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Even when speakers are proficient in English, Scientific English can still present challenges. Some bill it as ‘a foreign language’ even for native English speakers. Anyone who has learned how to use it might first laugh at that comparison and then grit their teeth on the grain of truth. Learning conversational English is a big enough task. Getting good enough to build a career in science fluently using Scientific English is a Herculean task.

The post Hey, language-learning platforms! appeared first on OUPblog.

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We had quite a week here. First a stomach virus laid most of us low, and then yesterday when I was finally feeling more like myself, I managed to wrench my back during a cough. So stupid.

But a lot of nice Decemberish things happened in between the grim bits. Before I got sick, I led a craft workshop for a group of teen girls—we made little Midori-style booklets out of envelopes and washi tape, a favorite project of mine. I got the tree up yesterday—no ornaments yet, just the lights—and even a strand of outdoor lights. And we had a double birthday this week, celebrated with marshmallow krispie treats instead of cake.

Last December I was reading novels nonstop for the CYBIL Awards. This year, I’ve hardly read a thing. This month, I mean. Between work and kids and illness, my brain just hasn’t been there. Except for reading Christmas books to the kids, of course. Jingle the Christmas Clown, Christmas Trolls, The Baker’s Dozen, Hanna’s Christmas (Huck’s pick, I swear).

I did a Periscope yesterday (about five minutes before I messed up my back) about how we use Memrise and Duolingo for foreign language and other things—a topic I’ve addressed here on the blog many a time. Earlier in the week when I was too sick to read, I found it soothing to review Memrise topics I’ve completed in the past…U.S. Presidents, British Monarchs. Rilla is loving Duolingo French and is now at a great age to use that program. As I said in the ’scope, it’s a bit too advanced for Huck—too much English spelling, let alone German—but there are aspects of the platform that he really loves, and if I sit with him to help with the spelling he gets along pretty well.

No plans this weekend except rest, answering some letters, and maybe cracking a book that has a spine thicker than a quarter-inch. You?

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See #1 in this series: Memrise.

Last night I had a trial lesson at italki.com with a German teacher who currently lives and works in Taiwan. At the appointed hour he rang me on Skype and we had a delightful half-hour chat. We started with video but the connection was wonky so we switched to audio only, and that worked fine. Something I especially appreciated was that whenever I struggled with a word or phrase, Stephan corrected me and typed the correction in the chat window so I could see it as well as hear it. Afterward, the chat log provided a nice transcript of the things I’d learned.

Since this was a first lesson, it was largely conversational. Stephan spoke to me in German from the beginning (when I set up the lesson I’d had to fill out a form describing my current level), asking lots of questions and encouraging me to plunge in and answer as best I could. I loved it. He also sent links to a couple of resources—a German children’s book, the first half of which I read and translated with his help, and, when I mentioned that I often confuse which prepositions go with which verbs, a pdf with some preposition exercises.

Italki lets you choose between “professional instruction,” where the tutor will probably have you work through a textbook with homework, and “informal tutoring,” which is more the conversational kind of session I had with Stephan, practicing and improving my skills through dialogue. The latter is the less expensive option, but both kinds of lessons are pretty reasonable—downright cheap in some cases, depending on the language you’re studying and the exchange rates involved. Payment is all handled through italki; you purchase italki credits (ITC) at the rate of 1 dollar per 10 ITC, plus a small processing fee based on your payment method. When you book a session, italki holds your credits, and after you mark the session completed, they pay the instructor. If the session doesn’t happen for some reason, you get your credits back. Most lessons seem to be in the neighborhood of $10-15 per session.

The selection of language is fairly staggering. Basically, anywhere there’s Skype, there are italki tutors eager to take you on as a student. Most instructors have made short videos to introduce themselves. I love this one from Modabo in Spain. Many instructors indicate on their profiles whether they have experience teaching children, if you’re looking for a tutor for younger kids. For teens, pretty much any instructor is a possibility.

Many instructors offer trial sessions like the one I had at a special rate. Italki allows new users to sign up for three of these trials, so you have a chance to try out the interface (and the teacher) without spending very much.

