One of the points of contention in the ongoing back-and-forth between Steve Kaufmann and Benny the Irish Polyglot is whether Benny can truly pull off fluency in three months. Specifically, Benny is in Berlin studying German right now and will deem himself fluent if he can pass a really hard German test and if he can fool native speakers for 30 seconds that he is a Berliner.
Sounding like a native and amassing enough vocab to pass a difficult exam is impossible IMHO. Senseless hype.
I can confidently state that this is not impossible; I myself did with Portuguese exactly what Benny is trying to do with German. (And that's not even getting into wunderkinds like Daniel Tammet.) That said, I'm doubtful that Benny can pull this off in Berlin because there are some very important differences between his situation in Germany and mine in Brazil that will make it a harder task for him to accomplish than it was for me.
Read more...The tourist visa I got to go to Brazil was for exactly 90 days, and I stayed for the entire 90 days. I had never formally studied any Portuguese before arriving in Brazil, and in fact the only thing close to studying I had done at that point was reading some parts of a Portuguese grammar book more than a year before arriving in Brazil. And that book was for the Portuguese of Portugal, so it had a number of things that were useless for me in Brazil.
On the other hand, my Spanish was pretty good. I had studied Spanish throughout middle school and high school, and had previously spent a month in Mexico studying it more. Spanish is of course not Portuguese, but they are so close that the benefit of knowing one when studying the other shouldn't be downplayed; knowing Spanish was without a doubt a massive help in learning Portuguese.
On top of that, I had a great learning environment. I was living with a large Brazilian host family and there was almost always someone around to talk with. I also had a Brazilian girlfriend with whom I was constantly speaking. I didn't need to do anything but study Portuguese, so except for the occasional emails in other languages to my friends abroad (which was further limited by the hassle of a dial-up connection I had to use), it was all Portuguese all the time for me.
In terms of what I was doing to learn Portuguese, the first two weeks or so I focused on getting an understanding of the grammar. Then I moved onto exposure: music, comics (Spawn, in particular), books (a history of the Roman Empire was one I spent a lot of time on, but there were a number of others as well), television (which was always on when I was doing anything else), etc.
Naturally, I spent a lot of time getting the vocab down. I still have my digital Portuguese flashcards as they were when I left Brazil. The flashcards contained some 4,000 vocabulary words and phrases. Add to those a few thousand words that never made it to flashcards (because they were so much like English or Spanish that there was no need to do anything to memorize them, or that I just managed to pick up elsewhere) or that got deleted from the set once I knew them, and I'd estimate that I had at least 6,000 to 7,000 words in my head to some degree when I left Brazil.
Using Benny' standard for fluency—fooling native speakers for at least 30 seconds that you are a native speaker yourself and passing a really hard test—I seemed to have been fluent in Portuguese after my three months there.
When I was leaving Brazil, I managed to fool the lady at the airport check-in that I was Brazilian. I can't recall if it was precisely 30 seconds, but I'd venture that it was. I remember that I had said a few things to her, including something about having already weighed my bags and that they shouldn't be overweight, before giving her my passport. Once I gave it to her, she said, "You're not Brazilian?" When I told her I was there studying Portuguese, she was shocked to find out I had only been there for three months. I'm guessing somewhere in the course of our conversation I eventually said something non-Brazilian sounding, but, based on her reaction to my passport, I do think I had her fooled at the beginning.
Regarding the test, I came back from Brazil and took my university's Portuguese placement exam. I got placed out of all the language-learning classes and straight into the literature classes (i.e., the ones where you might be sitting next to a native Brazilian). I think that my experience shows that three months can prepare you quite well for difficult tests.
However, I'm doubtful that Benny will be able to pull it off. If you compare my situation in Brazil to Benny's situation in Germany, there are a number of things that gave me a big advantage. First, my Spanish abilities made Portuguese so (so, so, so) much easier. Benny doesn't have anything comparable with respect to German. Second, the only thing I was doing was learning or using Portuguese, whereas Benny is working (presumably not in German) and blogging in English, and that is likely eating up a big chunk of his time. Third, my guess is that the test that Benny wants to take is a heckuva lot harder than the test I took, so I'm not so sure that he'll be able to pass it as easily as I was able to pass the one I took.
