Lingotopia

Today, the 14th of June 2018 marks the start of the Soccer World Cup in Russia. I'm looking forward to exciting matches, I love learning languages, I'm interested in other cultures and I enjoy taking part in challenges. So, why not combine all of that and take up a World Cup challenge? Starting from today I want to post every day a couple of sentences in the languages of the participating countries, some fun facts about them and of course links to music and resources in those languages. I know it's a tad crazy but I won't write whole essays but keep the blog posts rather short. And a lot of countries share the same official languages so I can group them together. My knowledge in the following languages goes from tiny little bit (Serbian), basic (Arabic, Portuguese) over intermediate (French, Spanish) to advanced (English). Spanish : Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Panama, Peru, Uruguay. Arabic : Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia French : B...

On the Facebook page for this blog, I use this little pic with abbreviations of nine languages as avatar. Somehow it didn't feel completely right since I didn't learn Russian so far. But I am fixing that and two weeks ago I started to study Russian actively. With this, I am also somehow completing a language collection: the UN collection. ;-)  The UN has six official working languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. I'm advanced in Chinese and English, intermediate in French and Spanish and now have basic knowledge in Arabic and Russian. I guess that Arabic will always stay the weakest language in my collection since it is the most challenging one for me. But I'm trying to get Russian on a similar level like Spanish. A year ago, I started studying Spanish, first just writing a couple of notebook entries on italki. After four months starting to take one hour of one-on-one online class weekly. Now I'm roughly at B2. Without much effort and...

As a teacher myself, I'm a difficult student. I have my own ideas and methods for language learning and I'm not easily convinced by the ways others teach and learn. The easiest way to scare me off is using a boring textbook. Yes, textbooks are important in language learning.They cover the most important topics of daily life and also all the basic grammar. But the problem is, that I only learn well when the topic is relevant to me. When going by car on holiday to another country, knowing how to talk to a doctor or a car repair shop, is very relevant to me, so I make sure that I learn about this topics right before the trip, but in my daily life in Germany, I don't need to know, how to call a tow service in any other language than German. That's why I prefer to learn vocabulary and expressions when they are relevant to me and not when I happen to reach lesson 8 in a textbook... Also, I don't like to learn grammar structures in a certain order, just because that...

That was the beautiful view from our terrasse at Lake Garda. We stayed for two weeks in August at a holiday apartment in a small town up a mountain and all our neighbours were Italian. Prior to travelling there, I asked on italki, if it would be possible to communicate in French or Spanish in Italy. I have tried that already when I once went to Bologna many years ago and couldn't find help when asking for the way in English. So I asked in French and with my knowledge of Latin, I somehow deciphered the reply in Italian. But some (non-Italian) italki users told me that it would be extremely rude to ask the way in another language than the local one. A user asked me if I wouldn't find it rude if someone asked me the way in Dutch instead of German. No, I wouldn't feel offended at all. I don't expect tourists to learn German. But since I don't want to be rude, I started to familiarise myself with the Italian basics two weeks before the holiday and took two online clas...

I studied Chinese at university as a minor, lived and worked in China for six years and have a Chinese husband. So, I should be pretty fluent in Chinese, right? Sadly 还差很多 (= I'm still far from it). Chinese is, next to Japanese, one of my strongest target languages but in the last six years, I haven't really done anything to both maintain and improve my Chinese level. I only took two years of Chinese classes, the first year at university and also the first year  So, in order to push myself to do something for Chinese, I signed up for this months "Hacking Chinese Reading Challenge" . The goal is to focus on extensive reading. I will try to read a book for a change instead of always staring at the computer or smartphone screen. Hacking Chinese by Olle Linge is my favourite website with tips for learning Chinese. It offers methods, ideas and links to resources not only for beginners and intermediate students but also for advanced students. On the picture you c...

Recently I've been too busy, to actually write something for my blog but I did some language learning nevertheless. Almost three weeks ago, I did a small Serbian writing challenge and after looking a bit into the Serbian grammar and pronunciation, I have to say that it is indeed a very intriguing language. It can be written both with Cyrillic and Roman letters, it has seven cases, it uses different verbs depending on the aspect and it has a pitch accent. I thought that the accent shouldn't be a problem with my knowledge of Chinese. But diacritics for the accents are only used in linguistic literature and the accents have to be learned individually for every word since there aren't many rules regarding the accents. Also, the diacritics are different to the ones used for Chinese. "è" marks a short rising tone in Serbian, but a high falling tone in Chinese. "ȇ" is a long vowel with falling tone in Serbian, while "ě" is a low falling-rising to...

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...

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 ...

My main motivation for learning languages is to learn about other cultures. Today I met a very nice family from Ethiopia. Actually, I almost knew nothing about this country. I only knew that their language is Amharic and I asked them to teach me how to say "good-bye" in Amharic and when I came home, I decided to do an Amharic challenge. This is kind of game of mine, that I invented a month ago. I choose a language, that I haven't learned yet and try to write a simple text and upload it on italki (a language teaching and exchange platform) to get corrections. That doesn't necessarily lead to me actually learning the language, but I get a glimpse of the language and the culture. I did that with Italian, Romanian, Polish and Odia (= Oriya) already. Italian was very easy because I know Latin and also a bit of French and Spanish, but Odia was challenging because it has its own script (initially I also couldn't figure out, how to use the Odia keyboard) and there ar...