Learning a language is no small undertaking. Many people find that languages are one of the most difficult things to learn. The process requires a lot of discipline and retraining your brain. If you're going to learn a new language, you want to make sure that your hard work is going to pay off.
Most people who decide to learn a new language either want to learn a lingua franca (a common language that people speak to communicate with one another) or a niche language (a language native to very few countries and not often spoken outside of those countries). Learning either of them opens up new opportunities and deciding which route is the best for you largely depends on how you intend to apply this new language in your life.
Consider Your Passion
Some people learn a language simply because it's on their bucket list. If this sounds like you, it mightn't matter which type of language you choose. As long as you're motivated and have an interest in the language or choose a language that's commonly described as relatively easy to learn, you're setting yourself up for a smooth journey.
If you intend to use a new language to set up a new life in a new country or to properly appreciate the art and culture of a place, learning a niche language might be more helpful. Scholars of Japanese culture might as well master the Japanese language – especially if they intend to go to Japan for an extended period of time.
For a Career
Learning a new language to increase your career prospects is a fantastic idea. If you've ever had a look through online job boards, you've probably seen jobs asking for employees with language skills. When learning a new language for a career, both the lingua franca route and the niche language route are good ideas. It all depends on what you intend to do with your career.
International companies have a strong preference for people who are fluent in a lingua franca because these people can help bridge gaps and forge connections to strengthen relationships with overseas partnerships. People who speak a lingua franca can do more in more parts of the world.
On the other hand, people who speak a niche language are highly valuable when it comes to specific countries and are usually harder to find. If a company wants to open up a manufacturing plant in Hungary, they might need someone who is highly fluent in Hungarian, a language commonly considered to be “difficult”, to get the job done.
For Travelling
Travellers need to know how to communicate with natives in the country they're visiting. It's helpful when purchasing something in a store, ordering a meal at a restaurant, or securing accommodation for the night. It's necessary in case of an emergency. If you need to speak with local authorities or get help, you're going to have a difficult time if you can't find a common language to speak.
In most parts of the world, it's not hard to find someone who speaks English. After all, it's the most common lingua franca. Despite that, you don't want to take for granted that you'll be able to find someone who speaks English when you're in an urgent situation. It helps to keep a translator app on your phone for emergencies – or learn some useful phrases in that particular language.
Research the lingua franca languages used in areas of the world you intend to travel to. If there aren't a lot of English speakers, learn the lingua franca used in a given region. In areas like the middle east, Persian and Hindustani are widely spoken as second languages and native languages. Knowing these languages will make your life easier.
Why Not Learn Both?
You don’t necessarily need to learn one or the other. There are instances in which knowing both a niche language and a lingua franca will help you cover all your bases. If you travel frequently or work overseas, it’s best to know as much as possible. There are numerous benefits to learning a second, third, or even fourth language. Communication is one of the most invaluable tools that human beings have. Anything you can do to maximize your ability to communicate is a worthwhile pursuit.
Sienna Walker is an experienced tutor, avid traveller, and a languages lover from Australia. She's passionate about self-improvement and is currently learning how to manage her travel finances through Brighter Finance. Whenever not working or planning another trip, Sienna is trying hard to pick up some new languages. She's currently focusing on Spanish and Norwegian. Feel free to reach out to her on Twitter.
Last year I wrote a post about the poor quality of subtitling on Netflix and am sorry to say that the same problems and frustrations continue to bug me. I've watched entire shows riddled with subtitles whose content is just nonsense.
It should read "And I even got that award off those feminists"
Netflix's subtitles for the British sitcom The IT Crowd were so awful that I can only imagine that they may have been automatically generated, not checked over, and subsequently just thrown onto the bottom of the screen.
YouTube should also get a special mention for subtitling quality. However, even though a lot of YouTube videos use automatically generated subtitles, the platform is kind enough to tell you they are and you don't have to pay a subscription for it like you do with Netflix.
However, the purpose of today's post isn't to name and shame bad subtitling (even though I just did), it's to praise Crunchyroll, a streaming service for anime, whose subtitles look like they were lovingly created and carefully implemented into shows.
If you don't watch anime, then you're probably not familiar with the platform Since all its shows are from Japan with Japanese audio, with the exception of a few dubs, a lot of subtitling goes on and they do it so well.
It's important to remember that Japanese uses a different writing system to English. One of my complaints with Netflix was that the Japanese text in scenes is often left untranslated. On Crunchyroll, not only are the subtitles placed over the Japanese text, but they also use same colouring as the original Japanese text, which makes everything clearer and makes the shows so much more enjoyable.
Crunchyroll's subtitling is exemplary of how to do it. Netflix should definitely take a page out of their book when it comes to subtitling all their programmes.
As we said on Wednesday, we're pretty excited for the Olympics. With that in mind, we thought we'd look at the events in the competition and how their names made their way into the English language.
Archery
The term "archery" came from the Anglo-French archerye and Old French archerie. These words, of course, came from the word for "archer". All the words surrounding archery inevitably have their roots in the Latin for bow, arcus. The root of arc comes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and meant "bowed" or "curved".
Athletics
Linguistically, "athletics" refers to the events in which "athletes" participate. In Greek, athlos was a contest and athlon was a prize. So basically, athletes compete in a contest to win a prize. Sounds about right, doesn't it? The term athletes in Greek was a prizefighter. This made its way into Latin as athleta and into English in the early 15th century.
