LibriVox bills itself as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain". Translated from that cute catch phrase back to English, that means they have audio book versions of books that are in the public domain, with links to the textual versions as well.
Read more...The vast majority of books with recordings are in English (nearly 10,000 of them), but there are a few thousand books in other languages as well, with Chinese, French, and Italian particularly well represented. (You can search for books by language on their advanced search page.) Because these books are all in the public domain, they tend to be old, so you probably won't be getting the most recent lingo in any of these languages.
They also give you the ability to contribute to their collection of audio recordings. I wonder if anyone's going to try to use RhinoSpike to add content to LibriVox.
You might recall that Michael Phelps did a stint as the spokesman for Rosetta Stone. Did you also know that Rosetta Stone and Phelps managed to uncover something about Chinese that has eluded linguists, scholars, and even the Chinese themselves for millennia?
The highlight starts at 0:53:
Interviewer: And, Michael, I understand you used [Rosetta Stone] to learn a little Mandarin to prepare yourself in Beijing. How did it go?
Phelps: Uh, it's a very tough language.
That's getting dangerously close to saying, "I didn't really learn anything so please don't ask me to say anything in Chinese." (But, then again, as Rosetta Stone is an advertiser on Fox, I suppose he didn't really need to worry about getting grilled by the interviewer.)
Phelps continues:
Phelps: Um, you know, uh, um, foreign languages have always been very tough for me to learn, but, you know, I figured I might as well, um, I'm gonna give it a shot and, uh, try it and, uh, learned a few of the simple terms and, and the masculine and feminine term, feminine terms, so…
And to think that for years everyone's been running around thinking that Chinese didn't have any grammatical genders.
Oh, right. It doesn't.
Now go to the video and watch Rosetta Stone's CEO Tom Adams' face when Phelps drops the gender thing. I'm not completely sure, but I get the feeling based on the way his expression changed that he realized right then and there what was wrong with what had just come out of his spokesman's mouth.
So how did Michael Phelps come to learn about Chinese's non-existant grammatical genders?
Read more...Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possibilities.
Rosetta Stone is so messed up that it's trying to teach grammatical gender in a language that has no grammatical gender. If Rosetta Stone is still merely translating the existing content from one language to another, rather than customizing the content for each language (as they've been criticized for in the past), that could very well be the issue.
Phelps used but did not actually learn from his use of Rosetta Stone's products.
Phelps did not actually use Rosetta Stone's products.
Phelps needed too much "extra help" to get through the Rosetta Stone software.
My money is on something like the following. Rosetta Stone strikes an endorsement agreement with Phelps. In the agreement, Phelps makes some kind of vague promise to use the software. Phelps tries the software while being filmed, and maybe even uses it a little bit on his own. Language learning isn't really much of a priority for Phelps in the lead-up to the Olympics, so he doesn't really use Rosetta Stone much, and the few times he does he finds that he's just not that into it. End result: he learns pretty much no Chinese but takes home a nice paycheck from Rosetta Stone. Then, when he's put on the spot by the report, Phelps—genuinely wanting to do good for his sponsor—tries to think of something good to say. His high school Spanish memories rear their ugly head, and you get grammatical genders in China.
He seems to have fared a bit better in other, more scripted promotional pieces:
While mildly humorous in a cornball sort of way, notice you don't actually hear Phelps speaking any Chinese.
You've gotta go to this one to hear him actually speak:
My Chinese-speaking daughter, who was sitting next to me as I watched the above video, said, "What's that guy saying? I know what the computer says but not what that guy says."
That doesn't seem to stop Rosetta Stone's software from telling him he's saying it right. Indeed, I've heard of native Japanese speakers being unable to get the software to recognize their Japanese, but when the American store clerk used his American store clerk accent on the Japanese, the software got it. Could it be that making people feel good about using their software is a better business strategy than making them comprehensible to native speakers?
The fact that Phelps was best understood by Rosetta Stone's software is probably why he didn't use a lick of Chinese when Mazda made him apologize to the Chinese people for the bong-smoking incident.
Not even a measly nǐ hǎo, even though a little effort in Chinese would have probably gone over pretty well.
I suppose we can't draw any firm conclusions about Rosetta Stone from this little case study, but things do seem to point in one direction.
Ah, hyperbole. Remember when Japan was going to take over the world in the 1980s? Somewhere between my G.I. Joes and Transformers, I recall my dad insisting on not buying Japanese automobiles back then. Of course, he didn't buy a single automobile during the 1980s—he rode that good ol' American 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme right into the ground—but his attitude left enough of an impression to have stuck in my memory until now.
Well, it now seems to be China's turn for all that. "When China Rules the World" by Martin Jacquesjust got some traction in the New York Times. I haven't read the book, but it seems to be quite well researched—but, then again, so did those many books about Japan way back when. China is clearly on its way up, rising in stature and power of all sorts, but I still can't help but look skeptically at any book with a title like that.
Geopolitics aside, there was of course some language-connected fun in the article.
Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia.
That one-in-five statistic needs to be taken with a grain of salt. While Chinese, i.e., Mandarin, is undoubtedly the "national tongue" of one in five people in the world, that hardly means it's their mother tongue, and in some cases it's not even an effectively acquired second language. (People from regions where another language is the native tongue—Cantonese, Fujianese, etc.—often say that foreigners like me speak better Mandarin than they do, although I generally take that as too much praise for being able to ask where the bathroom is.)
Regarding the second concept—that Chinese is displacing English as a second language in Asia—I just don't see it yet. Although, as discussed nearly a year back, Chinese undoubtedly will grow and is growing in importance and in popularity, I still don't see it assailing English's position just yet, in Asia or elsewhere. In Japan especially, English is everywhere, and Chinese competes with Spanish, French, German, etc., as the second foreign language of choice. That said, if anyone's read the book, I'd love to hear what data he uses to support all of this.
And the article goes on:
In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.
If you're counting the number of pages, this may very well be true. But until Chinese has the wide acceptance of English, English will remain the way in which people of various linguistic backgrounds communicate on the web. When Europeans begin regularly writing web pages in Chinese so that they can be read by Americans, Arabs, Asian, etc., let's talk about revising this.
Continuing my series on free online dictionaries (for Japanese, see here), today I present you with my favorite, free, online Chinese-English dictionaries, after the jump.
nciku: Nciku is my first stop when looking up a Chinese word. I've found that they simply cover more of the words I need than the other dictionaries on this list. They often supply numerous example sentences, which also puts them ahead of most of the other dictionaries here.
