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Ah English, you have such a wide range of dialects that can cause many hilarious confusions!

I nearly got fired once for innocently suggesting that my 13 year old Mathematics students in New York “openly share rubbers without asking permission” (Rubber to me is an eraser to them, but in USA it’s a condom). And, at first, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what my blogger friends were talking about when they said they wanted to dominate a “nitch”. Rather than being a really bad itch, it was actually a niche (“neesh” for me). And that’s just American vs non-American English differences!

In Ireland we are lucky enough to be exposed to quite a lot of different versions of English thanks to television/cinema/literature. As well as our own TV channels, we have BBC, lots of American series, Australian soap operas and loads more. However, the opposite just doesn’t seem to be as true (although Irish literature has indeed had a huge impact on the English speaking world).

Other than poorly imitated Irish accents in films, the Irish dialect of English seems to elude a lot of people. So today, I’m going to break it down for you! Maybe then you’ll understand us better, or at least not do such a terrible job when you try to mimic us

Why do the Irish speak like that?

Firstly, there’s no such thing as an Irish accent. Ireland may be a small island with a modest population, but the differences between regions and even within parts of cities like Dublin are vast and easy to pick up on. Of course, other countries also have the same phenomenon with dozens of English dialects within London alone and huge differences across America, but I’ll just focus on Ireland in this wee article

Despite there not being a ‘single’ accent, there are commonalities that stem from a combination of factors, the most important of which being that just a few generations ago, Irish (Gaeilge) was the dominant language of the country. Even though less people use it now in comparison, and there are even some people who don’t have any Irish, the influence of the language on their English is huge.

For example, you’ll notice that I’ve just written have any Irish – it is more common in Ireland to say that you have a language rather than you speak it. This is originally due to Irish’s phrasing of Tá Gaeilge/Fraincis agam (“I have Irish/French”)

As well as this, there are some traits of old English (due to earlier English colonisation attempts than elsewhere) that we have maintained that have pretty much died out in other parts of the world. Shakespeare himself used the word mitch, a word still common in Ireland that the rest of the English speaking world would be confused to hear (it means to skip classes or “play hooky”).

However, the main differences are definitely due to influences from our own language, and they are what make Irish (or Hiberno) English so much more colourful!

Different grammar

English grammar is pretty consistent, but the standard spoken form in Ireland takes on a life of its own.

For example, rather than rely on “to have just done” for a recently completed action, we would say “to be after doing”. I’m after finding a euro on the road! You’re after stepping in dog sh*t! (This is due to tá mé tar éis / i ndiaidh… in Irish)

Another interesting influence from Irish is its absolute lack of the words yes or no, so when our ancestors were speaking English as a second language, they would translate how they would use such words originally in Irish.

Although international English influences mean young people do this way less nowadays, a lot of us Irish still simply don’t use these words. In the Irish language (and in other languages like Thai for example), this issue is resolved by simply repeating the verb of the question. Can you swim? I can! Do you like tomato juice? I don’t. Are you coming? I amn’t.

Yes you read that right: amn’t. This is one I’m surprised other English speakers don’t use! You say isn’t, don’t, aren’t… It’s logical if you ask me!

Also, come on rest-of-the-English-speaking-world. A single word for both singular and plural you?? What were yee thinking?? We can say yee, yez, or even yous (depending on the part of the country). Of course, Irish has tú and sibh… like pretty much every other language in the world! I’m pointing the finger at vi too, Esperanto!!

Some strange turns of phrase

Story? Don’t give out about your man! Where’s the yoke?

These are very common things you would hear from an Irish person, but sadly I’ve had to water down my English over the years to be understood when abroad and avoid such interesting words.

Story? or What’s the story? Is a translation of the Irish Aon scéal? / Cad é an scéal? – where “story” means “news”, i.e. What’s going on? / What’s up? Usually used as a greeting. The more rural of us prefer “How’s she cuttin?” (‘she’ being used in Ireland more than in other places for inanimate objects).

To give out has nothing to do with distributing leaflets. This is from the Irish tabhairt amach and means to complain. This is another one that Irish people are always surprised to hear isn’t international!!

Your man is a nice avoidance technique for not using someone’s name. It is usually clear from the context who you’re taking about, and the “your” definitely can’t be taken literally, he may have no connection whatsoever to you and even be a complete stranger (although close friend is just as likely). Your one is for women.

Yoke is a synonym for “thing” and usually refers to something that we may not be too familiar with and not know the actual name of. Think of thingamajig/watchamacallit, although it’s used way more often.

This is just a small sampling! There are a host of other words like Deadly, Desperate, Fair Play, Gas, Press, Shift that you may think you know the meaning of, but we would use them for things that are completely different, unrelated and unexpected. You can see loads of them (and a lot of things in this article) explained pretty well in the Wikipedia article on Hiberno English. Let’s see if I can give a few examples just to really confuse you…

Fair play to ya! You shifted your one, that was deadly! – The turnout was desperate last night. – I went to the press and found the yoke I had been looking for! … That’s gas!

Then, of course, there are originally Irish words that we use even when speaking English. The most famous of these is craic [Edit: this is an Irish word, but is actually borrowed from English], “fun” or enjoyment, but also used to ask how things are How’s the craic? Any craic?

The lovely accent

Once again, I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed in the rest of the Anglosphere. Frankly the way you form words just doesn’t sound nice! South Africans are pretty much the only ones that could keep me in my chair without squirming uncomfortably and constantly glancing at the exit; non-Irish English has actually driven me to avoid the language entirely for most of the last 7 years!!

For example, other English speakers have this strange thing they do where they put their tongue between their teeth and blow a buff of air over the tongue. They call it the th sound.

Why??

We do away with that hideous noise in Ireland! [Edit: less likely in the north] To us, the th sound is simply replaced with a t (unvoiced) or a d (voiced). So do ya see the tirty tree and a tird trees over dere? Dat’s right! Sounds way better, doesn’t it!

My friends across the pond (both the Atlantic and the Irish sea) seem to love putting consonants together that never belonged next to one another in the first place. l & m for example – how can you say these so quickly at the end of a word? It’s totally unnecessary! So to us Irish, a film is pronounced fill-um. The Irish name Colm has two syllables. This is because Irish, like Latin languages, gives vowels the glorious importance they deserve, while Germanic and Slavic languages seem to have a thing for squeezing as many consonants together as possible…

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=URDKotwlV5I

Video in Irish with English subtitles:

Please click through to the site if you can’t see the videos (RSS e-mail subscribers).

Happy St. Patrick’s day!! To continue the current theme of celebrating the Irish language and culture, I’d like to share a short video with you!

This video is shown above in English, and then in Irish (with subtitles), but you can also watch it in the following languages:

Cliquez ici pour voir cette vidéo en français !

Haz clic aquí para ver este video en castellano

Clicca qui per vedere questo video in italiano

Clique aqui para assistir o video em carioquês… ups, quero dizer em português

Klaku ĉi tie por spekti en esperanto

Don’t forget to check out my previous post for more information about Irish!

I’m hoping the silly factor of a ridiculous looking leprechaun mixed in with some beautiful scenery of Dublin and the Gaeltacht will encourage lots of people to share it, and perhaps learn a little So please share this with as many people as possible (whichever language version you like) on facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, delicious etc.!