Indeed, the only advantage that Benny has over me is that he's studied some German previously, but, based on what Benny himself as said, that recollection is faint at best, although it will nevertheless provide some familiarity.
So while I'd love to see Benny do exactly what he's going for, if I were a gambling man, I'd definitely be betting against him pulling it off.
Rico Suave suggests language learning aids you in finding a future husband or wife by simply "increasing the size of your selection pool."
I don't think we can deny Mr. Suave's point. Indeed, given that I found my own wife on one of my language-learning jaunts, it probably wouldn't be inappropriate for me to consider myself a beneficiary of this "increased pool".
However, I wonder whether or not this is the real Mr. Suave, or just an impersonator.
WordReference.com: WordReference is my first choice in Spanish, and it's often the only choice I ever need. Not only does it provide you free access to a few different traditional (read: dead-tree) dictionaries whenever you look up a word, but it also has its own content.
If none of those get you the definition, then it's time to turn to WordReference.com's forums. With hundreds of thousands of entries in the forums, I've almost always found that whatever I'm looking for that's not already in the dictionary is already in the forums. And, when that fails, posting something in the forum will get you a quick response. For example, I put up this post when I was trying to figure out how to say "I'll spare you the details" in Spanish (f.y.i., it's "Te ahorraré los detalles"). I got the answers I needed in a minute. That's right; one, single minute.
Reverso: Reverso doesn't have quite the depth of WordReference.com's content, but it is a solid dictionary and once in a while I manage to find a phrase there that I couldn't find in WordReference.com. Given the breadth of WordReference.com and its powerful forums, I rarely use this, but it does provide a good back-up.
SpanishDict.com: SpanishDict.com takes third place here because it doesn't seem to have quite the breadth of the first two. It does have concise definitions, so it might be a good thing to use if you're just starting out and don't need the level of detail found in WordReference.com. Like WordReference.com, it also has forums used in a similar manner, but they're no where near as developed as WordReference.com's.
There are also two other online dictionaries that bear mentioning but not inclusion in the above list: Diccionarios.com and Ultralingua. Because you can only perform a handful of searches in these dictionaries per day (they limit you in the hope that you'll buy an unlimited version), they're not really completely free, but they can serve as a good fall-back when none of the other dictionaries are getting what you need. If you use them only in that way, you're pretty unlikely to ever hit their daily-use limit.
You might note that I didn't mention example sentences or the ability to listen to words being pronounced at all above. That's because, unlike the selections in Japanese and Chinese, there are no dictionaries that I'm aware of that implement these features in Spanish. Although you can find pretty much any word you like in the above dictionaries, you're often on your own to find a way to hear the pronunciations (here's one way to do that) and to find example sentences. There are of course some example sentences in the dictionaries above, but there's definitely no systematic sentence collection from net sources like that found in the Japanese-English dictionary ALC.
As always, let's hear what you've got to say in the comments below—especially if you can point me to an even better dictionary that I missed!
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.
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!
Ramses of Spanish-Only.com is a man who likes his sentences. While I tend to butt heads with him on grammar-learning methods, I do agree with him wholly on the value of sentences in language learning. I use them (although not solely, as he does) to learn vocab, and finding good sentences can be something of a challenge.
There's nothing quite like context to help you learn a language, whether for vocab or catching grammatical rules in practice, and sentences give you bite-size chunks of context good for just that. They won't be quite as useful for you as they were for Ramses (who got them from their original context), but the database can save you some work if you're looking for a ton of sentences that already have translations conveniently located nearby.
My one request at this point is a way to easily incorporate these into a spaced-repetition system. Currently, as far as I can tell, you'd have to pluck out the sentences one by one, but hopefully that is something that will change over time as it continues to be a work in progress.
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.
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.
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:
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.
As you may know, this blog is the companion site to a book I'm currently working called—you guessed it—Street-Smart Language Learning. The following is an except from the current draft of the manuscript. As I've yet to properly introduce myself on this blog, I've selected this excerpt from the book's introduction, which seeks to dispel with my story quickly so as to get readers to what they're really there for: how to learn languages.
When you tell someone that you speak eight languages, they are quick to label you as some kind of linguistic genius. And when you disagree with them, they assume you are just being modest. But as just such a person, I can tell you that I am no linguistic genius and I am not being modest when I disagree. Learning multiple languages hardly requires genius; our brains are all hard-wired to suck up languages, if only we approach language learning in the right way. Yes, that includes even you doubters out there who right now are saying, “Not me, I’m just not good a languages.” Yes, even you. With the right approach and a little bit of time, anyone can learn a foreign language. This book will help you formulate that approach and learn the foreign language(s) of your choice.
