Humour and language learning: fuel your vocab with idioms!

April 9, 2017Leave a comment

Humour can be a great aide memoire when learning foreign languages. For one thing, humour increases the salience – or importance – our brains attach to learning material. We’ve all experienced how it’s easier to learn something that isn’t boring!

What’s more, many research studies have repeatedly demonstrated how humorous material can enhance learning. It can boost recall – it’s one of the reasons the keyword system of vocabulary learning can be so effective. It can reduce anxiety in an education setting. And some, like this one, even suggest that the dodgier, morerisqué the content, the better the effect!

So, where to look for humour in your target language? Perhaps the best place to start is the quirky turns of phrase, aphorisms and idioms, that are very particular to a given tongue. Just take English, for example: it’s not hard to smirk at such gems as . One reason language is so full of them is that our brains latch onto the entertaining imagery in them, operating along these lines of salience and ensuring that they’re easy to recall later on. It’s the same reason that the wild, fantastical stories of oral literary traditions were passed down the generations by memory for centuries before being written down.

Hunting for humour

The easiest way to source these is to simply Google for “funny idioms in French / German / Spanish / your language”. Humour is popular, and there’s therefore no shortage of collections of funny sayings for language learners!

Once found, the best way to integrate them into your learning is to pick out a few of your favourites, and add them to your own personal word lists. These could be offline, in a notebook, or in your favourite vocab / drill program like Anki Flashcards.

However, since idioms lend themselves to some hilarious, imaginative visuals, it’s a good idea to harness that in your learning, too. As a starting point, there’s a superb book of Castilian sayings for learners, which illustrates each saying with a simple but funny cartoon: 101 Spanish Idioms. Although the hard work is done for you here, it’s even more fun and satisfying to create your own illustrations, especially if you like to doodle. For simple scribbles, for example, I like to use to use Notability or Procreate for iOS. Find a saying, create a sketch, then export it to use in flashcards, or add to a drilling program like Anki.

More vocab for your buck

But don’t just learn the phrase – break it down, and mine it for vocab. Take the Spanish phrase tomar el pelo (to pull someone’s leg). It literally means ‘to take the hair’ (weird, right?). But from that phrase, you get two extra words for your vocab list, ‘to take’ and ‘hair’, both of which are pretty useful. So add them as separate items to your word bank, and you get multiple hits for the price of one.

Humour in idioms: some favourites

Without further ado, here are a few of my own favourite humorous idioms in a range of languages. As you’ll see, many of them are based on animals or food – strangely recurrent themes when researching the world of weird idioms!

English 🇬🇧

mad as a box of frogs 🐸🐸🐸
completely crazy, eccentric

French 🇫🇷

avoir le cafard
to have the cockroach 🐞 (I know that’s a ladybird – there’s no cockroach emoticon yet!)
to be depressed

Dutch 🇳🇱

een appeltje met iemand te schillen hebben
To have a little apple to peel with someone 🍏
To have a bone to pick with someone

The English translation is just as odd and quirky as the Dutch!

Finnish 🇫🇮

juosta pää kolmantena jalkana
to run with the head as a third leg 🏃🏽
to be in a mad rush

Just an aside: it was tricky to find Finnish idioms that didn’t contain some very dodgy language – this was by far the cleanest in my little ‘net search!

German 🇩🇪

Schwein haben
to have pig 🐷
to have good luck

Icelandic 🇮🇸

ekki upp í nös á ketti
not enough to fill a cat’s nose 🐱
very little

Italian 🇮🇹

trattare a pesci in faccia
To treat with fish in the face 🐟
To disrespect

Norwegian 🇳🇴

født bak en brunost
born behind a brown cheese
a bit dim

Some useful general vocab here, plus a lovely nugget of Norwegian culinary culture!

Polish 🇲🇨

myśleć o niebieskich migdałach
to think of blue almonds
to daydream

dzielić skórę na niedźwiedziu
to divide the skin while it’s still on the bear 🐻
to count your chickens before they’ve hatched

Another one where the English translation is just as animalistic and odd!