They supply the pinyin for the words you look up, and pinyin is supplied for example sentences via a pop-up when you hold your mouse over them. The latter is kind of a pain because you can't copy and paste it and you can't see it without doing something, but you can always copy and paste the Chinese word itself into the search field to get copyable pinyin.
Example sentences can be pronounced via a pretty natural text-to-speeh program which goes beyond the simple character-by-character pronunciation of MDBG, but there's no pronunciation button available for the definitions.
Another very convenient feature is that you can write characters by hand to look them up—a great feature when you can't recall the reading.
If you're curious about what "nciku" means, see here and here.
Dict.cn: My second stop is usually Dict.cn. More aimed at the Chinese learner of English, Dict.cn's strong point is their example sentences sourced from the net, similar to ALC for Japanese. There is no pinyin and no pronunciation of Chinese words.
MDBG: If you dig around the internet for Chinese-English dictionaries, you'll surely run across some of thenumerousonlinedictionariesbasedontheCEDICTproject. But the site serving as the caretaker of the CEDICT project and one of my favorites Chinese-English dictionaries is MDBG.
MDBG has a large breadth of vocabulary and always provides the pinyin. MDBG can even color code characters and pinyin syllables by tone. Audio pronunciations are provided, but they pronounce each character as if it were alone, i.e., they don't take into account systematic tone changes based on the previous tone. Like nciku, you can also write characters in with your mouse to look them up.
iCIBA: A lot like Dict.cn: aimed at Chinese learners of English, strong point is example sentences (which also seem to be sourced from around the net), no pinyin, and no pronunciation of Chinese words. They tend to have more, but simpler, example sentences than Dict.cn, and also will serve up related encyclopedia entries.
Reverso: Reverso has pinyin but no pronunciations. The word coverage generally seems to be less than the others above, but they are an additional option that I turn to occasionally.
Know of a dictionary that belongs in this list? Drop a line in the comments below!
This post was updated on October 6, 2009, to clarify the name of nciku and to note that nciku does in fact have pinyin (thanks to doviende of Language Fixation for the clarifications).
While I couldn't find the equivalent of Hiragana.jp for Chinese (i.e., letting you convert an entire website and then browse it), there are a few good converters that will take a block of text and convert them from Chinese characters to pinyin for you.
There are lots of them out there that simply do it character by character, but as context can affect the tones (e.g., whether the characters are part of a word or not), the best ones take this into consideration.
Here are a two of the better ones:
Popup Chinese is a Chinese-learning website with the well-known Adsotrans character-to-pinyin tool. It's also got long lists of HSK vocab that you can easily throw into Anki.
Great... just when you think you've checked off all your Chinese character boxes, China starts debating whether to change the boxes by modifying certain characters.
Read more...For the first time in some two decades (in which time, I'm sure, many of us have commenced our studies of Chinese), China is considering revising some characters. The revisions only affect 44 characters, and below you'll find them in their revised format (click to enlarge):
Some of these characters I doubt whether I've even seen before, while a bunch are quite familiar. At first glance, I didn't even notice the changes, but, on a second look, it seems that one of the biggest changes is that of 朩 děng becoming 木 mù. So clearly we're not dealing with a revolution here, but still something that we learners should take note of.
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
When I signed up for CorrectMyText, I must have said I was studying Russian, because here's the message I got from them today:
Вы получили сообщение от Катрина со следующим содержанием:
I studied a year of Russian back in high school, but the only word I could remember was the first one, вы, which means "you". A couple of free onlinedictionaries quickly got me this translation:
You have received a message from Katrina with the following contents:
Knowing what it meant was a good start, but I also wanted to hear what it sounded like; although I can read the letters, I have no idea how close my imagined pronunciation is with the actual pronunciation (ultimate result: not so close). Without a Russian speaker anywhere nearby, and without feeling like spending the time to find one online willing to humor me via Skype, I googled about for a text-to-speech solution online, and quickly found one.
The Russian sounded fine to me, but I really have no idea, so to see how good these voices were I checked out the English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I have to say they are pretty darn good. In addition to those langauges, French, German, Italian, and Korean are also available. They even come with computer-animated speakers, one of whom (one of which?) is pictured above. They are a wee bit creepy, especially when they're moving, but that doesn't take away from the pretty impressive text-to-speech.
Another very cool feature is that they change the color of the text next to the animated image as the text is being read—kind of like language-learning karaoke.
All in all, a pretty cool tool for when you need a sentence or two pronounced for you on the fly.
If you're running Mac OS X, you've already got a built-in way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters by their component pieces, i.e., their "radicals": it's known as the Character Palette. (It, by the way, also works for the Chinese characters that used to be used in Korean as well, if you're into that.)
How to use the Character Palette to look up characters by their radicals, after the jump.
Read more...The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the Character Palette enabled.
From the Apple menu, open System Preferences.
In the Personal section (the first row of preference panes), click on International.
Select the Input Menu tab.
Make sure Character Palette is checked.
At the bottom of the window, make sure "Show input menu in menu bar" is checked.
Incidentally, this is also where you can select the languages in which you want to be able to type; just check off the appropriate boxes below the horizontal dividing line in the list above.
Once you've set that up, you'll have a menu that you can get to from your menu bar that looks something like this:
And here's how you can then look up a Chinese or Japanese character by its radical:
From the input menu, select "Show Character Palette".
From the View pull-down menu at the top of the Character Palette, select Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Japanese, as appropriate.
Immediately below the pulldown menu, select the "by Radical" tab.
Immediately below that, select the appropriate radical in the left-hand pane.
Select the character you're looking for from the right-hand pane.
To see information on the character, such as the reading, click on the triangle icon next to "Character Info" until the triangle is pointing down and the character information is displayed.
To see how the character looks in a variety of fonts, click on the triangle icon next to "Font Variation" until the triangle is pointing down and the font variants are displayed.
Or, if you already happen to have the character on your computer and don't need to go the radical search route, just copy and paste the character into the search field at the bottom of the Character Palette, and all the rest'll pop right up for you.
And that's it. It's a simple, always-handy way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters on your Mac.
P.S. If there's an analog to this on Windows, let me know and I'll add it.
The BBC, amongothers, are reporting that Shanghai is looking to get rid of its Chinglish (crappy English composed by native-Chinese speakers) that can be found on signs all over Shanghai (it incidentally can be found everywhere else in China too, but it seems that no one else in China has done enough lately to get the media in the U.K. to write about them).
