Langalot Blog

On 832 N. State Street in Chicago is Europa Books. It is an amazing place, full of books in foreign languages, language learning books, newspapers, magazines, audio books, kids’ books and games.

Europa Books has media in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and some non-European languages like Japanese. They have novels and nonfiction.

Nothing is cheap, but it is great to be able to browse through foreign language novels, dictionaries, grammar guides, and magazines in person is invaluable. If you live in Chicago or are ever in town, definitely check it out.

Europa Books is owned by Schoenhof’s, a foreign bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts founded in 1856.

Europa Books
832 N. State St.
Chicago, IL 60610
312-335-9677
Mon - Sat: 10am - 7pm, Sun: 10am - 6pm

Michael Janich is a government translator. In Speak Like a Native: Professional Secrets for Mastering Foreign Languages he lays out his strategy and tips for learning foreign languages. The book is organized into three enumerated lists: 10 rules of learning a foreign language, 12 steps for language learning, and finally 50 strategies and tips to optimize and accelerate your learning.

All the advice is sound, but I don’t think there is anything “secret” being revealed. There isn’t anything mind-blowing, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My favorite section was the 50 strategies and tips. It contained some good ideas like practicing your listening comprehension in noisy environments. The book contains many good tips and is worth reading to improve your learning process.

Author: Michael Janich
Pages:  136
ISBN:   1581604521

Author: Frederick Bodmer
Pages:  704
ISBN:   039330034X

The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages is at its heart a history of language book. It shows the origin of lanuage, how languages evolved, how they are related. But it is not just a history of language for history’s sake. The purpose of showing and explaining this history is to help the reader learn languages. The book claims that learning the evolution of a language and how it relates to other languages will make it easier to learn since it will be easier to connect it to a lanugage you already know.

The Loom of Language appendices contain basic vocabularies for Teutonic languages (Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German) and Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). They are divided by word type (nouns, division of time, numerals, adjective, verbs, adverbs, and social usage phrases).

It is stressed in the introduction that these word lists aren’t simply statistically the most used words, but a carefully hand-picked set of words that will allow you to communicate in the language. The word frequency lists in other books are full of irrelevant synonyms and derivatives of basic words that are a waste of time to learn off the bat. The author also argues for the importance of learning the essential particles (I like to call them the “little” words): pronouns, conjunctions, directives, prepositions first as it is hard to understand or communicate without them. The book also contains essential grammar, but in a comparative, evolutionary format.

This is a wordy book. It’s not an easy read, but it is fascinating. The Loom of Language is unlike any other book in that it isn’t a “learn spanish” book, but a learn language book that throws ten languages at you at once, including many other examples of ancient languages. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re studying a teutonic or romance language.

The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey is basically an autobiography of Steve Kaufmann about the languages he’s learned and how he learned them. At the end of the book is a 20 page chapter on “How to Learn a Language” that contains his advice and preferred method (the input method) of language learning.

It’s an interesting read. The author has a blog where you can get a lot of the same information in a different form.

Author: Steve Kaufmann
Pages:  140
ISBN:   1420873296

Language Acquisition Made Practical: Field Methods for Language Learners is an interesting book in that it contains a method for language acquisition that can work if there aren’t any pre-existing audio programs, textbooks, grammar guides, or dictionaries. It was first published in 1976 by Lingua House. Their main goal is to “enable missionaries to be more effective communicators through more effective language and culture learning.” I won’t delve into the pros and cons of missionary work, but I wholeheartedly support learning languages. And this book doesn’t mention anything to do with missionary work, just language acquisition.

The reason the LAMP method doesn’t require any pre-existing materials is that you basically build up all of these materials yourself. It allows you to plop yourself in a community where you don’t speak a word of the language and slowly acquire it. You must be immersed in a culture that speaks the language you are learning to use the LAMP method.

The program consists of a “Daily Learning Cycle” of activities:

1. Prepare what you need for the day.
2. Practice what you prepare.
3. Communicate what you know.
4. Evaluate your needs and your progress, so you will know what to prepare for tomorrow.

It also requires you to have a language helper that is a native speaker of the language and hopefully speaks some of a language you know. You give your helper phrases you want to be able to communicate, they translate them for you and you record them speaking it. The first day’s recommended blurb is “Hello. I’m learning (name of language). This is all I can say. Goodbye.”

You practice what your helper has translated and recorded, then you go out in the community and say your speech to as many people as you can. They suggest 30-50. Then you evaluate what you’ve done and decide what you’d like to do next.

There are lots of suggestions on how to learn how to substitute other vocabulary to build up what you can communicate and build a full understanding of the language.

After explaining the process, the book answers many typical questions then it has a large set of topics and suggestions on “things to talk about”, things you should learn how to communicate in the language. Following that is a chapter about mastering the sounds of the language, followed by a chapter on formalizing the grammar.

I bought the version that came with an example tape, but I don’t have a tape player handy…At some point, I’ll dig up an old walkman and listen to it. I bought the book and tape directly from Lingua House. You have to mail a check and order form, but it’s the best deal.

I haven’t tried the method, but I got some good ideas from it. The part of forcing yourself to give your prepared speech to as many people as possible and the various section on things to talk about helped me. I think it would definitely be a good method for an anthropologist or anyone going into a culture where you can’t read books or take language classes or watch tv in the language you are learning.