My best wishes for everyone Irish and Irish at heart out there across the world!!
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Gaeilge

Gaeilge, Irish, or “Irish Gaelic” is the national and first official language of Ireland, as well as one of the official languages of the European Union.

Although everyone in Ireland speaks English, there are regions known as the Gaeltacht that use Irish as the main language of communication, both in businesses and in families.

When we say Irish (the language) we don’t mean our accent in English (i.e. Hiberno English – I’ve written a separate post about that here!) – we mean a language on a completely different branch of the European language family tree.

More distant than French and Spanish, stranger than Slavic languages and more exotic and beautiful than many languages, Irish is an interesting specimen and something I’d like to share with readers today as part of a few posts for Seachtain na Gaeilge – the week celebrating the Irish language and culture leading up to St. Patrick’s day!

Níl sé deacair ar chor ar bith

While Irish is quite different, there are some things that make it pretty straightforward to learn.

It only has 11 irregular verbs (compared to 500 or so in English and thousands in Spanish/French/etc. depending on how you count them), there’s no indefinite article (so you can just say “Tá leabhar agam” – literally I have book etc. with no “a” to complicate things), and even though it has masculine and feminine nouns, the definite article “an” (the) is the same for both. It uses the same alphabet as other European languages (although it is the only language that still traditionally uses its own special font).

The phonetics (pronunciation based on spelling) are quite different, and this usually scares a lot of people. But you can learn the differences very quickly and after that they are consistent (unlike in English), so you can read any given text aloud pretty well after a small amount of study.

Most of the letters work pretty similarly to how they do in most European languages, but some changes include mb = m, gc = c, th = h, dt = d, bhf = silent, and some consonants change sound depending on if they are before i/e or a/o/u. This happens in Spanish/French/Italian and other languages too (with c/g for example) but is slightly different in Irish.

For example S before i or e is an sh sound – this is why the well-known name Seán is pronounced (and spelled, in America) as Shawn. Most of the vowels work similarly to as they would in English, with the exception of “ao” pronounced as “ee”, so the name Aoife is pronounced Ee-fa. The subtle difference between how some consonants are pronounced takes some practice but can indeed be learned .

This is important for saying Irish people’s names correctly (even when just speaking English). Even some titles are not translated in Ireland, instead of a “prime minister” we have a Taoiseach (the word we use in English too) – based on what I said above (and ‘ch’ is pronounced gutturally as in loch), you will see better why this is pronounced Tee-sho[ch].

The language also interestingly has no word for yes or no (like in Thai for example). We simply repeat the verb of the question, e.g. Ar ith tú do lón? D’ith! Did you eat your lunch? I did! (literally, I ate)

Cad atá tú ag caint faoi?

There are a few tricky aspects of the language that merit a mention though.

You know the way in most languages you change the end of words in certain situations? (car/cars, I eat / he eats, drapeau / drapeaux etc.)… And even the middle of the words in other ones (man/men, mouse/mice)? Well in Irish we very merrily change the beginning. This is something common in other Celtic languages and adds to a nice flow between words.

So, for those of you who don’t know, my name is actually Brendan (Benny is my nickname ). In Irish this is originally written Breandán and when followed by verbs and such it stays the same. Tá Breandán ag ithe - Brendan is eating.

However, thanks to the magic of initial mutations we can change the start of words in many situations! So if you want to get my attention some day, don’t shout Breandán!! but A Bhreandán!! – which is actually pronounced ah Vrendawn since bh=v! This would be the vocative case for the linguists out there. Another example: Mo = my & madra = dog, but my dog is mo mhadra (“mo wadra”) since mh=w.

This strange use of spelling and the other examples mentioned above may seem offputting, but it’s actually quite helpful believe it or not! You see, we keep the letter of the original base word (e.g. crann for tree) in a modified version of the word (e.g. i gcrann for in a tree – the ‘c’ is silent, but essential for recognising the original word when the modified one is written). This is way better than if the language was perfectly phonetic; even if you knew the word crann, if you saw “grann” in a dictionary, text, or spelled out for you, it would be much more confusing. I’m told that Welsh (in the same language family) operates more phonetically despite the same initial mutation situation and I’d personally miss my original letters for recognition!

The vocabulary of the language is of course quite different; it’s one of the few languages I’ve seen (the other being Esperanto) that has its own word for things like the Internet (Idirlíon), and even words you would hope would be slightly similar go way off; “vegetarian” is feoilséantóir (literally means, “meat shunner”).

However, despite the huge differences, like in some other languages, words are formed logically using prefixes, suffixes and combinations of roots. A lot of Irish words do this so after you have some basic vocabulary it isn’t that bad to recognise more complicated words and very quickly build up your base of vocabulary.

For example, astronomy is réalteolaíocht [réalta=star, eolas=knowledge/information, íocht=y/ity etc. suffix, or more generally the second part, eolaíocht = science, so "star science"]. And then sometimes we just separate the words in an easy way. Exit is simply bealach amach (way out).

Word order changes a bit from English, and we have preposition conjugation (same way in Spanish/Portuguese con + tu = contigo, except that it is applied to all persons for most prepositions). Also, because of the initial mutations mentioned above, capital letters (upper case) can occur as the second or third letter in a word! So Donegal (county in the northwest) is spelled Dún na nGall. These things do take some getting used to, but it really isn’t that bad.

Tá an teanga i ngach áit!

The best part of all, is that Irish speakers are generally always happy to help! We are a long cry from arrogant perfectionists (something that holds too many people back from speaking a language), so if you can form some sentences we’ll be very happy to hear them even if there are some grammatical mistakes Whenever I hear a cúpla focal from someone I always encourage them to keep going!

Whether in Ireland or abroad, there are usually some books in major libraries on learning Irish. You can also order them online – one of my favourites for beginners or those already with a wee bit is the multimedia Turas Teanga course (you can get it on Amazon US/UK) from Irish language RTE newsreader Sharon Ní Bheolain, who teaches the language while going around the country showing it used by natives. Teach yourself also do a great book about Irish for complete beginners (Amazon US/UK), and the more adventurous of you can even read Harry Potter in Irish! (Amazon US/UK)

But even if you aren’t in Ireland, the possibilities of being exposed to Irish are endless! As I’ve mentioned before you can use meetup.com or other social networking sites to see if there are other interested Irish learners in your city, and you can practice it through twitter as you learn it. I do this with all of my maintained languages so you can follow me @ilteangach as Gaeilge, and make sure to check out the hashtag this week for #snag (Irish language and culture week) or #gaeilge to see tweets in and about Irish.

You can also change the language of your computer and software to be entirely in Irish! Firefox, Open Office, Ubuntu and many more interfaces are available as Gaeilge.

Then of course there are lots of sites online to help you practice your Irish. Here is a small sample:

Liam Ó Maonlai has a free online course with PDFs and MP3s for download. The audio has some typical phrases that you can repeat.

Gramadach na Gaeilge – An extremely in-depth look at Irish grammar. Perhaps more interesting to linguists due to how extremely detailed it gets!

Irish Gaelic Translator forum – Get an almost instantaneous answer from a native or fluent speaker of the language on simple questions and short translations. This forum is very active and will be a great help! There is also the Daltaí forum.

