An Awesome Chrome Extension for People Studying Another Language
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 studying Russian, you can set it to translate 1 out of every 20 words from English to Russian. And you can hover your mouse cursor over the word to see the English version. Very cool.
Daily List of Free Kindle eBooks for Foreign Language Study
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.
How do you become fluent in 11 languages? [BBC VIDEO]
This 20-year-old is fluent in English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan, and Italian.
Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not Writing
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 words, these letters are all narrower than the Latin letters we currently use. This means that more letters and words can fit on a line, meaning that we can read faster and not have to move our eyes as much.
To illustrate how much screen space this saves, here’s a comparison of a regular paragraph with its Dotsies equivalent below it:
The Dotsies site has a bookmarklet that lets you convert any regular text online to the Dotsies font.
The whole thing makes sense and sounds interesting. I don’t think it’ll ever catch on beyond a few geeks and early adopters, but it is still a neat idea. I’d love to see some people study this and then do tests to see how much faster/easier it really is to read this way.
![“Do you long for a world where linguistics is a popular sport? Here is a chart of hand signals used by syntax referees in that better world.”
[Cascadilla Press via Book of Joe]](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/vowelsme/17665411468/1/tumblr_lzg7akpsU11r5twvg)
“Do you long for a world where linguistics is a popular sport? Here is a chart of hand signals used by syntax referees in that better world.”
[Cascadilla Press via Book of Joe]
Language-conscious Fry.
Do You Need to Know a Foreign Language to Major in Linguistics?
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. French)? Thank you!
It really all depends on your university, but I think most university linguistics programs require a degree of proficiency in at least one foreign language. Some require you to go to a certain level in one language, others require a couple languages. Some schools also have stipulations about the languages that you learn (e.g., the main language cannot be an Indo-European language).
For my bachelor’s degree in linguistics (from BYU), the foreign language requirements were like this:
Complete 15 credit hours (to a 200-level or higher) of university-level course work (or the equivalent) in a single foreign language (American Sign Language also qualifies). Students intending to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly encouraged to study a non-Indo-European language. Non-native speakers of English may elect to use English to fill this requirement. [Source]
I ended up taking 8 credits of Chinese (Mandarin) and then had something like 35+ credits of Russian and Ukrainian because I was able to take a proficiency test and get credit for what I already knew.
For variety’s sake, here are the requirements of a couple more schools. Here’s Harvard’s:
Basic concentrators must demonstrate knowledge of one foreign language by the end of junior year. This can be done in the following ways:
[Source]
- by being a native speaker of the language;
- by obtaining at least a B grade in a full-year, second-year language course;
- by passing a Harvard College language placement exam; or
- in some cases, by passing a special departmental reading exam.
And here’s UCLA’s (I know the page is old, but I couldn’t find the requirements on any newer page):
[Students must complete] the equivalent of the sixth term of one foreign language and the third term of a second foreign language. You are required to complete at least the equivalent of the third term in a language other than those in the Romance, Slavic, or Germanic families. [Source]
It’s worth noting that if you’re a native English speaker and want to study the English language, some schools have an English language degree. Mine did. This degree studies the English language itself, as opposed to an English degree, which studies English literature. A fair number of the English language major requirements overlapped with the linguistics major requirements.
If students at other universities want to send me their school’s requirements, I can collect them and put them in a followup post. Or if you have any further questions, ask away.
Hundreds of company name etymologies
Very cool Wikipedia stating the origins behind hundreds of companies’ names.
Language experts to help identify internet 'trolls'
From the BBC, so it’s legit.
