Pro bono language teaching

This article on Unlimited Potential, an Arizonan group that helps immigrants to the US (presumably mostly Spanish speakers) learn English, funded primarily by grants, describes how they are making a difference in their community through language education. As a lawyer, I'm used to the idea of spending a certain portion of my time working pro bono providing legal services to those who otherwise could not afford them and it is interesting to see how the concept is implemented in other industries, and the language-learning industry in particular.

With resources available online, it seems to me that it would be trivially easy to enhance language education to groups such as those targeted by Unlimited Potential simply by providing them to access to computers with an internet connection and a webcam. You could easily get them on websites like Livemocha.com where they can learn for free with the help of native speakers. Public libraries seem like an obvious resource for this, with the only problem being the silence typically demanded by libraries. At my local library, for instance, computers are sitting in a sort of main area where you wouldn't be able to practice pronunciation or anything like that out loud.

A more interesting question, I think, is how can those companies whose core resources are not free - websites like LingQ or one of the big boys like RosettaStone - use what they have to help the disadvantaged. Could LingQ find some way to reasonably manage a pro bono tutoring service? The trick would be making sure the students actually deserve pro bono service. Could RosettaStone provide their software to disadvantaged groups? The trick there would be to make sure their donated or discounted software didn't end up back on the market.

Poking around a few websites and a few rudimentary Google searches don't seem to what, if anything, such companies are doing in this regard, so if any one has any examples I'd love to hear about them.

Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German

This page has lists of the top 10,000 words in each of Dutch, English, French, and German. As the page is in German, I've put together a little table to take you directly to the lists. The lists unfortunately do not have translations.

After the jump, the table and a another word frequency list for French.

Read more...

Dutch	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
English	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
French	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
German	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000

About.com has a top-100 word frequency list for French here. In contrast to the lists above, About.com's does have English translations.

About me

As you may know, this blog is the companion site to a book I'm currently working called—you guessed it—Street-Smart Language Learning. The following is an except from the current draft of the manuscript. As I've yet to properly introduce myself on this blog, I've selected this excerpt from the book's introduction, which seeks to dispel with my story quickly so as to get readers to what they're really there for: how to learn languages.


When you tell someone that you speak eight languages, they are quick to label you as some kind of linguistic genius. And when you disagree with them, they assume you are just being modest. But as just such a person, I can tell you that I am no linguistic genius and I am not being modest when I disagree. Learning multiple languages hardly requires genius; our brains are all hard-wired to suck up languages, if only we approach language learning in the right way. Yes, that includes even you doubters out there who right now are saying, “Not me, I’m just not good a languages.” Yes, even you. With the right approach and a little bit of time, anyone can learn a foreign language. This book will help you formulate that approach and learn the foreign language(s) of your choice.

The rules that I’ve laid out for you in the subsequent parts of this book aren’t the result of any “survey of the literature” or the like. I’ve got no degree to make me an official linguist. In fact, I would say that my relationship to a linguist is the same as that of a criminal to a criminologist; they’ve got the data, the literature, and so on, while I’ve got the gritty experiences and the street smarts. These rules were developed over years, and to my own detriment even I didn’t always follow them, but to extent you can put these rules into practice you’ll be able to learn languages better and more quickly.

Before I arm you with all the tools you need to learn a language, let me first tell you a bit about myself and how I came to speak so many languages.

Read more...I was raised in an English-speaking Italian-American family just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I lived with my mother, father, grandmother, and sister. My parents and grandmother could speak Italian and initially tried to teach it to my sister and me. Unfortunately, after a few initial “I don’t wanna speak Italian!” tantrums from us, they gave up on it (and how I regret that now). They did, however, use it on occasion when they didn’t want us to understand, resulting in us picking up only certain choice exclamations (in addition to the stereotypical “Mamma mia!”, the not-so-vanilla “Vaffanculo!” comes to mind). This, and various relatives speaking in heavily accented English (including one who to this day swears that Italy under Mussolini was great), did result in me having a pretty good Italian accent when I ultimately did get back to studying it, but I definitely did not know enough to be considered anything other than monolingual.