Abair.ie – An amazing voice synthesiser for Irish text. It uses the beautiful Tír Conaill accent (Ireland’s 3 main dialects are quite different!!) and can help train you in your pronunciation.

RnaG – Ireland’s main Irish language radio station that you can listen to live. This is the best way to hear what the language actually sounds like! The entire page is in Irish, but click on “RnaG beo” (beo=live) link beside the radio image in the top-right to open up the stream.

Tg4 – Ireland’s Irish language TV station. What’s better than listening to the radio in Irish? Watching TV shows originally in Irish! Check out the Ros na Rún page (and click “Féach ar” [watch]) to watch a soap opera entirely in Irish! There are many more categories, but the site is navigated entirely in Irish of course.

Irish dictionary – free online dictionary.

Focal.ie – A free technical dictionary. Not good for basic words, but gives declensions and plurals for a lot of words; for intermediate and higher level learners.

———————

You can also check out a video I made about my experience in the Gaeltacht. The course I took was given by Oideas Gael in Donegal and takes place regularly every year for all levels. My Irish is far from perfect (my accent is definitely not as lovely as so many others that you would hear), but you can see some videos I’ve made entirely in Irish (most with subtitles) on my Irish videoblog. I don’t update it regularly, but I’m hoping to make a somewhat silly video next week about the Irish language [Edit: that video is ready! You can watch it in both English and Irish here]

I hope this post gives those of you out there curious about the language a little hint into how to learn and use it! Let me know in the comments about your own Irish learning experiences! Don’t forget to share this post with your other Irish-at-heart friends through twitter and facebook

Go n-eirí an bóthar libh!
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This is what I get for buying an "M" t-shirt in Asia

My first month in Thailand has come to an end; the purpose of this month for me was to discover a little of the south, be a tourist and be able to grasp the rules on reading Thai.

It was way easier than people warned me it would be, and I’ve only put a total of about 2-5 hours a week into it. Really. (The real work starts from this weekend; see below)

I’d like to think I had learned a lot about languages before starting this blog, but I’ve been exposed to something that will be essential in helping me communicate how you can do it too; waves of scepticism, doubt and negativity through comments and e-mails. This has been a very good thing because I am getting a much better idea of what is holding others back from achieving the same goals, by gaining a deeper understanding of their perspective, which I honestly think should be changed if they want to make it easier.

I was told that it would take months of pure practise to read Thai without romanisation, and almost 50,000 stumbles on my post about how I did it has shown that I was on to something in showing that just a few hours is all you really need. Despite that I got warned that it would definitely take months (or years) to learn to decipher Thai tones from the text.

Just because it took you months or years doesn’t mean that I or anyone else has to follow your same boring timetable

Let me show you what I mean, by looking at Thai’s reading/tone roles in two ways:

The unnecessarily complicated & pessimistic way

Deciphering Thai’s 5 tones (mid, low, high, falling & rising) from the script is an intimidating process of remembering if the first consonant is low, mid or high (which you have to remember for each of the 44 consonants), whether the syllable is live or dead and if there is a tone mark present. Live or dead syllables in turn depend on whether the vowel is long or short or if it ends in an unvoiced consonant.

There are no spaces between Thai words, so it will take lots of work to figure out where one word ends and another begins before you can even begin to apply these rules. Even if you somehow master all of this, English speakers are completely unused to Thai’s 5 tones so you will likely say them wrong or find it impossible to distinguish them when others speak.

Expect years of hellish labour or give up right now. (Encouraging, huh?)

There are always shortcuts

What I’ve learned from the naysayers is that they tend to look at a problem one-dimensionally. If they wanted to lift something heavy, they’d get 3 strong men to do it instead of just doing it themselves with a lever or pulley. If they wanted to find a guy named Bob in a room they’d go up to each man and ask if his name is Bob, instead of just shouting “Which one of you is Bob?” And if they wanted to learn a list of rules for how an aspect of a language works, they’ll write it out in tabular form and learn each cell of the table until it’s drilled into their head.

It’s unnecessary overkill. Rules like the above one, and basically any set of rules that you need to learn are “complicated” when you look at them expecting them to be complicated. I’ve already said that you need a positive outlook and this is what I always apply to languages I learn.

There are always shortcuts, techniques and patterns that will make it much easier if you just look “outside the box” (literally; I keep seeing such rules written in tabular boxes!)

Some Thai reading-rule shortcuts

I’ve discovered several ways of reducing the workload of understanding and remembering Thai tone and reading rules. I’m sure others have seen these patterns too, but from what I can tell a lot of them would not be included in Thai courses. So here is my personal summary of everything you need to know to read Thai quite well in just 11 bullet points.

• Forget learning the high/mid/low aspect of each consonant. Well over half of them are low. So just presume the consonant is low (‘default’) and learn to recognise the high/mid ones. Work reduced by more than 50%.
• In case that wasn’t enough, reinforce it by remembering that all nasals (m, n, or ng sounds) and semi-vowel consonants (y, w sounds) are low class.
• Several symbols have the circle on the left (overall, or from diagonal line) for middle class and on the right for high class. There are a few exceptions, but it helps a bit for recognition. Here’s some Mid vs High to give you an idea of what I mean

ฎ ฏ ด ต บ ป vs ถ ผ ฝ ศ

• Looking for patterns in the annoying table of rules we can see that you can presume that the syllable is a mid tone if it ends in m, n, or ng or a long open vowel (3/4 of the time; i.e. for both low and middle class starting consonants). So just look out for high class consonants where it would be rising instead and otherwise always presume that it’s mid tone!
• I don’t see the point of the live/dead syllable notation other than academic labels for linguists. I personally ignore it: if the syllable ends in a k, p or t sound, or has a short open vowel then it’s a low tone for both high and middle class. Low class splits it up further into falling tone (long vowel) and high tone (short vowel) when also ending in the same consonants.
• The tone markers ๊ and ๋ are only really used with middle class consonants, so you only need to learn the other two (่ and ้) in the 3 classes. The “silent H” consonant ห is high so this means the whole syllable will have the “high consonant” rules applied to it.
• The above 3 points are all important points to remember about tone rules. If I’m missing anything, it just means that I’m 90-95% covered, which is fine by me. The above points are much easier to learn than 3 seemingly random tables for low/mid/high class consonants.
• Learning the alphabet is easy; use the same association techniques I discussed before but add multiple levels and associations to each symbol; First, its alphabetical order number: associating a number isn’t that hard and will help you look up words in the dictionary; rather than remembering the overall order of the symbols (as we tend to do in English), remember its order number (e.g. ด “do dek” is 20th, which was easy for me since it looks like Esperanto’s word for 20, dudek) and compare to the next symbol! It’s really effective for using a dictionary. Then learn the name of the letter (chicken, monk etc.). This will help you read Thai letters as the Thais do, as well as expanding on your vocabulary.
• Don’t forget to think of the tones as what we have in English as I demonstrated in the video of the previous post; high is “surprise”, rising is “question” etc. Here‘s a good page for testing your understanding of the tones. The first few times are tricky, but then you get the hang of it and see it isn’t that bad!
• To distinguish between different syllables, it helps a lot to know what almost always denotes the end of a syllable, such as vowels ะ, or even ั which shows that there must be a linking consonant next, and which consonants never end a syllable (ฉ, ฌ, ผ, ฝ, ห, etc.) so you know just before them the previous syllable has ended. Also, because you have learned how to read Thai and are learning vocabulary that way rather than through romanisation, you’ll quickly start to recognise words and know where it has to end.
• The consonants ร, ล, ว tend to merge with the preceding one, and you have to learn the irregular combinations ทร = s at the beginning of a syllable and รร = n at the end of a syllable. ์ indicates a silent letter (usually for foreign words like ฟิล์ม “film”, with a silent l), ็ shortens the vowel, ฯ means the previous word is abbreviated and ๆ means the previous word is repeated.