Badminton
The racket sport of badminton takes its name from where the sport was first played. BadmintonHouse was in Gloucester, United Kingdom. Its name came from the Old English Badimyncgtun.
Basketball
It's a sport using balls and baskets, what more do you want?
Boxing
Boxing takes its name from box, a 14th-century verb that meant "to beat" which later meant "to fight with the fists" and gave us "boxing".
BMX
BMX is short for "Bicycle Motocross". We'll get to "cycling" in a bit.
Canoe (Slalom and Sprint)
The sport is named after the boat used. The word for that boat, canaoua, came from the Arawakan language used in Haiti in the mid-16th century. Many variants made their way into English, but by the 17th century it was established as "canoe".
Cycling
The term "cycling" refers to riding a bicycle, but "cycle" comes from Latin and Greek. In Greek, the work kyklos referred to many circular things and motions. This became cyclus in Late Latin.
Equestrian
Equestrian events involve horses, and the term itself means "relating to horses". However, the term eques in Latin was a horseman or a knight, and equus, of course,means "horse".
Fencing
"Fencing" is technically a shortened form of "defencing", the act of defending oneself. Just like you have to do in this swordsman's sport.
Football
Football obviously comes from putting the words "foot" and "ball" together. However, if you're from one of the countries that calls it "soccer", the term comes from the shortening of "association football".
Golf
After a century out of the Olympics, golf is back. The sport gets its name from Scottish in the mid-15th century; the term gouf came from the Middle Dutch term colf meaning a "stick", "club", or "bat". Nowadays, you can only play golf with a club, though.
Handball
Another obviously named ball sport. "Hand" + "ball" = "Handball".
Hockey
The term for hockey is thought to have come from a Middle French term for a shepherd's staff, the hoquet, since hockey sticks are thought to resemble the staves and crooks used by shepherds.
Judo
The martial art of judo, which originated in Japan, unsurprisingly has a Japanese name. In Japanese, judo means "gentle way", as ju means "gentle" and do means a "way" or "art". What you see is what you get.
As we're halfway through the Olympic events, we'll continue our look at the rest of the games on Monday, when we'll be even more excited as the competition will be in full swing!
Pokémon has been dominating the news recently. Older readers probably remember the phenomenon surrounding the franchise in the late '90s with the TV show, trading card game, and first generation of video games that got tonnes of people obsessed with catching them all. Now, after years of steady global popularity, it looks like the franchise has struck gold with the "Pokémon GO" app.
Now I'd like to look at some of the interesting linguistic features of Pokémon. Firstly, the name:
Pokémon, portmanteau
For those not familiar with the franchise, it's Japanese. However, the name isn't really Japanese, it's a portmanteau of English words that Japanese borrowed. In Japanese, the franchise is called "Poketto Monsutā" from the English "Pocket Monster". The Japanese was then shortened and merged to make "Pokémon".
Taking Pokémon around the world
Aside from the stories, the battling, and trading, the fact that Pokémon went global gave rise to some very interesting translations. Today I'd like to look at some of the best Pokémon from the first generation (also featured in Pokémon GO), and some of the most interesting translations used.
Scyther
Scyther is a bug/flying type Pokémon, and looks like a praying mantis with scythe-like blades for arms. In Japanese it was called strike, but the French name is awesome! It combines the French for insect (insecte) and the gardening tool pruning shears (sécateur), to make "Insecateur".
Alakazam
Alakazam has an amazing name, since it's the third of three evolutions, the first and second being "Abra" and "Kadabra"... get it? Abra, Kadabra, Alakazam.
Gyarados
Almost everywhere in the world, this Pokémon is a portmanteau of two monsters from Japanese monster movies, Gyaos and Rodan. However, for the French translation, they decided to go with Léviator, from Leviathan. Pretty cool, right?
Arcanine
The fire-type dog is a portmanteau of arcane and canine in English. However, in Japanese it is actually called Windie, due to its speed. Clearly that wouldn't have sounded right and needed to be changed.
Gengar
The name of this ghost-type Pokémon in Japanese was taken from the German word doppelgänger. In most countries, it goes by Gengar. However, the French translation went above and beyond when they combined the words for ectoplasm and plasma to call it Ectoplasma.
Dragonite
The dragon-type Pokémon has a cool name in both French and German. In French, it combines the Latin word for "dragon" and the French for "colossal", giving the name Dracolosse. I reckon German wins this localisation battle with Dragoran, from the words for "dragon" and the verb "to riot", randalieren.
Blastoise
In English, this water-type Pokémon's name is a portmanteau of "blast" and "tortoise". Everywhere but France kept it the same, with France opting for a portmanteau of the French for "turtle" and "tank", to give Tortank.
Charizard
The most popular of the original 150 Pokémon. This dragon-like fire/flying-type Pokémon is not only awesome in appearance, but its name in most localised languages is awesome. Of course, English is a combination of "char" and "lizard". In French it's Dracofeu, from "dragon" in Latin and "fire" in French. German wins this round with a combination of "ember", "dragon", and "rocket", giving us Glurak. Regardless, you probably want this Pokémon in your team.
I was reading an article on the BBC today about how Iranian state media isn't happy about some English-language clothing and claims it to be offensive. If you're interested in the story, you can find the article here. This got me thinking about some of the awful English I've seen on clothes around the world.
Whenever I find myself outside of the UK or English-speaking countries, I can't help but giggle to myself when I see someone wearing clothing with terrible or poorly translated English on it. If you'd like to amuse yourself with nonsense English, a quick internet search will reveal plenty of brilliant nonsense that people unknowingly sport on their t-shirts as they leave the house. One of my personal favourites is "The pig is full of many many cats", whatever that's supposed to mean.