The persistence of Chinglish has been a puzzle to me for years (and Japanglish, perhaps better known as Engrish, as well, but let's leave that for a later post). There are all sorts of native-English speakers floating around China (take a look at just about any college, and you'll probably find a bunch). Many of them would probably be happy to correct the English for free. Slap "internship" on this correcting role and they'll come in droves.
And, yet, Chinglish persists.
Now, however, you don't need to bother to seek out an in-situs native speaker because there's an even easier way to get native-level English on all the signs in China: the Chinese speakers tasked with making these signs can make use of websites where you can get your foreign-language writing corrected for free.
So, Shanghai (and the rest of China), if you're listening, save yourself a few bucks—and perhaps some embarrassment—and throw the text into one of these sites the next time you need a sign in English.
If Chinglish truly goes the way of the dodo (I have my doubts), we native-English speakers will of course miss its unintentional hilarity. So, in honor of the Chinglish we have grown to love, I give you even more Chinglish, after the jump, including photos of a masterpiece of a Chinglish sign that I took myself, plus links to much more (warning: involves an obscenity or two).
Read more...Let's kick it off with the Chinglish gems from articles mentioned above:
Please do not spilt everywhere ant litter up. The violators will be amerced with in range of 20 to 50 yuan.
Haven't you always wanted to be amerced?
Keep valuables snugly.
Hold them close to your heart and love them because—before you know it—they'll be gone.
Beware the people press close to you designedly.
Beware indeed... they might be looking to find a mate.
Please leave your values at the front desk.
I'm not so sure that this is a mistranslation at all, given those sketchy calls you can get at some hotels in China for "massage services".
Please bump your head carefully.
That's generally good advice that I wish my one-year-old son would follow.
If you are stolen, call the police at once.
Again, generally good advice. You wouldn't want to wait a week or two after you're stolen, would you?
Now let's move on to one of my favorites, this "Notice to Tourists" that was at Simatai, one of the common Great Wall destinations near Beijing, back in 2002. I took the below photo myself:
Here's the English-challenged text (the all-caps formatting is from the original):
NOTICE TO TOURISTS
PLEASE OBSERVE LANDSCAPE ORDER DON'T BLOCK THE ROAD AND EXIT BUY TICKET8 IN TURN AND ENTER THE LANDSCAPE AFTER THEY BE CHECKED PAY ATTENTION TO KEEP YOUR COUNTERFOLLS SO AS TO BE CHECKED AGAIN BY THE STAFF MEMBERS.
So, in other words, if you don't be holding counterfolls (wha...?), the staff gonna be up on your @$$.
PLEASE OBSERVE DISCIPLINE AND OBEY THE LAW DON'T SCUFFLE CREATE A DISTURBANCE DO SUPERSTITION AND OTHER UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES.
It would seem that as long as you don't scuffle, create a disturbance, and do superstition and other unlawful activities, you're good to go. No need to check your voodoo doll at the gate.
PLEASE OBSERVE SOCIAL MORALITY RESPECT THE OLDERS TAKE GOOD CARE OF CHILDREN AND BE SELF POSSESSED PLEASE GO SIGHT SEEING AOLOROMA TO THE LANDSCAPE RULES.
I hope all you self-possessed men are ready to do some sight-seeing aoloroma (whatwhat?!)! Just make sure that, if you feel the need to mow the lawn, you follow the landscape rules.
KEEP YOUR OWN THINGS WELL IN ORDER TO AVOID LOSING THE- M DON'T SPIT AND LITTER.
Of course, you may spit or litter; it's the combination they frown upon. This loophole probably explains why China has been struggling with stamping out both of those bad habits.
PLEASE TAKE CARE OF CULTURAL RELICS PLAND WILD ANIMALS.
Because, you know, cultural relics will just fall right into your hands while you're walking around the Great Wall. Make sure you take care of planned wild animals as well, although with unplanned ones you can do as you will. I just don't want to be there when a panda pops up unplanned on tourists at Simatai...
DON'T ENTER NON-LANDSCAPE AREAS CARRY INFLAMMABLES AND O- THER DANGE ROUS ARTICLES THE LANDSCAPE IS FIRE PREVEN TION TO THE SAFE SIGNS AND FOLLOW THE STAFFS ARRANGE O- THER WISE YOU WILL ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES YOURSELF.
I'm glad they've got their priorities straight and made the landscape part of the fire prevention for the safe signs. Without those safe signs (which are presumably in Chinglish as well), I'm not sure what would come of Simatai.
SIMATAI GREAT WALL LANDSCAPE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE
And at least we know who to blame for this mess: the landscapers.
Sadly, this sign is likely long gone thanks to the 2008 Olympics. We'll miss it dearly.
If you're in for something a little less wordy (but a lot more vulgar), try this one on for size:
In lieu of "Fuck the fruit area", a much better translation of this would simply be "Dried fruit". The character 干 gān has the unfortunate distinction of meaning both "dry" and "to do" and, euphemistically, "to fuck". I didn't take this pic myself, and—given the incredibly convenient placement of "the"—I'm skeptical as to the reliability of this pic (Photoshopped, perhaps?). But, even if this is fake, it certainly could happen.
Finally, below I've added a bunch of Chinglish links for you, and please drop a line with you favorite Chinglish in the comments below!
When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.
Sound like something you'd be interested in? A comparison of the websites on which you can do just that, after the jump.
Read more...The first two sites below—Lang-8 and CorrectMyText—are focused primarily on textual corrections. The rest—Livemocha, Busuu, and LingQ—include textual corrections as one among many features.
One note before diving in... the comparisons below are only looking at what these websites do in terms of text corrections. All of these sites can of course do other things, but I'm leaving those features aside for now (although feel free to highlight your favorite features in the comments below).
Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever text you feel like posting. Although many people do post journal-like entries, I typically post all sorts of things in there. In addition to texts to get corrected, this mainly consists of language-related questions. Just as people are happy to correct your text, they're also happy to answer questions about whatever confusing point of the language you've come across.
Making corrections. Lang-8 first breaks the text down into sentences, separating them based on punctuation (this results in the occasional weird break-up when you have something like "12.1" in the sentence; Lang-8 interprets the decimal point in that number as the end of a sentence and breaks it up accordingly). Then correctors can edit sentence by sentence. The system flags uncorrected sentences so subsequent correctors can focus their efforts where most needed.
Correctors edit each sentence in a little window. The one annoying thing about the editing process is that, if you want to add formatting to the text, you've gotta deal with tags tossed into the text in that little window, such as [BLUE][/BLUE] or [BOLD][/BOLD]. It can get pretty jumbled up.