That’s it – nearly all the rules of reading Thai.

I’ve seen whole books try to present the same information across hundreds of pages. As far as I’m concerned this is all I need to know for now since I can indeed read words and apply the right tones. If I’m skipping anything, then I don’t particularly care as the above will help me read the vast majority of what I need to, and I just need practise to make sure I’ll do it quickly when under pressure.

Time for stage two: speaking

Since I’m happy with my understanding of reading, I’m going to move on to the more fun part of learning a language that I usually tend to start with; actually speaking it! I wanted to focus on the least familiar linguistic aspect first, just this once; tones, and script. Now I’m going back into familiar territory and using my usual methods to see how far I get and how much I can speak before I fly out in a month’s time! I’m going to try to aim for a higher (basic) conversational level than my initial goal when introducing the mission.

The south was interesting, but not for me. I was an English speaking tourist my entire time and there are so many things missing that I usually get to have in my travels, even in the early stages of speaking a language. Once I have a basis of comparison from living in the north, I’ll share my reasons for why learning languages hugely enriches your travels. You would think that it would be obvious, but the amount of tourists without even hello/thank-you in the foreign language disproves that. This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve used English to travel with in a country that it isn’t spoken in.

I’m going straight to Chiang Mai on Saturday and if I like it there, I’ll stay for several weeks before going back to Bangkok

—————————-

So, any thoughts on my condensed guidelines for reading Thai, or nitpicks for obscure rules I didn’t include? In case you haven’t gotten it yet, discouraging comments don’t work on me So what I’d really like to see is even more patterns that I’ve missed. I came up with these in a few short hours study. I’m sure those way more familiar with Thai could make it even easier for us and show us more simple patterns and short-cuts!

Otherwise, do you think I will indeed have a much more enriched experience living in Chiang Mai? Let me know in the comments!!
Similar Posts:

• [video] Another way to look at the 5 tones of Thai
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9wd9m3pxaU

This post includes an embedded video. If you are reading it through RSS or email and don’t see it, click through to watch it on my site!

Note: Rather than this video being a how-to about Thai tones, it’s simply giving an idea of the way that I’m looking at and approaching them to help to make them easier. Since I had only been in Thailand for just over 2 weeks at the time of filming there are a few mistakes, but it should hopefully help others starting off!

Blogger cameo roles in the video

I was going to wait to record this video for another week or so when I would have had a better ear for the tones, but I couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to work on a shared project with some big names in the blogosphere! I spent an entire week in Ko Phi Phi and most of that was in the company of some fellow “location independent professionals” that went with me to the parties on the beach every night. It’s definitely been the best part of my Thailand trip so far.

I convinced some of them to help me with this video. They are (in the order you see them):

Sean Ogle Location 180: Sean quit his job and decided to move across the world and has a great blog about why it’s not as scary as you think to do that. In person he’s super cool and really great fun! We’ll be meeting up again before I leave Thailand for sure!

Dan Andrews Tropical MBA: Dan knows his business and he does most of it from somewhere tropical! He runs a cool podcast to inspire others to do the same and was giving me some great advice for how I should expand on my blog. His work partner Ian was the cameraman.

Tom Li: Tom, and the others above are all working together. Tom and I had an amazing time meeting people on the sandy dancefloors!

Adam Baker ManVsDebt: Adam’s blog is huge after less than a year since he started it, because apart from really amazing content, he is proving that you can travel the world even if you have a family and showing that there is a way out of debt if you are committed to it and sell all your useless stuff. His beautiful daughter Milly (who also appears in the video) and his wife Courtney are with him on the adventure of a lifetime. He’s really nice in person!!

Summary of the 5 tones

Just to expand on what I said in the video (and correct little mistakes I made), the way I see the 5 tones of Thai are as follows:

• High tone. This title is misleading because you would think it is just simply a higher version of the middle/low tone, but I actually hear it as rising. It does so in a different way to the rising tone (see below), and I think this can be pretty well represented by shock or surprise as I did in the video. So you start already high and make it higher.
• Rising tone. This title is better, but it’s important to note that you have to go down before you actually do rise your tone. This is precisely the same as we do in single word questions (like really?) on hearing interesting information.
• Middle and low tone. I still find these two a little hard, so in the video I just focussed on the difference between them; at the moment just making a tone that feels middle or low is what I’m going with. Since then, from more practice, from what I can tell, the low tone sounds like how we would end a sentence in English. Click the different words on this page to hear a native pronounce them and you’ll see what I mean. If you can give a better easy explanation than my “jaws” suggestion in the video, say so in the comments
• Falling tone. I totally messed this one up in the video; sorry! (One long take and a lot of stuff to remember, whoops!) In the link in the previous point you can hear what it actually sounds like; it’s like the opposite to the rising tone in that it starts high and then falls low. It’s actually not that hard at all; I was just a little distracted in the video.

One other mistake I made in the video was that despite saying it pretty well on the beach, I said the high tone almost exactly the same as the rising tone (I went down-up, instead of up-up) when giving the example in the last part. I think I sound pretty silly trying to point out the difference between two sentences that sound pretty much exactly the same and shouldn’t in Thai…

So overall, I definitely can’t say that I’ve “mastered” tones yet, but I hope that I have a pretty good idea thanks to comparisons with situations in English, as in the video, and with practice they will come! Rather than giving tips in this video, I wanted to just share the learning experience, even in the stage where I’m still making lots of basic mistakes. And of course, it was a great excuse to work together with the other bloggers on a common project that only took a few minutes!

Right now I’m in a small town called “fisherman’s village” despite there not being a single fisherman in sight; great fake title for tourist soundbites though. It’s on the north part of Ko Samui and I’ll be getting the 20 minute speedboat to the famous full moon party this weekend! Can’t wait!!

If you have any comments on the video, tips to help me improve my command over the tones, or if you are also a subscriber to the blogs of the guys I got to spend a week with in Ko Phi Phi, do share it with us in the comments!!
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For those of you who have been following my latest mission, I was successful in convincing several Cariocas (residents of Rio de Janeiro) that I was one of them. This involved working on two parts of how I interacted with people; my body language/outward behaviour and my spoken Portuguese.

In today’s post I am going to go into the technical details of what I did to improve the level of my already fluent Portuguese, but with a typical gringo accent, to the point where I could convince a local that I was one of them (talking for about 20-30 seconds until I slipped up), as long as I was focussed.

With a time limit greater than 3 months I could have stretched that 20-30 second timespan further and reduced the number of mistakes, and not needed to be so focussed, as it would have come more naturally with practise.

Despite that, I’m pretty sure I’ve discovered the main things that someone in the same starting position would have to work on, if they were aiming for the same goal.  Here they are!

