Benny Lewis's Blog, page 68
October 2, 2017
Conversational French: 25 Ways to Start a French Conversation
Whether you’ve just been introduced to someone new, find yourself sitting next to a French-speaker on the bus, or end up walking beside a French tourist while visiting an attraction, I’ve got a French conversation starter for you.
Before we dig into the conversational French, I’d like to say a little bit about conversations in general.
Starting Conversations Doesn’t Have to Be Tricky
We’ve all been there. You meet someone new and start chatting with them, only to have the conversation fizzle out after the initial “Nice to meet you”s are over with. What gives?
What’s probably happening is that you’re each hoping that the other one will decide on a good conversation topic. But you can’t wait forever, or you’ll miss your chance; someone has to make the first move. And with a few handy conversation starters, that can be you.
Starting a conversation in a foreign language like French can feel more difficult than doing it in your native tongue. You can end up doubting yourself. What if they get bored talking with a non-native speaker? What if you accidentally say something rude? What if they don’t understand you?
With these French conversation starters, I want to give you the confidence to move beyond these concerns.
One more thing. When you want to start a conversation with someone, the best thing you can do is to say something. Anything. Don’t worry about coming up with the “perfect” way to start chatting. Just be natural, and the conversation will flow without you needing to force it.
How to Keep a Conversation Flowing
Once you’ve sparked up a conversation, how can you keep it going?
The easiest way is to avoid closed-loop questions. These are questions that the other person can only answer with “yes” or “no”. The problem with them is that they don’t invite any further discussion; you ask a question, they answer yes or no, and that’s it.
Instead, ask open-ended questions. “What happened next?”, “What do you do for fun?”, “Tell me more about where you grew up.”
And Remember… Conversations Don’t Need to Start at the Beginning
Not all French conversations need to start with “bonjour!”. That’s certainly the most common way, but it may not be best for every situation.
I’ve found that some of my most naturally-flowing conversations are those that start in the middle.
You skip the boring small-talk and hit the ground running, so the conversation never has a chance to fizzle out.
Let’s get started looking at some French conversation starters you can use in the real world.
French Conversation Starters: To Someone You’ve Just Met
“J’aime votre chapeau/sac à dos/manteau, puis-je vous demander où vous l’avez acheté(e) ?” (“I like your hat/backpack/coat, may I ask where you bought it?”) Complimenting someone’s taste is a foolproof way to start a conversation and quickly get the other person chatting to you like an old friend.
“Est-ce que vous savez l’heure ?” (“Do you know what time it is?”)
“Qu’est-ce que vous pensez de cette histoire (indicating an article in a newspaper) ?” (“What do you think of this news story?”) Use this phrase, for example, if you’re reading the paper and notice an interesting story that you can chat about with the person next to you, or if you see someone else carrying a newspaper and you catch sight of an interesting headline. Obviously, don’t interrupt someone if they’re actually in the middle of reading their paper though.
“Est-ce que vous savez où se trouve une bonne boulangerie/épicerie/pâtisserie dans le coin ?” (“Do you know where to find a good bakery/grocery store/pastry shop in this area?”) Chatting with a local is a good way to both practice your French and learn about the city you’re visiting. But if the person turns out not to be a local, no problem! If they have a bit of time, they might help you find what you’re looking for, or the two of you can look for a local to give you directions. Never underestimate the kindness of strangers, either local or tourists!
Conversational French Phrases: In a Restaurant or Café
“Excusez-moi, est-ce que je peux m’asseoir ici ?” (“Excuse me, can I sit here?”) Crowded cafés and food courts where strangers have to sit at the same table are a wonderful opportunity to start up a conversation with someone new. Ask politely if you can sit at their table, then use one of the other conversation starters to get the ball rolling.
“Ça [indicating the other person’s food or drink] a l’air bon.” (“That looks good.”)
“Je recommande le poisson/repas végétarien/poulet, c’est excellent.” (“I recommend the fish/vegetarian dish/chicken, it’s excellent.”) Use this phrase if you’ve eaten there before. Ordering something new in a restaurant is always a gamble, so people are usually grateful to get a recommendation about what’s good. It will open the conversation for you to chat about your favourite foods, or your favourite restaurants in the area.
“Qu’est-ce que vous recommanderiez ici ?” (“What would you recommend here?”) If the other person looks like a regular at the establishment, strike up a conversation to ask them what their favourite dish is there.
