What does a foreign language sound like to a non-native speaker, Benny Lava?

According to this Italian parody of a 60s/70s English-language pop song (via Fluent Every Year), it might just sound like gibberish...



I was about ready to write the English subtitles for that video, but who needs to add English subtitles to English-mimicking gibberish when you can add it to a completely foreign language?

This Tamil-language video, which has been floating around the internets for some time now, shows us that a foreign language might just sound surprisingly like a very humorous version of your own language.

Get ebooks with audio for free on LibriVox

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.

YouTube videos automatically captioned in English

If you're learning English and wondering where you can get video with subtitles, look no further than your friendly neighborhood YouTube. Google is launching some new features on YouTube that will make for some good language-learning resources for those whose target language is English. In particular:

1. For selected English video content, YouTube is implementing automatic captioning.


2. For all English video content, YouTube is implementing that ability for video owners to automatically caption their video by simply uploading a transcript of the video (YouTube will do all the work in terms of putting the captions in the right place).

Uploaded transcripts should in theory be perfect, but how about auto captioning? According to Google:

The captions will not always be perfect … but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Although I haven't tried it out, it seems like the owner of the video can edit the caption files, so there appears to be a means to correct incorrect machine captioning. It'd also be great if this was opened up in some way to crowd source, but that doesn't seem available at this point.

For you English learners, consider yourself lucky to have this tool available to you. For the rest of us, let's keep an eye out for Google expanding this to other languages.

Links:
Automatic captions in YouTube [The Official Google Blog]
YouTube Expands Auto-Captioning Program [WebProNews]
YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos [TechCrunch]

China pwnage

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.

Read more... Here's what they have:

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.

Link: Waking Dragon [New York Times]

Japan's foreign-language teaching industry valued at a cool $8.7 billion

There's an interesting article in The New York Times saying how Japan is gaga over learning English from Obama's speeches. They apparently even go gaga when they can't really get what he's saying; he's just that moving.

While that's fun and all, the most interesting part of the article was this little tidbit:

The publishers [of learning resources using Obama's speeches] are trying to tap into a foreign-language teaching industry [in Japan] that the Yano Search Institute said was valued at ¥767 billion, or $8.7 billion, in 2008. The figure includes the cost of books, CDs, dictionaries, e-learning programs, standardized English tests, and the cost of private language lessons. The institute, in Tokyo, says the majority of the spending is aimed at learning English.

Just to see it with all the zeroes, that's $8,700,000,000. To put that number into perspective, that's more than the GDP of 46 countries as listed in the CIA World Factbook. And that's in 2008—hardly a stellar year for the world economy.

So if you're in the language-learning industry and Japan's not a major focus for you, it's probably time to make a Japan plan.

75-year-old Iranian guy crowdsourcing a Farsi-English translation in Geneva airport

Here's an interesting anecdote about a 75-year-old Iranian guy crowsourcing a Farsi-English translation in the Geneva airport. Sounds like he's doing a pretty good job of getting it done that way, but perhaps someone should tell him about how to get his foreign-language writing corrected online for free.

Google's getting into the language-learning game

Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm, has invested an "undisclosed amount" of its $100 million in EnglishCentral, Inc., an English-language learning website where learners can watch popular videos (such as a clip from Forest Gump or a Red Bull ad) and then get graded on how well they pronounce the words spoken in the videos via EnglishCentral's "unique speech recognition platform".

This investment represents nothing more than Google dipping its toe in the water of the language-learning world. Let them get in up to their ankle or knees, and we'll all think back to the quaint days when we thought Rosetta Stone was a big player in the language-learning world.

Links:
EnglishCentral
Google Ventures, Atlas back language startup EnglishCentral [Mass High Tech]
Google Ventures Invests In English Language Learning Startup EnglishCentral [paidContent.org]

Get foreign-language text read to you online for free

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 online dictionaries 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.

Read more... What I found was Smartlink's text-to-speech website.

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.

5 Free English-Learning Tools to Help You Get Into Business School

The following is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer, whose name you may recognize from her guest post on Aspiring Polyglot earlier this week. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about accredited online colleges for OnlineColleges.net and guest blogs regularly on language-related topics.

