Don't Trust Google Translate

Google Translate can be a wonderful tool if you're learning a language, and in fact, I use it all the time whenever there's a word I want to look up or a text in a foreign language that I want to get the gist of. But like Wikipedia, it is not something I would rely on if I were going to do anything important, like give a deposition, write a newspaper article, or submit an assignment for a grade. Nevertheless, I continually have students hand in papers that have obviously been written with the "assistance" of Google. It's usually very easy to spot. There will often be an advanced vocabulary word that is completely out of place and used incorrectly. I figure they don't know the actual meaning of the word, so I ask them where they got it from, and most of the time they confess that they simply Googled it. I have to remind them that Google is not always accurate, and even still, they shouldn't use words that they don't know. It's been a while, but I used to have students who would compose their entire essay in Arabic, then put it through Google translate to make it English. These essays always ended up being the most garbled, incoherent mess, that it was incredibly obvious that the student hadn't done the work properly.

All these examples have to do with students not using the tool for what it was intended for, but every now and then I come across examples that are quite humorous when Google Translate gets things completely wrong. For instance, today I wanted to see some of the differences between Czech and Slovak so I wrote out the sentence "Rád učím sa slovenčinu" (I like to learn Slovak). Google came back with "rád učim se češtinu," which means I like to learn Czech. I realize that the two languages are similar, but I find it curious that Google would use them interchangeably like that in the translation.

I've seen a couple other examples from the Hungarian news site hvg.hu. Since you'd have to know Hungarian to fully appreciate the original, I'll summarize it here. Apparently, last year, if you put the name of the famous Hungarian statesman "Kossuth Lajos" and translated it into English, it would come back with "Abraham Lincoln." Both are famous statesmen for sure, but clearly not the same person. I suppose Google got word of this because it no longer makes this mistake.

Another example from hvg.hu shows that Google apparently has a hard time staying up with current events. If you entered the French phrase "le président américain" (The American president), it would come back simply with "Bush." I checked, and it doesn't do this one anymore either, but it's still funny.

This kind of technology can be helpful when used as a starting point, but certainly not when a polished final product is expected. Sadly, it would appear that we're still years away from anything like a Babel fish or the TARDIS translation matrix. Does anyone else have examples of humorous mistranslations where Google gets it completely wrong? Comment and share if you do.

Update: I did some searching and found a few humorous ones on jackcola.org:

This is a quite funny one, but it kind of works for all names, but it suits Justin Bieber the best.
What to do: In Google Translator, convert the phrase “Will Justin Bieber ever hit puberty” from English to Vietnamese. Now take this text from Vietnamese, and convert it back to English. Have a read what it says.
Since this works for any name, I say it’s a little bug within Google Translator.

Children's Television: Pat a Mat

When searching for different resources to use for learning or teaching a language I often try to find children's television shows in the target language. There are several good reasons for this. Children are language learners themselves--first language learners--so programs made for them often have simpler language compared to programs made for adults. These types of shows also tend not to be as dialogue driven, instead using strong visuals to move the story along. These visuals make it easier to understand the story without having to necessarily understand all of the dialogue. Also, programs for children tend to be very short, sometimes just a five to ten minute long clip. This makes it easier to rewatch several times to assist in learning. Lastly, children's programs that are made in the country of the target language tend to be a good way to learn the culture of the language, and there is a strong connection between language and culture.

One thing I hope to be able to do on this blog is share resources like children's shows that I find so that anyone who wants to study that language can access them. So the other day I was trying to find some TV programs in Slovak. If you were to try a similar search, you would likely find a lot of programs in Czech, but not in Slovak. The reason for this is that back when the Czech and Slovak republics were one country, most of the programs produced were in Czech, and the Slovaks simply watched them in Czech. This isn't necessarily that big of a deal since both languages are fairly similar, though they are certainly different enough to be considered separate languages.

My search ultimately led me to the delightful "Pat a Mat." The two main characters are named Pat and Mat, which means "stalemate" and "checkmate." The "a" in between just means "and." It is technically a Czech program (though since it was considered subversive, during its early years it was produced in Bratislava, Slovakia). Beyond the opening and closing credits though, there is no dialogue, so it really makes little difference which country it was produced in. Basically, the stop-motion animation show is about two handymen: Pat and Mat. Each episode features them trying to solve some sort of problem, often one that is self-created since they both are a little bit clumsy. They spend the rest of the episode using tools in creative ways to solve the problem. One thing I like is how often a chainsaw is used to fix their messes. I shared the show with my four-year-old, and he instantly loved it.

One might ask how I use this show to learn Slovak or Czech if there is no dialogue. The answer is that I use the title of each episode as a starting point. Most of the episodes have a one or two word title that deals with the duo's dilemma. I look that title up and use it while I watch it (you could just use Google Translate for this, though I started using this online Slovak dictionary instead). For instance, the first clip below is from the episode "Autodráha." I looked it up and saw that it basically means an autodrome, or race track. In this case, they build a ridiculous slot-car race track in their house. 

Autodráha

While watching the show I try to repeat the vocabulary item I learned from the title as much as possible. So I ask my son, "What are they building?" hoping that he'll answer by saying autodráha. As their track gets more and more ridiculous, I tell him, "Wow! This autodráha is ridiculous" and so on. After watching it a few times, I might look up other words of objects in the episode, like chair, which is stolica. I can then ask him if they're building their autodráha on top of the stolica. It's small, and it's simple, but it's still a fun way to learn some vocabulary.

What I also love about the show is just how Central European it is. When I see their house, it looks like a house in Slovakia. When I see their kitchen, it's definitely a kitchen from the region. I've found two holiday episodes that also demonstrate some specific traditions. The first one is the Christmas themed episode Vánočka (which in Slovak would be vianočka). Though I've got a little bit of Slovak ancestry (which is why I wanted to learn the language in the first place), I wasn't familiar with this tradition. The name comes from Vianoce, which is the Slovak word for Christmas, and refers to the special weaved bread that is made on Christmas (here's a recipe, if you're interested in knowing more). So consider everything that I'm learning from such a simple episode. I've learned not just the word vianočka, but also the related word Vianoce. I'm also learning about customs from the region. This is all pretty good for a seven minute program.