Improving your Portuguese

The only book I studied this time for improving my Portuguese (since most of my work was practical and hands-on) was Colloquial Portuguese of Brazil 2, which you can get off Amazon (UK or US). There is also a part 1 here: (Amazon US/UK), but part 2 already presumes that your level of Portuguese is quite good.

It goes into slang and informal usage and gives a lot of dialogue examples; it definitely focusses on Portuguese as it’s actually spoken, where most books will teach you the formal language. I highly recommend it for someone who already has a pretty good grasp of Portuguese.

If you’ve only learned Spanish, you need to be aware of the many differences between Portuguese and Spanish and work on your Portuguese grammar (components like the future subjunctive don’t exist any more in other European languages for example), expand your vocabulary and practise a lot until you reach fluency or are at least speaking pretty well.

Even without using books, in this article I’ll presume that your Portuguese is already quite good if you aim to speak like a Carioca.

Without a very good level of Portuguese, the mistakes you make will give you away. Cariocas themselves do not actually speak the formal Portuguese that nearly all courses teach you (why I liked the untraditional book above), but the “mistakes” they make are very specific. They can be emulated, but ideally you would work “down” from a good level.

For example, in Rio, there is a frowned upon yet extremely common use of the “tu” (second person) pronoun with “você” (third person) conjugation. This gives us tu vai, tu sabe, tu é, etc. Absolutely “wrong” Portuguese, but you will hear this regularly among Cariocas. This happens in English too in some dialects, but is very restricted.

However, you can’t ever say “eu vai”, “eu sabe” as well as less obvious mistakes; i.e. only the accepted mistakes (if that isn’t an oxymoron) should be repeated. It is better to work on your “formal” Portuguese first, if possible, and then to focus on the Carioca dialect from there

Gírias

Gírias (Turns of phrase, expressions) are the padding to soften formal language beyond pure fact and literal translations. Their use will make you sound more local than the most formal and perfect Portuguese ever can. I always make it a point to learn these as soon as possible in any language, and in trying to emulate a native, it was essential to increase my usage of them.

Instead of saying “OK” to confirm you want to go to a praia you can say Partiu! or Demorou! Look for equivalents to English expressions; the ironic “yeah right!” has its “Até parece!” and standard words have their informal replacements. Mentira becomes caô, feia becomes canhão, inteligente becomes cabeçudo and legal (cool) becomes irado or maneiro!

It would be impossible for me to list all of these here, but a good place to start for general Portuguese expressions (i.e. not specific to Rio, but just as important in Rio) is this list on Wikipedia.

A much more amusing list that is very specific to the Carioca dialect, is given on the Portuguese version of the uncyclopedia, on the article on Carioquês <– definitely worth a read. It mentions more typical Carioca examples like meu irmão, mó etc. Both the “desciclopédia” and the wikipedia articles are in Portuguese of course.

Finally, cursing is, once again, frowned upon by formal learners, but essential if you want to understand and attempt to blend in with locals. Any frustration must be indicated with words like Porra, and referees who make decisions you don’t like must be loudly instructed to vai tomar no cu! Here is an excellent sample dictionary of Portuguese curses <–> English (most of these are general and not Rio specific). Listening to locals for even a few short hours and emulating them will quickly give you hundreds of curse words!

Sotaque

The above focusses on what you are saying but not how you say it. Your accent will be the defining factor in convincing locals you are one of them. I’ve already discussed some general tips to reduce your English-speaking accent, that should definitely be kept in mind.

In the Carioca dialect of Portuguese, some other tips include:

• Make the r guttural. This only applies to initial or ending rs, double rs or those preceded by an n or l (i.e. Rio, carro, tenro but not compras or espera). It is not as harsh a guttural sound as in other languages, and you can get away with simply pronouncing it like a forced “h” some of the time (as they do in other parts of Brazil), but other times you do need to really go for the ch sound in loch to make it sound authentic.
• s chiado - another typical Carioca sound is changing an s specifically at the end of a word/syllable followed by an unvoiced consonant (t, c, f, p) to sh. So meus pais is pronounced mih-oosh pah-eesh, although the most famous example that I’m obligated to give is biscoita, pronounced as if the s was replaced by a Portuguese x. Before a voiced consonant (b, d, g, m, n, r) the chiado actually becomes more like the French j or the s in measure (Israel, rasgar etc.)
• Join the words together! One of the most obvious ways a Brazilian (not just a Carioca) can recognise a speaker of English (or German etc.) is by the seemingly “robotic” way of separating words. Those… imitating… me… said… that… I… speak… like… this. In Portuguese (and more famously, French with its liaison), words flow together to make one sound. This is in combination with the wave that I’ll be discussing below. So, no pauses mid-sentence. Pronounce everything before a comma or full-stop as if it was “one word”, while saying it clearly; you do not have to speak quickly to achieve this.
• One consequence of the above rule is how the previously mentioned chiado and r pronunciation works. Although the r at the end of “por” would be pronounced as a guttural r if said in isolation, at the very end of a sentence or when followed by consonants in the next word, it would actually be rolled (as in single r in Spanish/Italian) if the next word begins with a vowel. So por você and por isso both have different r sounds. This principle also works with the chiado. So mais um has the s pronounced as it would be if that were one word maisum and not as a chiado sound (as in mais bonita).
• Don’t overdo the chiado! The above point in combination with the fact that sometimes even Cariocas occasionally say it like the rest of Brazil, means you shouldn’t force this sound; my over-enthusiasm with the chiado at first made me sound quite strange.
• Open vs Closed vowels. This one is generally a tricky part of Portuguese, since there are two ways of pronouncing some vowels depending on the acute accent ó (open) or circumflex ô (closed). Unfortunately, most of the time these accents are not written if the stress would fall on that syllable without the accent. So “olho” can mean both “eye” and “I look”, but is pronounced ôlho for the first and ólho for the second. Vaguely, ó is “aw”, ô is “oh”, é is “eh” and ê is “i” in “sin”. An important subtle difference is that he is êle but she is éla (both not actually written with accents).
• Southern preference for closed vowels and t/d chiado. Before Rio, I had spent more time in the Northeast, where there was a preference for open vowels, while in the south/southeast of Brazil, they prefer closed ones. So it’s pronounced dêzembro in the South/Southeast and dézembro in the northeast (even though it’s not written with either accent). T & D are also more phonetic in the northeast and have a chiado applied in the south. So teatro is pronounced as spelt in the Northeast but as tiatro (ch sound like in “chain” on the t) in the south/southeast.
• Carioca diphthongs on single vowels. When speaking certain words, Cariocas open their mouth wider when saying stressed vowels, which results in a diphthong. So the word “Carioca” actually sounds like Cariôaca (subtle “a”), “amigos” can sound like “amíegos” (subtle “e”), apartamento actually sounds like apartame(a)nto, (with both e and a nasalised due to n) etc.

• Unstressed o becomes u. When starting to learn Portuguese, you will quickly see that os at the end of words require a u sound, but I found out that (at least in the Carioca dialect) some unstressed os in other syllables also become u. So bonito is pronounced “buni(e)tu”, dormir is durmir etc.
• Softer consonants and open mouth on vowels. Something I mentioned early on in the mission is that in English we tend to eat unstressed vowels. I also found out that a typical English accent forces consonants too much. ps and bs do not need to be so “explosive” and every other consonant should be sound less stressed.