Foreign students are always welcome in English-speaking business schools. Most programs love to accept diverse groups of applicants to simulate real-world scenarios in the classroom. To be considered for acceptance, however, you must be able to speak and write English relatively well. Fortunately, there are quite a few English-learning tools online that can help you brush up on your skills before you apply to your program of choice.

Five free tools that work particularly well for business school applicants, after the jump.

Read more... PhraseBase. Memorizing entire phrases is a good way for business school applicants to build vocabulary and gain an understanding of sentence structure and grammar at the same time. You can buy a phrasebook for this purpose or you can sign up for a free membership to PhraseBase. PhraseBase offers a free electronic phrasebook to its members. The phrasebook is customizable and can be accessed through a computer or mobile device.

VerbaLearn. In addition to learning new words and phrases, business school applicants should also regularly review the English words they already know. This can easily be done on VerbaLearn. VerbaLearn is a free web application that makes it easy for students to customize how and what they learn. The app offers many different tools for this purpose, including video flashcards, print flashcards, mp3 vocabulary lists, word usage reviews, fill-in-the-blank reviews, and crossword puzzles.

OWL. Getting a good score on the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) is a must—particularly for applicants who want to get accepted to a top business school program. To prepare for the GMAT, students should avoid getting bogged down with grammar study and instead focus on learning the most common grammar topics tested on the GMAT: verb usage, pronoun usage, and modifiers. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) is the perfect place to learn about all three of these things.

ETS. Although some business schools are willing to waive TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores for certain students, most do not. This makes scoring well on the test very important. One of the best places to prep for the TOEFL is the ETS site. ETS develops, administers and scores the TOEFL. Applicants who visit the ETS site can get information on the test and receive official practice tests, sample questions, and sample writing topics.

AddLang. When it comes to English language learning, there is no real substitution for practice. Before applying to a business school, applicants should make an effort to practice their English every chance they get. This isn't always possible at home, which is why it makes sense to join a social language network like AddLang. AddLang allows users to practice English with native speakers and communicate online through Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AOL Messenger.

Links:
15 Free Language Learning Podcasts [Aspiring Polyglot]
15 Free English Language Learning Sites [Al Jamiat]
15 Free Hi-Tech Language Learning Tools [English Virtual Community]
20 Free Online College and University Lectures [Debt-free Scholar]

Dear China: Banish Chinglish with free online corrections by native-English speakers

The BBC, among others, 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

1. 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 @$$.

2. 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.

3. 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 (what what?!)! Just make sure that, if you feel the need to mow the lawn, you follow the landscape rules.

4. 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.

5. 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...

6. 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!

Links:
Chinglish: Found in Translation[Amazon]
More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues[Amazon]
The Chinglish Files
The Chinglish Collection
The Chinglish Pool [Flickr]
Chinglish [Wikipedia]
Save Chinglish [Facebook]

Shanghai seeks to end 'Chinglish' [BBC]
Could it be the end of Chinglish? [Guardian]
Shanghai to purge itself of 'Chinglish' [Telegraph]

Get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free

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).

Lang-8

• Overview. Lang-8, based in Tokyo, is a two-person project by Yangyang Xi, CEO, and Kazuki Matsumoto, CTO, that focuses letting language learners get their texts corrected.


• 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.

CorrectMyText.com

• 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.


• Languages. Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.


• 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.

Livemocha

• 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.


• Languages. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu.


• 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.

Busuu

• 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.

LingQ

• 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 of focusing on grammar, 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.


• Languages. Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.


• Interface. LingQ recently made some system-wide improvements to the site, which included some interface improvements. The site before was fine, and the improvements made it better. Overall, a very usable interface.


• 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!

Can you help me improve my language-learning routine?

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!

thatwhichmatter: Advanced English grammar via Twitter

If you're learning English (as some of us native speakers still are), thatwhichmatter on Twitter (via Lifehacker via Daring Fireball) is full of bite-sized nuggets of English wisdom. While aimed at native speakers, I'm guessing if native speakers are screwing things up, so are the non-native learners, so get your advanced-English cap on and dive in.