My linguistic knowledge remained limited to English and handful of Italian phrases until middle school. Our school district kicked off language learning with a pretty worthless French/German/Spanish sampler in seventh grade. Based on your experience in that, you were supposed to pick which language you wanted to learn in eighth grade, and I went with Spanish. My choice was based less on what happened in that sampler than the fact that it was the closest of the three to Italian, so if I were ever to get to studying Italian I’d have an easier time, and that it was the de facto second language in the States. In class, I didn’t do poorly but there was nothing in particular that set me apart from any of the other students. However, Spanish was one of the subjects I liked and, knowing that languages are actually something that could be useful beyond primary school, I became eager to learn more.

I would finally get this chance as an upperclassman in high school after clearing out some of my other core graduation requirements. In eleventh grade, I added French. Thanks to its similarities with Spanish and a cooperative teacher, I was permitted to basically go at my own pace and managed to cover three years of our high school’s curriculum in one year. I followed up the summer after eleventh grade by taking a French course at nearby Chestnut Hill College, and in twelfth grade I found myself in the fifth – and highest – year of both Spanish and French.

That same year, I really wanted to take it up a notch. In addition to Spanish and French, I enrolled in a German class at high school, did an independent study in Italian with an Italian-speaking Spanish teacher, took a Japanese class at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and started studying Russian for free under the tutelage of my kind French teacher from Chestnut Hill College, Sister Kashuba.

The results from that year were mixed. Spanish continued along well and by the end of high school I could hold rudimentary conversations with a friend of mine who, although born in Mexico and having spent the first few years of his life there, had previously lost all his Spanish and at that point was at basically the same level as me. Although I abortively tried to read Camus’ The Stranger on my own in French and continued to do other things on my own as well, my French teacher preferred to spend time talking about his designer shoes (in English, no less) than give us a period of French a day. My French only improved to the extent I could push it forward alone with my nose buried in a book.

My German teacher begrudgingly let me knock off the first year of German with a placement test, but, unlike my French teacher the previous year, she decided that I had to stay with the class, which was excruciatingly slow and seriously limited the progress I made. On the other hand, going at my own pace in Italian, its similarities with Spanish and French, and the fun of finally learning that when my relatives described things like putting ketchup on pasta condescendingly as “midigan” they were actually saying americano in dialect, or that pastafazul meant (duh!) pasta and beans (again in a dialect), resulted in decent progress in Italian.
I had assumed that a college-level language course would be challenging, but my Japanese teacher was frustratingly of the opinion that Japanese is difficult for us poor Westerners and that we should go slow—real slow. We were supposed to cover two textbooks over two semesters, but we got through the first only after skipping a bunch of stuff and only managed to do a chapter or two in the second. Needless to say, I didn’t learn much Japanese. In Russian I made good progress, but with all the other things going on that year, and since I wasn’t getting graded, I didn’t have the incentive or ability to put the time into it that I would have liked to. Unfortunately, I have yet to return to Russian and that remains as far as I’ve gotten in the language.

Besides two off-the-cuff road trips to Quebec from my home outside of Philadelphia, where I did put some French to use in a very limited way, my first venture out of English-speaking domains was a three-week senior trip to Germany. A German exchange student I met while he was in the States offered to host a friend and me for three weeks. While in Germany, we naturally studied German but also took numerous day trips around Germany. While it was a good initial outing (and certainly a better use of the money than renting a beach house at the Jersey shore, as most of my high-school classmates did), it was limited in utility for language learning by its short duration and the fact that I was with another native-English speaker most of the time.

A month or two later would lead to a trip that would result in the first language I would become proficient at: Japanese. Sometime during my senior year of high school, a friend of mine had told me about an announcement for a scholarship to study abroad with Rotary that I had somehow missed, but, as soon as I heard about it, I knew it was right up my alley. I ended up getting the scholarship (which, as I understand it, is quite a bit easier for Americans than non-Americans to get due to a big demand to come here; some other popular destinations seem to be France and Spain). I put Japan down as my first choice simply because, among the languages I had studied, it was the most different from English and would require more time on the ground to get the language down. As I was the only one in my group to choose a non-Western destination as my first choice, I got it. I left for Japan in August 1997.