Onda

Another thing I mentioned at month 1 in the mission was that sentence rhythm was essential to improving my accent. The “wave” in Portuguese, or specifically in the Carioca dialect, must be adhered to closely, as English (and other languages such as German) speakers can be spotted immediately by their robotic way of speaking.

Parallel to the point I mentioned on not pausing, the wave must continue uninterrupted to avoid this robotic sound. This is something I will go into in much more detail another time, but for the moment the best comparison I can give without providing recordings or going into musical analogies is to imagine how the Indian accent sounds in English. This up-down movement within words may sound weird to us, but it is the music of other languages that makes English sound so monotone to other speakers.

The music of this wave in the Carioca dialect is not the same as it is in Indian English, but applying this up-down pattern fluidly will improve your accent. It’s important to note that the sentence usually ends on a down tone (even in many questions, unlike in English), and that some words get stress more in Portuguese than they do in English such as “e” (and) and key words of the sentence.

Not applying this rhythm will make your sentences sound incomplete or confusing; when I travelled deep inside Brazil away from large cities, they had trouble understanding me exactly because of this. In cities like Rio, they may understand you, but it’s only because they are used to so many foreign accents. The best way you can improve the musicality of your sentence rhythm is by mimicking how people speak (less annoying if you do it with the TV or radio!)

Finally, the music of a sentence is improved if you put emotion into your voice. This is especially true when reading, where it would come out quite dull otherwise. When reading a newspaper article aloud I imaged how I would read it to a child to make it sound more alive, rather than how we would naturally read most English.

————————————

Dr Seuss once said “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” That is how I feel about my amazing time in Rio!

Before I wrap up the Brazilian mission, I still want to briefly mention How to act like a Carioca, and I will be summarising all the posts of the last 3 months before discussing the next mission! In the next post, on Wednesday, I’ll ask a favour of 3 minutes of your time – anyone who has it, it would be appreciated

With regards this post and the expressions, musicality and the Portuguese-improving aspect of sounding like a Carioca, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts! Almost everything I discussed here was something that I have learned in the last 3 months; this should make it clear why I had to be so focussed and would only make it to 20-30 seconds before slipping up. It’s a lot to remember!! Practise would make it come more naturally

For those who speak Portuguese, is there something that I left out (that wasn’t mentioned in the links I gave either)? For those who speak other languages, do you find any of this can apply to that language too? Do you strongly agree or disagree with any of my recommendations? Do let us know in the comments!
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What I’ve discovered from learning Czech to a pretty good level

So, my summer has come to an end! My experiment was an interesting one and I’m happy with the results and have learned a lot from the conclusions that I’ve drawn! I’ll be trying a similar experiment soon (although my very next one will be completely different; to be revealed next week!)

This post discusses particular hacks for Czech, but you can see many more of my suggestions that would work for this and other languages, in the Language Hacking Guide!

I chose Czech randomly, and was able to reach a pretty good level after just two months of a casual part-time commitment (with no commitment at all in the entire last month because of my increased workload to pay off a debt; hence 2 months instead of 3). Rather than reaching a “pretty good” level because of some hidden language-gene that I definitely don’t have, it was because of the techniques that I’ve openly discussed on this blog (which I’ll summarise in the next post), and the general positive attitude I’ve had from the very start. This attitude was deeply routed in the refusal to believe that Czech was a hard language.

Rather than having this philosophy simply from repeating a mantra like “it isn’t hard” over and over again, I was constantly finding evidence to support this theory as I learned more about Czech. Today I’d like to share these discoveries and the tools that I used with those of you interested in trying this experiment for yourself, or for anyone in the basic stages of learning the language.

My study tool recommendations

I got asked in comments a lot what tools I used to study. A great book that helped a lot was Czech, an essential grammar, which you can get directly from the Amazon UK or Amazon US site. It was highly recommended to me and now I highly recommend it to you!! It goes into great detail about word formations (that I summarise below) and very clearly explains Czech grammar in a straightforward and no-BS way. It doesn’t waste time with childish pictures or irrelevant examples, but goes right into explaining the meat of the language, with full translations of all examples used and with lots of important vocabulary in each chapter. I just wanted the facts, explained clearly and in detail, so this book was the best for me, but if you need a more lesson oriented approach this won’t be for you.

As I mentioned before, I always have a phrasebook in my pocket. Anytime I am waiting anywhere I take it out and learn some words from the dictionary at the back, which is small enough to get through a whole letter of the alphabet in a 10 minute wait for the tram, while still being big enough to cover most of the essential words. Then of course you can also learn the huge amount of phrases from a wide range of categories squeezed into this tiny book. The Lonely Planet phrasebook series has served me well in several languages and it did a great job in Czech too. There are lots of other phrasebooks, but I like the wide range of topics covered by the phrases by LP, as well as its price. You can get this on the Amazon UK or Amazon US site, but if you are passing through Dublin’s or London’s airports you will see it on sale there too.

If you’re near a computer when studying, there are plenty of websites that can help too! There is a very detailed dictionary at Slovnik.cz but sometimes it gives way too many translations for simple words with no context explanation, so I personally prefered good old Wordreference’s Czech dictionary for looking up simple words. I also found some great blogs including the Czechmatediary, which is written entirely in both Czech and English, by a Czech native living in the states. If you know of other great websites that help with learning Czech, please do share them in the comments.

Ignore the scare tactics!

If you’ve decided to learn Czech, the first thing that other learners or (especially) natives may do is tell you how hard it is. It’s got 7 cases, unpronounceable consonant clusters, irregular plurals, unrecognisable vocabulary, the hard-to-pronounce letter ř, lions and tigers and bears, oh my!!! As a generally optimistic person, I tend to ignore unhelpful comments like these whenever possible. None of these news-flashes were going to help or encourage me to make progress in the language, so I found another way of looking at them.

Even after studying it for just a few hours, I had already found several reasons to claim that it was easy, such as discovering that it was a phonetic language (unlike say, French and definitely not like English. I challenge you to say though, through, plough, dough, cough very quickly on the first attempt) and that its conjugation can be similar to Latin languages. Since then I’ve found other ways of looking at the issue that you may find interesting. I’m not trying to say that Czech is “easy”, just that constantly focussing on it being hard is not helpful! Looking at it the following way may motivate you and help you reach a good level much better than trying to scare or “impress” you with its difficulties ever would.

Vocabulary

When you learn French, Spanish etc. there is a host of words the same or similar in English that really ease the blow (I’ll talk about these another time). Since Czech is in the Slavic language branch, most words you encounter are nothing like their English counterparts, so it can be quite discouraging when you have hundreds of thousands of words to describe all the basic things in life, to learn off. Even the best memory techniques may not help when you are up against such a vast amount.

Lucky for us, Czech isn’t actually made up of hundreds of thousands of different of individual words, but actually, a much smaller subset of word roots, prefixes and suffixes, most of which are linked together in logical or easy to remember ways. Czech does this way more than the western European languages I’m familiar with (which already do it to a certain extent). Let me show you what I mean:

Let’s take 4 prefixes; v, vy, od and za, (all but vy are also prepositions) and add them to a word root chod related to the verb chodit, to go (habitual). v by itself and in many verbs means in so when you have something for “going in” you have a…? An entrance! vchod! vý/vy doesn’t exist by itself in this context, but it means the opposite and you have an exit: východ. od by itself means simply from, so what do you think a “from-go” thing would be? A departure = odchod!