The website also encourages connections among users; you can find language partners to practice with or do swaps—say, you help me with German and I’ll help you with English. After all, actually speaking a language—jumping in, trying to form sentences, making lots of mistakes and having someone correct you—is the best way to move toward fluency. Users are also encouraged to write notebook entries in their target languages, inviting native speakers to offer corrections and advice. There’s a handy markup system to use in editing others’ entries. All very friendly and low-pressure.

So far, in my limited experience (two weeks browsing the site and last night’s wonderful lesson), I give italki high marks. Rose is drooling over the language list. We’re thinking some italki Spanish lessons might be a very good option for her. Like me, she’s been using Memrise to build vocabulary in her target language(s), and she studies Spanish grammar in a print textbook. But there’s nothing, nothing, like speaking with a native speaker. I’ve been stuck at a sort of low-intermediate level in German for a very long time. As in: decades. It was exhilarating last night to discover how much I really can say and comprehend. I understood almost everything Stephan said, and when I didn’t, he repeated the phrase, typed it out for me, and told me the English. It’s a very organic way to learn. I would love to take more lessons with him, the informal tutoring kind. I see Sign Language is offered as well, which is a very exciting possibility.

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Note: this is not a sponsored post and I’m not affiliated with Memrise in any way. It just turned out I had quite a lot to say about it!

To follow up on my post about memorizing monarchs and presidents, I thought I’d elaborate a bit further on how we’re using Memrise to learn languages, along with some other resources like Duolingo, iTalki, and Earworms, which I’ll talk about in subsequent posts. It’s kind of amazing how much you can do from your couch.

MEMRISE. Free for computer, iOS, Android. Excellent for building vocabulary, not so much a grammar tool. (But read on.) You pick any of a multitude of courses in your target language. In small batches, words appear on your screen along with “mems,” mnemonic devices created by other users to help you remember the word. The best mems create some kind of visual image that helps fix the word in your mind, the way I was taught as a kid in the 80s to remember that Caspar Weinberger was Secretary of Defense by picturing Caspar the Unfriendly Ghost defending a bottle of wine and a hamburger. I don’t remember which teacher planted that image, but the picture is still vivid. That’s what the Memrise folks call a mem.

You can scroll through all the existing user-created mems for each word or phrase, and if you don’t like any of the choices you can create one of your own. The interface makes it easy to select a public-domain image, and then you add whatever text you want. Here’s a mem I made to help me identify Chad on a map of the Countries of Africa:

It’s corny but it works. Not all mems have an image attached; a good word-picture can help just as readily. I remember Ceuta on the map (a place I’d never heard of until taking this course, an autonomous Spanish city on the North African coast across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain) by thinking of the Spanish pronunciation —thay-uta—and using the mem “they oota be in Europe but they’re in Africa instead.” Again, not exactly the height of cleverness but it was the hook I needed to remember how to spell the name of the city.

As this image suggests, and as I described the other day, you can use Memrise to learn a lot of things besides foreign languages. Other topics I’m studying include British and English Monarchs, U.S. Presidents, and the World’s Tallest Buildings. (What can I say, I’m a junkie.) But foreign language is where Memrise really shines. The selection of languages is breathtaking in its scope. Lingala, anyone?

Rose, whose favorite pastime, I kid you not, is learning the first chunk of a new language, has absorbed beginner vocab in Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, and who knows what else, in between her longer-term progress through a 1000 Spanish Words course. I’m taking several different German courses simultaneously—you can move as quickly or as slowly as you want. I too have a “1000 Words” course I use as my primary focus to add vocabulary, but there’s a “German Conversation” course as well that has lots of useful longer phrases like “I couldn’t care less,” “I completely agree with you,” and “he’s so reliable you could build houses on him.” Then there’s the short course on prepositions I whisked through as a review, and a challenging one on verb conjugations that I like because it includes the preposition that goes along with each verb plus the case nouns take after the combo. And then—slowly, oh so slowly! probably only a hundred words over the course of a year!—I’m using the vast and comprehensive 5000 German words course which is packed with upper-level vocabulary.