This phenomenon extends far beyond clothing, though. There are also examples of bad English tattoos, which are far more unfortunate than a dodgy translation on a t-shirt (and a lot more painful to get rid of). The internet is a also great resource for finding them, including (but not limited to): "I'm awsome", "beliefe in dreams", and "What didn't killed me, made me stronger".
These examples are unfortunate for some, but not really a problem. However, bad translation has become a problem in South Korea, where the government has had to set up a task force dealing with horrendous menu translations. Food experts and language experts are helping create better restaurant translations in English, Chinese, and Japanese. There's another good article from the BBC about it here.
If you're buying or making a cheap t-shirt, you probably don't care about hiring a professional to translate or proofread it before it goes into production. If you're getting a tattoo on a drunken night out, you're probably beyond the point of thinking twice about the spelling, grammar, and punctuation that's going to be put permanently on your body.
Good translations can sell good products.
What really gets me, when it comes to restaurants, hotels, and plenty of other businesses, is how little some seem to care about their translations. I've seen so many horrendous restaurant menus (in some very good restaurants, too) that could have been translated perfectly, but weren't.
Maybe it's to save some money. Maybe there's someone at your restaurant who's pretty good at a foreign language, so why don't you get them to translate your menu? That's a huge mistake! Restaurant menus, in terms of words, are generally quite short and simple for a professional translator.
These kinds of documents are a piece of cake for a qualified professional native translator, especially one who lives or has lived in your country, is familiar with the cuisine, and will create a better and tastier-sounding menu than Google Translate or a staff member who's okay when it comes to chatting to foreign customers.
The same goes for all documentation across all businesses. When someone visits your business, whether in person or online, you don't want a poor translation representing you. In a busy market, customers will stop at places where they know what they're getting, not places where they're confused as to what's on offer. Is it really worth running that risk with nonsensical translations?
I certainly don't think so, and I'm fairly certain our fellow language lovers will agree with me. To deliver a proper message in a foreign language, you need a real translator!
What are some of the worst translations you've ever seen? Did it put you off doing business with them? Tell us about your terrible or hilarious experiences in the comments below!
Love them or loathe them, emoticons are becoming more and more commonplace in language, and not just for casual conversations between friends on Facebook or WhatsApp. Due to the immense popularity of mobile phones, texting, the internet, and messaging as forms of communication, emoticons, and now emojis, are now almost universally used.
While some of the purists among us may believe that most languages are diverse and varied enough not to need them, emoticons and emojis are everywhere. One use that particularly struck me was when I saw that the BBC had started using them more frequently in their posts on Facebook.
Today I'd like to talk about why emoticons and emoji are so useful in language, and the role they play in communication.
Texts and messages are short and instant forms of communication. Originally, all text messages were written using a traditional phone keypad instead of the keyboard featured on modern smartphones. Since you had to type letters by pressing a number key multiple times, texting could take quite a while.
When it comes to language, if there's a way to make something easier, we tend to do it. Not only were we trying to save time, but we were also trying to save money. The last thing you'd want to do is have your text (which had a limited number of characters) become two texts, costing you double.
SMS language was created as people tried to use fewer characters without any loss in meaning, which is how letters and numbers like "b", "c", "r", "u", "y", "2", and "4", began to be used to refer to the words "be", "see", "are", "you", "why", "to", and "for", respectively.
The Oxford Dictionary's "Word of the Year" in 2015.
The tone of texts can also be very ambiguous, so you can see how punctuation resembling a face could help set the mood of a message without having to write several long texts, which would take more time and money.
From characters looking like faces, we got emoji, a Japanese term that combines e, meaning "picture", and moji, meaning "character". Once emojis were included on Apple's iPhone, their popularity snowballed. Soon after, they were added to Android phones, and have now become a massive cultural phenomenon.
In fact, the Oxford Dictionary made an emoji their word of the year. The "Face with Tears of Joy" got the award in 2015, and is the most popular emoji.
What do you think of emoji and emoticons? Are they useful for communication? Or are they abominations on our once-beautiful languages? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
There are plenty of lists around the internet of the hardest and easiest languages to learn. While these lists can be interesting and helpful if you're trying to decide upon a new language to learn, they're inherently flawed due to the idea that such languages actually exist.
Hold on! I'm not saying languages don't exist; that'd be completely absurd. Of course they do! What I'm saying is that it's pretty much impossible to classify languages as difficult or easy to learn. However, I have seen a number of clever criteria for attempting to create these classifications, so I'd like to look at a few of them today.
Hong Kong, the home of both Chinese and English!
Similarity to your Native Language
One of the first ways many people classify language difficulty comes down to similarity to the learner's native language. While I agree that I've seen plenty of evidence to support this statement, this does mean that the world's hardest or easiest language differs depending on your native language. Does this mean it could also be affected by which dialect of your native language you speak? I'd love to see some studies about that...
Complexity
The complexity of a language is said to influence how easily somebody can learn it. However, "how complex is a language?" is as difficult to answer as "how difficult is a language to learn?". If one language uses more phonemes in speech, is it more difficult than one that uses more characters in its alphabet? How do we assign value to each component part? We couldn't possibly all come to an agreement on which elements complicate a language the most and which parts the least.
Time Spent Studying
Time is a fairly scientific way of measuring progress. The less time taken to become proficient in a language, the easier the language must be. However, at what point is a speaker "proficient"?
