful structures as well, for expressing agreement, disagreement and other opinion ‘glue’ for speaking. Well worth a revisit.

Collins Easy Learning French Idioms

Who doesn’t like a good idiom? There have been lots of fun collections of these over the years, not least the sadly now out-of-print 101 French Idioms.

But in the absence of that, I’ve found Collins Easy Learning French Idioms a great substitute. It’s easy to dip in and out of, and features plenty of cartoon-style illustrations as aides-memoire. And it’s laid out thematically, so it’s simple to find a saying for a given occasion. Perfect to remettre les pendules à l’heure (set straight) my French.

And the Rest…

Of course, any reading you can do is going to help reinvigorate old knowledge. I’ve went hunting in Foyles last week, and availed myself of an Arsène Lupin pocket detective story, L’aiguille creuse, which I’m working my way through. It helps, of course, that Netflix has a brilliant French series, Lupin, inspired by those stories.

And that’s the dressing on this salad of false beginner’s resources – the fun stuff that you personalise to your own tastes, like films, magazines and podcasts. It’s helping get my old French back on its feet, and I hope you can do the same, too.

Who knows – I might even dare to use some in the office one of these days.

Bonne chance!

Greek microblog content from Instagram (screenshot).

The Way of the Microblog : Kitchen Sink Inspiration and Language Learning

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It’s all about the foreign language microblog for me lately. Short, snappy snippets of target language piped directly to your social media streams: what’s not to love?

In fact, I’m practically drowning in them at the moment. That’s thanks to the notorious and mysterious algorithm (TM), of course, which is a fact of life these days; like one thing, and you get a ton more of the same thrown at you, for better or for worse.

Happily, in the case of us language learners, it’s generally for the better. Take my Instagram feed; its AI wisdom has decided to channel reams of Greek pop psych, heartwarming quotes and concise self help my way. It’s twee and a wee bit naff, granted. But every one of those posts is a 30-second language lesson.

This latest bite-sized adventure all started with a single Greek account, gnwmika.gr. It exclusively posts what you might call ‘fridge magnet’ content: folk wisdom and kitchen sink inspiration.

The great lesson imparted here, in true, lofty microblog style, is:

“Beautiful things will make you love life. Difficult ones will teach you to appreciate and respect the beautiful ones.”

I know – deep, eh.

Anyway, I hit follow and thought little else of it… Until things escalated. Next thing, I’m being shepherded to not only more of the same, but anything and everything Greek. Poetry, history, celebs, TV… the lot. It’s become a rabbit hole leading to some well obscure (but fascinating) places. And, crucially:

…my Greek is so much better for it!

Fill Your Little (Microblog) World Right Up

It all plays in marvellously to the fill your world with target language strategy. Since our worlds are ever more digital, one of the easiest ways to do that is to follow the monkeys out of accounts we find fun and engaging. Add one or two, and let the system start popping more and more into your suggested follows.

Now, the only catch is that the algorithm (TM) is smothering me in Greek. I’d love a bit of Gaelic, Icelandic, Norwegian or Polish (and the rest). So, if you’re reading this and have some good microblog recommendations to kick the cycle off again…

…please let me know!