You’ll actually find that a huge amount of words in Czech are formed by a small number of prefixes added to roots and a lot of them have extremely logical meanings like this. Compare this to the French for exit, sortie, which is impossible to understand unless you have seen specifically that word or its verb sortir before. I find Czech’s word formation to be much more logical and it is definitely easier to remember. So learning a new word sometimes doesn’t actually involve learning any new words at all!

However, some examples take a bit of imagination, but are still not that illogical if your imagination is good enough. Taking my last prefix za with chod; za can mean behind/off, i.e. going offstage or out of view. Well, if you are excusing yourself to go from out of the current “scene” or location, you may be going to… the toilet! Czech signs say toaleta, but using the word in conversation would be weird because záchod is what most people say for toilet! Yes, I know I’m pushing it a bit! But you have to admit, it’s not that much of a stretch of the imagination! This technique, combined with the very very many straightforward logical combinations gave me thousands of Czech words for very little work.

In fact, prefix + root combinations multiply. So if you understand the vague sense associated with the main prefixes do, na, nad(e), ne, o(b), od(e), pa, po, popo, pod, pro, pře, před, při, roz, s(e), spolu, u, v(e), vy, vz, z, za and combine less than half of them with say 10 roots that they may work with, then for the price of learning 20 word-meanings, you actually get 10×10=100 words thanks to all the possible combinations!!

When you add suffixes to the mix it helps so much for understanding a huge amount of words without getting a headache trying to memorise each word individually. For example, the suffix “ař”, which means people associated with the root word, and the word for a medicine lék, will give you a lékař… a medicine-person? A doctor!! Film is the same as in English, but filmař is film maker, ryba is fish, but rybář is fisherman etc. So many words can be broken up like this, so studying the prefixes and suffixes gives you an exponential amount of possibilities to understand the language.

Grammar

When I was told that there were 7 cases for each word with a different option for singular and plural, I was worried that I would have to learn 14 “words” for each individual word. This is not the case. Sorry Czech, but your cases don’t scare me in the least. All we need to do is change the end of the word (most of the time, simply changing one vowel to another, but practically all other changes follow consistent rules like h->z). It does take a bit of getting used to that you have to remember if you are changing that last o to an a and which case to use etc. but if you do enough exercises or (in my case) actually talk with Czechs and just throw in any old ending, they will correct you and it will sink in quickly enough. This is something that you can get used to!

In fact, it soon becomes quite natural! It may seen annoying when starting off, since we don’t have this in English, but you must look at it from within the language itself, instead of from English. I got so used to the use of Czech cases that I actually find it annoying now when people use the Czech word “Praha” in English instead of Prague without declining it! You can’t say in Praha or to Praha; it would obviously be in Praze and to Prahy, duh!!

You may be scepticle to think that this is easy, but let’s compare it to other languages: Czech failed to impress me in difficulty in so many counts and noun declensions was one of them. In Irish we also have the genitive and vocative sense for example, but because of initial mutations on words, when we alter a word, the ending and the beginning is changed. A word starting with a B changes to a V sound for example. In Czech all they do is change the ending, and the rules are very consistent (explained in the book I mentioned).

In French you can almost never just say a singular word in a sentence without adding an (in)definite article, which requires you to know its gender. Czech doesn’t even have indefinite/definite articles. It’s true that they use demonstrative (this/that) more, but translating a sentence as “I saw car” (with no the/a, which complicates the sentence somewhat in other languages) is completely correct.

However, when you do learn genders of nouns they are easy to remember. Almost all the time a noun ending in a consonant in masculine, ending in ‘a’ is feminine and ending in ‘o’ is neuter. There are exceptions, but they follow predictable guidelines. There may be 3 genders, but it’s very easy to remember which gender a noun is, especially compared to a language like French and to what I remembered from German, which has more complex ending-gender association rules and can seem much more random.

The right attitude when learning is the key

There is no challenge in the Czech language that you cannot overcome. The consonant clusters are tricky, but in Czech, some consonants tend to act like vowels, so krk (neck) actually sounds a bit like Kirk (although note that the r is rolled, and this was one advantage I did have when starting because I’ve already learned this sound from Spanish), just with the vowel sound reduced. When you are focussed and devoted enough to the language these “noises” do turn into words very quickly. Children learn this language all the time, so a smart adult like you has no excuses!

It’s possible to retort this post with a list of reasons why Czech is hard, but why bother? How can that help language learners? Czech has great literature and can be a very expressive and difficult language to master. But if your goal is to just speak it, then there is NOTHING holding you back from this. I challenge you to find even more reasons why it’s easy rather than tell me how wrong I am about it not being hard. Give this language a try and let me know what I missed in my quest to prove that it can indeed be spoken quite well, quite quickly.

Apart from these tips specifically for Czech, it’s very important to have an efficient study and learning method. In the next post I’ll summarise the entire summer experiment for reaching the level I did, relevant to any language. After that I will officially start my next 3-month mission.

Děkuju you Czech, it’s been a pleasure!

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But I have just decided to take it an extra step and apply it to languages that I am learning…

The International Youth Congress of Esperanto -- video in Czech (with subtitles)

I had promised to make a video in Czech at the end of my stay here, but I am going to break that promise and deliver one right now!! I recently spent a week with hundreds of Esperanto speakers, and since it happened right here in the Czech Republic I thought that I might as well make this video in Czech! Not just so that I get to practise, but also since I sincerely think (well, hope) that Czechs will find this video interesting.

I am still far from fluent, but I also believe that we should never wait until we are “ready” before trying something with languages, since that day may never arrive if you put “ready” on an ever rising pedestal. Even though I’m still not so comfortable with my Czech, I decided to ignore such unhelpful thoughts, and any embarrassment I may feel, and show the world how “bad” it currently is!! I also wanted to share the wonderful experience of my Esperanto week with you all anyway! Without further ado, here is what Czech with an Irish accent sounds like:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ04Y085alM

(You can also watch this video in Esperanto; I promise that I speak that better!!)

Considering I’ve only been studying Czech for about 6 weeks, I’m pretty pleased with how I am speaking! Some of you may have been curious to hear my current level anyway, but hopefully a native actually understands what I’m saying Of course, this is no reflection on actual fluency level, since speaking in a quiet room to a microphone, with a script that a native proofread and corrected for me, is a far cry from having a natural and leisurely conversation! But that will come soon enough

Make speaking the language more interesting

We all have plenty of pastimes and I’m no exception. No matter where I am, and I have found that doing things I normally do anyway in the language I wish to practise has been the best way to encourage me to really speak it. Of course, if you’ve applied my most important advice for speaking a language you’ll be doing this anyway. But let me give a couple more examples to illustrate what I mean.

Back when I was really getting into Spanish and looking for any chance to practise it, someone suggested that I read the newspaper daily. I tried this for several days and it was not helping; I was bored and the political vocabulary was discouraging me; this was quite a bad idea for one very simple reason: I don’t read the newspaper in English! I never have. I get my news from other sources. This is one of the many reasons that I don’t like the standard academic approach. I never find the material that they teach to be personally relevant. I don’t care so much about the examples and articles that they give, and sometimes the words that they suggest that I should learn are words I would not usually say (even if they are common).