Vánočka

Another holiday episode is Velikonoční Vajíčko (which in Slovak would be Veľkonočné Vajíčko). This comes from Veľká noc, which means Easter (though literally means "great night.") Vajíčko means egg, so the whole title in English would be "Easter Egg."

Velikonoční Vajíčko

The episode starts with Pat (I think Pat's the one in the yellow shirt) watching a video about traditional Czech Easter egg painting. Mat comes in carrying various Easter symbols, one of which was a whip of some sort that I didn't recognize, so I looked it up online. It's called a pomlázka (in Slovak šibačka), which is a whip that boys would carry around on Easter Monday that they would playfully use to whip neighborhood girl's legs. I'm pretty sure in most of Slovakia the tradition is like in Hungary where they would also spray (or soak) the girls with water or perfume in addition to whipping them. At any rate, our modern holiday traditions sadly lack the violent spirit they used to a century or two ago.

If you're interested in more episodes of Pat a Mat, I've found dozens on YouTube. It's a fun and clever show that doesn't demand that you learn any Czech or Slovak to enjoy it, but if you put in a little bit of work it can be a good way to pick up some vocabulary and learn about the culture.

A Question About Questions

A fan of the blog wrote in and asked me the following question:

On page 9 of Hungarian An Essential Grammar by Carol H. Rounds there are illustrations of question intonations.  How do those illustrations compare to questions in English or other languages?  Can you tell if a person is asking a question no matter what language he speaks (or you speak)?

Who am I kidding? The question was written by my mother. Hi mom! Look at me! I'm on the internet!

And to answer her question, no. No, you cannot tell if a person is asking a question no matter what language they speak because languages form questions in different ways. In fact, different dialects of the same language can form questions in very different ways. Off the top of my head, the three ways I can think of that languages form questions are:

• word order
• intonation
• vocabulary (tag question, wh- words, particles)

Word Order

One of the first things that should come to mind when forming questions in English is the word order. For instance, English usually follows a subject-verb-object sentence order, as in "You are hungry." However, if I want to ask a question, I have to move the verb to before the subject, "Are you hungry?" A handful of other languages do this, but in many others the word order doesn't change, and the only way to distinguish whether a statement is a declaration or a question is by intonation.

Of course, in English we can do the same thing. It just forms a different kind of question. When I ask "What did John eat?" it means I don't know the answer, and I'm inquiring. If, on the other hand, I ask, "John ate what?" it means that I probably do know the answer, I just can't believe it. 

 

Intonation

Intonation is how you change the pitch of your voice when you're speaking. In English, when asking a yes/no question our pitch rises on the last syllable to indicate that we're asking a question. I'll use an arrow over the last syllable to indicate this.

Intonation:     -       -     -   -   -    ↗
Sentence:    Have you got a  minute?

Many languages have a similar rising tone at the end of the sentence to indicate a question, but not all do. Hungarian is pretty distinctive in that the rising tone is not on the last syllable but on the second to last, or penultimate one.

Intonation:     -  ↗       ↘
Sentence:      Éhes     vagy?   
Translation:  Hungry  (you) are? (Are you hungry?)

Of course, some languages are called tonal languages, like Chinese or Thai. In these languages, the tone used changes the meaning of the word. Here's an example from Chinese. You can also hear the first four of these tones pronounced here (a lot of Chinese don't consider the fifth, or neutral tone to be an actual tone, so it doesn't always make these kinds of lists).
                       
First tone (high and stable): 妈 mā - mother
Second tone (rising): 麻 má - hemp
Third tone (dipping): 马 mǎ - horse
Fourth tone (falling): 骂 mà - scold, curse
Fifth tone (neutral): 吗 ma - question particle

So if someone were to ask you a question in Chinese, you wouldn't be able to tell based on tone alone.

Vocabulary (Tag question, wh- words, particles)

Tag questions are words that are "tagged" on to the end of a sentence, usually to turn a declarative sentence into a question. So, "You're coming" could be transformed into "You're coming, right?" You'll notice that the intonation on the tag question is a little bit different than simply rising at the end in that it rises and then falls again very quickly.

Also, not all dialects of English use the same tag words, which could cause confusion. In British English, a very common tag word is "innit." Here's a short article the BBC wrote several years ago about its usage. So if someone came to you and said, "Weather's nice, innit?", and you weren't familiar with that particular tag, you might be confused as to what exactly they were saying (especially with some of the nonstandard uses found on the BBC link). More so, in Malaysian and Singaporean English a common tag question is "can", as in "is it possible?" When we were visiting our friends in Kuala Lumpur the air conditioners in their house needed to be fixed. They called their landlord about it, and I overheard them asking something like, "You'll come at 11am to fix our air conditioner, can?" I think most native English speakers who haven't been to the Malaysian peninsula would find this confusing and not necessarily recognize it as a question.

Every language I've studied uses some kind of wh- words, which are question words that almost always start with wh-, which in English are who, what, where, when, why, which, and how. The thing about these words in English is that their presence alone is enough to indicate a question, so the intonation doesn't rise at the end of the sentence. In fact, the intonation for a question like, "What are you doing?" is basically exactly the same as the intonation for a declarative statement. So if you didn't know the wh- word, you wouldn't recognize that you were being asked a question.

Another vocabulary item that could be used is a particle, which is generally just a short syllable that is added to a sentence to turn it into a question. In Hungarian, this particle is "-e." It's usually used in writing to indicate a question (since word order doesn't change to indicate a question), but it can also be used in speaking:

Hungarian: Igaz-e?
Meaning:   True-question particle (Is it true?)

Chinese uses particles as well to indicate questions, most notably 吗 ma, as in the question below:

Chinese: 你   好     吗？
Translit.: ní   hǎo   ma
English:  you good question particle (Are you good? or How are you?)

(And don't anyone give me a hard time about writing ní as having the second tone instead of the third tone. In Chinese, two third tones can't go together, so the first one will turn into the second rising tone).

Of course, beyond all these I suppose there are also non-verbal cues that someone might be asking you a question, but these could also vary from culture to culture. So in short, languages form questions in lots of different ways, and I don't believe that you would necessarily be able to tell a question from a statement simply from hearing it if you were not already somewhat familiar with that language. Otherwise, if anyone else in addition to my mother has a question, feel free to send it to me, and I'll gladly do my best to answer it.