Links:
ThatWhichMatter Delivers Grammar Tips in Tweets [Lifehacker]
ThatWhichMatter, a Splendid Twitter Feed on Grammar and Usage [Daring Fireball]

The official (free, online) Japanese-English dictionary of legal terms

Pretty much every day at work I make use of Japanese Law Translation, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is, but it's got a few neat tricks up its sleeve.

The website is maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Justice, with contributions from various lawyers (including those at my firm), legal academics, and others (more about its genesis is available here). It is in effect the official translation of legal terms in Japanese.

It has a basic bilingual dictionary, where you can look up words in English or Japanese. (And there are rumblings of later expanding it to include Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese as well.) It then gives you a list of the definitions that contain the word plus links to the laws it's found in.


However, not all terms that have been translated can be found in the dictionary, so another very useful tool is the ability to search translations of the law for the word you're looking for. That will get you both the English and the Japanese text and you can figure out how the word was translated.

As the website is a work in progress (and will need regular updating as laws change), not all laws and regulations are included yet, and as mentioned above not all terms have been added to the dictionary, but it is a very useful tool if you ever have a need for legalese in Japanese.

Mori to Clinton: Me too.

When I was studying abroad at Waseda University in college during the 2000-2001 academic year, a famous alumni of ours, Yoshiro Mori, was causing us a great deal of embarrassment by generally bungling his way about the prime ministership of Japan—with an abundance of verbal gaffes.

I was interning that year in Japan's legislature, and he wasn't exactly strongly supported there either. So it came as no surprise when the legislative-office rumor mill brought wind of an alleged interaction between Prime Minister Mori and U.S. President Bill Clinton at the G-8 summit that was held in Okinawa in July 2000, several months before my internship began.

Basically it went something like this. Mori, not very good at English, got some coaching from translators to help him at least get a basic greeting down for when he was to meet with Bill Clinton. But, instead of starting with, "How are you?", Mori forgot how it was supposed to go and blurted out...

Read more... Mori: Who are you?

Clinton: [surprised, but not missing a beat...] Haha, I'm Hillary's husband...

Mori: [apparently not realizing Clinton hadn't just said "I'm fine. And you?"] Me too.

So... a case of last-minute language learning gone horribly wrong, or a complete fabrication? Snopes calls shenanigans on this one, blaming the Japanese media, which hardly sounds unreasonable, given the climate at the time. On the other hand, here's a Japanese professor, asserting the truth of the story (or perhaps just parroting a media untruth).

I recall seeing a video of Mori going up and shaking hands with Clinton that was running in the Japanese media all those years back (a quick search on YouTube didn't get the video for me) which claimed to be a film of when the above was said, although it was taken from far enough away that nothing could be heard (convenient, right?).

I doubt Mori'd fess up if it's true, so someone give Bill a call and let's get the final word on this.

Drinking-party English

Today there was a going away party for some departing summer associates at my firm. One of the Japanese attorneys sitting nearby commented that it's difficult to understand drinking-party English (飲み会英語 nomikai eigo). And I can see what he means.

One particular utterance that came directly from my own mouth demonstrates the point neatly. Some of my more-or-less inebriated non-Japanese colleagues were chugging ramen. Slurping vigorously would be a more accurate description, but we settled on "chugging" to describe the action. When a bowl of ramen was passed my way, I declined, saying, "I ain't chuggin' no noodles!"

The linguistic dissection, after the jump.

Read more... Oh how "wrong" is that sentence, let me count the ways. First there's the sort-of-not-quite-right use of the word "chugging", described above. Then I swallowed the "g" at the end of "chugging", so that's one step farther from linguistic purity. Then there's the contraction "am not" to "ain't", which grammatical sticklers the world over frown upon (and which doesn't seemed to be covered in many English classes in Japan). And I bring it all together with the dreaded double negative, an even bigger grammatical faux pas in English.

Rather than being ungrammatical, what we really have here is an example of something that's only grammatically correct in a given kind of language (more on that here); in this case, very informal language. That, together with the somewhat creative word usage (more on that here) make it pretty tough to parse out the meaning for many English learners, even though native speakers would have no trouble (and even though some of those English learners can breeze through contracts and legalese in English that some native speakers might have trouble with).

The attorney in particular that made the comment is actually bolstering his English by watching U.S. television shows, among other things, and with enough of that I expect he'll sooner or later be able to tackle drinking-party English with ease. Now if we can just figure out how to get all English learners in Japan to get the same kind of exposure, we'll be making real headway.