“On a commandé la même chose !” (“We ordered the same thing!”)
French Conversation Starters at Tourist Attractions
“C’est fatiguant, hein ? Quand était la dernière fois que vous avez fait l’exercice comme ça ?” (“This is tiring, eh? When’s the last time you did exercise like this?”) Try this phrase when the walk to an attraction is particularly difficult. You’ll probably end up lightening the mood of the other person, if they’re grumbling under their breath about the strenuous hike.
“Quelles autres attractions touristiques/historiques est-ce que vous avez vues dans la région ?” (“Which other tourist/historical attractions have you visited in the area?”) If you both share an interest in visiting culturally or historically significant sites, you have a ready-made topic of conversation.
“Qu’est-ce que vous savez sur cet endroit ?” (“What do you know about this place?”) You might get some really interesting tidbits of trivia about the attraction in question if you ask other people what they’ve heard about it.
“J’ai lu que ce site est l’endroit où (some historical event) est arrivé.” (“I read that this is where (some historical event) happened.”) If you learn some fascinating info yourself about the place you’re visiting, you can share it with other tourists to get a conversation going about it.
Phrases to Start a French Conversation in Someone’s Home
“J’adore cette bibliothèque/ce casier à vin/cette peinture, où est-ce que vous l’avez obtenu(e) ?” (“I love this bookshelf/wine rack/painting, where did you get it?”)
“Qu’est-ce que vous avez pensé de ce livre (indicating a book on their bookshelf) ?” (“What did you think of that book?)
“Depuis combien de temps est-ce que vous vivez ici?” (“How long have you lived here?”)
One thing to keep in mind: if you’re in France, I suggest you don’t ask for a tour of the home you’re visiting. It’s not very common in France for people to show guests all around their home. Pity, as it’s a great conversation starter!
Business French: Conversation Starters
Sometimes, you’ll meet someone in a more formal setting, perhaps being introduced by a mutual acquaintance at a business event or dinner party. In these cases, you’ll probably opt for some more classic conversation starters. Here are some examples:
“Bonjour, je m’appelle (your name). Enchanté.” (“Hello, my name is (your name). Nice to meet you”)
“Je suis très heureux/heureuse de faire votre connaissance.” (“It’s nice to meet you.”)
“Comment est-ce que vous connaissez [name of the friend who introduced you] ?” (“How do you know [the name of the friend who introduced you]?”)
“Qu’est-ce que vous aimez faire dans votre temps libre ?” (“What do you like to do in your spare time?”) I love this phrase, because it does two things: invites the other speaker to talk about themselves, which most people are happy to do (thus kickstarting the conversation), and lets you learn more about them and their interests. You may discover that you have more in common than you originally would have guessed.
“Qu’est-ce que vous faites comme travail ?” (“What do you do for a living?”)
Conversational French to Use During a Skype Call
Skype calls with conversation partners are unique in that they don’t have a situational context that you can use to fuel the conversation. You’re just two people in front of your computer screens. In this case, you’ll probably want to start with one of the traditional greetings above, and then ask the other person for some information about themselves:
“Est-ce que vous avez des enfants ?” (“Do you have children?”)
“En quoi est-ce que vous avez fait vos études ?” (“What did you study [in university]?”)
“Quels sont vos rêves pour l’avenir ?” (“What are your dreams for the future ?”)
“Est-ce que quelque chose de drôle vous est arrivé pendant la semaine dernière?” (“Did anything funny happen to you in the past week?”)
“Quel est votre endroit préféré que vous avez jamais visité ? Pourquoi ?” (“What’s your favourite place you’ve ever visited? Why?”)
What Will You Talk About in French Conversation?
Obviously there are a lot more situations than I’ve mentioned here in which you can start a conversation in French.
I think I’ve gotten my point across, though, which is that there are countless right ways to have a conversation with someone new. The only wrong way is to make excuses and talk yourself out of doing it.
What are some of your favourite French conversation starters? Let me know in the comments.
The post Conversational French: 25 Ways to Start a French Conversation appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 29, 2017
How to Use Visual Memory Techniques to Build a Conversational Vocabulary
Research tells us that only about 30% percent of communication is verbal, the rest is physical or through tone of voice. This is why you can stand at in a restaurant flailing your arms indicating your food purchase to the cashier and generally you can get what you order. But, that’s a whole 30% you are missing. You can’t really understand how natives live, laugh at their jokes, or make a friend without understanding their language.