The rules that I’ve laid out for you in the subsequent parts of this book aren’t the result of any “survey of the literature” or the like. I’ve got no degree to make me an official linguist. In fact, I would say that my relationship to a linguist is the same as that of a criminal to a criminologist; they’ve got the data, the literature, and so on, while I’ve got the gritty experiences and the street smarts. These rules were developed over years, and to my own detriment even I didn’t always follow them, but to extent you can put these rules into practice you’ll be able to learn languages better and more quickly.
Before I arm you with all the tools you need to learn a language, let me first tell you a bit about myself and how I came to speak so many languages.
Read more...I was raised in an English-speaking Italian-American family just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I lived with my mother, father, grandmother, and sister. My parents and grandmother could speak Italian and initially tried to teach it to my sister and me. Unfortunately, after a few initial “I don’t wanna speak Italian!” tantrums from us, they gave up on it (and how I regret that now). They did, however, use it on occasion when they didn’t want us to understand, resulting in us picking up only certain choice exclamations (in addition to the stereotypical “Mamma mia!”, the not-so-vanilla “Vaffanculo!” comes to mind). This, and various relatives speaking in heavily accented English (including one who to this day swears that Italy under Mussolini was great), did result in me having a pretty good Italian accent when I ultimately did get back to studying it, but I definitely did not know enough to be considered anything other than monolingual.
My linguistic knowledge remained limited to English and handful of Italian phrases until middle school. Our school district kicked off language learning with a pretty worthless French/German/Spanish sampler in seventh grade. Based on your experience in that, you were supposed to pick which language you wanted to learn in eighth grade, and I went with Spanish. My choice was based less on what happened in that sampler than the fact that it was the closest of the three to Italian, so if I were ever to get to studying Italian I’d have an easier time, and that it was the de facto second language in the States. In class, I didn’t do poorly but there was nothing in particular that set me apart from any of the other students. However, Spanish was one of the subjects I liked and, knowing that languages are actually something that could be useful beyond primary school, I became eager to learn more.
I would finally get this chance as an upperclassman in high school after clearing out some of my other core graduation requirements. In eleventh grade, I added French. Thanks to its similarities with Spanish and a cooperative teacher, I was permitted to basically go at my own pace and managed to cover three years of our high school’s curriculum in one year. I followed up the summer after eleventh grade by taking a French course at nearby Chestnut Hill College, and in twelfth grade I found myself in the fifth – and highest – year of both Spanish and French.
That same year, I really wanted to take it up a notch. In addition to Spanish and French, I enrolled in a German class at high school, did an independent study in Italian with an Italian-speaking Spanish teacher, took a Japanese class at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and started studying Russian for free under the tutelage of my kind French teacher from Chestnut Hill College, Sister Kashuba.
The results from that year were mixed. Spanish continued along well and by the end of high school I could hold rudimentary conversations with a friend of mine who, although born in Mexico and having spent the first few years of his life there, had previously lost all his Spanish and at that point was at basically the same level as me. Although I abortively tried to read Camus’ The Stranger on my own in French and continued to do other things on my own as well, my French teacher preferred to spend time talking about his designer shoes (in English, no less) than give us a period of French a day. My French only improved to the extent I could push it forward alone with my nose buried in a book.
My German teacher begrudgingly let me knock off the first year of German with a placement test, but, unlike my French teacher the previous year, she decided that I had to stay with the class, which was excruciatingly slow and seriously limited the progress I made. On the other hand, going at my own pace in Italian, its similarities with Spanish and French, and the fun of finally learning that when my relatives described things like putting ketchup on pasta condescendingly as “midigan” they were actually saying americano in dialect, or that pastafazul meant (duh!) pasta and beans (again in a dialect), resulted in decent progress in Italian. I had assumed that a college-level language course would be challenging, but my Japanese teacher was frustratingly of the opinion that Japanese is difficult for us poor Westerners and that we should go slow—real slow. We were supposed to cover two textbooks over two semesters, but we got through the first only after skipping a bunch of stuff and only managed to do a chapter or two in the second. Needless to say, I didn’t learn much Japanese. In Russian I made good progress, but with all the other things going on that year, and since I wasn’t getting graded, I didn’t have the incentive or ability to put the time into it that I would have liked to. Unfortunately, I have yet to return to Russian and that remains as far as I’ve gotten in the language.