Language-learning linkwrap 4/4/2009

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.

Young Americans going abroad to teach: When in economic peril, teach English abroad.

Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials: Say what? Babies can learn in their sleep! I wonder when and if that wears off...

On to Z! Quirky regional dictionary nears finish: For buffs of obscure Americanisms, this book's for you.

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.

Son's first word is ねんね ("sleep") in Japanese

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.

Language-learning linkwrap 3/15/09

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...

Where Education and Assimilation Collide: The New York Times discusses the debate over how to teach all of the non-English speakers coming into the States.

日本語を勉強する (in English): Aspiring Polyglot has a nice bunch of Japanese language-learning links.

The runners' nod and the runners' bow

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 do we call Japan "Japan"?

Kelly of Aspiring Polyglot left this comment on my earlier post about how to say "China" in Russian and Japanese:

Would you happen to know why we call Japan 'Japan' and not Nihon or Nippon?

This is one that I dug up a long time ago because I wondered the same thing.

The kanji for "Japan" are 日本. They respectively mean "sun" and "origin", or together "origin of the sun". This is of course from the perspective of China, to the East of which Japan lies in the same direction as where the sun rises. That's also where English gets "land of the rising sun" from, which is simply a more nuanced translation of the characters than "origin of the sun".

Read more...The word in Japanese is pronounced Nihon or, with a bit more emphasis or formality, Nippon. Nihon is actually a relatively recent shortening of Nippon, which in turn is a shortening of the readings of the two characters following normal character combination rules. 日 can be read nichi or jitsu in this case, and nichi is preferred here, while 本 can be read as hon. Typically, when two character are adjacent to each other in a single word, the first ends in chi or tsu, and the second starts with h-, the chi or tsu is dropped, the consonant doubled (or っ is added for all of you who are beyond romaji), and the h- becomes a p-. You thus get Nippon. You can also see the pattern in, e.g., ippon (一本, いっぽん, "one long, slender object") combining ichi and hon, or in happyaku (八百, はっぴゃく, "eight hundred") combining hachi and hyaku.

Once I had figured all this out when I was first studying Japanese, I thought I had figured out where "Japan" came from as well; obviously people had just used the other reading for 日 at some point, i.e., jitsu, which would have resulted in a reading of Jippon, and that's only a linguistic hop, skip and a jump away from "Japan".

As it turned out, I was on the right track but not quite there.

Nihon and "Japan" ultimately share the same etymological roots, but the path to the English word isn't very clear. It's believed that it came to English via one of the Chinese dialects' pronunciation of the characters 日本. It's these same pronunciations that likely supplied both the j in jitsu, and in "Japan", so my guess was a wee bit too high in the etymological tree.

Marco Polo called Japan "Cipangu", which, in Italian, would be pronounced like "Cheepangoo". (The gu is from the Chinese character 国, meaning country or kingdom, and which is currently pronounced guó in Mandarin.) This is thought to have come from a Wu dialect like Shanghainese. The Portuguese also brought words like Giapan over to Europe, which ultimately led to the English word. Below are a few of the Chinese dialects that might have been involved and their modern day pronunciations of Japan:

Cantonese	Jatbun
Fujianese	Jít-pún
Shanghainese	Zeppen

Links:
Names of Japan on Wikipedia
Japan in the Online Etymology Dictionary

Getting exposure to your target language in a plane

I'm currently on a plane on my way to Tokyo for a week-long trip there followed by a week-long trip to China. Sitting here, it's obvious what a useful environment for language learning your flying time can be; the by-necessity multilingual environment of a flight to another language zone means you can easily get some exposure to your target language while in transit that probably isn't always readily available outside of where the language is spoken.