But then, I thrive on variety. Other users might prefer to move steadily through one course at a time. There’s a fair amount of overlap in my assortment of courses, which helps cement things in my mind, but I can see that it might feel redundant or confusing to others.

Regarding mems for language, I’ve found that the best kind are those that help me work from the English to the German. I can usually remember the English meaning of a German word after a couple of repetitions, but it’s much harder for me to look at English and grope for its German counterpart. The majority of user-created mems seem to work the opposite direction—they’ll start with the German and use English puns to link the word to the English. For example, here’s a text-only mem I made for aufhören, German for “to stop doing something”:

It didn’t really work for me, not after some weeks away from the program. I couldn’t look at the English definition and get to the German word. What I really needed was something that starts with “stop doing something” and gets to “aufhören.” In this case, I tried to enhance the mental picture that goes with the above mem: I picture a Stop sign with Alf the TV alien perched on top holding a phone—the phone because the “hören” part reminds me of Auf Wiederhören, “until I talk to you again,” which you say when getting off the phone. Now, this revised image is working pretty well for me—but it requires me to remember to use the “stop” in “stop doing something” as my jumping-off point for memory. Will I remember that if I come across the word in another context a year from now? I don’t know. I do know that a vivid and specific mental image makes a tremendous difference in my ability to connect words in two different languages, and that after some repetition, the word is transferred to my permanent memory and I don’t need to rely on the mnemonic device anymore.

This repetition is part of what makes Memrise so successful: the program works by giving you the words at ever-increasing intervals as you demonstrate mastery. First you “plant” the words, a few at a time, and they give you a lot of interactions with it in different ways—English to German, German to English, multiple choice, type it in. This process only takes a few minutes for each new batch of words.

Here’s one example:

Here’s another:

Now the words are planted in your short-term memory. Memrise locks them for a few hours (sort of—you can override the lock by clicking “overwater” for extra practice). After that, they are ready for “watering”—you come back and review them again. If you get a word right on the first attempt, next time there will be a longer interval before it’s ready for watering. Eventually, as the words move from short-term to long-term memory, the intervals may be many days long.

As you can see, most of the words in this lesson are in my long-term memory and don’t need “watering” (reviewing) for several days or even weeks. A phrase I missed yesterday, “auf diese Weise,” is ready for watering now. “Auf,” a common preposition I learned decades ago, is (obviously) in my long-term memory and only comes around every few weeks. If I wanted, I could tell Memrise to ignore it altogether—there’s a setting you can click that means I’ve got this one down and never need to review it again. I certainly don’t need “auch,” a word I learned on day one of German, popping up in my word list. I don’t always bother to mark words “ignore,” though, since it’s an extra step.

I mentioned above that what Memrise excels at is teaching you vocabulary, but it’s not as strong at conveying grammar. You won’t necessarily learn word order or grammatical cases from this program—for that we use other resources like Duolingo (about which, more in a future post). But what my kids and I have found is that Memrise is invaluable for building our vocabulary, and grammar is so much easier to nail down when you have a big word list to draw from. And when I was really struggling to keep straight which prepositions take which cases for object nouns, Memrise came to my rescue. I found a German course that focuses on that very thing—you have to enter +A or +D after each verb-preposition combo to indicate whether the noun will take accusative or dative. That’s the kind of drill I need to take me to the next level of fluency. I’ve been stuck in the middle of Level B1 (going by the Goethe Institute’s fluency scale) ever since college. My periodic reimmersions in German have prevented me from losing what skill I’d gained, but to move forward toward real fluency I need some more intensive drill. This course is helping shift my recall from groping to automatic.

How much time does Memrise take? It can be as little as five minutes a day, if you want—plant a couple of new words, maybe water some of your older ones. I tend to go in intense bursts of activity with long lulls between them—sometimes many weeks will pass without my checking in, and that’s fine. The whole point of the program is to plant the words in long-term memory. If I’ve forgotten them—the app can tell by how I answer—they get pushed back into a more active, frequent rotation in the list.

