February 2012
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An Awesome Chrome Extension for People Studying... →
If you use Chrome (and you should, because it’s awesome) and are learning a foreign language, you should definitely install this extension. What does it do?
Polyglot [the name of the extension] translates randomly selected words on the sites you visit into a language of your choice, allowing you to learn and practice foreign vocabulary while you browse the Internet.
So if you’re...
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Daily List of Free Kindle eBooks for Foreign... →
Earlier this week I published a list of free Kindle books that were related to language learning. I’ve decided to make that a thing, and I’ll be updating the list every day. Today there are materials in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, and English. Go check them out and download them ASAP. Most of them are free for today only.
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How do you become fluent in 11 languages? [BBC... →
This 20-year-old is fluent in English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan, and Italian.
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Today's Free Language-Related Kindle Books...
These ebooks from Amazon may be free only for today (and only in the US), so grab them while you can. They can be read on Kindles, in a web browser, on a Mac or PC, on an iPhone or iPad, and on Android devices.
Every day there are new free Kindle books in or on a variety of languages. If this type of list is something you’d like to see more often, please like it or reblog it so I know.
...
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Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not...
Dotsies is a font/alphabet designed to help us read more efficiently. Its letters look like this:
As the Dotsies site says:
Since latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience!
So in other...
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Do You Need to Know a Foreign Language to Major in...
Someone asked me this question recently:
Hello! I’m interested in pursuing a degree in Linguistics in the near future. Would you have any advice on the usefulness of knowing a second or third language (and to what degree - how would four years of GCE ‘O’-level German stand)? Did your course focus on English or were you to choose a specific modern language to study (e.g....
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Hundreds of company name etymologies →
Very cool Wikipedia stating the origins behind hundreds of companies’ names.
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Language experts to help identify internet... →
From the BBC, so it’s legit.
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Why You Should Always Keep Learning Vocabulary →
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Urban Dictionary: Herro →
Definition: The standard greeting of Engrish, as in, “Herro! How are you?”
January 2012
19 posts
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Etymology Man! →
A fun comic on xkcd.com about word origins. If you like this site, you’ll like this comic.
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List of the longest monosyllabic English words →
The longest one-syllable word is 12 letters long!
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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....
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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...
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What does "et cetera" literally mean?
Good to know: The literal meaning of the Latin phrase et cetera is “and the others.”
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List of the world's languages by number of native... →
Whoa. Cool.
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Using a Kindle or Kindle Fire for foreign language... →
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.
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“New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000...”
– From Guns, Germs, and Steel
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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...
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Linguistics Micro Lesson: Cognates, False Friends,...
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...
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This Is How I Study Foreign Language Vocab
This is my favorite way of studying vocab. I just use 3x5 lined index cards cut in half and then folded. The cards fit in any pocket and don’t take up any room (like a small notebook does, for example). And I can carry only the card I’m studying, instead of having to cary a bunch of other stuff (again, like carrying a notebook).
I fold each card in half because then I can test...
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I Can Has Thesis?: A Linguistic Analysis of... →
Holy crap. Someone wrote a 122-page master’s thesis on lolspeak. If you’re unfamiliar with lolspeak (for shame), this will get you up to speed pretty quick.
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Linguistics Micro Lesson: Prescriptive Grammar vs....
In linguistics we often focus on descriptive grammar. This means that we describe how language is actually used by people when speaking or writing. Think of it as someone listening to people speak at a cafe and taking notes on how they say things.
This contrasts with prescriptive grammar that states how a language “should” be spoken or written. This is what most of us think of when we...
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“The mere fact that a sentence is long does not make it a run-on sentence;...”
– From Wikipedia’s Run-on sentence page. Awesome.
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English Double Contractions →
A list of those lovely words in English like he’sn’t, they’d’ve, y’all’re, and many more.
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Language Learning Foundations: The Infinitive
[This is the first in a series of short posts about things you should know that will help you learn languages faster and easier. These posts will discuss words and concepts that language-learning materials often mention but not always define.]
The infinitive form of a verb is the verb in its most basic form, without any grammatical inflection or conjugation. It’s the form of the verb as...
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How's Your English Pronunciation?
If you can pronounce every word in this poem correctly, you’ll speak English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
—
The Chaos by G. Nolst Trenité
Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye,...
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The Quick Brown Fox...
The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is well known because it uses every letter in the English alphabet. The sentence is often used to showcase fonts because it lets you see what every letter in that font looks like. It dates back to 1885.
Mainly I’m just talking about this because I found this gif:
December 2011
7 posts
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List of words that have different meanings in... →
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Linguistics Micro Lesson: What Is a Linguist?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and that means that a linguist is a person who scientifically studies language.
Linguists go beyond simply studying the grammatical rules and vocabulary of a particular language. Among many other things, for example, linguists study language structure, why words are the way they are, how and why language X is related to language Y, how language...
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Linguistics Micro Lesson: Metathesis
Metathesis (the emphasis is on the -a- when you say it) is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word.
Examples:
enmity → emnity
foliage → foilage
cavalry → calvary
asterisk → asteriks
It’s something that kids do a lot, like saying “psketti” instead of spaghetti. And it’s also something that you see in a wide variety of languages, not just English.
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Linguistics Micro Lesson: Auto-antonyms
Auto-antonyms (also called autantonyms; there are a couple other names for them, too) are two words that are spelled the same but actually have opposite meanings.
A few examples:
“To cleave” = “to cling” or “to split”
“To weather” = “to endure” (as in a storm) or “to erode” (as in a rock)
“To buckle” =...
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Etym Online: A freaking awesome site for anyone... →
For example, did you know that the word “paraphernalia” literally means “a woman’s property besides her dowery”? Awesome.
November 2011
17 posts
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“Almost” is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in...”
– Random English fact
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If you say "That's a sweet-ass car," what... →
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Random English Factoid
The longest words you can type with only the left hand using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard:
tesseradecades
aftercataracts
sweaterdresses (more common but sometimes hyphenated)
The longest “normal” word is stewardesses.
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The Search for the World's Most Difficult Language →
Sweet article from The Economist.