Unlike some of the other exchange students in Japan, I had already graduated high school so my year in Japan didn’t really count towards any diploma or degree, leaving me free to focus solely on learning Japanese. While there, I began to crystallize a lot of the language-learning methods I had begun working on back in the States. I’ll get into the details of those in the rules below, but suffice to say that I was able to learn a great deal in what would turn out to be some ideal language-learning environments.
Returning to the States to start college in the fall semester of 1998, I began studying intensive Chinese at George Washington University. But the broader picture was a language-learning plan that I had begun working on while in Japan and finalized during my freshman and sophomore years at college. The basic plan was that I would spend every single college break (i.e., based on the typical U.S. college schedule, about a month in winter and three months in summer) studying languages abroad, plus another year in Japan (to get my Japanese beyond high-school level), a year in China, and a semester in Spain (due to university requirements, I needed to be back on campus; as we had a campus in Spain that counted as “on campus”, I opted for that rather than heading back to DC). Since I was able to stay at the homes of various friends I had made among other exchange students, all I typically ended up paying for was plane tickets, and tuition abroad was usually cheaper than tuition on campus, so all of this was a surprisingly affordable thing to do.

The plan worked well. Winter 1998 was in Mexico, summer 1999 in Brazil, winter 1999 in Costa Rica, summer 2000 in Germany, academic year 2000-2001 in Japan, academic year 2001-2002 in China, summer 2002 in Taiwan and Italy, fall semester 2002 in Spain, winter 2002 in Italy, and summer 2003 in France. In 2003, I started law school at the University of Pennsylvania with a similar plan in law school, except that it was focused on Chinese alone, so winter 2003, summer 2004, winter 2004, and part of summer 2005 were all spent in China. After a month-long stop-off in Japan in January 2006, I spent the rest of calendar year 2006 in China to obtain a master’s degree in Chinese law from Tsinghua University. The program was primarily in English—a big downer for language-learning purposes—but I was able to take a couple courses in Chinese (and somehow struggle through them).

I met my Japanese wife while in Japan in 2000. We initially spoke English (at the time, I was trying to get her to break up with her then-boyfriend, and I compromised on my language-learning rules in order to claim the linguistic home turf while trying to woo her away from him), but then went to Japanese for a while. We are now back speaking English (as we live in the States, her English proficiency is more important than my Japanese proficiency), but she speaks Japanese to our children and we also typically have a Chinese nanny or Chinese babysitters in order to teach our kids Chinese. English, Japanese, and Chinese are in constant use around the house, and, from time to time, I use Italian with my mom and French with my wife when we don’t want the kids and/or my mom to understand what we’re saying.

And that’s basically where I am. In sum, I can speak English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and that’s roughly in order from strongest to weakest. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as native-level or fluent in any of these languages, although I might be able to fool native speakers over the phone for a few minutes. For at least Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, I would describe myself as proficient, meaning that I can function reasonably effectively in a business setting in fields that I am familiar with. In all of these, however, I can easily do the basic “get around” stuff and hold social conversations, and I think if needed I could get them all up to proficiency in short order. Moreover, in my work as a lawyer, I have so far had to review contracts or conduct other business in all of those languages, and, with the help of an online dictionary or two, it hasn’t been a problem at all. (As an odd little aside, I’ve even had to do a preliminary review of a document in Dutch (i.e., just to determine who should be reviewing it), and I was able to do that thanks to an online dictionary and its similarities with German.)

Related: What is this blog about?

The Top 100 Language Blogs

LexioPhiles put together this great list of the top 100 language blogs.

Kanji poster

In Japanese, there are about 2,000 kanji characters designated for daily use. Have you ever been sitting around, studying kanji, and thinking, "Gee, I wish I had a poster of all of these kanji that I could write on with a dry-erase marker"? Well, if so, you're in luck, because KanjiPoster.com has just that for $35 (including shipping).

You can also get a T-shirt with the same thing for about $30 (including shipping). I don't think the dry-erase marker will work as well with these, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Typing pinyin on a Mac

Pinyin is the how Chinese characters are transcribed phonetically. The Chinese themselves use this method (you'll see it in materials aimed at young children still learning how to read characters) and it's equally valuable for foreigners learning Chinese as it uses the Roman alphabet. While it's easy enough to write out by hand, how to do it on a computer is not so obvious.

To type pinyin on the Mac, you first need to switch your keyboard from U.S. to U.S. Extended. To do this:

1. Click on the Apple icon in the left side of the menu bar and select System Preferences.
2. Select the International preference pane.
3. Select the Input Menu tab.
4. Scroll down in the list to U.S. Extended and check that off. You can uncheck U.S. if you'd like to have that out of your input menu.