I don't find language learning to be a journey from A to B with a definite endpoint, but rather an ongoing adventure. I definitely couldn't pinpoint an exact moment when I became proficient in any of the languages I speak.
If proficiency is judged by passing a test, then the tests would have to be standardised across the entire world. I'm sure they're not...
All roads lead to Rome, but do all Romance languages lead to
a simple language learning experience?
Easy Languages
When it comes to English speakers, most lists put the Romance languages in the easy category. French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese tend to feature regularly as easy languages to learn because of their similarity to English.
Difficult Languages
The languages that generally get lumped together as the most difficult languages tend be geographically and linguistically distant from English (at least if you consider the language to be from the UK, as I tend to do). Languages from Europe don't tend to be included in this list.
Many of these languages make use of a different writing system to English, such as Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese. However, I'm sure Mandarin speakers wouldn't struggle as much with the Japanese writing systems as someone more familiar with the Latin alphabet would.
With all that said, I tend to find that similarities can also make something more difficult to learn instead of simpler. For example, I know how to walk and I know how to drive. If you make me walk on ice, I struggle, and if you put me in a car that I'm not familiar with, I have to spend a while working out where everything is. However, I can still walk to the car and start driving and start walking when I get out the car, despite the two being completely different activities. Differences can make something more memorable!
While these are all fair ways to measure how difficult a language might be, they all ignore a number of factors. I'm not disparaging those who have tried to measure something that's seemingly immeasurable, I'm just saying that you can comfortably ignore a lot of these lists. If you want to learn Tagalog before you learn French, then go for it!
Everyone has their own experiences while learning a language. In fact, in a recent post I complained about the subjunctive tense and a few of the reasons that English speakers may find it difficult. That said, I know plenty of people who comfortably master it without even breaking a sweat!
What I'm trying to say is that when learning a language, there will always be things you find easy and things you find difficult. You'll never get to find out which is which if you don't start!
If you like TV shows and movies, Netflix is pretty great. The streaming service is one of the quickest ways to lose hours upon hours of your free time to popular media, and I'm cool with that. Netflix's algorithms always seem to suggest shows I end up liking, but there is one thing I don't like - its dubbing and subtitling.
Origami, another of Japan's fine artistic exports.
In the past, we've discussed dubbing versus subtitling at length (I tend to prefer subtitling over dubbing where possible). However, when watching anime (Japanese animation) I tend to take it on a series-by-series basis.
If the subtitles are good, I will happily watch an entire series with the original Japanese dialogue. However, when anime subtitles are bad, they are really bad! The internet is full of great examples of this.
Before I get into this rant, I need to clarify a couple of terms. For the purposes of this post, I'm taking "closed captioning" (CC) to refer to user-activated text that is generally used for those that are hard of hearing and "subtitling" to refer to a translation of foreign language dialogue that is not likely to be understood by the viewer. A quick way to distinguish whether you're watching CC or subtitling would be to see whether there are descriptions of sounds that wouldn't be considered dialogue, such as "[Phone rings]".
Aside from the bad grammar, unnatural syntax, or odd vocabulary choices present in bad anime subtitles, Netflix has a great way of making subtitles completely redundant. Aside from their low linguistic quality, I firmly believe there's also a technical issue at play here.
When I watch anime series on Netflix, I usually have two options for audio and two options for subtitles. The audio is available in either Japanese or English, while the subtitles are only available in English and can be "off" or "on". This is what causes problems.
The subtitles, just like the dubbing, are a translation of the original dialogue in Japanese. However, they are clearly not done simultaneously, nor do they appear to have any relation to each other.
On the one hand, the dubbing tends to have altered the original dialogue to make it fit better with the timing of the characters' speech, as well as make the lines more natural and easier to deliver by voice actors.
On the other hand, the subtitles tend to more strictly follow the meaning and structure of the dialogue. The massive difference between the dubbing and subtitling means that I find it almost impossible to have both dubbing and subtitling active at the same time.
Since you can either have all of the subtitles or none of the subtitles, Japanese text that appears in subtitles, such as explanations of time passing or where a scene takes place, are left untranslated. This is when I really get annoyed. I have to pause, turn the subtitles on, and rewind back to the start of the scene, just for the subtitles to load and tell me something like "One week later".
It should be noted that Netflix has also received criticism from deaf communities for the low quality of its CC. As much as I love the fact that it allows me to binge on watching massive robots and ninjas fight each other, it really needs to work harder on its foreign materials.
What do you think of Netflix's subtitling? Love it or loathe it? Are there better streaming services for subtitling? Or worse? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
As today is the 13th, an unlucky number for some, I thought I'd delve a little deeper into how fortune and luck differs across languages. It seems that numbers play a huge role in superstition, and since there are plenty of countable objects that we deal with in everyday life, numbers seem to have made their way into the superstitions of almost every culture.
I won't get through them all today because almost anything can be considered lucky or unlucky, so I thought I'd just pick out a few of the most interesting numbers associated with luck.
4
Numbers are everywhere when it comes to fortune and misfortune. The number 4 is considered to be terribly unlucky in the Chinese culture and gives rise to tetraphobia. In Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, Min Nan, Japanese, and Korean, the pronunciation of the number 4 is very similar to the word for "death".
The luckiest garden ever.
Those aware of the superstitions related to the number 13 in Western cultures (which I'll get to shortly) will be familiar with the practice of avoiding specific numbers. In the cultures where the aforementioned languages are traditionally spoken, particularly South East Asia, the number (and even digit) 4 is avoided when possible, especially when numbering floors, doors, parking spaces, etc.