Besides two off-the-cuff road trips to Quebec from my home outside of Philadelphia, where I did put some French to use in a very limited way, my first venture out of English-speaking domains was a three-week senior trip to Germany. A German exchange student I met while he was in the States offered to host a friend and me for three weeks. While in Germany, we naturally studied German but also took numerous day trips around Germany. While it was a good initial outing (and certainly a better use of the money than renting a beach house at the Jersey shore, as most of my high-school classmates did), it was limited in utility for language learning by its short duration and the fact that I was with another native-English speaker most of the time.
A month or two later would lead to a trip that would result in the first language I would become proficient at: Japanese. Sometime during my senior year of high school, a friend of mine had told me about an announcement for a scholarship to study abroad with Rotary that I had somehow missed, but, as soon as I heard about it, I knew it was right up my alley. I ended up getting the scholarship (which, as I understand it, is quite a bit easier for Americans than non-Americans to get due to a big demand to come here; some other popular destinations seem to be France and Spain). I put Japan down as my first choice simply because, among the languages I had studied, it was the most different from English and would require more time on the ground to get the language down. As I was the only one in my group to choose a non-Western destination as my first choice, I got it. I left for Japan in August 1997.
Unlike some of the other exchange students in Japan, I had already graduated high school so my year in Japan didn’t really count towards any diploma or degree, leaving me free to focus solely on learning Japanese. While there, I began to crystallize a lot of the language-learning methods I had begun working on back in the States. I’ll get into the details of those in the rules below, but suffice to say that I was able to learn a great deal in what would turn out to be some ideal language-learning environments. Returning to the States to start college in the fall semester of 1998, I began studying intensive Chinese at George Washington University. But the broader picture was a language-learning plan that I had begun working on while in Japan and finalized during my freshman and sophomore years at college. The basic plan was that I would spend every single college break (i.e., based on the typical U.S. college schedule, about a month in winter and three months in summer) studying languages abroad, plus another year in Japan (to get my Japanese beyond high-school level), a year in China, and a semester in Spain (due to university requirements, I needed to be back on campus; as we had a campus in Spain that counted as “on campus”, I opted for that rather than heading back to DC). Since I was able to stay at the homes of various friends I had made among other exchange students, all I typically ended up paying for was plane tickets, and tuition abroad was usually cheaper than tuition on campus, so all of this was a surprisingly affordable thing to do.
The plan worked well. Winter 1998 was in Mexico, summer 1999 in Brazil, winter 1999 in Costa Rica, summer 2000 in Germany, academic year 2000-2001 in Japan, academic year 2001-2002 in China, summer 2002 in Taiwan and Italy, fall semester 2002 in Spain, winter 2002 in Italy, and summer 2003 in France. In 2003, I started law school at the University of Pennsylvania with a similar plan in law school, except that it was focused on Chinese alone, so winter 2003, summer 2004, winter 2004, and part of summer 2005 were all spent in China. After a month-long stop-off in Japan in January 2006, I spent the rest of calendar year 2006 in China to obtain a master’s degree in Chinese law from Tsinghua University. The program was primarily in English—a big downer for language-learning purposes—but I was able to take a couple courses in Chinese (and somehow struggle through them).
I met my Japanese wife while in Japan in 2000. We initially spoke English (at the time, I was trying to get her to break up with her then-boyfriend, and I compromised on my language-learning rules in order to claim the linguistic home turf while trying to woo her away from him), but then went to Japanese for a while. We are now back speaking English (as we live in the States, her English proficiency is more important than my Japanese proficiency), but she speaks Japanese to our children and we also typically have a Chinese nanny or Chinese babysitters in order to teach our kids Chinese. English, Japanese, and Chinese are in constant use around the house, and, from time to time, I use Italian with my mom and French with my wife when we don’t want the kids and/or my mom to understand what we’re saying.