Speed of corrections. Although none of these sites are slow in getting corrections back to you, the corrections come extremely rapidly on Lang-8; I rarely wait an hour, but I think the most I've ever waited is something like a day. In fact, one day I put up a whole bunch of posts on Lang-8 and, by the time I was done adding all the posts, most of them had already been corrected.
Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through formatting: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I make most use of Japanese, unsurprisingly, but I've also made use of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French thus far. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.
Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done. I'd like them to make it even easier to view edits, but it's decent as is.
Bottom line. I find Lang-8 to be the best of the bunch, and I recommend it highly.
Overview. CorrectMyText, based in Russia, is the project of Dmitry Lopatin. It's a new entry to the free online text-correction market; as far as I can tell, it was launched all of seven days ago. As such, it's still got a lot of squeaky wheels that need some grease, but the functionality you need to get text corrected is already there.
Content. You can put any kind of textual content into CorrectMyText.com.
Making corrections. CorrectMyText first breaks the text down into paragraphs, separating them based on line breaks. The corrector can then edit each paragraph's text direcly.
Speed of corrections. Given how new CorrectMyText is, and thus the limited number of users it has compared to the other sites in this list, the corrections don't come quite as quickly. Nevertheless, if my limited experience is representative, you'll still get them within a day or two.
Correction presentation. The corrector cannot apply any formatting. CorrectMyText.com will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in red and struck through. The after version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes.
Interface. This is still a bit rough. It's sometimes hard to figure out what you need to press to move on, and I found myself pressing the wrong thing more than once. It remains very basic, as you'd expect from a newly launched website.
Bottom line. As a new entrant to the market, it still needs some work before it'll be a viable contender against Lang-8, but it's definitely a site to keep an eye on.
Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through text corrections (see my complete review of Livemocha here).
Content. The textual submissions on Livemocha are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects". However, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about, and indeed that's what I've often done. In fact, Livemocha may soon be considering implementing freestyle writing. That'll be more than a nod to reality than an actual change, but I'd be happy to see the addition.
Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.
Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.
Correction presentation. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Interface. As far as text correcting goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.
Bottom line. Not a bad back-up to Lang-8 for text corrections, but as Lang-8 specializes in this feature and it's just another feature at Livemocha—and Livemocha's still not made for freestyle writing—I'm going to stick with the specialist Lang-8 and hope that Livemocha gives this feature some TLC.
Overview. Busuu is a direct competitor of Livemocha, using a similar picture-based learning method, but it also connects you with lots of native speakers, including, again, through text corrections.
Content. Just like Livemocha, the textual submissions are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe a real person in your life", but, again, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about.
Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text, mirroring Livemocha. It does have one convenient feature that Livemocha lacks: a button to automatically copy and paste the unedited text into the comment field.
Speed of corrections. Although I don't have any numbers to back up my supposition, it seems to me that Busuu has less users than Livemocha, and accordingly will take a little longer. That said, corrections still come back within a day or so.
Correction presentation. Like Lang-8 and Livemocha, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Languages. English, French, German, and Spanish. One of the largest differences with Livemocha is that Busuu covers fewer languages.
Interface. Busuu's interface is probably the nicest of the bunch, and it's just fine for getting texts corrected.
Bottom line. Given how similar it is to Livemocha, the bottom line for both is essentially the same; not a bad back-up to Lang-8, but until Busuu puts some more focus into textual corrections, I'll be sticking with Lang-8.
Overview. LingQ's focus is on audio and textual content (especially audio with the accompanying textual content), and, among other things, it has a feature that allows you to get your text submissions corrected. LingQ's text correction feature, however, is not free (it's not terribly expensive though, basically coming down to $0.033 per word, although the pricing is a bit more complex than that). I've broken the free-stuff-only rule and included it here because it has some very interesting features that the completely free ones do not yet match.
Content. You can put any kind of textual content into LingQ.
Making corrections. You highlight the text you want to correct, and click a button. Up pops a window with the text you selected, and you can then edit it. Thus far, that pretty much makes it like all the rest. But then you then get the option to select what kind of error it is—spelling, word order, verb form, etc.—and that data will be used when presenting corrections.
Speed of corrections. Corrections are generally done by a learner's selected tutor, and you might have to wait a little bit before your tutor has a chance to correct your text. That said, tutors seem to reply relatively quickly. I'm a tutor on the site, and I typically try to do my corrections as soon as I'm notified they're there. My slowest response time thus far has been a single day.
Correction presentation. Just like CorrectMyText, LingQ will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow, the after version in green. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes. Alternatively, the same corrections are listed out below the side-by-side versions in a table that also lists correction-specific notes and the type of each correction.
And then here's where LingQ lays down some awesome. Using the type of errors that the corrector marked down, you get an analysis of your mistakes.
Just. Fricking. Awesome. Getting this level of analysis is far better than just seeing your mistakes, because it can help you focus your efforts on where to improve. Although Steve at LingQ is not a big fan offocusingongrammar, this lets you do just that. If you see that you're struggling in a particular place, you can do a read-through of the section in your grammar on that topic, or take other steps to figure out why you keep messing up. Great feature.
Bottom line. They've built in some very clever features into LingQ's textual correction system, but I just can't justify the cost for text corrections when Lang-8 and all the above are available completely free of charge.
So do you know of any other places where we can get our foreign-language writing corrected? If so, drop a line in the comments!
And wait until you see what chaos emoticons bring us after the jump.
Read more...Japanese emoticons (and Chinese emoticons as well, although the examples here are all from Japanese) are a great deal more complicated than what we've got in the West. Perhaps they're just used to complex characters in the form of kanji (I'd be curious to find out whether Korean emoticons are as inscrutable), or maybe they're somehow connected to anime-like facial expressions, but they certainly do have a lot more complexity to them. For instance, we all know the winking emoticon:
; )
Our two-character wink is totally zen compared to one of the simpler Japanese versions:
(^_~)
At least I can easily tell what that one is. Take a look at this page to see some emoticons for which you'll have no idea what they mean, or take this example from a website profile of a friend of mine:
ヽ(*´∀`)ﾉﾟ.:｡+ﾟฺ♡♡
OK, let's try to analyze that one. The upside-down A is, I presume, the smiling mouth. Those two little dots next to it on either side must be eyes. I'm not sure what that thing next to the eye on the left would be, but the parentheses are the sides of the head. The slashes—ears, or arms? After that, I'm totally lost. I presume the hearts are just tossed in there for the cuteness effect, but I have no idea what the plus sign and everything around that are supposed to be. And this is hardly the worst of them.