Despite 4's misfortune in Asia, in Irish and Celtic cultures, the four-leaf clover is said to be a sign of considerable fortune.
7
The number 7 is often considered to be very lucky, especially in prominent world religions. The Old Testament frequently references the number 7, such as the creation of the world in 7 days in the Book of Genesis. In Judaism, the menorah has 7 branches, while in Islam, the earth is composed of 7 layers. Japanese mythology also features 7 lucky gods. The list goes on and on...
8
Just as the number 4 in Mandarin sounds like the word for "death", the number 8 also has a similar-sounding counterpart. However, unlike the number 4, the number 8 is considered to bring about good fortune. This is because the number 8 in Mandarin sounds like "fortune" or "prosper", following a rule can seemingly be applied to a whole host of numbers in Chinese.
The luckiness of the number 8 also dictates all kinds of behaviours by both people and companies, who love to use the digit "8" in any way they possibly can. For example, Sichuan Airlines paid a hefty sum for a phone number that consisted only of 8s, and the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games started on the 8th August at 8 p.m. local time.
13
In many English-speaking cultures, 13 is considered to be an unlucky number, so much so that it has its own phobia, triskaidekaphobia. The term itself, like most fears and phobias, is named using Greek words. There are a number of suggestions as to why 13 is considered to be unlucky, including the number of people at the Last Supper, the date of the arrest order for the Knights Templar, and the number of full moons in a year.
However, this superstition goes even further, especially in several Western cultures, if the 13th day of the calendar month coincides with a Friday, making the dreaded Friday the 13th.
Friday the 13th
It is suggested that Friday the 13th is considered to be unlucky due to the number's prominence in the story of Jesus: 13 people (12 disciples and Jesus himself) were at the Last Supper, plus the fact that Jesus was killed on the Friday. If you are inexplicably terrified of Friday the 13th, you may have paraskevidekatriaphobia.
Tuesday the 13th
While I grew up with the knowledge that Friday the 13th was an unfortunate day, if you grew up in a Spanish- or Greek-speaking culture or country, you'll probably consider Tuesday the 13th to be the unlucky day.
What numbers are considered lucky and unlucky in your language or culture? Tell us about them and the reasons why they're lucky or unlucky in the comments below!
If you speak a foreign language, at some point you've probably been in that mildly embarrassing situation when you've had to ask somebody to speak either more slowly or more clearly. Then you may have wondered, "why do they speak so fast anyway?"
From my experience, it seems quite clear that most people (regardless of their mother tongue) believe at least one particular language to be spoken more quickly than their own. I imagine that part of this is due to the fact that when hearing a foreign language (especially when first learning it), your brain is working so hard that you barely have time to keep up, making the language feel really quick with a sensation that you're trying to keep thousands of different plates spinning at the same time.
How fast you speak a language is known as the speech tempo and, as I suggested, human perception of this phenomenon is largely subjective. However, there are ways to measure speech tempo, including measuring it as a rate of syllables over time, since the length of words varies wildly across languages. This measurement can be taken either with or without considering pauses in speech. It is known as speech rate when counting pauses and articulation rate when ignoring pauses.
An interesting study on this subject was published a few years ago, which found that the quickly spoken languages (of those studied) tend to contain less information per syllable. However, those spoken more slowly tend to contain more information per syllable. I've put the results into an interactive chart below so you can see for yourself.
As you can see from the chart, languages with a low information density had a high syllabic rate, and vice versa. Mandarin was shown to contain the most information per syllable (since Vietnamese was a reference) while Japanese contained the least. In terms of speed, Japanese was the quickest and Mandarin the slowest.
Spanish was the fastest European language and German the slowest. Spanish also had the lowest information density of all European languages, while English had the highest. It seems to be that as humans, we all tend to deliver information at the same speed.
Which languages do you think sound like they're being spoken the fastest? Do you struggle with the speed of native speakers' speech for any languages you've learnt? Tell us about your experiences with speech tempo in the comments below.
Whenever I go to a massive 24-hour supermarket, I'm confronted by tonnes and tonnes of different choices across plenty of different products from all over the world. I'm not here to get into a debate about giant supermarket chains killing local family-owned stores or price wars, but rather how language plays a part in everything we do.
Despite being a huge fan of pizza (of all shapes and sizes), I still find it difficult when I purchase Dr Oetker brand pizzas due to the fact that the German name doesn't sound as authentic in my head as any Italian-sounding brands.
Mmm... pizza.
My conviction isn't strong enough to stop me buying the brand since I enjoy their pizzas, after all. However, some people would not buy the late August Oetker's pizzas, regardless of whether or not he had a PhD. Marketers are fully aware of this process, so you'll find that products with names that don't match their origin or perceived origin appear to be in the minority in your supermarket.
Berghaus
The outdoor clothing company was founded in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the '60s and chose the name from a very liberal German translation of "LD Mountain Centre", where they were first based, for the name of their company. I speak from experience when I say that the brand name was rarely pronounced correctly in Newcastle by locals wearing the full-length draa-string borg-hoos jackets, as they were called locally.
Dolmio
If you've ever seen the "when'sa your Dolmio day?" adverts, you'll get that this brand really wants you to believe that their range of pasta sauces are far more Italian that Dr. Oetker's pizzas. However, the Dolmio brand is actually Australian and owned by the American company Mars, Inc.
We're sorry if these photos made you hungry.
