Chinese Fascination

The past week has been a strange Chinese filled adventure. I've been given a full sponsorship to go study on a Summer School program in Beijing and I've participated in the Chinese Bridge competition for foreign language students.

I study Mandarin at Stellenbosch University in South Africa just to inform you peeps how/why I do all this. Eastern culture really fascinates me: you can read a detailed account here. When a few us Stellenbosch students went to the University of Western Cape to take part in the Chinese Bridge competition, (Bridge is used figuratively here. As in build a bridge across cultures) I experienced something strange.

One of the judges of the competition was on the bus with us, but I've never seen her in the department before. So she must have been from somewhere else. As we were driving past the Cape Flats and Khayelitsha (a big slum suburb in Cape Town filled with tightly packed shacks), the Chinese women took out her camera and in stereotypical Asian fashion started taking pictures of the shacks.

Perhaps it might just Asian curiosity, or the fact that it might be so strange to them, but I couldn't help but feel ashamed and surprised. Here a Chinese woman was taking pictures of the worst part of Cape Town, happily documenting it to perhaps show her friends or reminisce when she leaves the country.

We often drive past these shacks and find ourselves indifferent towards this blotch on the landscape, but it's usually the first thing foreigners notice when they ride out of Cape Town airport. The Chinese woman made me confused. I kept wondering why she would do it. Whatever the reason, it gave me a new perspective. It reminded me of a poem we did in highs chool, Decomposition by Zulfikar Ghase. It explained the trouble a photographer went through when he was taking photos of a weak homeless man. I quote two stanzas:

Behind him, there is a crowd passingly

bemused by a pavement trickster and quite

indifferent to this very common sight

of an old man asleep on the pavement

and,

His head in the posture of someone weeping

into a pillow chides me now for my

presumption at attempting to compose

art out of his hunger and solitude.

The Chinese woman might not realize it, but she in fact took pictures at a cost. However, just like the photographer in the poem it also made me realize how much we take things for granted. "Ag, bloody hell, not more shacks, what's on the radio? Play some 5fm," might be our usual response when driving past Khayelitsha, but to the Chinese woman it was sight to take back and capture. A different perspective from another totally different culture made me realize South Africa's own poverty stricken culture again. I was blind as I'm not one those affected by AIDS, poverty, health and crime. If South Africa needs to fix itself, it needs more outsiders to show us our flaws, as many South Africa have become indifferent and couldn't care less.

World's Easiest Languages To Learn

To follow up on one of our most popular posts, World's Hardest Languages to Learn, I decided to do a quick survey or what people think is the easiest language in world to learn.

Their responses where quite surprising, there was a clear consensus that Spanish is the easiest language to learn. Although this was a small sample size, I'm still surprised with the answers.

If there's another language you think is easy to learn, feel free to respond in the comments.

With out further ado, here are the survey responses.

Born in Tampa, Florida speaking English and started studying Spanish back in the days when middle school was still called Junior High!!!!

Spanish is the easiest language to learn because each letter sounds the same at all times in all various contexts.

It took me five years of formal study in a school language lab and three weeks of living in Chile until I was conversationally fluent and bi-literate (can read, write and speak it).

Tips:

1. Start young and start your children even younger - experts agree that native or near-native pronunciation is the product of early language learning.
2. With Spanish, once you master the sounds of the consonants, the consonant blends and the vowels, the rest is simply putting it together because, unlike English, what you see is what you get with Spanish!
3. Practice rolling your Rs so you sound like a native with that one simple trick. It's a trilling of the tongue up on the roof of your mouth. Do an internet search for other clever ways to practice that rolling of the Rs!

Happy Educating! ¡Sea feliz educando!

-Beth Butler
Founder of The Boca Beth Program

Raise A Bilingual Child the Fun & Easy Way!

www.BocaBeth.com

Not meaning to be flip, the easiest language for me to learn was "animal", especially canine.

I didn't get my first dog until I was in my 30's and found that I was able to communicate with him right away -- without any books, tapes, videos, Rosetta Stone, etc. Among other things, he told me when he needed to go out, wanted to be fed, to fill his water bowl and play with him. And when I responded to him correctly, he rewarded me with love and licks. What a great way to learn a new language! And, amazingly, he understood English! Asking him "do you want to go out?", he always responded with a canine "yes."

Further, I came to understand that dogs were able to understand many human languages. Quick illustration -- a friend found a dog in a park having a collar with a tags and brought it home, seeking to find its human from there. She remarked that although the dog had tags that it appeared not to be trained because every time she asked/commanded it to sit, it wouldn't. Observing the situation, I asked what made her think that the dog's human spoke English? And, so with a lit light bulb above her head, she commanded the dog to sit in Spanish, which the dog promptly did!

With regards -- and a woof to you!

-Dan Gersten & Associates LLC
site: www.tinyurl.com/DanGersten
blog: www.tinyurl.com/GerstenBlog

Esperanto. I learned it fluently -- I can hold conversations of
indefinite length without translating. The grammatical regularity and
the affixes that let you create words on the fly really make it easier
to start reading, and to start *producing* it.

http://www.esperanto-usa.org
-David Wolff

Without being too facetious I'd have say that the THIRD language you learn is the easiest as long as they're all similar, such as romance languages.

I'm a native English speaker who began my foreign language studies learning French because of my French-Canadian ancestry and my geographic proximity (at the time) to Montreal. Now bits of Spanish is easy for me to pick up because so many French and English words are similar in sound or spelling to Spanish. Am I fluent in French or Spanish? No, but if I wanted to be, I have no doubt I could with a little effort.

-Mel. Edwards
Creative Truth Teller
Founder Votre Vray, Your Truth is Your Way. Always.
Votre Vray Blog
Follow me on Twitter.com/Mel_Edwards

Spanish for sure: it all makes sense, it rolls off the tounge, there are no TRICKS like in ENGLISH.