Emoticons remain a neglected facet of language learning, and indeed I'm guilty as charged as I've long ignored them myself. The thing is that I run into these enough that I feel like I should at least know the basic ones, although I can probably get by without knowing this:
I thought I'd share with you what's shaping up to be my language-learning routine. I'd love it if you could take home a few good pointers from my routine, but I'd love it even more if you could give me a few good pointers to improve my routine.
My days are, predictably, dominated by Japanese and English. I try to maximize my use of Japanese because of my need to use it at work, but there are two places where I use English as a matter of course. The first is with my kids; I only use English with them, and my wife and I speak English to each other whenever we're in earshot of them, in order to maximize their exposure to English. This is of course a direct trade-off between my Japanese and their English, but one I'll take to prevent them from speaking Engrish. The other place I use English regularly is of course at work when I need to do any of the various things a lawyer might need to do in English.
My language-learning day gets kicked off with my morning alarm; I awake to the sound of Japanese podcasts giving me today's news. Breakfast with the fam is largely in English, although my wife always speaks to the kids in Japanese and the nanny speaks to all of us only in Chinese, so that'll be floating around as well. My mother typically joins us for breakfast via video chat, so once in a while she and I will use some Italian when we don't want anyone else to understand.
Read more...Whenever I'm walking around (such as to, from, and in train stations) or standing around (such as on trains when I can't get a seat), I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts and to review vocabulary with iAnki. My first iAnki/podcast stint every day is from the time I leave my apartment until I sit down on the train to work.
Once seated on the train, the podcasts continue, but I typically break out my computer and try to get stuff done that often doesn't involve a foreign language—doing actual work, responding to emails, working on the book, or preparing these blog posts. When I arrive at the station at which I get off, I return to iAnki/podcasts until I get to my office.
Once in my office, I switch from listening to podcasts on my iPhone to listening to them on my laptop quietly in the background, and I keep them playing in my office the entire time I'm there. I also run a screensaver that shows selected vocab on my laptop screen while I work from the firm-supplied computer. You do end up glancing at it from time to time, and it's especially useful for getting extra exposure to things you've been struggling wtih.
Although I end up doing much of my work in English, I get exposed to plenty of Japanese over the course of the day. Once people figure out that my Japanese is passable, they typically stop using English with me whether via email or in person (and I of course encourage this by using Japanese as much as possible). I also regularly have to deal with Japanese-language documents, websites, etc.
All of these serve as founts for vocab to feed into iAnki and from there into my brain. As I come across words and phrases that I'm unfamiliar with over the course of a day, I quickly note them down in an Excel spreadsheet. Before I leave the office each day, I send the Excel sheet I made over the course of the day—which typically has somewhere between 15 to 30 items in it—to my personal email. When I get home each night, I look up all the words, get example sentences, and add them to iAnki.
Whenever I write Japanese, I get it corrected, review the mistakes, and make any new items for iAnki that might be necessary (by first adding them to that Excel spreadsheet). My secretary helps to correct any Japanese I put together for work, but I've been submitting everything else to Lang-8 for corrections—totally gratis. On Lang-8, native speakers of the language you are learning will correct your writing (and you're expected to reciprocate). Response times are impressive, and I've rarely waited more than a hour for corrections, and certainly never more than a day.
As for other languages I encounter at work, I treat them the same way I treat Japanese. As I'm part of the China Practice Group at my firm, I regularly get exposure to Chinese. I've also had to review documents in other languages, such as Spanish and French, and there have been phone calls to Latin America, so any words I've had to look up have ended up mixed in with my mostly Japanese iAnki reps.
Whenever I get the chance, I'll revert to podcats/iAnki, e.g., on a walk to the bank, which is maybe 5 or 10 minutes away from my office. And whenever I get a little bit of time in which I can't effectively do anything else—such as if I'm on hold on a phone—I'll quickly pull out my iPhone and do a few reviews on iAnki. Even if I only have 30 seconds, I can probably get through at least 10 reviews in that short a time period.
On the way home, it's back to iAnki/podcasts. I typically can't find a seat until maybe halfway through my ride home, so this is typically the period each day in which I spend the most time reviewing vocabulary. Once I do find a seat, I break out my laptop and do the same kinds of things I do on the morning ride, while continuing to listen to the podcasts. And, once again, the walk from the train to home is more iAnki/podcasts.
Once home, I add the new items from the Excel spreadsheet mentioned above to iAnki and see what I've managed to do over the course of the day. Typically, I'll get through somewhere between 300 and 500 reviews in a given day. I'll then make any changes necessary to the items in iAnki (such as adding example sentences to things I'm struggling with), as well as updating the vocab words in my screensaver.
It's also at night when I do thing like read news in other languages, although I don't spend as much time doing that as I'd like to.
And that's pretty much my routine as it currently stands.
I am looking to make a few changes, however. One thing I've been puzzling how to do efficiently is bring in languages other than Japanese in a more systematic manner. I think I'm going to do this by assigning a time percentage to each language and then listening to podcasts in each language accordingly. Ideally, I'll be able to find podcasts with transcripts and then review those as well, and then put the vocab into iAnki.
And, of course, I'm sure you might have some tips for me as to how I can improve this routine, so please drop them in the comments below!
An article in today's New York Times seems to have some anecdotal evidence that you can get proficient in Chinese—despite working full time and using some degree of English at work—in about two years.
“I didn’t know anything about China,” said [Joshua Arjuna Stephens, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies]. “People thought I was nuts to go not speaking the language, but I wanted to do something off the beaten track.”
Two years later, after stints in the nonprofit sector and at a large public relations firm in Beijing, he is highly proficient in Mandarin . . .
After two years of living and working in China, [Sarabeth Berman, a 2006 graduate of Barnard College with a major in urban studies,] is proficient in Mandarin.
If you are studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (I'm not, really, but I find the lists of vocab for the test that can be found floating about the internet are useful because they approximate frequency lists) and you happen to speak Chinese, check out this vocab list. There's no English, but you can learn your Japanese from Chinese (or learn both at the same time). It's all in traditional characters, but I'm sure you tricky netizens can finda method or two that could convert it to simplified for you.
It's got separate lists for all four levels of the test (1, 2, 3, and 4, with 1 being the hardest), or you can view the vocab all together. The list was made in 2005, so it may be a little out of date, and it was made in Taiwan, so you'll probably get that variety of Chinese.