Stupid Questions

We all remember being in elementary school and being told by our teachers to ask anything we like, even if we think it's stupid, because there are no stupid questions. Anyone who has actually taught knows this simply isn't true and that students ask stupid questions all the time. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh. I don't have any problem when a student genuinely doesn't understand a concept and needs to solicit further explanation. What really bothers me is when I have taught something, the student has learned it, but has taken no care to apply it. I wouldn't call that person stupid, but I'd like it if they put a little bit of thought into their problems before consulting me. Here's an example of what I mean from a conversation I had today. A student came up to me with a draft of the essay she was writing.

Student: Can you read my conclusion?
Me: Why?
Student: I don't think it's good.
Me: Why not?
Student: I don't know.

See, here I feel like the student simply views me as an editor, not as an instructor. She wanted me to read it and tell her if it was good or not without giving it any thought herself. In other words, it wasn't that she didn't understand the concept, but that she hadn't thought to apply what she had learned before coming to me. Though to be fair, I've found that this is fairly typical of education in the Middle East. Students do not see themselves as having access to answers or knowledge, only teachers have answers to questions. So again, maybe I don't think the question is stupid as much as I dislike the attitude that teachers are the only source of knowledge and that students can't think for themselves. All hail teachers!

I have really tried to discourage students from asking me these kinds of questions when they're writing. I've told them that if they come to me with a specific question, I'll gladly answer it, but that I am not there to proofread their work. So in the case of this student, I had to ask a few more questions to figure out what her actual concern was. 

Me: Do you know what makes a conclusion good? Do you know what elements you need to put in it?
Student: No.
Me: (glancing over her paragraph) What is this first sentence here? What is it doing?
Student: It's a summary.
Me: That's good. You knew that your conclusion is supposed to start with a summary. What's supposed to come after the summary?
Student: A recommendation.
Me: Right, or it could be a prediction or a call to action. There needs to be some sort of final thought. Did you write one of those in your paragraph?
Student: Yes, I did.
Me: Okay then, you have everything you're supposed to have in the paragraph. So why then do you think it isn't good?
Student: It's very short.

Now at this point I should say that I always find it very interesting what students consider to be "good" writing, and it invariably has something to do with length. Good writing, they think, is long. How long you ask? As long as you can make it. I personally disagree. Good writing is concise. My 8th grade English teacher put it this way: good writing is like a woman's skirt. It should be long enough to cover the topic, but short enough to keep us interested. Of course, I can't use this metaphor here in ultra-conservative Qatar, so I instead pointed out to her that length isn't the issue. If she has covered all the points in the paragraph, then it doesn't matter if it looks a little bit short.

She said thank you and went back to her seat to work. I'm genuinely not trying to be mean, but I still hope this way of questioning students doesn't make them feel stupid. I have had some get annoyed at times and tell me, "Stop trying to make me think!" But that's my job. I'm not here to fix your paper so that you can get a good grade. I'm here to help you think about what you're doing and learn how to do it yourself.

The Joke

Apparently, talking about what makes a language hard to learn can be kind of a downer, so I thought I'd try to lighten the place up a bit by sharing some of the linguistics jokes I know.

Feature Checking

The first one I remember hearing was in a minimalist syntax course I took during my undergrad (so you know it's going to be funny). Actually, I'd have to explain a lot of fairly uninteresting theory for this joke to even make sense that it probably isn't even worth it. Here goes anyway. One aspect of minimalist theory is called "feature checking." It's been a while, so I had to look it up on Glottopedia (which is the linguist's version of Wikipedia), but it's basically where two elements that share a feature "check" each other in order to eliminate the feature in one of them. That probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but for the sake of setting up a joke it's more than you need. The way it does this is called "percolating." So one day we were sitting in class, diagramming sentences, and someone called out, "A good pick-up line would be 'I'd percolate to check your features!'" We all laughed, though I'm sure our professor groaned and rolled his eyes since he'd probably heard the same joke every semester.

Greek

I promise the next one will be (marginally) funnier. Whenever someone finds out I have a degree in linguistics they inevitably ask how many languages I know. "All of them," I nonchalantly reply, "except for Greek."

They'll follow up by asking how do you say [something] in [some language], like "How do you say 'pencil' in Swahili?"

To which I reply, "Eh, it's all Greek to me," followed by an awkward pause, then, "but seriously, I speak Spanish and Hungarian."

The problem is, in preparing to visit Athens last year, I actually learned some Greek, so the joke doesn't quite work anymore. Still, I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of that joke. Probably the only one I've gotten more mileage out of is one I stole borrowed from my friend Dave back in high school. Whenever someone would come in a room and ask if we knew where someone was, we'd reply with, "He ran off saying something about a treasure map and a waterfall."

The Fourth Floor

This next one isn't so much a joke you can readily use as a funny story that happened to me from a few month ago. To give a little background, one of the most famous sociolinguistics papers ever written was by William Labov, titled "The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores" (I was actually surprised to find a copy of the whole article online here for free!) Many people know that in a New York accent people will frequently drop the letter "r" when pronouncing words like "car" or "floor." William Labov wanted to see to what degree social class affected whether people dropped their r's or kept them. So he went into a handful of New York department stores based on what social class usually frequented them. Saks Fifth-Avenue was the highest ranking, followed by Macy's, then S. Klein. He'd go into each store and interact with the employees, asking which floor something was on, trying to get them to answer him by saying the words "fourth floor." He'd then lean forward and say, "Excuse me?" so that they'd repeat themselves. In each case he would note whether they pronounced their r's or not, ultimately to find that, yes, social stratification did have an effect on the way people talked.

So a few months back, my wife was at the mall looking for a particular item. A saleswoman suggested she go upstairs to a store on the fourth floor to look for it. When my wife told me about this later, I got really excited and asked, "Did she say fourth floor or fouhth flooh? Cause we should probably call Bill Labov." Then I just laughed and laughed, all by myself of course, because no one else around me could possibly have gotten it.


Do you speak...?

The last joke I'd like to share is one I actually use every semester with my students. It looks a little intimidating because there is a lot written in other languages, but in each case it is just the question "Do you speak [whatever the language is]?" in that particular language. It goes like this:

Two Americans were sitting on a park bench enjoying their afternoon when an Arab gentleman came to them to ask a question. Though well-traveled, unfortunately, this man didn’t know any English.