The noun is described by the adjective.

-Kama Linden
www.kamalinden.com
www.bodyfriendlyoga.com

As a native Spanish speaker, I can told you that I have never meet an Englishman that speaks proper Spanish. Well, only once, a teacher of the British Council who was married to a Spaniard an had lived here for ten years, but he had a horrible pronunciation. I've learned English and sometimes my writing can be bad (I don't write very often) but after a pair of years working at Scotland I have developed a decent Scottish accent. Mastering Spanish grammar is not a very big challenge, but speaking it in a way that doesn't make you sound like "Muzzy" it's very hard, maybe because our bad custom of using lot of slang (which change from one town to another, making it crazier).

I also speak Basque, and... Well if you haven't learn it as a child (as I did) it can be a kind of labyrinth.

-Hector

My first tongue was Polish, I learnt UK English in 6 weeks from the TV at age 5, then had French and Latin hammered into me at school for the next 10 years, then university Polish. I went to Spain on a holiday and was reading Spanish newspapers after two weeks drinking San Miguel. I visited Brazil a couple of years later and was discussing plumbing systems after a week. Spanish is one of the easiest languages in the world as far as as vocab and grammar is concerned. Where pronunciation does not affect meaning (say Chinese or African languages), proper pronunciation is not key to comprehension.

-JK

Well there you have it, let us know what other languages are easy to learn in the comments below.

April Fools Folks - Leximo Not Bought by Google...Sorry :-(

Okay, we need to clarify this before it gets out of hand. Leximo has not been bought by Google. It was that time of the year, April Fool's Day and Leximo joined in on the action. I thought the April 1st date at the top would have tipped people off, but I guess not.


Well we've been congratulated by several people, including being offered housing in Mountain View, California haha. And we would like to thank those of you that supported Leximo and fell for the prank.

Leximo is still just Asad and I, and we plan to stay that way for a while. We have our eyes on a BIGGER PRIZE.

Political barriers shouldn’t be linguistic barriers

Since this blog focuses on learning languages and forming a community around languages, I am bringing up the topic of why politicians change foreign language education policy to put new political alliances.

I was recently in the former Yugoslavia as an election observer in Macedonia and was pleasantly surprised at how I was able to use Serbo-Croatian to communicate with various people: a Slovenian diplomat, an ethnic Albanian woman in Macedonia and a Macedonian man. The Slovenian diplomat and I started speaking to our ethnic Albanian interpreter and our Macedonian driver in Serbo-Croatian. We felt uneasy about the ethnic Albanian’s reaction since she might link the Serbo-Croatian language to the former Yugoslavian government and its actions against the Kosovar Albanians. (We were in Tetovo, Macedonia, where there were ethnic clashes between Albanians and Macedonians in 2001. So, the topic of ethnic violence was quite relevant.) But, she was fine with our speaking in Serbo-Croatian and responded to us in English or Macedonian.

The language surpassed political barriers. The former Yugoslavs used the Serbo-Croatian language to reminisce about Yugoslavian sports teams and music groups that existed before the fall of the former Yugoslavia. I listened along while awakening my own knowledge of the language. (I hadn’t spoken much Serbo-Croatian in over eight years. I understood almost everything, but I was sometimes searching for my words.)

The Slovenian diplomat told me that children in Slovenia no longer learn Serbo-Croatian and focus only on English and German. Since Slovenia broke apart from the former Yugoslavia and joined the European Union, the country is concentrating on being more aligned with the European Union and becoming more Western Europe focused. Though I understand the political reasonings for focusing on teaching English and German in Slovenian schools, there’s no reason not to learn Serbo-Croatian. Why should the young generations of Slovenes not be able to communicate in another Slavic language with their Southern neighbors? They still have business ties to Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and would have better relationships if they spoke to those people in the language that used to unite all of them rather than using English.

The same goes for former Soviet countries who also don’t mandate learning Russian in schools. Let’s take the Baltic countries as an example. Yes, I am very aware of the bad things that the former Soviet Union did in the Baltics and why people in the Baltics may not embrace Russia as their best friend, but they can’t deny the huge neighbor next to them. Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with one’s neighbor in their language rather than using a third language like English or communicating via an interpreter?

Having lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain, I am intimately aware of political barriers. It’s because of my personal history that I see how vital it is for people to learn foreign languages and communicate directly. It pains me to see how political changes can effect educational policy.

Incidentally, if it weren’t for my being able to resurrect my rusty Serbo-Croatian from when I lived in Bosnia in 2000-2001, I would have been in trouble. I got very sick while in Macedonia and my local election coordinators called for an ethnic Albanian doctor to come to my hotel room to examine me. Everyone else in our group left for a party and I didn’t want to bother the interpreter who was resting. The doctor and I communicated in Serbo-Croatian. Even though I was sick and not very strong, I was still able to talk to the good doctor and explain myself. Here I was, a Slavic woman originally from Russia, speaking to a Muslim Albanian man in his third language, Serbo-Croatian. According to political fault lines, we probably should not have been communicating. But he was a doctor doing his job and I was sick and needed assistance.

There were no political barriers between the doctor and I.

Language is language. Politics are politics. Don’t confuse them.

As you are working to create the world’s social dictionary, also keep in mind the societal implications of language education. You may not be creating only a collaborative dictionary, but you may be stepping on the toes of politicians who may not want you to communicate with someone else. Go ahead and step all over those false demarcations between people! Those barriers need to be removed.

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Susanna Zaraysky is the author of the Create Your World Book Series.
Read Language is Music for free at www.createyourworldbooks.com until April 5, 2009. You can contribute tips to the book and enter to be published in the book and win prizes from contest co-sponsors.