The problem, is that learning a language takes a lot of time and effort. As a digital nomad, it’s not possible for me to become fluent in the native language of every country I visit. I’d be spending my entire time learning the language of the next country I am visiting instead of enjoying the country I’m in!
And here’s something I’ve discovered that’s helped me feel a whole lot happier: You don’t have to become completely fluent in a language to get more out of your experience travelling in another country.
You only have to become partially fluent, and you can do it a lot quicker than you think.
How Fast Can I Learn a Language?
You only need to know about 2,000 words in many languages to be around 85% fluent. Say you wanted to learn as much as possible in one month - that’s 66 new words a day to be 85% fluent. If you stop and think about it, that’s quite a lot. But, there is no reason in why in 30 days you can’t gain a basic level of conversation skills.
I want to be very clear here: a very basic level of conversation is exactly how it sounds. There is a big difference between knowing the words and being able to speak them and understand them properly. They are completely different skillsets. Connor Grooms became conversationally fluent in 30 days, but he spent the entire time in Colombia while doing it. Here’s a very interesting Ted Talk he gave about his experience:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKVVSKFdEL4
Connor also documented his entire experience learning Spanish in a month.
By learning the most foundational vocabulary first, you can pick many words out of a conversation and understand a sentence by context.
Learning vocabulary is arguably the most difficult and time consuming aspect of learning any language. You can make your life much easier by using certain techniques that have existed for millennia. By using these techniques, you will be able to learn faster and significantly improve your retention ability.
How to Remember Anything
Context is the key to planting a new piece of information in your memory. If you think about it, a foreign word in a dictionary or phrasebook is completely lacking in any context. It is just a word that represents a meaning.
The entire art of remembering anything is to figure out ways to take information lacking in context and to transform it in a way in which it becomes unforgettable. In other words, give it a context that’s meaningful to you.
Visual memory techniques are the most powerful way to do this. Combine the visual memory technique with the stressed syllable technique and you’ve got a memory match made in heaven.
Here’s how that works.
The Stressed Syllable Technique
Research has found that if you focus only on the stressed syllable of a word when trying to memorize it, your brain is able to remember the unstressed syllables without much effort. This has two huge implications. The first is that you can greatly reduce your efforts by only focusing on the important part of the word. The second, is that focusing on the stressed part of the word will teach you how to pronounce the word (note: tonal languages are an exception to this rule).
The stressed syllable of a word is simply the syllable that is emphasized the most. To illustrate how this is done, here’s a short list of very common Spanish words. I’ve bolded all of the stressed syllables for you.
In the list below, I’ve modified the spelling slightly for two reasons.
The first is so you know how to pronounce the word, and the second is how we are going to translate these seemingly unintelligible words into something unforgettable.
Once you have identified the stressed syllable of a word, the next step is to translate the syllable into an image. This is the basis for all visual memory techniques, and by using these techniques your retention of those words will be significantly better than you thought possible.
Remember Anything: How to Turn a Stressed Syllable into an Unforgettable Image
As I’ve mentioned, the entire art of remembering anything is to figure out ways to take information lacking in context and to transform it in a way in which it becomes unforgettable.
Think, for a moment, about the most unforgettable moments of your life - getting married, having your first child, or something traumatizing like a car accident. What you will find about these memories is that you can relive them in your mind’s eye and remember an awful lot of detail about them. When you relive these memories I bet you can remember random facts like the clothes your now-spouse was wearing, the smell of the cologne or perfume you had on during your first kiss, or the feeling in your hands when you touched a hot stove top for the first time.
These memories stick around because so many senses are associated with them. In other words, they’re about sensory memory.
This idea of sensory memory is how we are going to hack our minds into remembering foreign words that have no associations. We are going to give foreign words “context” by creating fake pictures and emotions to associate them with. This process takes time to learn - but once you can do it, it’s a skill you’ll be using for the rest of your life.
Here’s how to create images to associate with new words:
1. Include as Many Senses as Possible. Including sound, smells, and emotions in your images will make them much more memorable. Just think back to your most memorable moments.Each memory comprises far more than just a picture.
