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Feeling tired in the office this afternoon? Need something to keep you going? It’s time to test your knowledge of winter festivals with our Winter Festival Mega-quiz! Click here to take the quiz and remember to leave your score in the comments below.
We started September by joining the Arabic teachers to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, saying ‘Eid Mubārak‘ and tucking into a well-deserved feast. As the month drew to a close ,we said a hearty ‘Prost!‘ when we raised a beer with the German teachers for Oktoberfest but managed to save some space in our stomachs for a portion of songpyeon (special rice cakes) with the Korean teachers for Chuseok. November started with a bang. A double-whammy of fireworks for Guy Fawkes night and Diwali got us in the mood and after crackers, sweets and after saying ‘Diwaali muubaarak‘ (Happy Diwali) to our Hindi teachers, it was almost time for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is probably the most widely-celebrated festival in the US and our English teachers did us proud. Eating roast turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce until we almost burst was a great way to enjoy November 25th. Now December is underway, we’ll look forward to lighting the candles in our menorahs one by one and eating more than our fair share of sufganiyot (jelly-filled doughnuts) and latkes (potato pankakes). Let’s say a big ‘Hag Sameach‘ (Joyous festival) to our Hebrew teachers to wish them a happy Hanukkah. With all the snow in the UK recently, many of us are hoping for a white Christmas. Who knows, maybe getting snowed in might make the bank holiday even longer! To welcome in the New Year, let’s get ready to say ‘Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu‘ to our friends in Japan and ‘Nollaig chridheil agus bliadhna mhath ùr‘ to any Scottish Gaelic speakers celebrating Hogmanay. It’s amazing how two cultures on opposite sides of the world have similar customs of cleaning the house thoroughly before the New Year arrives. After that, it’s almost time to get ready for all the spring festivals. I’m going to need to make doing more exercise my resolution this year to get ready for some more serious eating! Today’s image is by Marek Bernat.
Hola! I’m K, a member of the learn2lingo team and I’ve been learning Spanish for some time now, which I absolutely love! Spanish is one of those languages which sounds great to listen to and is even more fun once you learn even just the basics.
I was lucky enough to spend some time living and working out there and had an unforgettable experience (I would highly recommend it). The Spanish have such a positive attitude to foreigners learning their language and are genuine about helping you as long as you give it a go. Of course, learning around native speakers also means you get to learn the colloquial side of the language, which for me made it much more interesting and real as I could use some of the same phrases I would in English – in Spanish. A few of my favourites include:
¡Hombre!
¡La leche!
¡Guay! Using Music to Learn SpanishAnother way which really helps me improve my Spanish and understand it in an everyday context is through listening to Spanish music. Listening to it, and then attempting to translate it or even catch the gist of it can be really insightful, and I find that I recognise a new word each time I listen to a song.
Spanish radio introduced me to a number of popular Spanish artists such as Bisbál, Julieta Venegas and Maná, but I also found artists that made similar music to that of which I’d listen to in English. One of my favourites is Macaco. His song ‘Tengo’ (Tengo = (What) I have) is about appreciating what you have in life and in love and about making the most of it all.
Here is the chorus in English and Spanish:
Music is a great way to practice learning Spanish, and as well as improving your vocabulary and understanding of the language, you’ll also get to discover some amazing new artists! Now I’m back in the UK I am continuing to practice and learn Spanish with learn2lingo, and highly recommend Raquel Sanchez and Mari Carmen as great Spanish teachers.
¡Disfrúta! (Enjoy!)
The EU wants children to learn at least two foreign languages from an early age; so lets see what their 2006 report ‘Europeans and their languages‘ says about this. The report found that 28% of EU citizens are able to hold a conversation in two languages other than their mother tongue, while 56% can hold a conversation in at least one, so there’s still a way to go. However these percentages had increased since the previous report in 2001, so there are some grounds for hope that the EU’s goal might eventually be achieved. The difference in foreign language ability is striking between countries, with countries like Luxembourg and the Netherlands reporting near universal second language ability, while Germany is around the middle, and there are no prizes for guessing what the bottom two countries are. In general the large West European countries do the worst; this may be because their citizens have less need to travel to other countries, and because they may expect people of other countries to speak their language. Have a look at the report for all the percentages by country, it’s quite interesting. This author thinks it might be easier for everyone just to speak the same language, but then his country did come second bottom in the report…  Plaza de Espana, Seville, Spain I recently read a fascinating article in the New York Times about how different languages shape the way we think about things in the real world. Here’s a link to the article. Masculine and feminine objects According to Guy Deutscher, who writes the article, this gendered aspect of language has effects on the way we think about inanimate objects as well. In an experiment German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe the properties of various objects differing in gender between the two languages. One of these objects was a bridge, which is German is feminine: “die Brücke”, but masculine in spanish: “el puente”. While the Spanish speakers deemed bridges (together with clocks and violins) to have manly properties like strength, German speakers saw them as being more slender and elegant.  Würzburg, Germany Deutscher wonders whether this has affected the design of bridges in the two countries. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell, as any number of factors could have contributed to different styles of architecture. You could of course raise 50 German speaking babies and 50 Spanish speaking babies in isolation, then give them some lego and see what they come up with, but sadly modern day ethics boards would probably forbid it! I’ve been trying to think of some more examples of this: is a french fork (la fourchette) more feminine than a spanish one (el tenedor)? How we think about directions Another example is how languages affect how we think about directions. The article describes an Australian aboriginal language: Guugu Yimithirr, which unlike any language discovered previously, makes no use of egocentric coordinates like ‘in front of you’, ‘right’ or ‘left’, but uses the cardinal directions ‘north’ ‘east’ ’south’ and ‘west’, even to describe, for example, which door you have to open to find the bathroom. As a result Guugu Yimithirr speakers have the ability to tell where north, east, south and west are instinctively wherever they are: their language has made use of an ability that the rest of us must have innately within us, but was never realised. |
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Winter certainly is a busy time for festivals and here at learn2lingo we’ve been busy celebrating with teachers and students from all over the world.
The 26th of September was the European day of languages, a day marked since 2001 to encourage language learning across Europe. This is an example of how the EU adheres to its policy of multilingualism as an aim for its citizens as well as in its institutional workings: a multilingual population can work in other EU countries, fulfilling the EU’s goal of worker mobility and economic efficiency.
However some evidence against the theory comes from the fact that I searched the internet in vain for a feminine looking bridge in Germany: they all look like the one on the right, that’s if they’re not constructed out of steel girders.