Once you've got that enabled, each tone can be placed over a vowel by (1) holding down the option (alt) key and pressing the key for each tone and (2) without holding down the option key, pressing the vowel you want the tone to be over or, in the case of ü, pressing v. The following table lays it out for you:

Mark over the vowel	Key to press while holding down option key	Result after then pressing vowels or v
First (¯)	a	ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ǖ
Second (´)	e	á, é, í, ó, ú, ǘ
Third (ˇ)	v	ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ
Fourth (`)	` (to the left of the 1 key)	à, è, ì, ò, ù, ǜ
Umlaut with no tone (¨)	u	ü

Another way to do it, on both Mac and Windows is OpenVanilla. I've yet to try this out personally but comments from its users all seem to be positive. I'd be happy to hear about your experiences with it.

Via: Typing Proper Pinyin on Mac, Times New Rohan

Teaching my daughter how to say "th"

Until recently, my four-year-old daughter was unable to say "th" consistently. She'd sound right on "the", but "three" would be "free", "they" would be "dey", and "brother" would be "brudder".

For all language issues, we decided that we would teach our daughter normal language right from the get-go, and we would correct anything she got wrong right away. So we avoid "baby words" like "doggie", "go bye-bye", etc., and have just used standard terms, and whenever she makes a mistake we correct her and have her repeat the corrected form. By doing this consistently, we gradually remove incorrect patterns from her speech. We've applied this in both English and Japanese and in Chinese to a lesser extent due to the nanny not being as diligent as we are about it. When she is being uncooperative and won't repeat after us, we simply repeat it for her to hear and then let it go. We're generally not very forceful about demanding her cooperation, but she is quite used to it and generally cooperative.

Read more...Her pronunciation of "th" has been one issue that has been particularly intractable. Initially, when we tried to get her to say "three" instead of "free", I showed her that the tongue goes against the bottom of the teeth to pronounce the "th". She tried, but kept moving her lip up and making the "f" sound. After a few rounds of this, I tried physically holding her lip down so she couldn't move it up to make the "f". Doing this, she put her tongue on the bottom of her teeth and made a very spit-filled "th". I encouraged her and she did it a few more times, and even managed to get it without me holding down her lip, but ultimately went back to an "f" before not wanting to try anymore.

One time after that, as we were talking, she said "they" and then, without any prompting on my part, stopped and started repeating it, trying to get the "th" sound down. When I said it wasn't quite right, she herself held her lip down to get the "th" out, and she pulled it off. This kind of pattern played out several times. Over time, she's gotten out of the habit of needing to hold her lip down and now can say "th" perfectly.

After she got the "th" sound down, she pointed out to me that "You don't need to put your tongue on the bottom of your teeth to say 'th'", and she proceeded to make the sound by putting her tongue on the back of her front teeth. That one she figured out all on her own, but I think she was led to it by watching us say "th" words without being able to see the tongue.

However, the "th" issues are not over. She has many "th" words already programmed in as having an "f" or a "d" sound instead. Even for some words that we've practiced pronunciation on, she'll sometimes slip back into her previous pronunciation. The difference now is that, when alerted to the fact that something is a "th", she can typically pronounce them without trouble.

Best online dictionaries for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish

After the jump,Below you'll find a list of my favorite free online dictionaries for each of the languages I speak. There are numerous other dictionaries out there that you need to pay for, but I'm interested in doing this without shelling out a dime because, well, because you can, so why shell out that dime? Moreover, some of these websites have a lot more than just language-learning dictionaries, but here I'm just looking at their dictionaries.

If you'd like to just cut to the chase and get to a list of dictionaries by language, click here. Otherwise, read on for a brief description of each dictionary.

Read more...

• WordReference.com: This is one of my favorite online dictionaries and my start-off point for Italian and Spanish. It has generally great word coverage. For Chinese and Japanese, my big complaint is that they don't tell you how the characters are pronounced.
  
  Languages: English to and from French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. In beta, English to and from Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.


• Reverso: This is my start-off point for Portuguese and a great back-up for the others. I generally prefer WordReference to this because I've found their coverage to be a bit better, especially for phrases, but it's a close call. The specialized dictionaries are also a welcome addition.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese, French, French business terms, French computer terms, French medical terms, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Spanish computer terms.