2. Include Action in Your Images. Images that have movement are far more memorable than images that are stationary.
3. Make your Images Unique and as Crazy as Possible. Bizarre images are much more memorable than ordinary images. If you are trying to memorize a dog, give it wings or an aliens’ head or something absolutely crazy.
4. Use Vivid Colour. Brown, black, grey, and white images are more difficult to memorize than ones with vibrant colour. If you are picturing that same dog with wings, instead of imagining it with brown fur picture it with pink fur.
5. Use Emotions. So, now we have a pink dog that is flying, but that isn’t enough. We need to associate the feeling of flying to the dog. Feel what it’s like to go skydiving, or if you have never been, the fear you feel when you take off and land in a plane and feel that as you picture the pink, flying dog.
How These Absurd Images Work in Practice
Now, I’ve already broken down our common Spanish words and re-spelled them so you can directly see an association. Let’s use cuando (cWANDo) as an example. Cuando means when in Spanish, as in, when are we going to the bank? The stressed syllable sounds like wand, so our image is going to include a wand because it’s tangible. Now, we need to link a wand to the meaning when something happens. Picture a magician waving a wand and the hour and minute hands on a clock twirling to indicate time.
When I wave my wand, time itself changes!
I specifically picked a word that can act as an adverb or conjunction to illustrate how this technique can be used on words that don’t have an obvious association. For instance, it’s very easy to remember perro is dog. Perro sounds like pear, so picture a dog shaped like a pear. To give the dog action, picture it doing something like drinking a glass of beer!
Get Your Images Organized With a Memory Palace
Dumping hundreds new words in your brain in hopes you will be able to recall them at a moment's notice is very ineffective. In other words, you don’t just need to store things in your memory. You need to be able to find them.
The most effective way to increase memory recall is to organize the things you memorize into a mental file cabinet. Another name for this mental file cabinet is a memory palace.
A memory palace is a space within your imagination that represents either a real or imaginary location. It could be your apartment or house, or it could be a completely fictional location that you build. Within your real or fictional location you place the unforgettable images you learned how to create earlier, so when you return to that location the images are remembered.
So, say you want to organize the word cuando. The easiest way to do it is to place the image we devised earlier in a location you are familiar with that already contains a clock. If there is a clock in your living room above your TV, picture the magician standing in the middle of your living room waving his wand at the clock on your wall. The next time you visit this location in your mind you will see the magician and be reminded of its meaning.
There is, however, a problem with the traditional use of memory palaces in language learning.
Traditional memory palaces are not the most efficient way to learn a language, as they take a long time to create. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about memory palaces is that they take too long to create and you can just rote memorize the material in the time it takes to learn the technique.
While I completely disagree with this complaint, there is a valid concern behind it.
Here’s what I do to deal with this concern. In a typical memory palace you sequentially go from location to location without any organizational principle in place. With the traditional technique, the words cuando and perro, both of which have no similarities (neither are the same part of speech and neither have a similar meaning), could exist in the same location, which makes no sense.
What I’m alluding to is the need for a more advanced organizational structure than in a traditional memory palace. That way, you can take advantage of your brain's ability to file information logically.
For example, you can organize your new vocabulary by:
Verb conjugations
Gender
Words that have more than one meaning
Words that can function in different parts of speech
You need a system that can handle each of these scenarios. Instead of a memory palace, you need a ‘memory world.’
Not a Memory Place, But a Memory World
This image illustrates the basis for a memory world, which is a more advanced organizational system than a traditional memory palace. Each area in a memory world is associated with a specific part of speech, so new vocabulary can easily be added. As you are trying to remember certain parts of speech, all you have to do is think of the area in the world in which that part of speech is associated with.
For the sake of simplicity we are going to classify cuando as an adverb (3 - plaza) and perro as simply a noun (5 - house). The image associated with cuando would be placed in a location in the memory palace associated with adverbs (the plaza) and the image for perro would be placed in the house. When you are actually trying to remember a word, all you have to do is move to the location associated with the part of speech you are looking for and visualize the image associated with the word.
Verbs throw another wrench in the traditional memory palace. In some languages there are over 20 common verb conjugations, each one associated with a different tense. Associating these conjugations in a linear fashion through a memory palace will confuse you more than help you. There is no way for your brain to know where in the linear progression of images each verb tense begins or ends. Instead, if you create a standard layout and apply it to every verb, then words can be associated with their proper tense. This also creates continuity between all of the verbs you learn.