During my intense bursts, I add new words, level by level. Then, when my focus inevitably shifts elsewhere, I stop accruing new vocabulary but the program is there to help me maintain the vocab I’ve got. “Watering” your words can be really relaxing.

The iPhone app is pretty sharp. I like to check in last thing before I go to sleep and see if any of my words need watering. It’s a good waiting-room activity, too, since the courses I’m taking work fine with the sound turned off.

 

Now, I’ve talked a lot about how I use Memrise for my own learning. What about the kids?

My younger kids are very interested in it; Rilla begs to use it for French, but it’s a skitch above her level. Her spelling isn’t strong enough yet for her to be able to easily enter answers in English, let alone French. Also, and significantly, Memrise is designed for adults, and the mems are created by adult users, which means that occasionally you come across one that’s a bit off-color. For these reasons, I think it’s better saved for kids 13 and up, depending on your parental comfort level. For us, 12 or 13 is a good threshold.

For my younger set, we tend more toward apps specifically designed for children, like the ones I reviewed at GeekMom a while back.

Before heading off to college, Jane used Memrise to learn Japanese kanji. Rose, as I said, likes it best as a way to experience a wide variety of languages. She’s very interested in language and linguistics, and Memrise has allowed her easily to explore the rudiments of more tongues than I can keep track of. Meanwhile, she’s making steady progress through her Memrise Spanish course, which we supplement with a grammar workbook. (She’s not keen on Duolingo. Beanie and I love it.)

Beanie, like me, is into German. She does about 15 minutes of Memrise a day, 4-5 days a week. Her vocabulary is growing steadily and the program has the advantage of building excellent spelling skills as well.

There are also Memrise courses for the SAT and other college admissions tests, including SAT vocab builders. You can create brand new courses, too, and make them private or public as you choose. (Choose: wählen, she CHOOSES to wear a VEIL IN church. That’s someone else’s mem but it worked like a charm for me.) If I hadn’t found a course with the verb-preposition-case info I wanted, I was thinking about creating my own. I’m always happy, though, when someone else does the leg work.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 21 mems to water!

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Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages Mark Abley

Abley starts in Australia, then travels to Oklahoma, the Isle of Man, Provence, Wales, and then New York, looking at minority languages that are in danger of dying out, and what people are trying to do in order to save them (with varying degrees of success.)

Along the way, he provides a potent argument for the role a language plays in culture and why keeping the small, endangered languages alive is important. (His argument is compelling enough that I personally feel it broadens out well as to why it’s important to learn another language-- not just for trade or commerce, but as a way to provide another way of looking at the world.)

Abley’s not a linguist, and I know that some of this book irks actual linguists and scholars in the field, but I think his non-expert approach really works in making the subject accessible to non-expert readers.

My main complaint is that it’s fairly European/North American-centric. While other areas of the world are touched on, I think it would have been stronger to look at other areas of the world more in-depth.

Parts of it are heart-breaking as languages and cultures die, stamped out by English and other dominant forces. But the things people are doing to try to save their language were inspiring, and, of course, we can always look to Wales and Israel to see how a dead language can come back.

Language death isn’t something one often thinks about, but it’s becoming more and more of an issue, and as a language dies, so much dies with it.

Book Provided by... my local library

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Learn how literacy coach Mindi Rench has helped middle school world language teachers to con-construct charts with their students, which has helped students' writing in French and Spanish.

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Stars: Ana Torrent, Fele Martinez, Eduado Noriega.
Language: Spanish

While researching her Honours thesis on audio-visual violence, overachiever Angela (Ana Torrent) enlists the help of Chema (Fele Martinez), a freakish loner who collects ultra-violent movies. But when the pair stumble across a video that appears to show the brutal murder of a fellow student, they soon find themselves the targets of an on-campus snuff ring.

Before achieving international fame with The Others, writer/director Alejandro Amenabar launched his career with Tesis, an American-style horror-thriller that earned seven Goya awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars), including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay, in his home country of Spain. Pretty impressive for a first-time film maker, especially considering the prejudice normally shown towards the horror genre.

