Languages

About languages

The power and beauty of languages. Also have a look at some hand-picked excerpts of beautiful lyrics and from literature.

Learning platforms

An annotated list of my favorite language learning resources

• Yabla

  • learning via captioned and subtitled videos from the internet/TV shows as well as some specific language lessons put out by Yabla

  • very well done, with videos segmented into loopable chunks, captions that are clickable for quick dictionary lookup, quizzes of selected vocabulary

  • some free videos but membership is a nominal fee (per language)

• Memrise

  • flashcard-type quizzing platform with a big database of user community contributed lists

  • not just multiple-choice based recognition but also different degrees of difficulty of recognition and recall (type out)

  • I find this much better than Duolingo or Rosetta

• News in Slow [Spanish|Spanish Latino|French|Italiang|German]

  • weekly news podcasts (also phone app) with keywords with quick lookup

  • access to first half free

• Linguee

  • search engine of online (mostly human?) translations giving search results of source-target language pairs

EN

Perspectives of a native American English speaker -- common errors I come across....

Common pronunciation errors by German speakers

Commonly misused words in English by non-native speakers

• "eventually" for "in the end" (for many speakers of many languages)

  • Subtle difference....

  • e.g. "You eventually did not go" to mean

• "eventually" for "possibly" (German speakers)

  • false cognate with the German word eventuell

• "control" for "check" (German and French speakers)

  • e.g. "He controls me regularly to make sure I'm doing my work" to say "He checks up on me regularly...."

  • "control" has a stronger connotation that conjures up images of force and institutional rigor, and hence inappropriate in daily examples like "ticket checks", "a boss checking up on employees" ("control" used here would be subjugating) , "check something to make sure it's right" -- compare this with "border control" (military, officials), "quality control"

• "ultimate" for "final"/"last"

  • This one is very confusing. "Ultimate" implies a very strong sense of finality that is only appropriate for serious endings and that there is absolutely no more/no turning back (e.g. his ultimate wish before he died). "Final" can also have a sense of closure but has a stronger sense of that no more changes would be made, not because there is no more way to change it. Think -- "ultimate" is closer to "ultimatum"

  • Therefore, "last call for orders" and not "ultimate call for orders", and "final information before the big day tomorrow" and not "ultimate information"

• "ultimately" for "finally" or "in the end"

  • "finally" and "in the end" are almost interchangeable (...but need to think about this more), but "ultimately" is not interchangeable with either -- "ultimately" is more appropriately interchangeable with "at the end of the day" or "the bottom line is", i.e. there is an implication of "having said all that (lots of things that are pointing towards a particular argument/view point), ultimately/at the end of the day/the bottom line is (and here comes the alternative/disclaimer).

• "until" vs. "by"

  • often confused by German speakers

  • Until marks the time interval from now to a particular target time point, e.g. marked by some event

    • e.g. I will hug this tree until they leave. (I will continue hugging this tree and will only let go when target=their departure comes)

  • By is not an interval but an instant of time. It marks a deadline. There is no continuous action, but indicates, metaphorically, at what point the carriage will turn into a pumpkin (by midnight) -- before which you can get a ride home, after which you're stuck.

  • Compare this with "until when" which focuses the frame away from an interval to the "when" (a point in time) and hence "until when" functions like "by" but the frame of reference is still before this point.

    • e.g. Until when are you open? = When do you close by?

      • You end up with semantic garble if you swapped the verbs and the prepositions here!

• "in former times" (German speakers)

  • This is not an English expression. English equivalents would be "used to", "Back in the day"

• "protocol" for "minutes" (German speakers)

Common grammatical mistakes

Following Chomsky's notation, ungrammatical expressions are preceded by an asterisk

• overuse of take

  • *"take a coffee" / "What will you take" for "have a coffee" / "What are you going to have?"

    • You can say, "I take two sugars with my coffee", or "I will take the coffee to go" or "I will take the coffee in a glass mug", but you should say "I'm going to have the/a coffee" if you're telling your companion what you are going to order and, "I'll have a coffee" when you are asking for one/ordering one.

• overuse of make

  • "make a difference" for "distinguish" / "see the difference" / "differentiate between"

    • "make a difference" means "have an impact"

  • *"make a picture" for "take a picture"

  • *"make a party" for "throw a party"

• *"We are two." for "There are two of us." / "Two of us are...."

• overuse of the progressive verb form (-ing) for simple present tense

  • The progressive verb form, or -ing verbs (e.g. is doing, was thinking, have been wanting) indicate some continuous action. It also implies that this continuous action might end at some point (just not within the span of the narrative time) -- hence, to say "John is working at the headquarters" implies that John is only working there as an exception/for a brief period and that he usually does not work there. There is an implicit unexpressed modifier that you expect to be given in the rest of the conversational context, e.g. "John is working at the headquarters today" (and only today because usually he works elsewhere). If John's usual workplace is the headquarters, then it is more appropriate to say "John works at the headquarters."

  • It's worth pointing out that Hiberno-English speakers overuse the progressive form, perhaps as a borrowing from Irish Gaelic (and it is a big source of confusion and sounds incredibly ungrammatical to an American English speaker, at least!!!!)

American English vs. Hiberno and British English

This is not an exhaustive list, which you can find elsewhere, but things that threw me off

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