Take a look at the image and study it for a second. Notice how each area of the building is associated to a verb tense. This creates a system without a linear progression, a system that is far more organized. If you want to say a word in the future tense, you find the building in your mind associated to that verb, then look in the location associated with the future tense.
The organizational structure I’ve introduced here should give you a great foundation to begin with.
Where to Find the Top 2,000 Words in Your Target Language
You might be thinking that everything so far makes sense. But where can you find the top 2,000 words in your target language?
Memrise gives you this list of words - and organizes them for you. Here they are for three popular languages:
Spanish top 2,000 words
French top 2,000 words
German top 2,000 words
Want the same for another language? All you have to do is Google top 2000 words in [language] memrise and find a slide deck. I’m a big fan of Memrise because they just added a feature called Mems, which allows you to upload images or write a funny sentence using the word to help associate it.
When I ran through the Spanish slide deck without creating an image for each word, it took me on average three minutes for five words (you review each word 5 times). When you first start using this strategy it’s going to take some time getting used to associating images to words, and some words will simply take more time to make memorable.
At 66 words a day, that’s about 40 minutes of study time for new words each day, but let’s double that because creating images for words will take longer, so 80 minutes. It will take about 40 minutes to review your images from the previous day, so that’s a total of 120 minutes or 2 hours of study time a day. If you’ve ever studied a language, hopefully you will realize how insanely short of an amount of time this is.
Learning vocabulary is difficult and time consuming. Learning a new strategy on top of that can be very cumbersome as well. However, if you give the techniques I mentioned a chance, I guarantee they will significantly boost the speed at which you learn a foreign language.
The post How to Use Visual Memory Techniques to Build a Conversational Vocabulary appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 25, 2017
Minority Languages: The Bliss of Learning Languages Less Spoken
"If you live with people and you share a life with them and you speak their language, they trust you." - Peter Rohloff, MD, Wuqu' Kawoq (Maya Health Alliance)
I have always found languages to be beautiful.
Having learned to speak seven languages - some of them fluently, and others at a more basic level - I suspect that we all speak different versions of the same language. That is to say, I tend to believe that Mandarin Chinese, American English, Arabic and Lingala, for example, are not fundamentally different from one another.
But languages, although they seem to be surprisingly similar in their ability to articulate human thoughts, each tend to have their own flavour or personality. Let me give just one example.
Haitian Creole has a frankness, or a directness in saying things, almost to the point of being comical. I remember the first few months that I spent living in Somerville, Massachusetts when the neighbourhood was still inhabited by large numbers of Haitians. It was just after the massive earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince in 2010. One taxi driver (this was before Uber) explained that Haitians always "say things straight." He gave an example. Instead of saying Il pleut (French for, It's raining), they say Lapli ap tombe (Rain is falling). "When you say it's raining," he asked, "What is raining?"
I laughed.
Also, I was amazed at how effortlessly Haitians inserted English words into Haitian Creole.
L'ap vini kunye a. Li slow. (He (or she) is coming now. He (or she) is slow.)
Fe bak. (Go back.)
M vle achte kat. Yo buy one get one fwee.* (I want to buy four. They're buy one get one free.)
They say that Haitian Creole is a language which was created in order to be understood. There's an expression in the language - Kreol pale, kreol conprann. It means "Creole is spoken; Creole is understood." There's no complicated grammar, no noun classes, no masculine or feminine, no verb conjugations, no adjective agreement, no distinction between infinitive and past participle. There are tense markers, but that's about it. It's a language that's built for communication. I found that even though I was far from fluent, if someone wanted to communicate something to me, they could do so easily. The language also lends itself to a certain kind of humour, the kind that is derived from saying things bluntly.
So I believe that when you learn a language and you get to know its personality, you also learn a lot about those who speak it. The people, collectively, have a certain personality which is reflected in their language. Even the metaphors that are used in a given language speak to what is valued in the culture. For example, in the United States, monetary wealth is highly valued. We use terms like invest in your future, spend your time wisely, don't sell yourself short and it will pay off, even when we're not talking about money directly.
What is a Minority Language?
All of this brings me to the point of this article. What is a minority language and why is it worth learning one?