One thing I like about this list (and that I'd like to see in other such lists) is that it notes on which syllable the stress falls in the Japanese word. My wife often says I use stress in Japanese words where there isn't any. This chart seems to back up her criticisms, given how many words are marked as having "0" (i.e., no) stress and thus should just be read flatly.
Raising a Child in Two Worlds: Nicole Sprinkle seems to be a bit too worried about whether her biracial child will be better at English or Spanish. Wrong question. The question she should be asking is how can I make my daughter obtain native-level proficiency in both languages? Note also the "two worlds" hyperbole of the title. Something like "Raising a Child to Use Two Tools" would be a bit more realistic.
European Parliament split over language teaching: Next time any of my fellow yanks get themselves in a tizzy regarding the use of Spanish in the U.S., just remember: it could be worse; translation costs could take up 1% of our budget. Tangential money quote: "'[P]romoting the learning of […] an international "lingua franca",' such as English, should be a 'political priority'." As if there were another international lingua franca.
More languages, not fewer: Professor Erin Hippolyte "regularly see[s] statistics that link world language proficiency to salaries that are 8-20 percent higher." What exactly is a "world language" anyway? I wonder if it's a West Virginia regionalism for "foreign language". Someone should check a quirky regional dictionary. I am probably proficient in one or two "world languages", so where do I apply for the raise? When are Professor Hippolyte's office hours?
The Waver's Dilemma: A lot more information on how runners communicate in English than I gave you in my post on the runners' nod. For the record, I'm personally against waiving on the grounds that it makes you break form.
Earlier this week, I discovered the addictive Skritter, a tool for learning simplified Chinese characters and the tones of those characters.
As promised, on Thursday I got the chance to let my four-year-old daughter use Skritter. She naturally likes to play video games, so I asked her, "Do you want to play a Chinese character game?" Naturally the answer was yes.
So I sat her down in front of the screen. The first character, if I recall correctly, was wǒ 我 ("I"). Out of context, I'm not sure that she knew what it was, even though she heard it, so I gave her some quick example sentences so she definitely knew which wǒ it was. To make this easier for kids, it'd be great if you could replay the pronunciation and if it had example sentences in Chinese, or even if it at least could read the English meaning out loud. Then I could just show her which button to push and she could go at it all on her own.
Once she knew what she was writing, I showed her how to press the "show" button to reveal how to write the character. She knows very few characters at this point, so she had to show pretty much every one. A few she only showed once, and then, beaming, she said, "I showed it once and then just remembered it!" Bingo. I hope getting kids to learn remains this easy forever.
Once she knew what she was writing and how to figure out how to write it, I just let her go to town. For each new character, she'd ask me what the word was. Some, like rén 人, she knew, but for the most part I had to give her examples so she'd understand the meaning. But she happily sat there going through them. This certainly looks like it can be a great tool for her to learn Chinese characters.
I was in the shower listening to my mix of five-star (according to my own personal rankings in iTunes) foreign-language songs. Now normally I tend to listen to podcasts, but sometimes you just need to get your groove on and today was that day for me. The playlist, which is supposed to be random, spit out a bunch of Spanish songs all in a row: El Niágara en Bicicleta by Juan Luis Guerra,El Último Beso by Los Boltons (a Spanish cover of Last Kiss by The Cavaliers),Esposa by Tony Vega,Estoy Aquí by Shakira,Mirando el Mar by The Sound Lovers, Buscando América by Ruben Blades,and Ciega, Sordomuda by Shakira. Naturally I was singing along with these songs, which, in addition to keeping me entertained (my wife, not so much), is a good repetition of the vocab contained in the songs.
After I got out of the shower, I had to go downstairs to tell the Chinese-speaking babysitter that she could go whenever she wanted to. As I was walking down the steps, I was thinking about what I'd tell her and I heard in my head, in Spanish, "Si quieres ir..." ("If you want to go..."), and it occurred to me that that was a bit odd. Here I was about to tell something in Chinese to a Chinese speaker and Spanish was coursing through my brain. I'm pretty sure that if that hadn't run through my head as I was walking down the steps, the first words out of my mouth to the babysitter would have been in Spanish. Listening to and singing along with those songs had put me in Spanish mode, and I didn't snap out of it until I consciously thought about it.
This phenomenon intrigues me. Anyone else who speaks multiple foreign languages ever run into this? I'm curious as to what is the relationship between this and language learning. I suppose it's a good thing that my mind just kind of switches automatically into another language, but how can I improve my ability to bounce between languages? The obvious answer is practice, but with better understanding of what's really going on in my head, it'd be easier to really figure out how to utilize this best for language learning.
I just stumbled across Scritter today. Scritter lets you study Chinese character by writing them on the screen. And it's awesome. The implementation is very smooth. They ask you to write a character, and if you don't know it you can press a button to show it. It appears and then fades away before you can write it all. You can of course show it again, but short term memory should hold it there for you, and then you get some muscle memory action by writing it out there.
I started toying around with it to see what it was all about, and I'm addicted. Since I pretty much only type in Chinese, how to write characters is something that often slips my mind. This makes for a great refresher. And what's even more fun is that they cover tones as well. If I have one weakness in Chinese, that is it.
But what I'm most excited about is sitting my four-year-old daughter down in front of this thing. "Wanna play a Chinese game?" We'll see how that goes tomorrow hopefully. So far she's only started to recognize characters, not write them, but this seems to be a great device for getting kids to learn. My only complaint as far as children's learning goes is that the feedback that appears in the window—"Should hook", "Stroke backward", "Excellent!" and the like—are all text only. For a kid who's just learning to read, it'd be great if these were audible.
With my obvious interest in language learning, it's great fun to have kids and watch how they learn languages. If you've been reading this blog, you know that my four-year-old daughter has long been a part of my language-learning observations, and now my son had joined the speaking world as well.
We've got what is essentially a trilingual environment set up for the kids. I and my mom, who lives with us, speak only English to the kids. My wife speaks only Japanese with them and we make them speak Japanese with each other (which has so far consisted of our daughter speaking Japanese to our son). We use only Chinese-speaking babysitters or nannies and have them around enough that our daughter speaks Chinese as well as English and Japanese.
Our son's first official word is nenne ねんね in Japanese, which means "sleep". It's the an infantile form of neru 寝る ("to sleep"). We give if the official designation because he's clearly saying the word and linking it up to a meaning that he can use to communicate with.
More observations of a one-year-old learning to speak, after the jump.