Tesis is a well-written, well-acted movie that works on a number of different levels. If all you’re after is a straight-up horror-thriller, then Tesis delivers that. Amenabar himself admits to borrowing many of the techniques used throughout the film from Hollywood. Furthermore, Tesis is one hell of a mystery. Amenabar places Angela at the apex of a love triangle, with Chema and good-looking but dangerous Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), then spends the rest of the film shifting the audience’s suspicions as to the identity of the killer between the two (or is it someone completely different?). However, through the character of Angela, Amenabar also explores the simultaneous attraction and repulsion the viewing public has towards violent images.

In spite of its subject matter, Tesis is not a gore film. At a number of points throughout the film, it appears that Amenabar is about to show the audience some particularly grisly sight, only for the camera to pull away just at the last moment; Amenabar, instead, preferring to focus on Angela’s reaction to what she is seeing. Angela insists that she is only interested in violent movies from a purely academic standpoint and that she considers what she is seeing to be disgusting, yet she is every bit as fascinated by it as Chema.

In Tesis, Angela serves as a proxy for the viewer. Anyone who wants to watch a film like this to begin with, must have a certain desire to see violent imagery and in the final scene, Amenabar takes his audience to task for having such a desire. Nevertheless, if horror is your thing, then you could do a lot worse than watching Tesis, an American-style horror film that outdoes the films that inspired it.

Verdict: Released three years prior to the similarly themed 8mm, this ground-breaking Spanish horror-thriller simultaneously borrows from Hollywood and shows the Americans how it’s done.

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Stars: Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner
Language: Norwegian

 

While on holidays in the mountains, a group of eight medical students are terrorized by an army of Nazi zombies who have been hiding in the area since the end of World War 2.

Well, that’s 90 minutes of my life I’m never getting back. With a fantastic concept that could have been used as the basis for either a highly original zombie thriller or a hilarious black comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, Dead Snow seemed destined to become an international cult hit. Yet, second-time writer/director Tommy Wirkola clearly lacks the experience and talent to do justice to his idea, with the result being an under-developed, amateurish waste of time.

To give Wirkola his dues, though, the beginning of Dead Snow is actually pretty good (hence, me not giving up on it like I should have). The film opens with one of the students being stalked and killed by an unseen monster and Wirkola springboards off this to create tension and suspense – which he then proceeds to throw out the window by boring his audience with scene after scene of his characters behaving like uni students on holidays (about as much fun as being the only sober person at a party full of drunks) interspersed with the odd, very brief zombie attack so that people don’t mistake the film for someone’s vacation footage.

At about the half-way mark, the students finally realize they’re in danger and we get to see a zombie clearly for the first time. This is the point where the film should have picked up, but instead, it completely loses focus and spins hopelessly out of control. None of the characters were adequately developed as individuals in the first half of the film, so it’s impossible to care whether they live or die; once they start being attacked, the characters all but stop talking to each other (and the zombies can’t speak), so things keep happening with little or no explanation; and anything that was previously set up is completely forgotten. For example, we are told several times that one of the med students is afraid of blood, but then, suddenly and with no transition scene, he’s hacking at zombies with a chainsaw. By the time the disappointing ending rolled around, I was only still watching because I’d seen so much of the film, I figured I might as well keep going to the end, but I was happy to be through with this completely pointless waste of time.

Nevertheless, clearly not everyone shares my opinion of Dead Snow. The quote on the DVD case (and we all know how reliable cover quotes are) says “zombies, Nazis, blood on snow… it doesn’t get any better.” I wonder if we saw the same movie? The cover also describes this as a black comedy. Unless your idea of humour is seeing people’s intestines (which Wirkola seems to find hilarious), it’s not. And of course, someone in Hollywood must have liked it because, following making this film, Tommy Wirkola was given the opportunity to go to Hollywood and make Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. I haven’t seen Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters yet, but based on Dead Snow, I am rapidly losing interest.