I had never heard the term minority language until I submitted an article to Fluent in 3 Months (Fi3M) about learning Tz'utujil where I offered tips for learning indigenous languages. The term appeared over emails sent back and forth between myself and the Fi3M team.
Officially, a minority language is one that’s spoken by a minority of people within a given country or territory. For myself, I have come to think of a "minority" language as one that is spoken by a small group of people in a limited geographical area. There are many good reasons to learn these types of languages, but you will also be sure to find people to discourage you.
“Why Would You Want to Learn That?”
Let me tell you a story...
It was October 31, 2016. Guatemala was having its annual kite festival in Sumpango where beautifully woven kites larger than billboards were flying high on display. Around that time in San Juan La Laguna, smaller kites were literally falling out of the sky and landing into my bowls of chayote carrot soup. The open-air kitchen concept, popular in Guatemala, has its advantages and disadvantages. I had just turned 31 that morning and was set to embark upon an overnight voyage to the Republic of Nicaragua, my second two-week vacation in just over a month. I was excited, chatting about my love of languages with an artist named Jesi Jordan on the lancha to Panajachel.
Eighteen hours later, I arrived in Leon, Nicaragua, exhausted but happy to have arrived safely. The next day as I explored the scorching capital of the Sandinista Revolution, it struck me as being worlds apart culturally from Guatemala.
Comparatively, the people were more reserved, spoke only Spanish (no indigenous languages), had a certain degree of respect for their government (absent in Guatemala) and were more left-leaning. Already, I missed the warm smiles and the laughter of the indigenous Maya.
One day, while walking across the courtyard towards the Catedral de Leon past a large fountain adorned by ceramic lion figurines, I met an older gentlemen named Ernesto, a native of Leon, who loved traveling. He had been to San Juan La Laguna and shared my enthusiasm for foreign languages; he knew Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Italian. I told him I was learning Tz'utujil, the indigenous language spoken in San Juan.
He looked at me like I was crazy."Why would you want to learn that?" he asked.
Many people ask the same thing.
Ernesto learned languages to broaden his world, not to narrow it down. Like many others, he believed that learning an indigenous language spoken by a very small group of people (Tz'utujil has fewer than 100,000 speakers) was, to put it bluntly, a waste of time.
Many others gave me similar advice. "Focus on improving your Spanish," they said, "Because once you leave San Juan La Laguna, your Tz'utujil will be worthless. But your Spanish will serve you across all of Latin America."
They were right. But I already felt confident in my Spanish, and I knew that the more time I spent in Latin America, the more it would improve anyway. I wanted to connect with the San Juaneros.
6 Reasons I Love Learning Minority Languages
Which language or languages you choose to learn depends on your objectives. Learning broad, sweeping languages spoken by millions, or billions, is a great thing. Languages like Mandarin Chinese, English and Spanish are international and if you can speak them, they open up opportunities for business, pleasure and cross-cultural understanding through vast segments of the entire world.
But there's something cool about indigenous languages, and minority languages. The world is becoming more globalized, and increasingly cultures are becoming more homogeneous. International cities have more in common with one another across borders than they do with the rural countryside surrounding them. The wisdom embedded in "minority" languages is dying as more and more people switch to speaking dominant or mainstream languages.
In my experience, learning these languages has been a great source of bliss. Here are the reasons why:
1. People Open Up to You and Trust You
When I began working as a maternal and child nutritionist in Somerville, Massachusetts, a devastating earthquake had just struck Haiti. Haitian refugees were arriving in the Boston area by the thousands, and my French was of little use among the majority of them, who spoke only Haitian Creole. I wanted to communicate with them in that language, and I was determined to learn it. I found a textbook in the Somerville Public Library entitled "Ann pale kreyol". At the time, I thought it meant Anne speaks Creole, but later on learned that it means Let's speak Creole.
After months of independent study and three weeks of intensive language courses at UMass Boston's Haitian Creole Summer Institute, I started using Haitian Creole with clients at work. When I began to do so, everything changed. Clients who had previously acted cold towards me and refused to answer any questions were now opening up to me. Instead of looking down or away when I spoke, they sat close and listened intently. Many were shocked that I'd taken the time to learn Haitian Creole, a language that, for the most part, is spoken only by Haitians. Some thought I'd spent a significant amount of time in Haiti, or was born there.