• ALC: This is my start-off point for Japanese and my favorite dictionary of them all. From what I gather, in addition to having a standard dictionary, this dictionary trolls the net for examples on the net where the phrase in question is in both Japanese and English and then adds that to their database. Even if there's no specific dictionary entry, you'll be able to get the third-party translation. I've been able to find difficult legal terms here that I was unable to find anywhere else. My only complaint is that, as it's made for Japanese users, it doesn't tell you how kanji words are pronounced. Which is why I still make frequent use of the next one...
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Goo: Goo's dictionary is a more standard dictionary than ALC that has good coverage and provides the pronunciation for kanji words.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Jeffrey's: While pretty rough in appearance, this serves as a valuable back-up Japanese dictionary and is the only one I use that is aimed at Japanese learners rather than Japanese speakers.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• MDGB: My first stop in Chinese. Geared toward English speakers, they have great word and phrase coverage and also provide the pronunciation and audio recordings of pronunciations.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Dict.cn: This is an excellent dictionary that takes a page from ALC and gets samples from the net. It is another of my favorites, although it doesn't provide you with the pronunciation of characters as MDGB does.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Iciba: Another solid Chinese dictionary, similar to Dict.cn.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Lexilogos: This site is great because it lets you look up your word into all the other major dictionaries, including my mainstays of WordReference and Reverso, all from a single page. It makes for a one-stop-shop in French.
  
  French to and from English and many, many other languages.


• LEO: This dictionary beats WordReference in terms of the number of phrases it generates for each word, and hence has become my first stop when looking up German words. It is one of several very good English-German dictionaries.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• BEOLINGUS: Another solid entry in the German category, with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German. German to and from Portuguese and Spanish.


• English Grammar Online: Yet another solid entry in the German category, again with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• SpanishDict: This is another very solid Spanish dictionary that I turn to from time to time. They claim to be the largest Spanish-English dictionary on the net.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Merriam-Webster: Yet another solid Spanish dictionary.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Woxicon: This one gives very short, typically one-word translations between multiple languages at the same time. While it does not have lot of depth, I've found it particularly useful for figuring out, say, whether the way something is expressed in one Romance language is the same in another.
  
  Languages: To and from Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.


• LookWAYup: This one limits what you get in the free version to entice you to purchase an upgrade version. I use it primarily as a back-up when one of my mainstays turns up blank.
  
  Languages: English to and from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.


• Ultralingua: Ultralingua makes high-quality dictionaries for download or for subscribers. The free dictionaries they host on their website allow unlimited access to their dictionaries but a limited number of searches per day. While this means they cannot be your mainstay dictionary, they are a great back-up dictionary to try out when other ones aren't given you the word you're looking for.
  
  Languages: English to and from Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. French to and from German, Italian, and Spanish. Portuguese to and from Spanish.

Beyond the above dictionaries, if you can't find the word you're looking for try plain old Google. The trick is to write the phrase in the target language and then write another phrase in English that you think would be in a translation of it. Doing this, you can typically find a text that contains the word and is translated into English (which is exactly what ALC does and is why I love it so much), and then all you need to do is figure out how they match up. You may need a native-speaker tutor for a bit of help in that regard (if they can't just tell you what it means to begin with).

Here are my favorite dictionaries for each of my languages in the order I typically turn to them.

Chinese

1. MDGB
2. Dict.cn
3. Iciba

French

1. Lexilogos

German

1. LEO
2. BEOLINGUS
3. English Grammar Online

Italian

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso

Japanese

1. ALC
2. Goo
3. Jeffrey's

Portuguese

1. Reverso
2. LookWAYup

Spanish

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso
3. SpanishDict

Using word frequency to teach writing to kids

The other day when I was looking at the word frequency lists that I mentioned in this post, my 4-year-old daughter came up to me and wanted to write, so she started writing down random words that were on my computer screen. When I looked at her paper, she had written "Genius Love Jazz Swing", which were from the children's music album Genius + Love: Jazz & Swing for Kids, one among the many that we have around here.

Having the word frequency list up in front of me and an eager student beside me, I put two and two together and wrote down a bunch of words for her to practice writing that were high in frequency rather than what just happened to be on my screen. A quick glance at one of the lists showed me that pronouns, the verb "to be", and possessives make up a lot at the top of the list, so I wrote "I am, you are, he is," etc., and "my cat, your cat, his cat," etc., and she gleefully ("glee" being a word she recently learned from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) practiced writing out the words I wrote for her.