Russian 🇷🇺

делать из мухи слона (dyelat’ iz mukhi slona)
to make an elephant from a fly 🐘
to make mountains out of molehills

…another pair of translations which are as colourful and zoological as each other!

Spanish 🇪🇸

arrimar el ascua a su sardina 🔥 🐟
to bring the coals closer to one’s sardine
to look out for number one, be selfish

Swedish 🇸🇪

nära skjuter ingen hare
near shot, no rabbit 🐰
close but no cigar

Do you have more personal favourites from your own language explorations? Please share – more laughs are always a welcome thing!

A dictionary won't always help you learn words in their natural habitat: the sentence.

Sentence building: Go beyond words with Tatoeba

April 1, 2017April 1, 20171 Comment

Learning and assimilating vocabulary in a foreign language isn’t simply a case of learning lists of words: context matters. Just like a careful zoologist observing animals in the wild, it’s important to study words in their natural habitat: the sentence.

Conversely, a lot of reference material for language learners fails to provide this context. If you’re looking for single words in your foreign language, there are myriad look-up tools available. Unfortunately, only a few take steps to set the word in situ; Google Translate, for example, is surprisingly better than many online dictionaries at providing context. If you type in a single word, many entries come with a list of translations and a useful list of cross-referenced, related terms too. Arguably a lot more useful to language learners than the actual machine translation feature!

Google Translate is great for single word look-ups.

However, there is little else online in terms of whole-sentence reference, Apart from “basic phrases in…” pages. Indexed, systematic lists of example sentences, complete with translation support, are harder to find.

Habeas corpus (linguisticus)

One open-source resource, though, is changing that. Tatoeba – from the Japanese ‘for example’ – is a vast, and rapidly growing, corpus of thousands of sentences in scores of languages. Moreover, it’s expanding continually through user contributions. And you, as a native speaker of your own language (even if it’s English!), can help expand it further.

With many of the entries including native-speaker audio, it is a fantastic (and still quite untapped) resource for language learners. It’s full of colloquialisms, handy turns of phrase, and authentic language use. There are many ways you can work it into your own learning; here are just a few ideas for starters.

Words in context

Learnt a new word, but not sure exactly how native speakers use it? Type that single word into Tatoeba, and if you’re lucky, a whole load of sentences will come up. It’s a fantastic way to put your new vocab into context, something which definitely helps me to commit new words to memory. If sound is provided, it’s an instant way to practise / improve your pronunciation too, much like the brilliantly useful Forvo website for single words.

Putting your vocab in context with Tatoeba.

Build your own sentence lists

With your free Tatoeba account, you can save your own word lists to store favourite sentences. Simply click the list icon next to a sentence – you’ll quickly start to build quite extensive, custom ‘vocab in context’ learning resources.

There are also collaborative lists, which means you can work together with others. This might be with classmates, or perhaps even a teacher you’re working with remotely on iTalki. Conversely, it’s also an excellent way for teachers to collate and share useful phrase lists as teaching resources.

Combine with Anki

Anki Flashcards is a firm favourite of many linguaphiles for drilling vocab. You can combine it with Tatoeba by exporting your lists from that site as CSV files, then importing them directly into the Anki program. For now, the Tatoeba export will only extract the text, and no associated sound files. But if you’re willing to fiddle, here’s a short guide on including available sound files in your Tatoeba-Anki port.

If you’re a polyglottal sucker for punishment, you can even export the lists with a translation other than your native language, in order to practise two languages at once. See the screenshot below for a rather scary Norwegian-Greek export setup – I’m sure you can think up even more testing pairings!

Changing the language pairing in a Tatoeba export.

Find ready-made Tatoeba Anki decks

If all the to-and-fro of exporting puts you off, then don’t despair – some Tatoeba decks have already been imported to Anki as shared desks. Check here for a list of them (several including sound files).