And that’s basically where I am. In sum, I can speak English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and that’s roughly in order from strongest to weakest. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as native-level or fluent in any of these languages, although I might be able to fool native speakers over the phone for a few minutes. For at least Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, I would describe myself as proficient, meaning that I can function reasonably effectively in a business setting in fields that I am familiar with. In all of these, however, I can easily do the basic “get around” stuff and hold social conversations, and I think if needed I could get them all up to proficiency in short order. Moreover, in my work as a lawyer, I have so far had to review contracts or conduct other business in all of those languages, and, with the help of an online dictionary or two, it hasn’t been a problem at all. (As an odd little aside, I’ve even had to do a preliminary review of a document in Dutch (i.e., just to determine who should be reviewing it), and I was able to do that thanks to an online dictionary and its similarities with German.)
After the jump,Below you'll find a list of my favorite free online dictionaries for each of the languages I speak. There are numerous other dictionaries out there that you need to pay for, but I'm interested in doing this without shelling out a dime because, well, because you can, so why shell out that dime? Moreover, some of these websites have a lot more than just language-learning dictionaries, but here I'm just looking at their dictionaries.
If you'd like to just cut to the chase and get to a list of dictionaries by language, click here. Otherwise, read on for a brief description of each dictionary. Read more...
WordReference.com: This is one of my favorite online dictionaries and my start-off point for Italian and Spanish. It has generally great word coverage. For Chinese and Japanese, my big complaint is that they don't tell you how the characters are pronounced.
Languages: English to and from French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. In beta, English to and from Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.
Reverso: This is my start-off point for Portuguese and a great back-up for the others. I generally prefer WordReference to this because I've found their coverage to be a bit better, especially for phrases, but it's a close call. The specialized dictionaries are also a welcome addition.
Languages: English to and from Chinese, French, French business terms, French computer terms, French medical terms, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Spanish computer terms.
ALC: This is my start-off point for Japanese and my favorite dictionary of them all. From what I gather, in addition to having a standard dictionary, this dictionary trolls the net for examples on the net where the phrase in question is in both Japanese and English and then adds that to their database. Even if there's no specific dictionary entry, you'll be able to get the third-party translation. I've been able to find difficult legal terms here that I was unable to find anywhere else. My only complaint is that, as it's made for Japanese users, it doesn't tell you how kanji words are pronounced. Which is why I still make frequent use of the next one...
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
Goo: Goo's dictionary is a more standard dictionary than ALC that has good coverage and provides the pronunciation for kanji words.
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
Jeffrey's: While pretty rough in appearance, this serves as a valuable back-up Japanese dictionary and is the only one I use that is aimed at Japanese learners rather than Japanese speakers.
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
MDGB: My first stop in Chinese. Geared toward English speakers, they have great word and phrase coverage and also provide the pronunciation and audio recordings of pronunciations.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Dict.cn: This is an excellent dictionary that takes a page from ALC and gets samples from the net. It is another of my favorites, although it doesn't provide you with the pronunciation of characters as MDGB does.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Iciba: Another solid Chinese dictionary, similar to Dict.cn.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Lexilogos: This site is great because it lets you look up your word into all the other major dictionaries, including my mainstays of WordReference and Reverso, all from a single page. It makes for a one-stop-shop in French.
French to and from English and many, many other languages.
LEO: This dictionary beats WordReference in terms of the number of phrases it generates for each word, and hence has become my first stop when looking up German words. It is one of several very good English-German dictionaries.
Languages: English to and from German.
BEOLINGUS: Another solid entry in the German category, with results similar to LEO.
Languages: English to and from German. German to and from Portuguese and Spanish.
English Grammar Online: Yet another solid entry in the German category, again with results similar to LEO.
Languages: English to and from German.
SpanishDict: This is another very solid Spanish dictionary that I turn to from time to time. They claim to be the largest Spanish-English dictionary on the net.
Woxicon: This one gives very short, typically one-word translations between multiple languages at the same time. While it does not have lot of depth, I've found it particularly useful for figuring out, say, whether the way something is expressed in one Romance language is the same in another.
Languages: To and from Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
LookWAYup: This one limits what you get in the free version to entice you to purchase an upgrade version. I use it primarily as a back-up when one of my mainstays turns up blank.
Languages: English to and from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Ultralingua: Ultralingua makes high-quality dictionaries for download or for subscribers. The free dictionaries they host on their website allow unlimited access to their dictionaries but a limited number of searches per day. While this means they cannot be your mainstay dictionary, they are a great back-up dictionary to try out when other ones aren't given you the word you're looking for.