And how quickly kids get that stuff down. Reading some books with her today, I pointed out words that she had practiced writing that day and, before reading them, I asked her what they were. While she wasn't running 100% by any means, she certainly still recalled a bunch of them. One thing I noticed was that she seemed to be able to better recall items near the top of the lists I wrote out for her. Although those words seem to be a bit more common, I'm curious as to whether there's something to being able to better recall items at the beginning of something that you studied compared to those closer to the end.

Related: Word lists based on frequency of use

Word lists based on frequency of use

Wiktionary has frequency lists of words in various language. There are a variety of languages covered, including English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and others. These are great for focusing your vocabulary efforts in the most efficient way possible.

Times Online: Spanish to overtake German in U.K.

The Times Online is reporting that Spanish is set to take German's position as the second most studied language in the U.K., right after French.

This change is in line with those languages' respective rankings by GDP. However, you might expect French to fall a bit, but being next-door neighbors likely keeps it up there.

I'd imagine that the popularity of a given foreign language in a given country is based on three things: the economic opportunities in the language (of which the global GDP represented by such speakers is probably a pretty good proxy), the country's proximity to speakers of that language, and the history of that language in the country.

With France, Spain, and Germany all among the wealthiest countries in the world and all nearby, plus a long history of strong relationships with all three countries, it's no surprise that these make the U.K.'s top three.

According to the National Centre for Languages' report, Chinese is also on the upswing in a major way. Whereas Spanish is in 50% more schools than in 2005, and Italian in about 150% more, Chinese is in 600% more. This would suggest that the perceived opportunities that Chinese has to offer are growing, and that's in line with their GDP ranking.

What I'm left wondering is where is Japanese in all this?

Related: The (roughly) top 20 languages by GDP

Japanese kana

I've converted two kana charts and posted them on this site. Both include hiragana, katakana, and romaji. The charts also include the extended katakana set that is typically omitted from such charts but is nevertheless used in Japanese.

• Kana chart in traditional sort order: This contains the kana in the traditional sort order, i.e., the way they are typically taught in class: in gojuuon order. Gojuuon of course comes first, followed by youon, the dakuten kana and finally the foreign-word katakana.
• Kana chart in phonetic sort order: This contains the kana sorted phonetically in order of romaji. This chart results in, for example, ta (た), chi (ち), and tsu (つ) ending up in different rows based on pronunciation.

Related: Japanese Romanization

Japanese Romanization

There are three main systems of Japanese Romanization, or romaji: Hepburn, Nihon-shiki, and Kunrei-shiki. Only Hepburn is designed to approximate English in pronunciation, and hence that is the one I prefer, although with a few modifications.

Hepburn is best because it provides a 1:1 match with how Japanese sounds, precluding the need for memorizing any pronunciation rules. For example, an s is always pronounced like "s" in English, whereas in Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki it would depend on what vowel follows it (e.g., s followed by i sounds like "sh"). Moreover, Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki don't play well with the various extended katakana to better approximate foreign-origin words.

Read more...I've prepared a table showing kana by their consonant and vowel sounds, which includes all three Romanization forms. This doesn't follow the typical order that you'll find everywhere else on the internet, but I find it to be a useful reference nonetheless.

When I use romaji, there are a few places where I vary from the standard Hepburn Romanization. The first is with long vowels. Long vowels in Japanese, unlike in English, do not describe a different kind of pronunciation, but rather a longer duration of pronunciation. This occurs when two vowels are next to each other. The standard Hepburn Romanziation requires the use of a macron (a line above the vowel) to designate these: ā, ō, ū, etc.

The problem with Hepburn's method is that it conflates things that are actually spelled differently in Japanese. Take "throne" (王位, or phonetically おうい) and "a lot" (多い, or phonetically おおい). These would both become ōi, with both ou (in "throne") and oo (in "a lot") becoming ō. I always stick with the kana spelling, so that these two, and others like it, would be differentiable: oui and ooi.

The second place I don't follow the most recent version of the Hepburn method is with n (ん). The n is supposed to be written with a macron over the top, but since that requires special fonts it's kind of a hassle. I stick with the traditional method of following n with an apostrophe before a vowel or y in order to distinguish n'a (んあ), n'i (んい), n'u (んう), n'e (んえ), n'o (んお), n'ya (んや), n'yu (んゆ), and n'yo (んよ) from na (な), ni (に), nu (ぬ), ne (ね), no (の), nya (にゃ), nyu (にゅ), and nyo (にょ).

