Language Trainers Blog

Researchers have discovered that babies as young as seven months old are able to distinguish between two languages. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveals that children who learn two languages at the same time develop the ability to identify a language through duration and pitch of words.

Tanya Lewis at LiveScience explains; “learning two languages can be challenging, especially when the two tongues have opposite word orders. For example, in English, “function” words (like “the” or “with”) precede “content” words, for example: “the dog,” “his hat,” or “with friends.” The content word also has a longer duration when spoken. In Japanese or Hindi, by contrast, the content word (“dog”) comes first, and has a higher pitch than the function word (“the”). In most languages, function words occur more frequently than content words.”

The babies were tested by repeating 11 words in two different made up languages. Each fake language had the same rhythm as a real language, for example English and Japanese. The two languages were broadcast from different parts of the room, and scientists timed how long the babies looked in the direction of the speakers, both in the language they learned and the one they did not. The scientists found that bilingual babies looked longer at the source of sounds that matched their expectation of word order, which suggested the infants were using the pitch and duration clues to keep the two languages straight.

The research goes against the popular belief that learning two languages at once can be detrimental to children’s learning behaviour. This way, parents should always have to encourage their children to take classes in good schools like Language Trainers.

Source: LiveScience

Happy New Year from Language Trainers!

Australians marked the start of 2013 by greeting friends and loved ones with a record number of text messages. Telecommunication companies across the country have reported that their networks held up well for the expected boom of activity, with an estimated 223 million texts being sent during the celebrations.

New language learning data has been made available by the state government, and it seems that Japanese is the most widely accessible second language option at state schools in Queensland. The language was available at 614 schools throughout the state, 44 of which were in Brisbane. German is another very important language, which is studied much today. For example, you could practice your German taking classes in Perth!

Mandarin Chinese was also widely available, although the number of schools teaching the language was less than a quarter of the schools teaching Japanese. Other languages taught at primary and secondary state schools in Queensland include Auslan, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese. This

John-Paul Langbroek, Minister for Education, Training and Employment, said:

“When the federal government announced its plan to make Hindi a priority language I pointed out that Queensland doesn’t have any registered Hindi teachers. Many students in Queensland schools access languages through distance education, simply because its difficult to get language teachers to the more remote and regional schools in the state.”

Source: Brisbane Times

Native American language Cherokee is the 57th language to be added to Google’s Gmail. Users can now exchange emails and instant chat messages in Cherokee syllabary. Google search began supporting the language last year.

The integration of the language was challenging as words such as “spam,” and “inbox,” had to be specially translated by a team of Cherokee Nation volunteers, because these modern words didn’t exist when the syllabary was transcribed.

Google software engineer Craig Cornelius said:

“When Google decides to support a language, it’s not just about which ones have the largest number of speakers. In order to do business around the world, we need to support languages with millions of speakers, such as Japanese, French or Arabic. But we also want to include less spoken languages in order to help preserve the culture and diversity that come with them.”

You can read more at the official Google blog.

Good news for Japanese book fans and language students: Amazon is launching a Japanese language Kindle, due to be released on November 19th! Around 50,000 titles are now available in Japanese in the Kindle store, as the Japanese language Kindle app was made available on smartphones, tablets and online last month. There is a huge emphasis on graphic books, with 15,000 manga titles, and Amazon states that the Kindle offers the best experience for reading Manga. The number of titles overall is limited as publishers fear that digitising their books will hurt sales of hard copies of books. The US Kindle store has over a million titles.

Rakuten already launched the Kobo e-reader in Japan with 30,000 titles; and Sony’s e-Reader is available with 60,000 titles.

This is Koshik, the Asian elephant from an attraction called “Zootopia” at Everland Zoo in South Korea. He is able to imitate 5 words in Korean, ‘annyong/안녕하세요’ (hello), ‘anja/앉다’ (sit down), ‘aniya/아니오’ (no), ‘nuo/드러 눕다’ (lie down), and ‘choah/좋은’ (good). In this video, the elephant can be heard saying the latter.

Wallabies hooker Tatafu Polata-Nau has been demonstrating his talents off the pitch by conducting interviews in Argentina in Spanish. The national Rugby Union team is currently in Argentina for the four game Championship Test.

Polata-Nau is fluent in Tongan, and learnt Japanese to communicate with the media and fans for the Bledisloe Cup Test in Tokyo in 2009.  His efforts in Argentina were the result of one quick Spanish lesson!

Practice your Spanish taking classes in Cairns!

Australia has submitted a German language film for consideration for the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards.

Lore already made it’s debut at the Sydney Film Festival 2012, and it now doing the rounds at other international film festivals, including New Zealand’s, and is now showing as part of Toronto’s International Film Festival. It is an adaptation of Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, and tells the story of a girl leading her siblings across Nazi Germany during World War II. Whilst the film was shot in Europe, it is a collaboration of Australian cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and director and writer Cate Shortland, who also directed the award winning Somersault.

Lore will be on general release in Australia on September 20th.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHDwaOvvWL8

Mental health foundation headspace have called for an enforceable code of practice of the media use of terminology which stigmatises those with mental health issues. Words suggested as inappropriate include “mental,” “psycho,” “schizo,” and “nutjob.” Headspace chief executive, Chris Tanti, believes that the gratuitous use of such language in a derogatory context increases stigma around mental illness, and decreases the likelihood of young people seeking help.

Mr Tanti said headspace was not seeking a ban on these specific words but that using mental health-related language unnecessarily should not be tolerated.

”We’ve taken words like sheila and poofter and wog out of everyday use but this is something that continues,” he said.

There is currently no general code of practice for the use of such discriminatory terms in the media. Media outlets in Australia have varying guidelines.

Australian Press Council chairman, Julian Disney, said such concerns were ”important and persuasive”, and would be given the ”highest possible priority” in press standards now under revision.

Source: SMH

Have you ever wondered why words get cut from the dictionary from one edition to the next? An editor from American dictionary publishers Merriam-Webster tells all in this video.

Apart from the obvious reasons, for example if the word becomes dated and is no longer in use, words can also be cut simply to make space for new ones!

If you’re a YouTube user, the Merriam-Webster channel is worth checking out. There’s some pretty informative stuff on there, including a video on mispronunciations of words which are acceptable.