Languages: English to and from Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. French to and from German, Italian, and Spanish. Portuguese to and from Spanish.
Beyond the above dictionaries, if you can't find the word you're looking for try plain old Google. The trick is to write the phrase in the target language and then write another phrase in English that you think would be in a translation of it. Doing this, you can typically find a text that contains the word and is translated into English (which is exactly what ALC does and is why I love it so much), and then all you need to do is figure out how they match up. You may need a native-speaker tutor for a bit of help in that regard (if they can't just tell you what it means to begin with).
Here are my favorite dictionaries for each of my languages in the order I typically turn to them.
Wiktionary has frequency lists of words in various language. There are a variety of languages covered, including English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and others. These are great for focusing your vocabulary efforts in the most efficient way possible.
The Times Online is reporting that Spanish is set to take German's position as the second most studied language in the U.K., right after French.
This change is in line with those languages' respective rankings by GDP. However, you might expect French to fall a bit, but being next-door neighbors likely keeps it up there.
I'd imagine that the popularity of a given foreign language in a given country is based on three things: the economic opportunities in the language (of which the global GDP represented by such speakers is probably a pretty good proxy), the country's proximity to speakers of that language, and the history of that language in the country.
With France, Spain, and Germany all among the wealthiest countries in the world and all nearby, plus a long history of strong relationships with all three countries, it's no surprise that these make the U.K.'s top three.
According to the National Centre for Languages' report, Chinese is also on the upswing in a major way. Whereas Spanish is in 50% more schools than in 2005, and Italian in about 150% more, Chinese is in 600% more. This would suggest that the perceived opportunities that Chinese has to offer are growing, and that's in line with their GDP ranking.
What I'm left wondering is where is Japanese in all this?
There are many reasons to pick a particular language to learn. If there is a de facto second language of importance in your country (Spanish in the States, French in Canada, etc.), it probably makes a lot of sense to choose that language, particularly if you don't see any globe trotting in your future. If your relatives or spouse speak another language, it's not a bad idea to learn that language. And many still choose a language because they like the way it sounds (français, anyone?).
My preferred method of choosing which language to learn is based on its economic utility. As I do tend to be a bit of the globe-trotting type, I've never really limited myself to any region or the like. Without such limitations, it makes a lot of sense to choose the languages you learn based on the percentage of world GDP represented by speakers of those languages.
Read more...And that was roughly how I chose the languages I've studied: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I knew which countries had the largest economies and I put their languages on a checklist, so it's hardly a coincidence that the languages I speak coincide with those at the top of the top-20 list below.
Rank
Language
Percentage of world GDP
1
English
29.3%
2
Chinese
12.5%
3
Japanese
7%
4
Spanish
6.5%
5
German
5.5%
6
French
4.6%
7
Portuguese
3.3%
8
Italian
3.2%
9
Russian
2.6%
10
Arabic
2.5%
11
Hindi
2.3%
12
Korean
1.7%
13
Indonesian
1.4%
14
Dutch
1.3%
15
Bengali
1%
16
Turkish
0.9%
17
Thai
0.9%
18
Polish
0.9%
N/A
Other
12.5%
This list was put together by Unicode.org and the data covered by the list runs from 1975-2002, although projections through 2010 for the most part retain the same order. One interesting thing to note about the projections is that the "other" group declines to only 10%, meaning the relative importance of the top 18 languages increases. It's also worth noting, if unsurprisingly, that internet use by language largely corresponds with this list, according to data collected on Wikipedia.
There are two things that this data leaves me wanting. First is the obvious update of the data to cover through 2008, as well as longer projections going forward. Second, I'd love to see a chart based on the actual number of speakers of a all languages, rather than on the number of native speakers. For example, estimates for the number of English speakers vary from around half a billion to a billion, depending on the skill level at which you count someone as a "speaker". This would result in counting multilingual people multiple times, which might make it trickier to slice and dice the data to get a GDP figure, but I'm sure some enterprising statistician somewhere could get something we could work with.
Given the large percentage of GDP controlled by English speakers, it seems to be quite a rational choice that, if you don't already speak English, you learn it. I imagine that English's role as a global lingua franca would push it even higher if that enterprising statistician I mentioned above came along to give us the data.
