Commas in action.
List of the longest monosyllabic English words
The longest one-syllable word is 12 letters long!
Are You Learning Chinese?
So my brother loves studying Chinese and he loves programming. Put those together and you get his new iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app.
It’s called Trevor’s Chinese Memory Game. It’s a matching game where you match similar-looking Chinese characters together. But it’s much more powerful than that; you can focus on sets of random characters or sets of similar-looking characters. You can also sort the levels by difficulty.
Here’s the app in iTunes. Go check it out!
You can also learn more about it at the app’s website, LingoSpring.com. He’s also got a free web app called Trevor’s Chinese Reader that’s really cool.
Linguistics Micro Lesson: Tautology
Tautology is the unnecessary or unessential (and sometimes unintentional) repetition of meaning, using different words that effectively just say the same thing.
Examples:
- added bonus - “bonus” is an added extra, so “added bonus” is actually “added added extra”
- first introduced - “introduced” generally implies that it is the first time that someone or something has been presented
- free gift - “gift” is, by definition, something given without charge
- new innovation - “innovation” is defined as something new
- safe haven - “haven” is, by definition, a place of refuge and safety
- pre-book - “book” already contains the idea of reserving in advance, so “pre-” is redundant
What does “et cetera” literally mean?
Good to know: The literal meaning of the Latin phrase et cetera is “and the others.”
Using a Kindle or Kindle Fire for foreign language learning
I run a blog about Amazon (the company, not the river) and wrote this article last week about using my Kindle and Kindle Fire for language study.
New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups (still with a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages.
How to Search YouTube in a Foreign Language
Let’s say you’re learning Bulgarian and want to watch some Bulgarian videos on YouTube. The problem, though, is that your computer isn’t set up to type the Bulgarian alphabet. Fortunately, YouTube has a built-in solution that’s really quick and easy.
From any page on YouTube, just scroll down to the very bottom of the page. You’ll see a drop-down menu from which you can select a bunch of different languages. Once you select the one you want to type in, the page will refresh and you’ll see a little keyboard icon at the right end of the YouTube search bar.
Click the keyboard icon and a popup keyboard appears. It’ll look like this:
Now either just start typing or click on each letter individually with your mouse. And voilà! You’re typing in your foreign language.
Linguistics Micro Lesson: Cognates, False Friends, and False Cognates
Cognates are words that sound similar in different languages, come from the same source or root word historically somewhere back down the line, and have the same meaning.
They can range from essentially the same word just pronounced with a foreign accent (English idea vs. Spanish idea; the words come from the older Latin and Greek words) to words that have slightly different appearances but still are recognizable if you have knowledge of the phonology (sound systems) of the foreign language, like the English school and the Russian shkola (школа).
You should be aware of false friends, too. These are words in different languages that look or sound similar but in fact do NOT mean the same thing. English’s fabric and Spanish’s fábrica are an example of this; the Spanish word actually means “factory.”
And finally, neither of these is to be confused with false cognates. To make matters more perplexing, false friends are actually often called false cognates, but this is technically incorrect. False cognates differ from cognates in just one way: the words are actually not derived from the same root word historically. So they’re still words that have the same meaning and sound about the same in both languages, except that they’re not historically related. It’s just a coincidence.
Examples of this are English’s fee with Chinese’s fei, English’s verb to occur and Japanese’s ocoru, and English’s dog with Mbabaram’s (that’s an Australian Aboriginal language) dog. Weird, huh?
Are you confused yet?