Häagen-Dazs
Häagen-Dazs is probably one of the oldest examples of this kind of thing. Originally, the name was a tribute to Denmark by founders Reuben and Rose Mattus to a country they felt had treated the Jews fantastically during World War II. However, the name itself is little more than nonsense made up by Reuben to sound Danish. Danish speakers will be fully aware of this as there are no umlauts in Danish nor "z" and "s" appearing together as they do here.
The company actually fought another ice cream brand in the '80s for trying a similar marketing strategy. Frusen Glädjé was an American company that used an alteration of the Swedish for "frozen delight" as their name (the "é" should be without the diacritic).
Matsui
The name may sound Japanese, but when UK electrical retailer Currys launched the brand with the slogan "Japanese Technology Made Perfect" and a logo reminiscent of a traditional Japanese "rising sun", they ended up in trouble for misleading customers. They were forced to get rid of the tagline.
Despite a fine, they were allowed to keep the name, which upset a number of British veterans of World War II who remembered the Japanese general Iwane Matsui, the man responsible for the Nanking Massacre in 1937, which resulted in the deaths of between 40,000 and 300,000 people (depending on who you ask).
Trader Joe's
The American chain of grocery stores sells a number of its own brands. Rather than slapping a label that says "Trader Joe's" on all of their products, they sell products under various names.
Mexican food is labelled as "Trader Jose's", Chinese food goes by "Trader Ming's", the Italian range is "Trader Giotto's", and then "Trader Jacques'" is the name of the French stuff. While it may seem overly simple and incapable of fooling anyone, they wouldn't do it if it didn't work!
During a recent Facebook scrolling session, an odd link popped up on my news feed. It was this video of a musical performance on the Late Show with David Letterman.
You don't need to be the most observant person in the world to realise that the performer, Hatsune Miku, or 初音ミク, as her name is written in Japanese, is not a real person. Hatsune Miku is not the first virtual performer; other popular virtual acts include Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Archies, and Gorillaz. However, Hatsune Miku can do something that other acts can't do: sing.
You may think that her high-pitched singing is not as good as the sped-up singing of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, and you may be right. However, the Chipmunks, much like other virtual acts, had their music and their vocals pre-recorded. Hatsune Miku's vocals are synthesised using Yamaha's VOCALOID2 and VOCALOID3 vocal synthesisers.
If you're familiar with Japanese, you may recognise the components of Hatsune Miku's name. In fact, the name translates as "the first sound from the future", with Hatsu (初) meaning "first", Ne (音) meaning "sound", and Miku (ミク) meaning "future".
Sapporo, Japan, the hometown of Hatsune Miku.
While 16 year-old Hatsune Miku could be said to be from Sapporo, the technology that allows her to sing was conceived of in Spain as part of a research project at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
Hatsune Miku's voice isn't purely synthesised and is in fact generated from phonemes prerecorded by Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. Initially, only Japanese phonemes were recorded, before learning English (from Saki Fujita's recordings) for a later release. This allows her to sing in both languages, albeit with a Japanese accent when she sings in English.
The process that allows for the manipulation of the phonemes into song is known as concatenative synthesis. Using this process, sound samples (known as units) can be manipulated. This allows the user to modify a range of qualities, including the unit's length, pitch, and timbre.
Since anyone who owns the software can synthesise speech and vocals, Hatsune Miku is "technically" the performer of thousands of songs. She's not alone, though. There are also other virtual performers available with different language combinations such as Spanish and Chinese. Other languages can also be approximated using preexisting phonemes, with differing levels of success.
Today is another obscure holiday, World Population Day. July 11, which marks World Population Day, was selected by the United Nations Development Program to raise awareness of population issues and, supposedly, work towards fixing them through global action.
In honour of this day, we thought we'd look at the populations of languages, and, as I love charts, figures, and graphs, attempt to show you a few facts and figures about world languages in a colourful, visual, and interesting way.
Today is the last day of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and I've been loving it. While there wasn't a huge amount of Japanese cultural export at this year's event, it would be silly to ignore the huge cultural and linguistic influence Japan has had on video games and other media. The Japanese language even has a name for the geek and nerd subculture. The term otaku refers to those who have an obsession with a particular interest or hobby, particularly Japanese anime and manga. The otaku subculture is even referenced in the video game Metal Gear Solid, by Dr. Hal Emmerich, who identifies as an otaku and gives himself the codename "Otacon" as a tribute to his nerdy fondness for Japanese culture.
Of course, it would be foolish to assume that everyone who likes anime and manga automatically loves video games. However, in the interest of being topical, it isn't foolish to realise there is a substantial overlap between those who enjoy anime and manga and those who enjoy video games.
During the '80s, those who made an unfortunate choice may have enjoyed watching recorded anime on Betamax. While the term Betamax is of Japanese origin, it is a proprietary name invented in the dark recesses of a marketing meeting.
The otaku movement is considered to have been born at the same time as the anime boom following the popularity of anime shows such as Mobile Suit Gundam, which features fine examples of mecha (メカ), an abbreviation of the word "mechanical". Technically, as an abbreviation of mechanical, the term mecha is an abbreviation of an English loanword which has its own roots in Greek and Latin.
Of course, Japan's history with martial arts means that the word dojo is known by most people who watch anime and read manga. They are fully aware that if you are in a dojo, you should get ready to practice some martial arts, particularly judo.