           

 “هل تتكلم العربية؟” he asked. The two Americans looked confused, so the man tried again.

“Savez-vous parlez français? ” he said, but the two Americans still didn’t understand.

             

“¿Saben ustedes Español?” the man grew more frustrated, so he tried every language he could think of. “Говорите ли вы русский язык? Sprechen sie Deutsch? क्या आप हिन्दी बोलते हैं? Biliyor musunuz Türkçe? Esetleg tudtok magyarul? 你的说中文吗? Μιλάτε ελληνικά?!?” Outraged and out of ideas, the Arab gentleman left.

            

A few moments passed and the first American turned the other. “Do you think we should maybe learn a foreign language? It seems like it’d be pretty useful.”

            

The second American, however, disagreed. “What do you mean, useful?!? That guy knew at least ten languages and it didn’t do him any good!”

As I already said, I usually share that joke with my students during the first week of class. I then ask them why they think I shared it with them. The answers they usually come up with have to do with how important English is in the world today, or that Americans don't bother to learn other languages, to which I say that those are good ideas, but not really what I was getting at. After a couple of minutes I make the following declaration: "It's a joke. I shared it with you to make you laugh." I let them think about that before continuing. "You've all been in school too long. You think that if a teacher puts something up on the board there must be some deeper meaning to it. If I had shared this with you at the mall, you wouldn't have said to yourself, 'That's funny, but what am I supposed to learn from it?" Of course, I then change directions and actually use the example to teach them something, which is that all writing has a purpose. The purpose of a joke is to make you laugh, not to make you learn. The purpose of a recipe is to teach you to cook something, not to make you laugh (at which point I pretend I'm reading a recipe, laugh hysterically, and say "Eggs"). So what is the purpose of an essay then?  There's more to the conversation than this, but I'll save that for another blog post.

Having put all of these in writing, none of them seems terribly funny. Perhaps I need some new material and should come up with a punchline to "Why did the linguist cross the road?" or "How many polyglots does it take to screw in a light bulb?" If you can think of an answer to those, feel free to share them in the comments.

What Makes a Language Hard to Learn Part 2: Grammar

In my last entry, I discussed what makes a language hard to learn and focused on pronunciation, basically saying that a language having different sounds doesn't necessarily make it difficult unless those sounds involve minimal pairs, are difficult for me to find in my mouth, and are not clearly represented in the writing system. This time, I'd like to tackle grammar issues.

I've lived in Argentina, Hungary, and Qatar, and in each one I've had someone tell me that their language is the hardest one in the world to learn. I'll say right now that the argument that Spanish is the hardest language is pretty flimsy (I think it had something to do with Spanish having a lot of vocabulary words). It's much easier to make the argument for Hungarian or Arabic, though I want to say right here and now that I don't find Hungarian grammar to be terribly difficult. In fact, I find it to be quite logical and easy, so it really isn't very time consuming. Regardless of the language studied, you have to spend a lot of time studying grammar. I don't have too much of a problem with this, again, so long as the grammar seems fairly rule-based and logical. It's when grammar textbooks say "There is no rule for this and each instance must be memorized" that I begin to feel that the language is being needlessly difficult.

Formation of Plurals

Forming plurals in English is fairly easy. You add an -s to the word. Sure, there are a few irregular plurals (child/children) and sometimes you add -es, but I think in most cases if you don't do it one-hundred percent correctly, the meaning will not be affected. Saying something like "She has many childs" sounds wrong, but you probably have no problem understanding it, and I think that understandability is an important key in what makes a grammar difficult.

I know it's just going to come off like I think Arabic is hard, but this is one thing that really gets me about the language. A lot of Arabic nouns form plurals by an internal consonant change. Something like this:

كتاب [kitab] - book / كتب [kutub] - books
فندق [funduq] - hotel / فبادق [fanadiq] - hotels
هرم [haram] - pyramid / أهرام [ahara:m] - pyramids

These changes aren't completely random, but it certainly can feel that way. In reality, there is a set number of patterns that can be made. It's kind of similar to strong verb forms in English, like speak/spoke, eat/ate, drink/drunk. The difference being that in English it really is a limited list of verbs that are affected by this, while in Arabic it seems like the majority of nouns. What this means is that for any noun that is learned, the plural form must be learned with it. Part of this also demands a good quality dictionary that will list the plural forms. If the dictionary only lists the singular, then the learner will have a hard time figuring it out.

I've felt a similar issue with German, where plurals can be formed either by adding an ending (often -e, -er, -en or -s), by an internal vowel change, by both, or by neither. Consider the following:

Die Tasche / Die Taschen - The bag / The bags
Das Buch / Die Bücher - The book / The books
Der Wagen / Die Wagen - The car / The cars

Again, there are a fairly limited number of patterns that are used and knowing the gender of the word can help narrow it down even more, but at the end of the day, when learning a new word you also have to learn the plural form. There is rarely anyway you can figure it out on your own.

In this respect at least, Hungarian is rather easy. There are some a few simple rules regarding vowel harmony which dictates all word formation in Hungarian, but after that the plural is formed simply by adding -k to the word.

taska / taskák - bag / bags
könyv / könyvek - book / books
bolt / boltok - store / stores
kocsi / kocsik - car / cars

The point is, once you know the handful of rules that govern plural formation, you can apply them to any noun you see without having to learn the form separately.

Case

While I'm on the topic of Hungarian, something I hear a lot of people groan about is that Hungarian has a lot of grammatical cases. Depending on what you mean by a case, there are at least sixteen. People who have struggled through cases in German, or worse still in Russian, quiver at the thought of having to learn so many cases.

The thing is, it's nowhere near that difficult. In German, Russian, and several other languages, grammatical case is simply something that the grammar demands. That is, it doesn't generally contain any meaning of its own.

ein Bruder - a brother, der Ball - the ball
Ich habe einen Bruder - I have a brother (+acc).
Ich gebe den Ball zu meinem Bruder - I give the ball (+acc) to my brother (+dat).

The first example demonstrates the accusative case. That is, since "Bruder" is the object of the verb "habe", and "Bruder" is a masculine noun, I have to add the accusative ending "-en." In the next example, "der Ball" is changed to "den Ball" for the same reason. There is also an example of the dative ending, "-em" because I am giving the ball to my brother (which is a dative construction). The thing is, the word "zu" is also there, which means "to." In addition, I'm using masculine nouns here. If I were using feminine or neuter ones, then different endings would have to be memorized. It's also different in the plural.

