Lingotopia

This is a follow-up to my previous post  Learning Shanghainese like a Child , in which I described how I learnt Shanghainese as an adult like a child. In this post, I'll elaborate more on why we don't learn languages like children as adults but at the same time on how we can adapt the language learning tricks of kids to our needs. Many adult language learners dream of learning a language like a child again. It seems so effortless. Children seem to pick up languages quickly, learn to speak accent-free and just happily chat away. But in fact, language learning means a lot of effort for children. We just don't remember it. It takes a year until kids can utter the first words. Another year until they talk in simple sentences. By the age of four, they already have impressive linguistic skills but in general, can't read or write, still have pronunciation problems, and still make many grammar mistakes. When they enter school, they start to learn about grammar, fin...

Often language learners hope they could learn a language like a child again. It seems so effortless and effective. Even though I don't agree with this view, and say that learning a language like a child is neither effortless nor effective for an adult, I, actually, did learn a language like a child as an adult: Shanghainese ( Wikipedia article on Shanghainese ). In this post, I'd like to introduce Shanghainese and my relationship with it and in the next post, I'll discuss my take on "Learning a language like a child". Get a taste of how Shanghainese sounds on Wikitongues, a great site, where you can find recordings of an abundance of languages:  Ivy speaking Shanghainese .  I started to learn Shanghainese at the age of 31 when I moved to Shanghai for the second time. I stayed for five years and learnt the language in an immersive environment, my husband's Shanghainese speaking family, together with my kids. Ok, I cheated a bit. Before the birth of our...

The first time I learnt something about sign language was when I visited a dormitory for deaf youngsters who pursued a vocational training in Munich. The director of the dorm explained that German Sign Language (GSL, Deutsche Gebärdensprache) was a language completely independent of spoken German. I learnt that GSL had its own complex grammar and even dialects. After the tour through the dorm, the visitors could have drinks in the dorms café and suddenly I felt mute. How was I supposed to communicate that I wanted a coke? I didn't know any sign language! It was an interesting experience and since that time I was fascinated by sign language and by Deaf culture . Yes, Deaf people have their own culture. A world that is unfamiliar to hearing people. But I love it that the Deaf community embraces their own culture rather than seeing themselves as disabled. "Able-bodied" or "disabled" are just terms defined by society, but not necessarily how people feel themsel...

This week I finally started my new job as a lecturer in a masters studies program called "Germanistik und Interkulturalität/Multilingualität " ("German Studies and Interculturalism/Multilingualism"). As you may figure, this seems to be just the right thing for me and I'm excited to go back to teaching again. Interestingly, a new colleague asked me, if I was from New Zealand. It seemed that I looked a bit Maori to her. Not long ago, I talked to another italki user and told him, that I was mixed-race to which he replied that he always thought of me being American Indian. This prompted me to conduct a little experiment on stereotypes and I posted this discussion on italki:  https://www.italki.com/discussion/165794 . If you're not an italki user, you can't read the whole discussion, so I'm going to summarize it. My initial post was:  I had some discussions with other users that it seems to be difficult to guess my ethnicity and my age from...

A new year has started and many language learners are setting their goals of which language to learn in 2018. My goal is actually to not add another language in 2018, but this resolution already went out the window on the second day of this year. In the book “Teach Yourself - To Learn A Language” by P. J. T. Glendening from 1965 I found an interesting paragraph about the so-called Linguamania that means “becoming so taken with the idea of learning languages that you are unable to devote more than a few days to a new language before you leave it (“temporarily”) to take up another one. The usual result is a vague smattering of a few languages, absolutely no knowledge of others and a good knowledge of none.” (p. 277) This is so true, and I’m already stuck deep in the linguamania abyss. But what’s the solution? Is there a cure? First of all, let me set some things straight because sometimes I get asked, if I’ve written all articles on this blog myself. Yes, this is just my own li...

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...