So think about what you actually do in your free time and try it entirely through your acquired language! I’ve played chess in Italian, read computer and men’s health magazines in French, taken dance lessons in Spanish, windsurfing lessons in Portuguese, flirted with pretty girls in Esperanto and chatted in MSN and Skype in Irish Gaelic. Whether my level was good enough or not for any of these activities was never an issue because I enjoyed doing them all and would do them anyway even if I wasn’t learning any languages. This makes it more fun, so when you do have to learn a word your motivation is completely different than it is for something you aren’t so interested in. It also makes it more natural, which is the whole point! It’s natural for natives, so why shouldn’t it be natural for learners too? It’s true that to have full command over a language, you need to learn vocabulary that you may not use so often, but until you decide on reaching that stage, why not learn everything you need specifically to live and enjoy your life?

If you are into wine tasting, or political discussions, or attending concerts of particular types of music, then why not try doing that when abroad too? It’s a much less touristy thing to do in many cases and the best part is that you will have common interests with others going to these meetings/events who will likely be locals! It’s an excellent way of making friends in a new place, considering that you aren’t just focussed on the language, since you are doing something else that you enjoy anyway. I’ll be trying this myself and looking for such groups in Prague to expand my social circle to locals that I would get along with and share interests with (rather than just looking for any local friends, just because they speak the language). You can find such events advertised in weekly event magazines, online, in university advertisements billboards etc. in many major cities. If you aren’t living in the country itself, then you can start with online equivalents (such as Yahoo groups about your interest, but in the language you wish to practise etc.)

Do you also combine your hobbies and past-times with your language learning? Do share in the comments, and give us all (including me) some more inspiration and ideas! Oh yes, and let me know what you think of my Czech
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This week I’m taking a break from my Czech studies and spending 7 days with 400 Esperanto speakers in the north of the Czech Republic, in Liberec.

What is Esperanto?

Esperanto is a constructed language with the purpose of connecting people from across many cultures who each natively speak different languages, without giving an unfair bias to any particular country/speaker as, for example, English currently does. Esperanto is also a very easy language to learn! I started learning it a year ago at the Summer Esperanto Study programme and I celebrated the New Year in Germany at the Internacia Seminario (click links to see videos I made about each event). Between both week-long events I’ve already reached a very good level of the language thanks to its similarities with other European languages and extremely easy grammar.

This is the third time that I’m meeting up with Esperantists; the events always cost very little money, with all accommodation and food included (vegetarian friendly if required), and there are options for self-catering and you can even camp here to reduce the price if you wanted to. The organisers prepare discussions, classes, cultural exchanges, concerts, nights-out and day trips etc. All of it in Esperanto. The event I’m currently at is the largest gathering of young Esperanto speakers (sometimes reaching up to 1000 people), and there are people from all over the world here. In the evenings there is a bar to hang out in, a chill-out area for non-drinkers and a disco to dance in.

Why would you want to learn a language that no country speaks?

There are actually Esperanto speakers in almost every country, and there are plenty of events like this all around the world during the year. I will be talking about the practical reasons to learn it another time (for example, even if you don’t care about the language itself, it can still seriously help you learn another language), but for me the most important reason to learn it has been to participate in these events! I am really enjoying this week and have already met some very interesting people my age who have very similar interests (some vegetarians, Linux users, language lovers, well-travelled and of course, fellow polyglots!) It’s also costing me very little money.

Have you ever heard of Esperanto before? When I mention it, some people seem to get defensive about learning a “non natural” language. Esperanto was “invented”, but after over a 100 years of usage, it has evolved into a “natural” language that quite a lot of people use very regularly. There are even native Esperanto speakers (always bilingual with one or more languages) usually due to their parents meeting at an event like this…

Its international spirit is fantastic, and if it’s really easy to learn, then why not? Does anyone here have any familiarity with this language? Do share it in the comments!
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xKu9FqvFNk

Today I will share the first one of these with you! This is a short video (less than 3 minutes long) I made about how to start learning Italian while I was passing through Rome again this year. There’s only so much you can say in 3 minutes, so it’s mostly a light-hearted video that obviously can’t be so detailed and is not to be taken seriously! Most of all, it was a good excuse for me to dress and act silly around Rome! You can watch it embedded through Youtube above in English, or through Dotsub below in Italian with English subtitles. [Note that these may not be viewable in feed readers / for email subscribers, so you might have to click through to my site]. You can also watch it in Esperanto, French, Spanish and Portuguese on Irishpolyglot.com .


(video in Italian with English subtitles)

Useful links

I will be expanding on particular points relevant to Italian in several posts on this site in future (words similar to English etc.), but for the moment I can definitely share some links with you that may be useful! If you know of others, then please do share them in the comments below. Note that some of these have equivalents in other major languages (Yahoo Answers, Blog search etc.), so these links aren’t necessarily only relevant to Italian learners!!

http://www.wordreference.com Great free online dictionary with an excellent, active and helpful forum for asking for translations of particular terms

http://it.answers.yahoo.com and http://answers.yahoo.com Another forum, the famous Yahoo Answers, but in Italian! If you have intermediate Italian, then ask a question (in Italian) about the language in the Società e Culture --> Lingue section. A huge amount of natives are only too eager to help. This is great for getting extremely quick answers for questions or having small text reviewed, for free. Note that the answerers are non-linguists (and sometimes mostly teenagers) so you should wait until you have several answers to be 100% sure. For beginners in Italian, use the second link for the same site in English and post your question in the Society and Culture --> Languages section. When writing in English, usually the wordreference forum is much better; non-natives would be answering in the English version of the Yahoo Answers site, and once again there are a lot of teenagers with time to kill there…

http://italian.about.com Interesting blog for beginner to intermediate learners. Includes regularly updated articles and free resources for learning the language.

http://www.transparent.com/italian/ Another blogger with a good chance of doing really well in the Top 100 Language Blogs, with excellent frequent tips about the language with lots of examples.

http://www.marinajonica.org/ A blog entirely in Italian written by an Italian (and good friend of mine) about Montegiordano in the beautiful Calabria region in the south of Italy. Italians blog too, so if you do a search for a topic that interests you (technology, music, etc.), but in Italian, then you can practise by reading modern content written by natives regularly. http://blogsearch.google.it is a good search tool for finding such blogs.

http://www.irishpolyglot.com/it It’s only fair that I should get to promote my own site too! Watch any of my videos in English first, and once you know what it’s about, watch its equivalent in Italian and see how much you can understand. I am far from a perfect speaker, and still have an accent (as you can hear in the Dotsub video embedded above), but I have a native proofread any dialogue before recording so you know that at least what I am saying is correct! As I mentioned in the video, twitter is a good way of practising each day with an Italian status update. Feel free to follow my regularly updated Italian twitter! It is not proofread, so I can’t guarantee that there are no occasional mistakes.

The Internet is full of sites in Italian; anything you can find in English (news, sports, blogs etc.), you can almost certainly find it in Italian!! A quick search on Google will give you a list of radio stations and even some live streaming video that you can watch/listen to. If you feel like sharing a site about learning Italian, or one in Italian, do so in the comments!

I hope you liked my video!! Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments. If you enjoyed it, why not share it with others through Stumbleupon, facebook or twitter by clicking the options below?

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