The other thing that strikes me in these examples is that the case ending doesn't really contain any meaning. It's just there because the grammar says it has to be. An example from English to demonstrate this would be the difference between "me" (which is used in accusative and dative constructions) and "I" (which is used in nominative constructions, or as the subject). If I ask, "Are you talking to I?" it sounds a little strange, but you still understand it. In fact, add another noun in there, and you might not know which is correct anymore. "Are you talking to John and I?" Or is it supposed to be "John and me?" Unless you're a real stickler for grammar, both probably sound fine because the meaning is identical in both (but so you know, "John and me" is correct).

Cases in Hungarian are almost entirely meaning based, which I think makes them really easy. Also, Hungarian doesn't have any grammatical gender, so you don't have to memorize endless charts. Again, the vowel changes based on rules of vowel harmony, but other than that the ending ends up being exactly the same.

az asztal - the table
az asztalra - onto the table (sublative case)
az asztalon - on the table (suppressive case)
az asztalról - off the table (delative case)

A   könyvet        az    asztalra        tettem
the book (+acc) the   table (+sub) put (1sing +past)
I put the book on the table

I personally don't feel that this functions the same as grammatical case in other languages and that it would be more accurate to simply refer to them as suffixes. Whatever you call them, they are fairly straightforward to use.

Gender

Similar to case, gender usually ends up being something that the grammar requires, but doesn't contain any meaning itself. Sure, sometimes it aligns pretty well. Words that describe men often are masculine in gender, while words that describe women can be female (unless you are a young girl in Germany, or Mädchen, which is a neuter word), but for the most part, grammatical gender has nothing to do with whether the noun being described is a boy or girl, but is just there to meet the demands of the grammar.

In some cases, like in Spanish, this is really no big deal because the gender doesn't do all that much. That is, if you want to say "the bread" and say "la pan" instead of "el pan," people are pretty much going to understand you. Gender in Spanish doesn't affect the formation of plurals (like it does in German) and Spanish doesn't use a case system, so there are no problems there.

As I've already shown, other languages do use different plurals and case endings for different genders, but this still isn't that big of a deal if I can figure out what gender the word is by looking at it. I'm sure most people are aware that masculine nouns in Spanish frequently end in an -o and feminine ones in an -a. But what about the many words that end in a different vowel, or in a consonant? How can you tell then?

In Spanish, you just have to memorize them, but in the Slavic languages I've studied (Russian, Slovak, Croatian, and Czech) they make it super easy for you. I'll use Slovak as an example, since that's the one I'm most familiar with, but it's all very similar in each of the languages.

Masculine - ends in a consonant
Feminine - ends with "a"
Neuter - ends with "o" or "e"

And for the most part, that's it. Sure there are some exceptions, but most of the nouns in Slovak follow this rule exactly, and if you can tell what gender a word uses just by looking at it, it makes it that much easier to learn.

I think the language that drives me absolutely up the wall when it comes to gender is Hebrew. Not only is there generally no way to tell what gender a word is just by looking at it, many masculine nouns take the feminine plural ending, and there's no way of knowing this unless you memorize each form individually. When I was in college learning these we called them "cross-dressers", though the joke really doesn't make them any easier to learn.

Masculine plural ending: ים- [im] / Feminine plural ending: ות- [ot]

דבר [davar] thing (masculine singular) / דברים [davarim] things (masculine plural)

מסעדה [misada] restaurant (feminine singular) / מסעדות [misadot] (feminine plural)
מקום [makom] place (masculine singular) /  מקומות [mekomot] (masculine noun with feminine plural)

So if I can close by making two points, it would be 1) though I might be biased, Hungarian grammar really isn't that hard, and 2) anytime I have to memorize forms individually because they don't appear to be governed by rules or patterns, I'm going to think that the grammar is difficult. In reviewing this article, I also noticed that I focused exclusively on nouns. In thinking about it, this might be because I don't really find verbs to be all that difficult in the languages I've studied (with the exception of imperfect and perfect verbs in Slavic languages). Adjectives and adverbs also seem to be pretty straightforward if you understand how the noun works, and prepositions don't follow any rhyme or reason, so there's little point in talking about it.

I also wanted to note that the issues I'm talking about here may make a language difficult to learn, but certainly not impossible. I'm simply sharing things that I have personally experienced that have frustrated me. Remember, every language is simple enough that a small child can figure it out simply by being exposed to it.

What Makes a Language Hard to Learn Part 1: Pronunciation

I spent the last week marking students' essays, several of which made the claim that English is the "easiest language in the world to learn." My initial reaction when reading that is that what makes a language easy or hard is highly subjective and that an absolute statement like that could not possibly be made. Nevertheless, I'm still fine with outrageous claims so long as the student provides some evidence to back them up, but when the student demonstrates this by stating that English is easy because it only has 28 letters and other languages have more, I'm left feeling not entirely convinced by their argument. Their writing at the very least did get me thinking, in particular about what I would say makes a language easy, or more particularly difficult to learn. 

It's kind of a tricky question because first we need to all agree on what it means to learn a language. For instance, I consider myself to speak fluent English, but if I sat down and tried to read a jargon-filled engineering report, I'd honestly have a very hard time following it. Anyone who has studied vocabulary for the GRE has probably felt the same way. So just how much of a language do you have to know to be able to say that you've "learned" it? For my purposes here, I'm going to distinguish between learning a language for general purposes and specific purposes. By general purposes, I mean the sort of day to day communication the average person would need to get through a variety of situations, which is different then specific purposes (e.g. academic, business, scientific). I know that definition still isn't very specific, so another way to think of is simply the minimum someone would have to learn in order to say that they know that particular language.

As I started to write, I realized I had way more things to say on the matter of what makes a language hard to learn than could fit reasonably into one blog entry. So I'm going to break this up into pieces. Here's part 1, where I discuss pronunciation. 

Pronunciation

Before being able to learn a word and use it in a sentence I have to be able to pronounce it with some degree of confidence. This relates to the actual sounds of the language as well as the way those sounds are represented in writing. Now, many languages are full of unique sounds. Even ones that are very similar may not be exactly the same (e.g., the letter "t" in English is pronounced slightly differently than the letter "t" in Spanish). Normally, mispronouncing words like this will just make it sound like you have a foreign accent, but it becomes a problem when minimal pairs are involved.