Read more...The first opportunity you'll come across are the flight attendants, who will probably be there to greet you when you get on board. Greet them in your target language, and if you've got any questions, try to ask them in the target language. They'll probably initially make assumptions about what language you speak. On a flight like mine from New York to Tokyo, Japanese-looking Asians will be initially addressed in Japanese and everyone else will initially be addressed in English, if the flight attendants have the language skills. I'm on a Japan Airlines flight, so most of the flight attendants are Japanese but of course all of them also speak English. Before I said anything to them, they predictably spoke to me in English, but once I spoke to them in Japanese they switched to Japanese. Some of them seem to be prefer Japanese when possible, and I'm more than happy to accommodate. You'll sometimes find that even if you speak your target language, they'll still won't use it back to you, but be stubborn; don't switch back just because they don't deem you target language worthy. Some flights will not have so many target language speakers, such as my typical Continental flights to Japan. In that case, you can direct any questions you have to those who speak the target language.

Although you're more likely to need to communicate in some way with the flight attendants, your fellow passengers are another good source for target language exposure. There's probably a pretty good chance that the person sitting next to you is a target language speaker. Find a way to strike up a conversation. Unfortunately, the person I'm sitting next to right now is a bit reticent and has been sleeping most the time, but on other flights I've had great conversations with those sitting next to me.

When they come around with reading material, grab something in the target language. Even if you're not that strong in the target language, get a newspaper or the like and see what you can understand. A few words here and a few words there might be all you can get, but it's nevertheless more exposure. There's also some reading material in the seat pocket in front of you and on signs around the plane. Although safety instructions and the like might not be the most exciting things in the world, they're usually in the target language and one or more other languages, so you've probably got a translation already sitting right in front of you.

The onboard entertainment is another good source. It will typically be in multiple languages, either with target language audio or with target language subtitles. Watch some of these to see what you can pick up, or if you're getting it all just sit back and enjoy.

And, of course, don't forget to be a good little Boy Scout and "be prepared". With a laptop, iPod, electronic dictionary, and an array of other possibilities, you can make that "wasted" flight time quite productive.

Tim Ferriss and language learning

For those of you that haven't stumbled upon it yet, Tim Ferriss's blog is quite an interesting read, but I am of course most interested in his posts about languages, the best of which are:

• How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
• Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate
• Youse, Y’All, and Other Confusions of Modern English
• How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour
• How to Resurrect Your High School Spanish… or Any Language

Once I get through Street-Smart Language Learning, you'll quickly see that I agree with almost all of his ideas.

And, courtesy of Tim's blog, here's a bonus link to a good article on frequency lists: Why and how to use frequency lists to learn words by Tom Cobb.

Related:
Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German
Word lists based on frequency of use

Bilingoz review: Great specialized Japanese vocab, could use some better study methods

Bilingoz (via Aspiring Polyglot), the brainchild of Mark MacIntyre, a Canadian who has logged nine years in Japan teaching English and finding the existing tools insufficient to teach those with a need for specialized vocabulary, is a study aid for English speakers in need of specialized Japanese vocabulary (or vice versa, I suppose), such as accounting, dentistry, metallurgy, etc., and one in particular that attracted a lawyer like me: law. So I kicked the tires by testing out my knowledge of basic Japanese legal terms, which (thank goodness) I seem to know pretty well.

Read more...Here's what you can do on Bilingoz:

• "Study", i.e., play a matching game in which you are presented with a six-by-five grid, with each square of the grid containing either Japanese or English. You must then match up the squares, similar to the child's game Memory.
• Take a "quiz", i.e, do a multiple-choice quiz, which randomly selects wrong answers from the English translations of other vocab.
• Listen to an audio recording of the words in Japanese at the basic level (i.e., their least advanced level). This is incredibly convenient and will save you a lot of time when you can't recall how a character is pronounced. Hopefully, they'll be added to the more advanced levels sometime soon.

And that's about it. Not quite a one-trick pony, but not far from it.

The exercises suffer from the process of elimination problem, which I've discussed before; because you can use testing strategy to eliminate answers, you can often figure out the right answer without really recognizing the word when you see it. I confess to finding the Memory-likegame mildly entertaining, but I don't think it would be as effective as a more standard flashcard-based system. I'd love to see them add traditional flashcard review as an option.

The other big downer is that it doesn't record your progress. You don't log in, so there's no record of what you have or haven't studied, meaning that you'll probably repeat words you already know in the exercises while trying to cover those that you don't.

