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...

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...

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...