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pairs are pairs of words that only differ in one sound, for instance the words "pay" and "bay." A native English speaker has no problem telling these words apart, but if you spoke a language like, say, Arabic which doesn't distinguish between [p] and [b] you can easily cause confusion by mispronouncing words (like the time I had a student saying she wanted to go downstairs to "bray." "Like a donkey?" I thought).

This is honestly one of the things that has held me back from seriously learning Arabic. Arabic has several minimal pairs involving letters called emphatic consonants, which are produced in the very back of the mouth (ق,ص,ض,ط, and ظ). They all also have their own non-emphatic counterparts, so mispronouncing these will cause a potential change of meaning in the word.

See if you can hear the difference

When I first heard these, I couldn't tell the difference between them and their non-emphatic counterparts. Though I can usually differentiate between them when I hear them spoken now, it still doesn't mean I can consistently find the spot in the back of my mouth where I'm supposed to make them.

Minimal Pairs and Aspiration

Another example of this that I've experienced comes from Hindi, which distinguishes between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants. For those who don't know, aspiration is a little puff of air that goes with a consonant. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say "ta, ta, ta." Now say "da, da, da." Hopefully, whenever you said "ta" you felt a puff of air on your hand which wasn't there when you said "da." Your tongue is otherwise in the exact same spot of your mouth. This is aspiration, and it usually indicated in phonetic transcription with a little letter "h" (like [tʰ]).

In English, aspirated and non-aspirated sounds really just appear in pairs like this: [tʰ]/[d], [pʰ]/[b], [kʰ]/[g], but in Hindi there would be four forms: [t], [tʰ], [d], and [dʰ]. Now, I've had a lot of practice making a non-aspirated [t] sound from learning other languages, so that isn't too difficult for me, but putting aspiration on a [d] is quite difficult to make my mouth do. It's also rather hard for me to hear the difference. An excellent site for learning Devangari (the script that Hindi uses) is right here. Click on the link, then go to the "Tests" tab. Assuming you don't know Devangari, here's a key for the first test:

क = [ka] / ख = [kʰa]
ग = [ga] / घ = [gʰa]

Try taking the test. It will play one of the sounds, then you choose the letter you think you heard. I guarantee that you will find it very difficult to hear the difference between the sounds. Since these sounds are minimal pairs, using them incorrectly can lead to completely changing the meaning of a word.

Spelling System

I do most of my language learning by reading, which is probably why pronunciation issues are so challenging for me when learning a language. I rarely have a native speaker or teacher there to let me know if I'm making sounds correctly. In addition to this, the way a language represents sounds in writing also influences how difficult it is I find that language to learn. For some languages, like Spanish or Hungarian, this is no problem since words are written more or less phonetically. That is, once you know the basic rules, you can look at a word you've never seen before and still know instantly how to pronounce it.

Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért

This intimidating looking Hungarian word could easily be learned with a little bit of practice, if for instance I told you that an "sz" is pronounced like [s] and an "s" by itself is like the "sh" in "shelf." An accent over a vowel makes it pronounced more or less longer and the stress of the word is also on the first syllable. There's a little bit more to it than that, but the point is that every time you see the combination "sz" it is always pronounced like [s]. (By the way, this word doesn't really mean anything. Hungarians just brag that it's the longest word in their language. If I had to try an translate it, it would go something like "You're a foreigner trying to learn my language, and I want to embarrass you.")

­

Writing words phonetically is the same even in a different alphabet, like Russian or Greek. After spending a little bit of time learning their letters and a few simple rules, I could pronounce new words with great confidence simply from reading them.

The same cannot be said for Arabic or Hebrew. I know both languages' alphabets fine, but the problem is how they represent vowels in writing. Both languages have long and short vowels. In writing, the long vowels are represented by letters and the short vowels are left out.

   written ktab, but pronounced kitab = كِتاب

 

Well, strictly speaking the short vowels can be written using marks that appear either above or below the letter (like the one on the bottom right of the word above), but in practice they're rarely included in writing. If English were to do the same thing, it would look something like this:

I imagn tht ths sentnce wld b nxt t impossbl t dciphr if y dd nt lread knw Englsh (nd evn thn...)   

I imagine that this sentence would be next to impossible to decipher if you did not already know English (and even then...) Clearly, the Arabic alphabet is written assuming the reader already knows the word. That is, it is not written for language learners. Of course, even adding the vowels in the above English sentence doesn't make things too much easier if you don't know the language. In Arabic, each letter pretty much can only make one sound with a few exceptions. This is certainly not the case with English. Silent letters aside, just consider our vowel system. We have 5 written vowels (and sometime "y"), but depending on your dialect English easily has at least 10 different vowel sounds: long and short variations. They show up in minimal pairs too (which is why I'm often taken aback when I hear a non-native speaker ask where the "beach" is). On top of this, English also can have multiple pronunciations for a word depending on if it's being emphasized (consider "I'm going to the mall" versus "I'm going to the mall"). For crying out loud, we make our children participate in competitive spelling contests because knowing how to spell words correctly is actually quite challenging. So on this count, at least, one would have a hard time arguing that English is the easiest language in the world.

Auto-Antonyms: Down with this sort of thing

About a week ago, someone posted on my Facebook feed a list of auto-antonyms. I had been aware of these words that are so ambiguous they also mean their exact opposite, but I didn't know they had their own name. I believe the first one of these I was aware of was the word "cleave", which can mean to split something apart, but also can mean to cling to. I have also had several experiences involving slang that could also be considered auto-antonyms. I remember being a teenager in the 90s and using the word "bad" to mean good.

A: How was the movie?
B: I loved it. It was so bad.

That is, I'm fairly confident we used to talk this way. It seems so ridiculous to me now, but to be fair, in French "terrible" can mean both terribly good or terribly bad. I know for a fact that we can use the phrase "down with something" to mean that we are actually for something. I remember once telling someone much older than me that I would be "down with something," and she just looked confused. To her, saying "down with something" was reserved solely for protesting something you were against.

 Careful now

Since I think these are kind of fun, I thought I'd check out and see to what degree this phenomena exists in the other languages I've learned, then share what I found here.