Verdict: There are many great foreign language horror movies out there. Dead Snow isn't one of them. Anything you could do with your time is better than watching this film.

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Some have suggested that we translate our stories into multiple languages to expand our market.  This is a fantastic idea and we’d love to try, but we are wary of the perils of mistranslation.

 

As an opera singer, I do a lot of translation of song texts, and I know very well how easy it is to make a mistake.  Sometimes one letter is all the difference between what you mean to say, and a dirty word.  Other times, a colloquial phrase that is popular in the States might transform into a hideous insult in another culture.

 

Just for fun, we plugged a few of our books’ phrases into Translation Party, a fun site that will translate any given English phrase into Japanese, then back to English, then back to Japanese, etc. until the phrase reaches “Equilibrium” (meaning the software is finally able to accurately reproduce the exact same phrase in both languages).  The results are fun and exactly what we don’t want to happen when we finally do translate our books.

 

First, a line from “What Animal Are You?”:

 

Roar, you great lizard and stomp through the floor.

轟音は、大トカゲや床まで踏みつける。

Roar, to the floor and trample lizards.

轟音を踏みにじるトカゲは床としています。

Trample lizards are rumbling and the floor.

踏みにじるのトカゲと鳴る床があります。

Final: There are sound and floor-stomping lizards.

 

The next phrase from “If I Were Big” took a little longer to reach equilibrium:

 

She’d have long legs and go anywhere

彼女は長い足があるんだけど、どこにでも行く

She has long legs I have, go anywhere

彼女は、私の長い脚をしているどこにでも行く

She will go anywhere to have my long legs

彼女は私の長い脚をしている任意の場所に移動します

She will move to any location on my long legs and a

彼女は私の長い脚を任意の場所に移動すると

She moved to any location of my long legs

彼女が私の長い脚の任意の場所に移動

Her to move anywhere in my long legs

彼女のどこにでも私の長い脚に移動する

I long to move the legs of her everywhere

私は長い脚を動かすには彼女のどこ

I have to move to where her legs are long

私が彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります

You must move the length of her legs I

あなたが彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります私は

Final: I need to move the length of her legs

 

Ours were fun, but my favorite came from the lyrics to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”:

 

Start – Hey where did we go, days when the rains came, down in the hollow, playing a new game.

 

Final: Or here is a small hole in the rain, I, or, if necessary, you must create a new game.

…

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It seems like a no-brainer, but books written for children, teaching them the grammar and vocabulary of their own language, are also great for adults learning a new language.  My Italian teacher confessed that a major component of her own Italian education was independent reading of Comic Books!

 

 

I have already suggested parents look over the books offered at the Rosetta Project, but what I should have realized (with a name like Rosetta) was that many of these books are offered in multiple languages.  What is great about this is that you can compare the English side-by-side with another language, like so:

 

“Once upon a time, there were four little Rabbits, and their names were- Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.”

 

Italian: C’erano una volta quattro piccoli coniglietti che si chiamavano Flopsy, Mopsy, Coda di cotone e Peter.

German: Es waren einmal vier kleine Hasen, die hiessen Flopsi, Mopsi, Wollschwanz, und Peter.

Romanian: Odata demult, erau patru iepurasi si se numeau: Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, si Peter.

 

I learned that ”SI” means “AND” in Romanian!  Amazing.  Foreign children’s books are fun little puzzles and can be delightfully weird.  In Italian class we read a book about a naughty boy whose “culetto” (little butt) was so fed up with him being spanked all the time, that it packed up a suitcase and moved away. 

 

Have fun learning a new language!  It’s not just for kids.

…

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This Saturday's Favorite Movie Moment debuted in 1973 and starred Ryan and Tatum O'Neal- Tatum who won an Oscar for the role.

I remember reading the book during class in Junior High, when we were told to read a chapter out of our textbook. I used to hide whatever novel I was reading inside my textbooks- I bet my teacher wondered why I never knew the material, because I read a lot of books that year.

Enjoy this scene, which is one of my favorites, and if you've never seen the movie or read the book, do both, it's a great story.

Happy Saturday!

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