This exchange of nerdiness in Japanese culture obviously lends itself to the internet. The word emoji comes from the Japanese for "picture", e, and moji, meaning "letter" or "character". It does seem that this word is becoming more popular than the term "emoticon", from the English words "emotion" and "icon".
When you have this cross-pollination of anime, Japanese culture, and the internet, you inevitably get the type of content the internet is rife with, porn. The term hentai refers to pornographic anime and while we won't include pictures, if you are really interested in finding out what it is, a quick search will yield more results than you ever wanted to see.
A word we keep hearing more and more in spoken English is the word kawaii. The Japanese term for "cute" is often used to describe Japanese things that are cute, but is increasingly used by gaijin (the Japanese term for foreigners) for non-Japanese things that are also cute.
A Japanese word that hasn't quite made its way into popular use is hikikomori. However, the Japanese term for shut-in, recluse, or someone who will attempt to avoid any type of social contact, is growing in popularity as sadly, the issue is becoming more and more common in contemporary Japan.
However, while I have painted a picture of a one-directional linguistic relationship with Japan, this is barely the case. There are also otaku words of English origin that have made their way into Japanese, such as fan fiction (ファン フィクション) andfan service, (ファンサービス), to give a couple examples.
As tomorrow is the birthday of James Curtis Hepburn, we thought we'd take a look at perhaps his biggest contribution to languages, Hepburn Romanization. However, first we'll tell you about the man himself.
Born in 1815 in Milton, Pennsylvania, Hepburn studied at Princeton, then earned his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to Princeton to earn his Master's degree. He initially went to China as a medical missionary in 1840 and from 1843 to 1845 he worked on Amoy Island, again as a medical missionary until his wife's poor health forced his return to the US.
It wasn't until 1859 that Hepburn and his wife went to Kanagawa, Japan, where he would start studying the Japanese language. His research led to his focus on creating a Japanese-English dictionary, which he would complete in 1887.
The Japanese language is written using a variety of writing systems. Kanji is a system of logographic characters borrowed from the Chinese writing system, while the Hiragana and Katakana writing systems are syllabic.
Hepburn's most widely recognised work is his system for representing the Japanese language using the Latin alphabet. As you may know, despite many languages using the Latin alphabet, not every character in every language is pronounced the same. In fact, in many languages, not every character in the Latin alphabet has a single used phoneme. As Hepburn was American, it is understandable that Hepburn Romanization is based on English phonology.
While Hepburn Romanization helps English speakers pronounce words in the Japanese language, a competing system, Nihon-Shiki Romanization, was devised by Japanese physicist Aikitu Tanakadate. It was created with the goal of completely replacing the traditional Japanese writing systems and allowing Japan to compete with the West. If you have learned any Japanese recently, you will be aware that this did not happen.
Nihon-Shiki Romanization would be developed into Kunrei-Shiki Romanization and adopted by the Japanese government in 1937. However, Hepburn's original system is still commonly used today for a variety of applications and its use is permitted alongside Kunrei-Shiki Romanization by several Japanese governmental bodies. Many students learning Japanese as a foreign language still learn a modern variant of Hepburn's original system.
Are you learning Japanese? Have you used Hepburn Romanization in your studies or elsewhere? If so, tell us about your experiences in the comments below.
As rumor has it, you can’t learn to have a good accent if you’re above the age of 7, or 12, or some other age that you’ve most definitely already exceeded. But that can’t possibly be true. Singers and actors learn new accents all the time, and they’re not, on average, smarter than everyone else (and they certainly don't all start before the age of 7).
So what’s going on here? Why does everybody tell you that you can’t learn good pronunciation as an adult? And if that’s not true, what is?
In this article, we’ll take a tour through the research on speech perception and pronunciation, and we’ll talk about learning pronunciation efficiently as an adult. But first, allow me a moment on my soapbox:
Pronunciation is important
This is a big topic, and as an opera singer, it’s a topic close to my heart. I find accents extraordinarily important.
This is a fényképezőgép
For one, if you don’t learn to hear the sounds in a new language, you’re doomed to have a hard time remembering it. We rely upon sound to form our memories for words, and if you can’t even comprehend the sounds you’re hearing, you’re at a disadvantage from the start. (Try memorizing Hungarian's word for camera, fényképezőgép [recording] or train station, vásutállomás [recording]. These words are brutal until you really get a feel for Hungarian sounds.)
But in addition to the memory issue, a good accent connects you to people. It shows people from another culture that you’ve not only taken the time and effort to learn their vocabulary and their grammar; you’ve taken the time to learn how their mouths, lips and tongues move. You’ve changed something in your body for them – you’ve shown them that you care – and as a result, they will open up to you.
I’ve seen this repeatedly when I sing or watch concerts in Europe. As a rule, audiences are kind, but when you sing in their native language, they brace themselves. They get ready to smile politely and say, “What a lovely voice!” or “Such beautiful music!” But beneath the surface, they are preparing for you to butcher their language and their heritage before their eyes. No pressure.
At that moment, if you surprise them with a good accent, they open themselves up. Their smiles are no longer polite; they are genuine. You’ve shown them that you care, not just with your intellect, but with your body, and this sort of care is irresistible.
But enough romanticizing; how do you actually do something about pronunciation?
Research on Ear Training and Pronunciation
Good pronunciation is a combination of two main skills: Ear training and mouth training. You learn how to hear a new sound, and you learn how to make it in your mouth. It’s the first of these two skills that’s the trickiest one; if you can hear a sound, you can eventually learn to produce it accurately, but before then, you’re kind of screwed. So for the moment, we’ll focus on ear training.