Autoantónimos en Español (Examples in Spanish)

I found this blog which addresses the phenomena in Spanish. Of course, you have to know Spanish to read it, but I can still share some of the more interesting examples here. He starts off with the example "yo huelo feo," which would most easily be translated as "I smell bad." However, since in Spanish an adjective can stand alone as a noun, it could also be translated as "I smell something bad." Therein lines the ambiguity. In one way, it means that the bad odor is emanating from the speaker, but in the other it means that the stench is coming from someplace else.

Other examples include "rentar" and "alquilar," which can be translated both as "to rent" or "to rent out." So if someone were to say "yo alquilo un carro," in one interpretation the speaker is the actual owner of the car (I am renting out a car), but in the other they are not (I am renting a car).

Antagonímia példai magyarban (Examples in Hungarian)

The only list I could find of auto-antonyms in Hungarian (in my very short search) was on the Hungarian version of Wikipedia. Some of them made complete sense, like ajándék which can be translated as "gift," and like the word in English can mean something you spend money on (e.g., I bought you this gift) or something that was given to you for free. Another one that appears to be very similar to English is biztos, which means "certain," but at the same time I could say that I'm only certain "to a certain degree," meaning I'm not very certain at all.

One I really like that the article mentions (though I'd like to see more examples of it) is bonyolít, which I always thought meant "to complicate." According to this article, in official language the word can also mean "to oversee or solve," which is the exact opposite it of complicating things. I tried to find some examples of this in Hungarian, but anytime I search for the phrase "a kormány az ügyet bonyolítja" (The government has complicated/solved the matter), I can only find thousands and thousands of examples of the government making things worse. So perhaps it really is the perfect word to describe what government does.

Okay, that's not strictly true. I did find other examples, I just couldn't resist the joke. First I looked on wikiszotar.hu and found the phrase, "a vállalat pénzügyeit bonyolítja" (He oversees the company's finances). I also found what appeared to be some sort of vocabulary test study materials which gave the following example: Manapság legfőképp a forgalmat bonyolítják (meg is látszik rajta!), which in English would go something like, "Nowadays [the government] primarily oversees/complicates traffic issues (and it looks like it too!)" So I'm not the only one with a sense of humor.

What about you? Are there any examples of auto-autonyms that you enjoy in languages you've studied? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

I Am Not Fine

About fifteen years ago I got to know Argentine hospitality as I was constantly being offered food and drink. After I had had my fill I would respond as any American might. They would say, "¿Quiere más pan? ¡Come más pan!" (Would you like some bread? Have some more bread!), and I would say, "No, estoy bien," translated from the English, "No, I'm fine." I did this until one day someone called me on it and asked me why I kept saying that I was fine. According to this individual, I should simply say "No gracias." (No thank you). They had, after all, asked me if I wanted some food, not how I was doing. This is a classic example of trying to translate a phrase from one language to another that doesn't really work. The more I thought about it, in fact, the more it seemed like a terrible non sequiter. Why is it exactly that saying that I'm fine is an appropriate way to turn something away?

Years later I was in Hungary with some Americans and I noticed the same thing happen. Some food or drink was offered, and the American responded, "Nem, jól vagyok." (No, I'm fine). I then asked the Hungarian woman offering us a snack if that was appropriate, that is, if that was something a Hungarian would say, and she of course said it was not, that it would be more correct to say "Köszönöm, nem kérek" (Literally: Thanks, I don't ask for it).

I can't be certain, but it seems to me that most languages don't allow you to say that you're fine when you really should say "no thank you." If you're learning another language, I would double-check with a native speaker unless you want everyone to think you're obsessed with your health.

What seems even a little stranger is when someone responds, "No, I'm good." That is, unless the person speaking is Superman.

Something to Argue About

Before introducing a new unit or activity, teachers will often use a pre-activity warm up to help introduce the topic and activate schema, which basically means to help remind the learners of what they already know about a topic. Here's the activity I like to use in class before introducing the genre of argumentative essay to my students. I put the following up on the board:

Write for five minutes

Think about an argument you've had in the past. Who was it with? What was it about? What was the outcome? What strategies did you use to try and win the argument? In retrospect, is there anything you would have done differently?

I set a timer and tell them to write quietly. I also tell them that they will not have to hand it in, though if any of them like, I'll give them the opportunity to share their experiences with the class. I like to have warm up activities that help the student connect the activity we're about to do with their real lives. I feel like too often students don't realize that skills they use in their actual lives are directly applicable to what they do in the classroom. The other goal I have with this quick writing activity is to help students realize that writing can be used for a lot of different purposes, in this case organizing your thoughts and making self-discoveries. I could just as easily have asked them to answer the question on the spot with a partner, but giving them time to write allows them to prepare more thoughtful answers.

Once the time is up I start taking volunteers to share their experiences. The arguments themselves aren't really important. What I'm interested in are the strategies they used since that's what I want to apply to their essay writing. As they share, I write these strategies down on the board.

One of the strategies students always mention first is using facts or examples to prove they're right. After that, since many of them still live with their parents, one will inevitably talk about an argument they've had with their father or mother.

"How often do your parents win those arguments?" I ask. The students reply that their parents nearly always win. "Is it because they have better facts or examples?" I then ask. The students say no, of course not. The reason their parents always win is because they can say "because I said so." I add "authority" to the list.

I teach mostly women, so I'm surprised that I'm the one who generally has to bring up being emotional as a strategy, since it's the strategy most of them try to use on me when arguing for a better grade. I tell them how at the end of every semester, I have students come to my office in tears. I demonstrate this in class by taking my glasses off and making the saddest face I can, before saying the following as melodramatically as possible: "But teacher. I have to get at least a B in this class or I'm going to lose my scholarship, and you will have personally ruined my life!" We then discuss the effectiveness of this, and the answer usually is that it depends on who you're arguing with. Sometimes you can easily sway someone by being emotional, but other people can see right through it and won't be affected.

The last one we usually discuss is some sort of name-calling or insulting. We might come up with a few others, but in general we always have the following four strategies:

• facts and examples
• authority
• emotions
• insulting

From this list, we then discuss how each might apply to essay writing and whether or not they're effective. The facts and examples are ones they're already familiar with, so I ask them about how they can give their writing more authority. The suggestion I ultimately make is to quote or reference an expert's opinion to strengthen theirs.

