Lingotopia

What is the first day of the week? As in the picture above, often Monday is regarded as the first day of the week because in many countries it is the start of the working week. And in Chinese, the days of the week are numbered from Monday as literally "first day of the week" (星期一/周一 xingqiyi/zhouyi) to Saturday as the "sixth day of the week" (星期六/周一). Only the Sunday has a special name as "sunday" or "heaven day" (星期日/星期天/周日). Ok, problem solved. But, wait a minute. Isn't in Christian church Sunday regarded as the first day of the week? That would make Monday the second day of the week. Yes, so the Portuguese are right. In Portuguese, the days of the week are counted as in Chinese, but Monday is as "segunda-feira" the second day of the week and Friday is as "sexta-feira" the sixth day. Saturday (sábado) and Sunday (domingo) have separate names. Well, it must be a Christian thing then to count the days of the week like...

My history with Persian goes way back as I have a Persian uncle. I have always been fascinated by Persian culture and wanted to travel to Iran and Afghanistan one day. Unfortunately, in recent years, this has been easier said than done. Actually around 20 years ago, I made my first attempt to learn Persian. It didn't last long, though, because I decided to study Japanese and Chinese at university and so I put my Persian books away. Last year, when I decided to do some volunteering work for refugees and heard that there is quite a number of Iranians and Afghans living in Germany, I remembered my Persian books and dusted them off. The Persian language is divided into several varieties which are mutually intelligible: Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan. Farsi and Dari are written with the Persian alphabet, which is a modification of the Arabic alphabet. It has four letters, which don't exist in Arabic:  پ (pe),  چ (che), گ (ge) and ژ (zhe). Several le...

Everybody has a guilty pleasure and one of mine is the European Vision Song Contest. I phrase it like this because the kind of music played there is mostly not my cup of tea and it seems to me that some countries (Germany included) compete in, who sends the most embarrassing or most spectacular act. So, even if the music isn’t always the best in this contest, it is highly entertaining and I always watched it with friends or family. This year’s slogan of the contest was „Celebrate Diversity“ and therefore I was excited to listen to songs that reflect the languages and cultures of their respective countries. During the years the regulations of the contest were changed several times. Sometimes contestants had to sing in an official language of their country, in other times they could choose freely. Since 1999 there are no restrictions regarding the language, which led to most singers and bands just singing in English. Of the 26 countries in the 2017 finals, only six perfor...

Painting by Syrian artist Mohammed Ghanoum  Read about him (in German) here: Der-Schoengeist-der-mit-Farbe-um-Syrien-kaempft Whenever learning a language one often faces the following problems:  the written and the oral variants are quite different the regional variants vary greatly, sometimes up to the point, that they are mutually unintelligible So, for instance, I am learning European Spanish because I'm traveling to Spain more often than to Latin American countries and also I speak the Southern variant of Mandarin used in Shanghai rather than the Beijing variant, which is actually the one used in most textbooks for foreigners. When learning Arabic it is even more difficult to choose a variant to learn. See the following comic and you get my point.  Comic by itchyfeet ( http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/ ) So, when I decided to learn Arabic I chose to learn Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) first and later to learn to speak Levantine dialect s...

Today I read an article on italki titled "The 3 Hardest Languages To Learn (And Why You Should Learn Them)":  https://www.italki.com/discussion/144616 . This article is just ridiculous. It discussed Arabic, Chinese and Japanese and it was obvious that author hadn't learned any of the discussed languages because the article was full of errors. It states: "Written Japanese is fiendishly complicated, combining five different writing systems, kanji, hiragana, katakana, Arabic and Roman." I have no clue, where the author got this weird idea from. Japanese doesn't use the Arabic script all! One could argue that the Japanese use Arabic numerals, but calling that "Arabic writing system" is a bit over the top in my opinion, since the Arabic numerals actually originate from India and are just called "Arabic numerals" because they were introduced to Western countries by Arabs. In Arabic other numerals are used:  ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠. And the article say...

Normally I don't like setting goals for learning languages because for me the process of learning the language is much more important than fluency or any other goal. Also, I dip my toe in way too many languages recently, but I have started learning Spanish around five months ago and I enjoy the language so much, that I decided to pursue it to fluency. At first I just started by writing little texts and uploading them on italki for correction. Sometimes I would also do a little translation of a Spanish text into German. Then I bought a textbook, which I found too boring and wasted two months by mainly working with Duolingo. I don't understand why it's so popular. It's boring, you don't learn much useful content and you actually only reach like A2 at best, if you finish all exercises. I finished them and learned such useful phrases as:  ¿Tocaste un elefante? (Did you touch an elefant?) ¿Has tocado un elefante? (Have you touched an elefant?) La tortuga perdió...

There is one language, that I learn by total immersion, but will never speak: Swabian. Swabian is a German dialect, but it's quite unintelligible with Northern variants of German and the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg (located in the South-West of Germany) prides itself with the slogan: "Wir können alles außer Hochdeutsch" (We can do everything except speaking High German). I live deep in the Swabian country (aka Ländle) and my rough estimate is that 90% of my colleagues speak Swabian. I'm South German, but from another southern region and there are many expressions and also traditions, that I didn't know, before moving here. Today I learned about a maypole tradition, that I didn't know. Surely, I knew about maypoles in general. It's a tradition, especially prevalent in Bavaria, Swabia and the Rhineland. Every village decorates a huge tree (there are competitions for the most beautiful maypoles) and sets its up, right before the beginning of the m...

I've been always fascinated by the linguistic and cultural diversity of India. When I worked at the University of Tübingen, I coordinated a German language project for Asian students and also had a lot of Indian students. There were no two students with the same mother tongue. One student would speak Kannada, the other Marathi and another one Telugu. Interestingly the Indian students rather spoke English with each other than Hindi. So, whenever I meet an Indian, my first question is always "What's your mother tongue?". That's how I recently heard of the language Odia. Odia is the official language of the state Odisha, located on the eastern coast of India. It has around 40 million native speakers and is one of the six languages, which are awarded classical status in India. The other five are Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. So, when I heard of Odia, I decided to challenge myself to write a little text in Odia, In my previous post about ...