Read more...He's said lots of things that happen to be words. Mama, baba 爸爸 ("father" in Chinese), dada, etc., but he didn't seem to use these consistently enough to indicate things as to really count as his first word. He'd at times call me "Mama", or just yell it out randomly, for instance. However, he clearly uses nenne to convey a single meaning.
However, his interpretation of nenne meaning is a little different. When he says nenne, he lays down flat on his belly on something soft, whether a pillow, a bed, or a person. If you say nenne to him while in the living room, he'll grab a pillow from the couch, lay it on the floor, lay down on top of it and say "Nenne!" He'll use it when he lays down to go to sleep, etc.
There was one earlier contender for his first word, and that was ge 个 in Chinese. He'd point at things and say, "Ge!" We speculated that he got that from the ge in zhège 这个 ("this") nàge 那个 ("that"), which he heard from the babysitters. However, since the ge was only really part of the word, we couldn't really count that as his first word.
He's also got a few other close contenders. When an airplane flies overhead, he says, "Woooo!" in imitation of the noise it makes. When a car drives by, he says "Vroom!", again in imitation of the noise it makes, which happened to be among my daughters first words as well.
One interesting thing is that he got basic intonation down before he ever said a word. He could long ask a question by pointing and saying some syllable with a rising intonation to make a tone. He would give a warning when something was amiss, like a door being open that we usually kept shut, with a sharp, high tone. He's use a fall tone to indicate comfort or the like.
Gestures came in before words as well. That's a well-known phenomena; children whose parents use sign language end up learning to communicate with that long before their peers learn to speak. Pointing, nodding his head, shaking his head, clapping after doing something good, tilting his head to the side to indicate inquisitiveness, etc., are all among the gestures he learned early on.
Old age begins at 27: Nevertheless, "abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increase until at least the age of 60." That, of course, would include languages.
The Economist translated into Chinese by Chinese readers (in Chinese) (via Waxy): If you like The Economist and are learning Chinese, here's a chance to read all of the articles translated into Chinese. What's great about this is that you can always refer back to the original English if you're confused. Now I'm sure there's a copyright issue or two to be found in here...
If you've ever done any serious running, you're probably familiar with the runners' nod. When two runners run past each other, there is a sort of ritualized greeting. It's like you're both members of some club and thus have to greet each other with the secret handshake, even if you've never met before. While two strangers walking past each other on the street hardly feel the need to greet each other, runners generally do.
In the U.S., this is the runners' nod; you meet eyes with the other runner and just nod at them briefly, with a brief smile being optional. (We'll often do the same to cyclists as well. I wonder if they call this the cyclists' nod.) A nod, as opposed to a vocal greeting, is used by necessity; often, on a run, you don't want to say anything because that could screw up your breathing, potentially resulting in cramps, side stitches, etc. A nod is subtle enough to let you greet the passerby and maintain your form at the same time.
The nod, however, is not universal. Nevertheless, some mystical runners' bond does seem to be somewhat universal, so that even in places where strangers would rarely greet each other runners still seem to do so. What changes is not the fact that there is a greeting, but rather how it is done.
In Japan, for instance, the runners' nod becomes the runners' bow. Instead of a brief bending at the neck, you do a very brief bow, bending instead at the waist. In order to avoid breaking your running stride, this bow is generally very limited; even in cases where politeness would require a somewhat deeper bow, runners don't bother. Here the typical rules of politeness take a bow (lame pun fully intended) to the rules of good running form and allow you to minimize the bowing.
If you do the nod in Japan, people will probably get your drift, but it's like speaking with an accent; they understand you, but you're clearly not quite there yet in the "language". Yup, I'm saying that body language is part of learning a language, and it's one that's very rarely covered in any book. So be sure to not just listen and read, but to watch as well; watch how native speakers move when they're talking. Mastering the body language used by native speakers will go a long way to making you seem more like one.
Why learn profanities? Surely civilized society has no need for such vulgarity. Well, that may indeed be true, but it doesn't change one basic fact about profanities: people use them, and hardly infrequently. For instance, according to this word frequency list showing the top 1,000 words in English, the f-bomb is the 605th most common word in the English language. That list is created from TV and movie scripts, so I'm guessing that puts it higher up in the rankings than it would otherwise be, but even if you drop it to 2000th place, that's still within the range of words you'll need to learn to be reasonably fluent in a language. So, while it may not be necessary for you to be able to spew vile invective in your target language, you should at least be prepared to understand it.
And the Chinese grass-mud horse is a case in point. Be ready for some profanity, after the jump.
Read more...China has recently been cracking down on smut on the internet. Among such smut are vulgarities. A well-known though seldom-invoked curse in China is cāo nǐ mā 操你妈, which means "fuck your mom". The phrase cǎo ní mǎ 草泥马, on the other hand, is a nigh homophone which means "grass-mud horse". These only differ by the tones, but, when sung, tones are gone or much less noticeable. This has unsurprisingly led to a bunch ofgrass-mudhorsesongs videos. It has also promulgated a bunch of tongue-in-cheek "naturevideos" about the grass-mud horse. And the grass-mud horse is only one of the puns used in these videos. Others are either vulgar, politically subversive, or both. I'll leave you to dig through and find the rest, as I'm sure there are some that I didn't even get.
To bring this back to language learning, where would you have been without knowing profanities in this case? Knowing them, it's clear this is a joke. Without knowing them, you might come to think that you just learned that the Chinese call an alpaca (the animal used to depict the grass-mud horse) a grass-mud horse, and you might end up embarrassingly asking a friend, "Why are songs about the cǎo ní mǎ so popular lately?" By understanding it, you'll at least be able to avoid a situation like this.
There once was a [Chinese] guy who went to a foreign [i.e., non-Chinese] company for an interview, after which he got on an elevator to leave the building. When the door opened on one of the floors on the way down, the guy saw a sexily dressed woman, learning her body against the doorway of the elevator. In a seductive voice, she asked, "Loose enough, aren't I?" [In Chinese, this sounds a lot like the English "Going down?". More below.] The guy jokingly replied, "Yeah, you're pretty loose, but I don't mind at all." Before he knew it, the woman jumped in the elevator and slapped him, yelling "You damn pervert!"
That night, as the guy was laying down to go to sleep, he finally realized what the girl was trying to say: "Going down, right?"
OK, so it doesn't work quite as well in translation, but let me explain.
Chinese speakers who use a lot of English will often throw in English words with Chinese, including the word ba 吧. Ba can have various meanings, but one common translation would be "right?" or "isn't it?".