Japanese kanji by frequency of use

I was searching for a comprehensive list of Japanese kanji by frequency of use, and I managed to track down a list on Jonathan's Japan Journal. The list covers some 3,000 characters in order of frequency, with the data vaguely attributed to a now-dead link from Aichi University. While it's not quite the authoritative source I'd like to have, it looks like the real deal.

For any students of Japanese out there, you'll be quick to note that the list of daily use characters only has about 2,000, and even if you add in the additional name characters you only get a couple hundred in to the 2,000s. This list goes we'll beyond that, so if you're thinking about studying based on this list you may want to limit it to the first 2,000 or so.

And, for good measure, here's a frequency list for Chinese characters.

The (roughly) top 20 languages by GDP

There are many reasons to pick a particular language to learn. If there is a de facto second language of importance in your country (Spanish in the States, French in Canada, etc.), it probably makes a lot of sense to choose that language, particularly if you don't see any globe trotting in your future. If your relatives or spouse speak another language, it's not a bad idea to learn that language. And many still choose a language because they like the way it sounds (français, anyone?).

My preferred method of choosing which language to learn is based on its economic utility. As I do tend to be a bit of the globe-trotting type, I've never really limited myself to any region or the like. Without such limitations, it makes a lot of sense to choose the languages you learn based on the percentage of world GDP represented by speakers of those languages.

Read more...And that was roughly how I chose the languages I've studied: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I knew which countries had the largest economies and I put their languages on a checklist, so it's hardly a coincidence that the languages I speak coincide with those at the top of the top-20 list below.

Rank	Language	Percentage of world GDP
1	English	29.3%
2	Chinese	12.5%
3	Japanese	7%
4	Spanish	6.5%
5	German	5.5%
6	French	4.6%
7	Portuguese	3.3%
8	Italian	3.2%
9	Russian	2.6%
10	Arabic	2.5%
11	Hindi	2.3%
12	Korean	1.7%
13	Indonesian	1.4%
14	Dutch	1.3%
15	Bengali	1%
16	Turkish	0.9%
17	Thai	0.9%
18	Polish	0.9%
N/A	Other	12.5%

This list was put together by Unicode.org and the data covered by the list runs from 1975-2002, although projections through 2010 for the most part retain the same order. One interesting thing to note about the projections is that the "other" group declines to only 10%, meaning the relative importance of the top 18 languages increases. It's also worth noting, if unsurprisingly, that internet use by language largely corresponds with this list, according to data collected on Wikipedia.

There are two things that this data leaves me wanting. First is the obvious update of the data to cover through 2008, as well as longer projections going forward. Second, I'd love to see a chart based on the actual number of speakers of a all languages, rather than on the number of native speakers. For example, estimates for the number of English speakers vary from around half a billion to a billion, depending on the skill level at which you count someone as a "speaker". This would result in counting multilingual people multiple times, which might make it trickier to slice and dice the data to get a GDP figure, but I'm sure some enterprising statistician somewhere could get something we could work with.

Given the large percentage of GDP controlled by English speakers, it seems to be quite a rational choice that, if you don't already speak English, you learn it. I imagine that English's role as a global lingua franca would push it even higher if that enterprising statistician I mentioned above came along to give us the data.

I came across one memorable instance of seeing English function as the global lingua franca while interning during college in the Japanese Diet (Japan's legislature) in the office of Yuriko Koike, whose background includes a degree from Egypt and having literally written the book on speaking Arabic in Japanese. During one visit with some Arab dignitaries of some sort, they lamented that neither side was learning the other's language, but rather using English as a medium for communication. They suggested increasing learning on both sides, but somehow I doubt much ever came of it.

Chinese words of English origin

Check out Loan Words from English - The Easiest Chinese Words for You for a list of Chinese words that come from English.

The Speech Accent Archive

The Speech Accent Archive contains the recordings and phonetic transcriptions of more than a thousand native and non-native speakers of English reading a standard script designed to evaluate pronunciation. If you're studying a foreign language, take a minute to listen to how speakers of your target language mispronounce English. By seeing how they mispronounce English, you might get some insight into how you should be pronouncing the target language.