While doing research for my book, I came upon a wonderful set of studies by James McClelland, Lori Holt, Julie Fiez and Bruce McClandiss, where they tried to teach Japanese adults to hear the difference between “Rock” and “Lock.” After reading their papers, I called up and interviewed Dr. McClelland and Dr. Holt about their research.
The first thing they discovered is that ear training is tricky, especially when a foreign language contains two sounds that are extremely similar to one sound in your native language. This is the case in Japanese, where their “R” [ɺ] is acoustically right in between the American R [ɹ] and L [ɫ]. When you test Japanese adults on the difference between Rock and Lock (by playing a recording of one of these words and asking them which one they think you played), their results are not significantly better than chance (50%). So far, so bad.
The researchers tried two kinds of practice. First, they just tested these Japanese adults on Rock and Lock for a while, and checked to see whether they improved with practice.
They didn’t.
This is very bad news. It suggests that practice doesn’t actually do anything. You can listen to Rock and Lock all day (or for English speakers, 불/뿔/풀[bul/pul/ppul] in Korean), and you’re not going to learn to hear the differences between those sounds. This only confirms the rumors that it’s too late to do anything about pronunciation. Crap.
Their second form of practice involved artificially exaggerating the difference between L and R. They began with extremely clear examples (RRrrrrrrrrock), and if participants improved, stepped up the difficulty until they reached relatively subtle distinctions between the two recordings (rock). This worked a little better. The participants began to hear the difference between Rock and Lock, but it didn’t help them hear the difference between a different pair of words, like Road and Load. In terms of a pronunciation training tool, this was another dead end.
Then they tried feedback, and everything changed.
Testing pairs of words with feedback
They repeated the exact same routine, only this time, when a participant gave their answer ("it was 'Rock'") , a computer screen would tell them whether or not they were right ("*ding* Correct!"). In three 20-minute sessions of this type of practice, participants permanently acquired the ability to hear Rs and Ls, and they could do it in any context.
Not coincidentally, this is how actors and singers learn. We use coaches instead of computerized tests, but the basic principle is the same. We sit with an accent coach and have them read our texts. Then we say our texts out load, and the coach tells us when we’re right and when we’re wrong. They’re giving us feedback. They’ll say things like “No, you’re saying siehe, and I need sehe. Siehe…Sehe. Hear that?” And as we get closer, they’ll keep continue to supply feedback ("You're saying [something that's almost 'sehe'] and I need sehe.”) After the coaching, we’ll go home, listen to recordings of these coaching sessions, and use those recordings to provide us with even more feedback.
Now, some caveats. Participants didn’t reach a full native ability to hear the difference between Rock and Lock. Their accuracy seemed to peak around 80%, compared to the ~100% of a native speaker. Further investigation revealed what was going on.
Consonant sounds have lots of different components (known as 'formants'). Basically, a consonant is a lot like a chord on a piano: on a piano, you play a certain combination of notes together, and you hear a chord. For a consonant, you make a certain (more complex) combination of notes, and you hear a consonant. This isn’t just a metaphor; if you have a computerized piano, you can even use it to replicate human speech.
English speakers tell the difference between their R’s and L’s by listening for a cue known as the 3rd formant – basically, the third note up in any R or L chord. Japanese native speakers have a hard time hearing this cue, and when they went through this study, they didn’t really get any better at hearing it. Instead, they learned how to use an easier cue, the 2nd formant – the second note in R/L chords. This works, but it’s not 100% reliable, thus explaining their less-than-native results.
When I talked to these researchers on the phone, they had basically given up on this research, concluding that they were somewhat stumped as to how to improve accuracy past 80%. They seemed kind of bummed out about it.
Possibilities for the future
But step back a moment and look at what they’ve accomplished here.
In three 20-minute sessions, they managed to take one of the hardest language challenges out there – learning how to hear new sounds – and bring people from 50% accuracy (just guessing) to 80% accuracy (not bad at all).
What if we had this tool in every language? What if we could start out by taking a few audio tests with feedback and leave with pre-trained, 80% accuracy ears, even before we began to learn the rest of our language?
We have the tools to build trainers like this on our own. All you need is a spaced repetition system that supports audio files, like Anki, and a good set of recorded example words (A bunch of rock/lock’s, thigh/thy’s, and niece/knee’s for English, or a bunch of sous/su’s, bon/ban’s and huis/oui’s for French). They take work to make, but that work only needs to be done once, and then the entire community can benefit.
Pronunciation is too important, and this solution is too valuable to wait for some big company to take over. Over the next 9 months, I’m going to start developing good example word lists, commissioning recordings and building these decks. I’m going to recruit bilinguals, because with bilinguals, we can get recordings to learn not only the difference between two target-language sounds, like sous and su, but also the difference between target language sounds and our own native language sounds (sous vs Sue). I ran this idea by Dr. McClelland, and he thought that may work even better (hell, we might be able to break the 80% barrier). And I’m going to do a few open-ish beta tests to fine tune them until they’re both effective and fun to use.
Hopefully, with the right tools, we can set the “It’s too late to learn pronunciation” rumors to rest. We’ll have a much easier time learning our languages, and we’ll have an easier time convincing others to forget about our native languages and to speak in theirs.
Learning a new language to increase your career prospects is a fantastic idea. If you've ever had a look through online job boards, you've probably seen jobs asking for employees with language skills. When learning a new language for a career, both the lingua franca route and the niche language route are good ideas. It all depends on what you intend to do with your career.