Contribute

Finally, the best way to grow the resource is to become part of it. You can add, correct, record and otherwise extend Tatoeba as a member. If you’ve found it useful, it’s an excellent way to give back.

Tatoeba is one more tool in the linguaphile’s online arsenal, and can be worked into a learning routine in many ways. Feel free to share your own experiences and tips in the comments below!

Vocabulary building: frequency hacks for faster fluency

January 31, 2017January 31, 2017Leave a comment

It’s not surprising that foreign languages can seem overwhelming to new learners. Vocabulary is the memory monster of language learning, scaring beginners away. Foreign language dictionaries are beasts of books. Even beginners’ word lists and glossaries in textbooks can top 1000 words!

There are ways to tackle vocabulary systematically. Books like the excellent Mot à mot (French), Wort für Wort (German) and Palabra por palabra (Spanish) can be great road maps to a language. They present a broad range of words and phrases for more advanced learners, arranged by topics like family and education. Even humble phrase books, like the Lonely Planet range, can prove a handy (and cheap) tool for basic, thematic vocabulary.

Generally speaking…

Guides like these bring some order to the chaos of words in the dictionary. However, they are predominantly situation-specific. They equip you to talk quite narrowly within set parameters, like ‘at the doctor’, or ‘ordering in a restaurant’. Surely, the goal of true fluency should be the ability to communicate generally and more freely. You might learn how to ask for headache tablets in a Japanese pharmacy, for example. Or you could request a shirt in a different colour in a Swedish department store. But is this limiting your ability to communicate?

Vocabulary with vigour

Fortunately, there’s a completely different approach to learning vocabulary. It’s an efficient hack, cutting out slack, and It’s also totally free. It involves applying the principle of word frequency to your vocab drilling. Did you know, for example, that the 100 most frequent words in English account for around 50% of the language you’re likely to come across in the language?

In that top hundred most common words, you’ll find lots of function words like the articles ‘the’ and ‘a’, but also content words such as ‘thing’, ‘look’ and ‘day’. The same goes for other languages, and you can leverage this fact to ensure that the stuff you’re learning is the stuff you’ll come across more often than anything else. Stretch the limit to the 1000 most common words, and you’ll cover 75% of what you hear and read.

Finding your frequency

The first step is to find a frequency list for words in your foreign language. There are some superb commercial lists available, like this Spanish frequency dictionary from Routledge. But thanks to online collaborative and Open Source projects, a lot of material is available for free too.

The first place to look is Wiktionary’s catalogue of links to frequency lists. It’s quite exhaustive; you’ll find links to the big, mainstream languages, as well as smaller ones like Estonian and Lithuanian. There aren’t many commercial resources for learners of these less common language choices; frequency lists like these can be a real boost to your learning material.

It’s also worth checking out the blog site of Neri Rook. This prolific linguist has published a series of eBooks for free, including several extensive frequency lists. Some of these are accompanied by example sentences, putting the vocabulary into context. It’s a remarkable set of resources to make freely available, and worth making the most of!

Ready, set, go!

When you have your list, there are plenty of ways to start learning it. At the simplest level, paper flashcards are easily made from index / revision cards. Simply write the target language on one side, and the translation on the other, and test away. In the classroom, you could extend this to wall art featuring the most common words in the target language. Alternatively, you could use one of many online quiz tools, like Quizlet, to create interactive games with them.

However, I’m a big fan of the desktop and mobile software Anki for creating electronic flashcards for self-testing. You could take the top hundred and key them all into Anki yourself. But one of the joys of the software is the treasure of publicly shared card decks available. Many of them even have native speaker sound files included. Chances are, someone has already created that electronic card deck for you! Just search on the word frequency and see what comes up (screenshot below).

Shared frequency vocabulary lists on Anki

Shared frequency vocabulary list decks on Anki

Take advantage of the word frequency trick. You’ll become familiar with half of the language you’ll read and hear by learning around just a hundred words. And we all like a shortcut, right?