Nevertheless, the vocab lists are of high quality; I wish I had them when I first began learning Japanese legal terms, because using these tools could have saved me some time. And the pronunciation recordings at the basic level are quite convenient. While the tools leave something to be desired, they are not without their utility and I'd recommend Bilingoz if you need specialist vocabulary in one of the categories covered.

Saturday Chinese school for my daughter (and me)

To get back to the theme of ethnic experiences in the U.S. that I touched on earlier, many of you in the U.S. or Canada may remember from your childhood that you, if you're Asian, or your Asian friends always had to go to school on Saturday. While the rest of us were getting our brains rotted out by Saturday morning cartoons, Asian kids' parents forced them to do more school, as if any kid thought five days wasn't already enough. Those forced to go never seemed very happy about it, and often rebelled and stopped going when they got old enough to pull it off. As much as these kids may have been unhappy during classes, those who actually ended up sticking with it ended up (hopefully) thanking their parents, because they were probably pretty darn good at the languages that those classes were teaching them.

My daughter, age four, just kicked off her experience with this Asian-American tradition with Saturday Chinese school (yes, that is despite her Japanese mother and her Italian-American father). We recently discovered that there's one of these schools about ten minutes from our house and, although we missed the first semester, we were eager to get her started and finally got around to it today. While she's had Chinese nannies and babysitters for most of the time that she's been speaking, we found that she was progressing a lot more in English (she goes to English nursery school every day, karate once a week, and dance occasionally) and Japanese (she goes to Japanese Kumon classes twice a week and ballet once a week) than in China, whereas Chinese was originally her best language (she started speaking while we were in China).

As it turns out, her Chinese classes here are as much of a language experience for her as they are for my wife and me.

Read more...One of Felicia's babysitters had called the school this week to see what we needed to do to get her enrolled, as their online registration wasn't working. He basically said just go there at 9AM on Saturday to take care of whatever paperwork there was, and she should be set for class at 10:45AM.

We show up at the middle school where the classes are held to see a parking lot full of Chinese people (they were probably mostly or at least partially Chinese-American, but let's just keep it simple and call them "Chinese"). We then go into the cafeteria, which was something of a base for the classes and a gathering places for pretty much every one related to a kid attending any of the classes, and this too was chock full of Chinese people with an occasional white person (case in point) floating around. In the typical entrepreneurial Chinese style (that somehow, amazingly, Mao managed to suppress for a few decades last century), one person set up a store of various snacks and drinks on one table, looking like they had just bought bulk and driven it straight over here. And some of the scenes there were straight out of a movie like The Joy Luck Club, such as the cafeteria table claimed for a game of mah-jong by a group of grandparents, with grandchildren running around at their feet.

We wandered around the cafeteria for a bit and weren't sure who was in charge until someone started setting up a printer and a scanner at a desk near what I suppose was supposed to be the front of the cafeteria. So we walked up to them to inquire about what we needed to do.

We thought there might be a little issue about our daughter starting in the middle of the year, so my wife, who thinks I'm a better negotiator, had me do the talking. Although I'm pretty sure they all speak English just fine, I opted to use Chinese because of a concern about the classes. There's a Chinese class for Chinese speakers, like my daughter, and another for Chinese learners, i.e., English speakers who are starting to learn Chinese. I was concerned that they'd see my white face and think, "Oh, here's another one for the foreigner's class," and so I hoped to evade that discussion by going at them in Chinese. Doing that, they would assume that my Japanese wife is Chinese and then just put my daughter in the class that promises better language exposure by not using English (although the teacher did keep saying "sticker" in English while speaking Chinese in lieu of the perfectly available Chinese word tiēzhǐ). Sure enough, the mid-year start date was raised as an issue. We weren't concerned about my wife speaking up either, because her accent's good enough that she falls within a range that sounds Chinese, and Chinese people are always generically asking, "So you're from Southern China?" when they hear her talk.

Their first answer was, "No, we're full,", but one thing I found to be true in China was that, if someone initially said no to you, persistence could turn that into a yes, and I intended to see if the same thing worked here. The rational analysis sometimes seemed to be, "Is it less of a hassle to just say yes to this guy or to keep saying no?" If they say no and you just walk away, that's a piece of cake for them, but if you make a nag of yourself suddenly it becomes easier to just let you do whatever you want. (This is something I discovered as a kid worked with my parents too, but I'd rather my kids come up with this idea.) For instance, when I was studying Chinese in Beijing, the placement test put me a level or two below the top of maybe a dozen levels, but I wanted to be in the highest level possible because of how rapidly you can learn when you're immersed. When I was first told no, I kept bugging the person who told me no and several other people until I finally got bumped up, clearly above what the test results had gotten me. I'm not sure if this works in all bureaucracies in China (unfortunately, in some, a wad of cash will work much better), but it usually worth a shot.