Go into any Western law firm's office in China and you'll find them using terms like "M&A", "capitalization", etc., and even words like "contract" mixed in with their Chinese. There are perfectly good Chinese words for all of these, and yet they throw these in there anyway. The same is true in other foreign companies in China; English is frequently used, and English words will be mixed into the Chinese. That's why the joke specifies that he interviewed at a foreign company.
Thus, you could very well hear someone say, "Going down ba?" That's what our joke's sexy lady was saying. What our less-worldly guy heard was, "Gòu yíndàng ba?", or "Loose enough, aren't I?" "Gòu yíndàng" of course sounds a heckuva lot like "Going down", followed by the ba mentioned above. And therein lies the joke.
Although the title of this post may sound oxymoronic, bear with me.
One of the Japanese podcasts that I listen to is 日本経済新聞＜総合版＞ (Nihon Keizai Shinbun Sougouban), which focuses on economic issues in Japanese and is of course aimed at native speakers. However, after commercials, an American announcer pops in and says, "The news continues on Radio Nikkei." In English. For those of you who've spent any time in Japan, that's hardly surprising, but could you imagine the parallel in the States? If they threw the same thing into an English podcast in, say, Spanish, I'd expect that most people would have no idea what's being said and that's why it rarely, if ever, happens in the States.
I'm not convinced that everyone in Japan would know what's being said in this case, although I might guess that the subscribers to this podcast are probably a bit above average. Still, everyone in Japan has studied English; it's required in school. So, in theory, they should be able to understand it.
So here's an interesting question. If a foreign language becomes so well understood among speakers of a given language that they throw words, phrases, and even entire sentences from that foreign language into the dialogue when using their native language, has that foreign language actually become part of their own language? Think about it another way; if someone comes to Japan from, say, China, would they need to understand English to the same level as the Japanese do in order to understand what's going on in Japanese? They very well might. Indeed, the Chinese are a very apt example, because one of their trouble points in Japanese are words written in katakana, which are primarily from English and don't share the Chinese character roots that many Japanese words do.
Different language learning methods serve various needs: Does RosettaStone have the best PR people ever, or is it just me? In an article noting how great immersion is, Rosetta Stone gets a nice blurb but no one notes how far it is from immersion. And don't even get me started on what Mark Frobose, author and founder of Macmillan Audio's foreign language audio line, says: audio CDs or downloads are "the single best way to learn a language". Seriously? So next time you have a choice between immersing yourself in a foreign country and listening to some CDs, go with the CDs! Riiiight.
Early Launch for Language: Money quote: "Children learn inductively, by example and by interacting with the environment around them, and adults tend to learn analytically and deductively." They treat this as a conclusion, but it's really just an observation. Ponder.
My Japanese father-in-law is studying Chinese. He's a major Sinophile, and I'm pretty sure that when he retires we'll be able to find him wandering around some obscure places in China. He's probably pretty happy that his daughter and son-in-law speak Chinese, and that our kids are effectively being raised trilingually, with Chinese one of the three.
I'm now back in Japan after a two-week stint in China, and I've come back with a suitcase full of Chinese children's books for the kids. When my father-in-law heard this, he wanted to see them, and he immediately grabbed one and started going through it, asking me questions about what they were saying.
He was asking questions mostly in Japanese but with some of his Chinese thrown in there. I found that, if he used Chinese, in replying to him I'd slip right into Chinese, even though I knew I should be using Japanese for him to understand. He might say something like 这是什么？ ("What is this?"), and, knowing full well that if I just broke out in Chinese to explain it he probably wouldn't understand, my first reaction was nevertheless still to start off with Chinese. It was as if by hearing the Chinese my mind had switched into Chinese mode and I had to think consciously to switch it to Japanese.
Read more...I found I was having particular trouble when I had to explain a Chinese phrase in the midst of Japanese. One book he looked at is called 丹利的菜园 ("Tanley's Vegetable Garden"). (Tanley is my best guess as to what the name is supposed to be in English.) While Japanese have an edge in understanding words made of Chinese characters based on meaning, such as 菜园 ("vegetable garden"), phonetic words, such as 丹利 (Tanley), don't mean very much to them. So he asked me what that was. To answer him, I said, "I think the rabbit's name is Tanley," using the Chinese word for Tanley: ウサギの名前は丹利だと思う. To say that, I had to be conscious of what I was saying in order to avoid continuing on in Chinese.
More broadly speaking, being in China for two weeks seems to have put me in Chinese mode. When I got back to Japan on Sunday, I found myself responding with hèi 嘿, when someone called me, which would roughly be the equivalent of "Yeah?" in English. The Japanese equivalent would be hai, but Chinese was just jumping out of my mouth.
One of my most interesting examples of this sort of issue occurred when I just returned to the States from Brazil. In Brazil, I wasn't using anything but Portuguese, so I was completely converted over to Portuguese mode. It was maybe the first or second day I had been back. My mom was pulling something out of the dryer and asked me a question about the clothes. I responded to her, and she laughed awkwardly. The problem was that there was nothing funny about what I said—it was just some mundane comment about the clothes—but when I thought back to what had just came out of my mouth, I realized it was Portuguese. The thing that made this so interesting was that I didn't even realize that I had used Portuguese until her response made me replay it in my head.
So, I'm curious... have any of you had anything like this happen to you before? If so, drop a line in the comments.
I'm sitting in the airport right now on my way back to Beijing from Hong Kong. One thing I find to be quite interesting about Hong Kong is that, when I'm here, I can always relate to Mainlanders who come here and can't communicate with people. Today I spoke with two Mainlanders who speak English. We could relate to each other very well as we spoke about how taxi drivers here understand neither English or Mandarin, so we're left writing out characters for them to figure out what we mean.
I'm not often in a place where I'm surrounded by a language I can't understand, but when I am I get an overwhelming urge to learn it. Yesterday I was in Shanghai and got to hear lots of Shanghainese around me, which made me wish I knew more. I can pick out some things in both Cantonese and Shanghainese, but I'm certainly not at a point of having any meaningful communication in either.
But I can say that if somewhere down the line I find myself in either of those cities for a longer stint, which, I would say, is not entirely unlikely, I'm definitely going to squander some of my free time in an effort to learn the local tongue.
LibriVox bills itself as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain". Translated from that cute catch phrase back to English, that means they have audio book versions of books that are in the public domain, with links to the textual versions as well. 
just got 
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
[Amazon]
[Amazon]
When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.
You are probably wondering right now what the heck a picture of 
is doing accompanying this post.
El Último Beso by Los Boltons (a Spanish cover of 
Subscribe to