Papping your horn at Greek ducks

January 19, 2017September 14, 20206 Comments

I’m sitting here imagining a duck in the middle of a big Greek road, as we drive ever closer towards it in our hire car. “It’s not moving!” I shout, panicked. “Quick! Pap ya horn and scare it out of the way!”

No, I haven’t gone mad, and it isn’t some strange nightmare. It’s an example of keyword vocabulary learning, popularised from the 1980s onwards by Michael Gruneberg and his Linkword system. It’s the reason I haven’t forgotten the Greek word for duck – πάπια (papya) – since I learnt it from one of his books in the late 90s.

The idea is simple. You find a word or phrase in your native language, which sounds similar to the foreign vocabulary item you’re learning. You then build a vivid mental scenario, including both the native and the target language word, like my duck example above, and spend some moments visualising it to create a strong association. If you use it for several languages, you might like to add a ‘cultural marker’ too, like setting the scene on a Greek road in my example – it helps to avoid polyglot confusion!

Do be daft

A good rule of thumb is the sillier the better, and this is for quite sound psychological reasons; memory researchers refer to salience as the degree to which certain information stands out in the mind, facilitating learning, and daft yarns like “pap ya horn at the duck in the road” fit the bill (pun intended) quite nicely. For a bit of added razzmatazz, you could try sketching out some of your funnier scenes, too, either digitally or the old-fashioned way. Anything goes to make them more memorable!

I’ve personally had a lot of personal success at vocab learning using this method (maybe because I have a slightly madcap imagination – it helps). What’s more, I’ve recommended it to family and friend, many of whom place themselves in the “but I’m no good at languages!” camp, and they’ve been impressed at how well it helps them remember, too.

Nonetheless, the technique hasn’t gained universal acceptance, and is certainly not particularly visible in formalised language teaching, such as the modern foreign language classroom. This is despite some promising results in studies such as this one from a UK school in 2002, which found that student progressed more quickly than expected when using Linkword courses as part of their language studies. In fact, Gruneberg and others have sometimes felt it necessary to defend the approach, for example, in this article from the Language Learning Journal (Aug 2007). From being quite common sights on bookshop shelves some years ago, you won’t find the original books on sale any more (although a range of apps is available on the website), making the approach a bit of a forgotten gem.

One tool amongst many

The issue is, as with all language learning techniques, that it’s not a complete system, but rather another useful tool in the array that you’ll need to learn a language. Brilliant at building stuck-fast vocabulary memories, there are a couple of obvious drawbacks:

It doesn’t lend itself well to grammar learning (although you can use it to learn some sentence-building items, such as conjugated verbs like ‘is’, for example)
It depends on finding good sound analogues in the native language to work – for instance, can you think of a good English keyword to build into a story for the Polish word zwycięstwo (victory)?

Nonetheless, I’m still convinced that this is a great way to build a modest vocabulary when you begin a new foreign language, supplementing the rest of your learning. Those memories I formed back in the late 90s are still holding fast!

Combine moves to power up!

What I like to do is combine it with our firm favourite flashcard software, Anki, for a double whammy. You can add a custom field to your language note types – I like to add a ‘Hint’ field, which will contain a brief ‘silly story’ to help me remember the word. You can then make this field visible in your test cards, so you get a reminder of the association every time it pops up:

Anki screenshot showing custom fields in a user-defined note type

Anki screenshot showing a test card with a custom field added

There’s a decent YouTube tutorial on doing the above at this link. You can also see more about how and why I style my Anki cards in this earlier post.

So, if you’ve not come across keyword vocab learning techniques before, give them a go; they may just be the hook that you need to remember your first few hundred words in a new language. And a bit of silliness is always welcome!

Tips from a language junkie

January 2, 2017September 14, 20205 Comments

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):

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.

Polyglossic

Love Learning Languages

Tag: vocabulary

Humour and language learning: fuel your vocab with idioms!

Hunting for humour

More vocab for your buck