The first answer we got from the Chinese administrator was, "Sorry, it's the middle of the year, we're full." So I said that we had called earlier this week and they said to show up at 9AM and we should be able to take care of everything. He asked who we spoke to and, since the babysitter called, I had no idea. I did know, however, that it was "the guy whose name and number were on the website", and I told him so. Apparently he had no idea who that was. After effectively repeating this interchange a few times, he finally gave in. I think he might have thought that the person our babysitter had spoken was someone important that was higher up in the administration, so he was weighing potentially needing to deal with that guy or just letting us sign up. He went for the signing up.

So we take care of the paperwork and whatnot and we're sitting in this cafeteria full of Chinese people. And then my son reminded me what good language-learning tools one-year-old kids can be; my son kept going up to people and pointing at them, and this would repeatedly result in them calling him cute and start talking with us.

My wife eventually left to run some errands, leaving me to escort our daughter to class. After dropping her off and again getting a chance to converse in Chinese - this time with the teacher, I was left alone. There happened to be free Chinese-langauge newspapers there so I picked one up and started reading it. It appears that the de facto standard Chinese in the U.S. uses traditional characters, and there were a few that were driving me nuts because I was sure I knew them as simplified characters but the traditional versions weren't ringing any bells. In any case, one of the articles I read was criticizing China's stimulus plan, saying it only helped bureaucrats' favored companies, while the U.S. stimulus plan was aimed at the average person. A pretty interesting read, but it was a shame I didn't have my dictionary with me because now I have to go back and reread it to find all the words I didn't know, if I even end up bothering to do so.

Today also happened to be the day of what they called "parent-teacher conferences", but were less the one-on-one meeting that that term conjures up than the teacher giving an update to all the parents at once. So I got to sit through my first such meeting in Chinese today, and I was surprised at how easily I was able to follow what she was saying. There were only two words I didn't get, but since they are things that the kids will be doing this upcoming semester (I got that much), I'll probably be learning the words soon enough.

So now we have a chance every Saturday to hang out in a hall full of Chinese speakers, and as my daughter makes friends and we meet people there, I'm sure we'll be putting our Chinese to great use. This is just one example of the many creative ways that you can find people to chat with, if not outright native-speaker tutors, and also get other kinds of exposure to your target language in less-than-obvous places far from the language zone. If you had asked me where I could find hundreds of Chinese people gathered together every Saturday in the New Jersey burbs just a month ago, I'm sure I would have had no idea. But now that I have found just that, it's definitely a great language-learning opportunity for all members of my family - and not only those for whom we're paying tuition.

Which language to argue in?

After my wife read this post, she started telling me about what might amount to an interesting trend. After noting that she herself prefers to argue in English rather than in Japanese, she said she heard the same thing from her Japanese-speaking American professor about his English-speaking Japanese wife. He told her that typically he'd be using Japanese while she'd be using English when they argue.

She cited two reasons for why she prefers English. The first, which I don't buy so much, is that English has more appropriate curse words to throw into the mix. I would agree that English has a leg up on Japanese in the curse word department, and we certainly use them a lot more, but Japanese attains the exact same effect through intonation and certain verbal forms rather than adding colorful vocabulary to the sentence. For instance, the standard, informal way of saying, "What are you looking at?" would be "Nani miteru?", "Nani miteru no?", with the no making it a bit softer, or "Nani miten no?", with the swallowing of the ru to an n making it sound more informal. You start to sound unhappy when you say, "Nani miterun da?" or, with a bit more oomph, "Nani miterun da yo?". When you're even more unhappy, so unhappy that you can't even say the whole thing, then it'd become "Nani miten da?" or, with oomph, "Nani miten da yo?" Depending on how it was said, that last one might be translated as "What the hell are you looking at?" To upgrade that to the equivalent of a stronger four-letter word in English, you would just make the intonation more angry, forceful, and emphatic.