Author: E. Thomas Brewster
Pages:  382
ISBN:   0916636003

Do you want to improve your immersion environment for the language you are learning? Well, clearly you use a computer, and if you’re reading a blog post, that probably means you use a computer a lot. In two minutes, you can change your computer’s environment so that you are being exposed to the language you want to learn whenver you are on your computer. Just change the language your operations system communicates with you. This has been suggested before by AJATT (see #5), among others. But in case you don’t know how to do it, here are some instructions for a Mac running OS X, Leopard or Snow Leopard (perhaps earlier versions too).

First, open System Preferences. You’ll see a window that contains the following:

Select the International icon in the top row. You’ll see this:

In the panel on the left, drag the language you are learning to the top. If you’re learning Japanese, it will look something like:

If the language you are learning isn’t in the list, click the Edit List… button to get a list of all the available languages:

Enable the language you want. Back in the original International window, the new language should appear. Drag it to the top to make it priority number one.

Close System Preferences.

The next time you restart or open an application, its interface should be in the language you just made the top priority. You need to relogin to see the changes in the Finder.

Many applications, such as web browsers, will pick up on the change you just made and certain websites (Gmail, for example) will also be in the immersion language.

The same courses that were used by The Foreign Service Institute to teach foreign languages to diplomats and the State Department are available for free on langalot:

• FSI Learn German Courses
• FSI Learn French Courses
• FSI Learn Spanish Courses
• FSI Learn Italian Courses

Some companies sell these courses (see Mastering German: with 15 Compact Discs, for example), but they are free on langalot for all users. You can listen to the first lesson of each course as a guest without an account.

The vocabulary can be a little odd (you’ll never forget how to say “Where is the embassy?”), but they still do a great job of teaching you the language. Each course has at least one PDF manual that you need to follow while listening to the audio. The courses take work, but they are a great tool to help you learn a foreign language by yourself.

It’s very new, but Langalot now starts with an incredibly fast online foreign language dictionary. We wanted the site to be immediately useful to anybody on the web. No sign up is required, just start typing a word in in any language and it will simultaneously search five dictionaries for matches. And it’s fast. Very fast.

The current dictionaries are German, Spanish, Italian, French, and English. It will search translations based on your browser language preferences. There is no need to tell it which direction to search (e.g. English to Spanish, German to French).

While searching five dictionaries at once is prety cool, you can also limit it to one of the languages by clicking on the language name, or you can go directly to the specific dictionaries:

• German Dictionary
• French Dictionary
• Italian Dictionary
• Spanish Dictionary
• English Dictionary

Please try it out and let us know what you think of it!

In high school, I had an HP-28S scientific calculator. It was a great calculator: you could graph functions, solve equations, store formulas, and write little programs for it. The way you did all the operations on the calculator was called ”Reverse Polish Notation”. It has nothing to do with the Polish language, just a Polish mathematician. If you’ve studied computer science, it is also called “postfix”. The basic idea is that the operator comes after the the operands. So to do three times nine, you would enter “3”, “9”, then ”*”. This might seem silly or pointless, but once you got used to it, it was so much easier to use. The results were stored on a stack that allowed you to do complicated calculations with ease.

Anyway, back to languages. In German, a verb often comes at the end of the sentence. The simplest case is with modal verbs (Michel Thomas calls them “handles”). When you use a modal verb, the second verb comes at the end.

Ich kann Klavier sehr güt spielen.

“kann” is the modal verb, “spielen” is the second verb. As soon as a modal verb is used, the RPN calculator starts up. Each word (operand) you see gets pushed onto the stack until you get to a verb (operator).

A phrase that uses “weil” also uses the stack/RPN calculator.

Ich gehe nach Hause, weil ich sehr müde bin.

“Weil” triggers the calculator, words are pushed on until you get to a verb to operate on the stack.

“Denn”, on the other hand, doesn’t use RPN:

Ich gehe nach Hause, denn ich bin sehr müde.

More complex phrases also follow this pattern.

Ich werde es kaufen, weil ich es haben möchte.
          stack 1         stack 2

I imagine this explanation of this part of German grammar just made it more confusing. But for those of you RPN/postfix aficionados learning German, I hope it will help!

Looking for a fun language game? Here are five to choose from:

1. translation zilla

   A translation game where you have sixty seconds to translate as many words as possible. The languages you can choose from are english, german, french, spanish, italian, and simplified chinese.

2. How Many Languages Can You Recognize?

   Given the phrase “I can eat glass and it doesn’t hurt me”, how many translations of this can you recognize? There are 33 languages represented. Full disclosure: this is the first game we developed at langalot.com.

3. Etymologic

   Billed as “The Toughest Word Game on the Web”, in this game, you are given ten etymology multiple choice questions. It is tough: I only got three correct.

4. Digital Dialects

   While these are fairly basic games, they do have a vast number of languages: 59! Most of the games are simple multiple choice quizzes. Given a word in a foreign language, pick the correct meaning.

5. Word Association

   Given a word, what’s the first word that comes to mind? There’s no right answer. The site is simply building up a database of associations between words. But the results can be interesting. It’s kind of like Family Feud: associations for “tease”.

Have fun! Let me know of other language games out there…