We then discuss becoming emotional and how effective that can be, and the conclusion we generally come to is it depends. A little bit of emotion can create a powerful impact upon the reader, but too much and you'll lose them. The last one--insults--I tell them doesn't belong in their paper, or in any good argument for that matter. I ask them if they've ever won an argument by insulting their opponent, and they all say no. No one ever responds to an insult by saying, "You know what? You're right. I am a stupid-stupid-head. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Wanna get a pizza?" I let the students know that they're probably not going to directly insult their opponents in their essay, but every now and then students indirectly say something that could be offensive.

After this we start talking directly about how to organize an argumentative essay. The whole warm up usually takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and the students always enjoy it.

Book Review: Apabila Saya Sakit

Even before I had children, one of my favorite souvenirs when visiting a foreign country was children's books written in the local language. Now that I'm a parent, I put these books to use by reading them to my four year old, since this is the best age to expose him to different languages. Since these books are all written for the local population and not necessarily for language learners, there is very little information (if any) in English about these books. As such, I felt it would be appropriate to occasionally review one for anyone who wants to learn the language. This time around, I'll be reviewing a series of Malaysian books, though mostly focusing on one title in particular, "Apabila Saya Sakit" (When I am Sick).

First, a Word About Malaysian

As an English teacher, I am grateful for the fact that I won the linguistic lottery and that the most important language that people all over the world are desperately trying to learn happens to be the one my parents taught me as a child. I say this because English is really hard. Sure, it's probably not the most difficult language in the world, but it's far from the easiest. If I had to pick one that was the easiest, I might go with Malaysian. The language is part of the Austronesian language family, which consists of languages spoken around the Pacific Ocean, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Malay Peninsula. Taking into account that Malaysian is basically the same language as Indonesian, then the language has roughly 180 million speakers--making it the 8th most commonly spoken language in the world (according to Wikipedia at least).

As I already mentioned, the language is incredibly easy. There is no grammatical gender to be bothered with, no cases, and no verb conjugations. Its writing system is completely phonetic. Want to make a word plural? Just repeat yourself. One book is buku, more than one book is buku-buku. While in English we have words that mean the exact same thing but have different grammatical functions (think about the difference between "I" and "me"), Malay just uses the same word in a different position:

Malay: Saya guru
English: I      teacher (I am a teacher)

Malay: Guru      saya
English: teacher my (My teacher)

From this example, you should have learned the first person singular pronoun "saya", which also appears in the title of the book I'm going to review:

Malay: Apabila saya sakit
English: When   I       sick (When I am sick)

I picked this book up (along with two others from the same series) while visiting Malaysia two weeks ago at the Kinokuniya bookstore at KLCC Suria in Kuala Lumpur for about 5.90 ringgit each (just around $2 US). In preparing to write this review, I was doing some research online and found that the publisher, Pelangi, has screenshots of this and their other books on the Indonesian version of Google Books (so I'm pretty sure it's okay if I reproduce some of those same screenshots here). After looking through some more of their titles, I feel like if I had had more time at the bookstore, I kind of wish I had found this particular one, Di Mana Beruang Teddy? (Where is the Teddy Bear?) because just look at how sad that little girl is. I hope she finds her teddy!

Anyway, back to "When I am Sick." The version I bought is actually a later edition with a slightly different cover. It also contains a second story (in this case Main Buih, or "Playing with Bubbles"). At any rate, most of these stories seem to follow a similar formula (I don't think anyone is reading these stories intended for 2-6 year olds expecting any great plot developments, and I think it's safe to say that I can spoil the ending and tell you that the little boy gets better at the end of the story). The formula seems to go like this: put the kid in some kind of situation (e.g., he's sick in bed, or he's having a bath), and see how many different things will happen in that situation. Since it's a sort of "theme and variations" approach, there is a lot of good repetition, which is what I think makes this series excellent for language learning.

This page illustrates the formula pretty well. The kid is sick in bed, so a lot of the story involves his mother (emak in Malay, but note that the "k" at the end is silent) giving him different things in bed to make him feel better. So many of the pages involve the formula "Emak beri ____________", or "Mom gives ____________." After which, the kid sometimes reacts to what he got. In this case, he thinks the food is "sedapnya", which means "delicious" or "yummy." By the way, all the food in Malaysia is sedapnya.

Repetition is important for language learning, and the repetition in this book together with the pictures makes it incredibly easy to understand what is going on, especially when reading it to a four year old. Once you know the basic formula, the new vocabulary that fits in the blank can be picked up from the picture. For example, on a later page, the caption reads "Emak beli alat mainan" and has a picture of the kid opening a box full of toys. I let my son know that "beli" means "to buy", so "Emak beli" means "Mom buys", but my son can easily figure out that "alat mainan" means "toys" on his own simply from the picture.

I think the second story, about playing with bubbles in the bath, is the one my son enjoys even more. In this case, the formula is that the kid is playing in the bath with bubbles and gets the bubbles on different parts of his body. This is a great opportunity to use TPR (Total Physical Response), which is a language teaching method wherein language is coordinated with physical movement.

Malay: Ada        buih     pada hidung
English: There is bubble on     nose (There is a bubble on my nose)

So in this case, I read the sentence, then ask my son to touch his "hidung", which he does with no problems since it's where the bubbles are in the picture. On the next pages the bubbles are on his kepala (head), telinga (ears), and lastly di mana-mana (everywhere). The next section, though, is the part my son absolutely loves wherein a new formula is introduced:

Malay: Saya sentuh buih        dengan __________. Pop!
English: I      touch  bubbles   with     __________. Pop!

So in each one of these next pictures, the kid touches a bubble, first with his jari (finger) and pops it. I tell my son to the do the same, touching one of the bubbles on the page with his finger, to which I loudly say "Pop!", then he laughs hysterically. On the next page the kid pops the bubble with his kaki (feet), so I tell my son to get his feet up on the page and pop the bubbles. This one makes him laugh even harder.

And that brings me to my ultimate point about why I think these books are great: my son has lots of fun reading them. He isn't being bogged down with grammar and vocabulary, so he doesn't even realize that he's picking up bits and pieces of another language while we're reading them together. This is a book he actually brings to me and asks me to read, which is absolutely the best a parent can hope for when trying to teach their child to read in any language, let alone a foreign one.