The second reason, which makes a more sense to me, is that she said that when she switches languages, she switches cultures as well. I can relate to this better, as this is something I do as well. When visiting a friend in France with whom I had studied in Japan, she joked that she could tell what language I was speaking - English, French, or Japanese - without even hearing what I was saying due to the change in my mannerisms. As for arguing, Japanese culture is quite a bit less confrontational than our barbaric Western culture, and argumentative females remain a relatively rare species in Japan, so the cultural switch leaves her at something of an arguing disadvantage.

So I'm curious... has anyone else encountered anything like this in a multilingual relationship?

Languages, dialects, and politics

When you think logically about where to draw a line between a dialect and a language, it would seem that the place to draw the line would be at mutual intelligibility. If the way two groups of people speak is mutually intelligible but somewhat different in pronunciation, word usage, etc., you're looking at two dialects, whereas if those two patterns of speech are not mutually intelligible, you're looking at two languages.

This standard would generally work well as a rule of thumb. American, British, and Australian English would all be dialects, as would the Kantou and Kansai dialects of Japanese, while Spanish and Portuguese would be languages. However, such a division won't always hold true in all languages, and the big example I'm thinking of is Chinese.

Read more...China is a country full of what I, and apparently most linguists, would call languages. They are all for the most part related Sino-Tibetan languages, but as they are generally mutually unintelligible I'd classify them as languages. Indeed, the English of most of these end in the "-ese" suffix, designating them as languages rather than dialects, e.g., Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. However, in Chinese they are referred to as fāngyán 方言 ("dialects"). When referring to them directly, Chinese will often use the -huà -话 (roughly, "speak") suffix, which usually designates a dialect, e.g., Guǎngdōnghuà 广东话 ("Cantonese"), Shànghǎihuà 上海话 ("Shanghainese"), etc. Other examples of where this -huà -话 is used to designate a dialect are Pǔtōnghuà ("Mandarin", or literally "normal speak") and Měiguóhuà ("American English", or literally "America speak"). In contrast, the suffixes -yǔ -语 and -wén -文 are generally used to designate languages, e.g., Hànyǔ 汉语 ("Chinese", or literally "the Han language"), Zhōngwén 中文 ("Chinese", or literally "the Chinese language"), Yīngyǔ 英语 and Yīngwén 英文 ("English"), etc.

I often compare Chinese "dialects" to the Romance languages. The differences between Chinese dialects and the Romance languages are similar. The spoken word is generally mutually unintelligible, but you'll be able to pick out at a minimum some words and phrases. They all share a vast vocabulary base, although pronunciations often vary to the point of mutual unintelligibility. Grammar is extremely similar, so if you ever do need to learn another, you'll have little problem doing it. If you know one, you can do a pretty good job of reading another. Indeed, the two words above for Chinese emphasize this fact; -yǔ -语 emphasizes the spoken language, and hence is linked with the Han group and how they in particular speak, while -wén -文 emphasizes the written language, and hence is linked with all of China because of how the written language can largely be understood anywhere in China regardless of the dialect you speak.

So why is one called a dialect and the other a language? Although I'd venture that the gap between the Romance languages might be a bit bigger than the gap between the Chinese dialects, it seems to me that history and politics are at the heart of it. Europe has long been divided into countries, each more or less with its own language, stressing the difference. China, on the other hand, for whom national unity has been a long historical struggle and remains a core policy of the government, prefers to stress the oneness of the Chinese language while downplaying the differences that these dialects actually represent. But, if you consider them dialects, then you can make a pretty strong argument that the Romance languages are dialects of Latin. And if you consider the Romance languages to be languages, then, vice versa, you can argue that the Chinese dialects are mostly separate languages as well.

What does a language learner take home from this? If you speak Mandarin, don't think you're going to nail down Cantonese as easily as you'd go from American English to British English just because it's called a dialect. At the same time, don't think that the differences between Portuguese and Spanish are so great just because they're called separate languages. If you really want to know how far two languages/dialects are apart from each other, talk to some speakers of both languages are take a look at some language family trees, which can be found aplenty on Wikipedia.