I came across one memorable instance of seeing English function as the global lingua franca while interning during college in the Japanese Diet (Japan's legislature) in the office of Yuriko Koike, whose background includes a degree from Egypt and having literally written the book on speaking Arabic in Japanese. During one visit with some Arab dignitaries of some sort, they lamented that neither side was learning the other's language, but rather using English as a medium for communication. They suggested increasing learning on both sides, but somehow I doubt much ever came of it.
This post I wrote back in 2006 when my wife and I were talking about starting a blog on language learning for children. At the time, we were living in China with my daughter, who was just starting to speak, and a Chinese nanny. I think I intended to write more for the post, but since I've let it sit for so long, I can't recall where I was taking it. In any case, I'm posting it today, February 17, 2009, but keeping it's original date.
In the interest of full disclosure, we're not exactly the typical in terms of languages. In rough order of ability, Akiko speaks six (Japanese, English, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish) and I speak eight (English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German). Many say we both must be some kind of language geniuses, but I always argue against this assessment. What we had was not some blessed DNA, but rather a desire to learn languages and opportunities to do so which we took full advantage of. So while we have no qualifications in linguistics or the like whatsoever, we do know a thing or two about learning languages.
Our plan for our daughter and any other children that come along is for them to be fluent in multiple languages. English is an obvious first choice; even ignoring the fact that they'll be living in the States while they grow up and likely living there beyond that, English is of course the global language. And, of course, they'll need it to communicate with those in our family who haven't spent quite as much time learning other languages. Japanese is another no-brainer; they'll need it to communicate with the Japanese side of our family. Beyond these, we're incorporating two more languages: Chinese and Spanish. China's economic rise gives the Chinese language more and more import, and this will continue long into our children's lifetime. Spanish has become the unofficial second language of the United States and speaking it will be an advantage in a wide range of professions in the States.
There's also some strategy here if they want to branch out to other languages. Picking up another Germanic language—German, Dutch, Nordic languages, etc.—will be made at least a little bit easier by knowing English. Learning the other Romance languages—Italian, Portuguese, French, etc.—is much easier when you already know one. Learning Chinese—i.e., Mandarin—makes it easier to learn any of the other Chinese "dialects" (I put that in quotes because the they're usually as different as or even more different than the Romance languages which for some reason are not considered "dialects" of Latin). And learning Japanese can help with Korean.
If any of our kids branch out into any other language groups—Slavic languages like Russian, Semitic languages like Arabic, etc.—they won't get as much help from the languages they already know but they should already have the "hardware" for new languages. The hardware/software analogy is one I used often when describing my take on learning languages. With each new languages you learn, you're developing your language-learning facilities, i.e., the hardware. Grammatical rules, vocabulary, writing systems, accents, etc., are all just the software. The more languages, you learn, the better you develop your "hardware" and the more easily you can "install software". So if the language hardware is already top of the line, any languages they decide to take on should be made easier.
Of our four languages, we've got no convenient way to teach her Spanish at this point, so that's being held off on until we get back to the States and have some money to put towards it.
Our basic plan is creating the best environment for learning the language. We've hired a Chinese nanny to care for our daughter this year. She takes her our and she plays with all the Chinese kids in the neighborhood. Akiko is with her plenty as well, so Japanese is covered. I'm often busy at work and don't get to see her as much, so I always make a point of just running my mouth off in English when I'm with her, reading books to her, and simply teaching her what things are called.
So perhaps it's unsurprising that right now Chinese is her strongest language. It's generally her language of first choice when she proactively speaks, although it depends on which language she used to learn the word. For example, she learned to jump on the bed with me, so "jump" is in English. Japanese would be the next strongest, and English the least. However, in all of the languages she understands much of the same things when we say them, even if she doesn't proactively say them herself.
Several examples have already emerged of her knowing the words in multiple languages. "Dog" is one example. She recognizes and can say it in English, Japanese (wanwan), and Chinese (gǒu). She first learned it in Japanese, and that continues to be the most common to come out of her mouth, but Chinese has come more and more often as she's used gǒu with the nanny. She generally will only say "dog" when I first use it, but then she knows to use that instead of the other two. "Eat" is another example.
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
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.
El Último Beso by Los Boltons (a Spanish cover of 
Mirando el Mar by The Sound Lovers, 
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