In the end, it boils down to trust. When you learn a language that is spoken by so few, people will begin to trust you almost immediately. Learning a language with a limited number of speakers proves your commitment to those people. If you weren't sincere, you would never have bothered. Even in Rwanda, if you just say a sentence or two in Kinyarwanda, people will say Uri umunyarwanda (you are Rwandan).
2. You’ll Find People are Eager to Help You Learn
Sometimes people complain about learning languages like French, because they go to Paris and no one will speak French with them. The French just respond in English as if to say, "Why are you even trying to speak my language?" In the same way, when immigrants come to the United States, few people give them credit for trying in English.
By contrast, it's been my experience that when learning "minority" languages, you're encouraged and pushed forward by native speakers every step of the way. People’s eyes light up when they see you're even trying, and they will go out of their way to help you learn whatever you want to know. I've been studying Kinyarwanda in Rwanda now for three months, and haven't had a teacher, though many people have offered to teach me for free. Instead, I go up to people and talk to them, and when I don't know how to say something, I ask. While riding the bus, I pull out flashcards and converse with people near me using the vocabulary words I'm learning. Rarely do other passengers not get excited about my learning process and try to help as much as they can.
I've had nearly identical experiences learning Haitian Creole and Tz'utujil.
Note: I don't know whether it's fair to call Kinyarwanda a minority language, as it's spoken by millions, but nevertheless it is a language whose speakers are concentrated in one specific, relatively small geographical location.
3. You Will Make People (and Yourself) Laugh
Especially the indigenous Maya. It seems they never stop laughing. In Rwanda, I've found, one of the best ways to engage with people and get them laughing is through singing. You can either ask Rwandans to teach you songs in Kinyarwanda, or offer to teach them songs in English. Either way you'll build rapport and share a good laugh during the learning process.
4. You Will Gain Insight Into a Different Worldview
There's something fascinating about Mayan languages. People are still speaking them. Despite centuries of Spanish influence and despite repeated attempts to eradicate Maya people and civilization, and unlike elsewhere in Central America, these pre-colonial languages are still thriving. Primarily, speakers of Mayan languages reside in Guatemala and Mexico, but they also extend into other neighbouring countries. This means that the worldview of a people who inhabited the Americas long before the arrival of the Spanish is still intact and alive, embedded inside indigenous languages. Many of these are at risk of becoming extinct as the younger generations are adopting Spanish for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are employment opportunities.
By learning such a language, spoken by so few, one can begin to appreciate other ways of framing and seeing the world, beyond what the framework of a Western language such as English or French provides. Granted, widely spoken majority languages throughout the world can provide insight into worldviews that differ significantly from a Western point of view. However, there is a richness in the sheer diversity of minority languages spoken by small groups which are dying out at a rapid rate globally.
In Tz'utujil, there are unique grammatical features that are deeply intriguing. The relationship between subject and object places less emphasis on distinguishing between the agent of the action and the recipient of the action. It reminds me of Michael Pollin's book Omnivore's Dilemma. Did we cultivate corn or did corn cultivate us? In fact, corn and humans rely on one another for their propagation. By refusing to make a hard grammatical distinction between the doer and the doee, Mayan grammars emphasize the interconnectedness of all things. At least that's what the academics say. And in the time I spent studying Tz'utujil, I began to understand this to be true.
The linguist Daniel Everett wrote a fascinating book called Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. In it, he describes his journey of learning to speak the language of the Pirahā in the Amazon rainforest over the course of a decade, referring to their grammar as the "grammar of happiness.” He claims that the Pirahā have no numbers beyond three, no way to speak about the past or the future and no recursion (no way to embed sentences within other sentences). His argument is that the language itself shapes the worldview of the Pirahā, forcing them to live in the present and to rarely think about the past and future, if at all, because they have no tenses to articulate such thoughts. Some question the validity of his work, but I am fascinated by it.
Being able to see the world in a new way, for me, is one of the major motivating forces for learning an indigenous or minority language.
5. You Will Be a Bridge Over Massive Cultural Divides
This goes back to building trust. In many cases, the language barrier is what separates one group from another. Once you start speaking the language, though, a lot of walls come down. People feel they can trust you. This is what happened to me with Haitian Creole. If I'd made an assessment of "what Haitians are like" before speaking Creole with them versus after, it would be entirely different. It's hard to really understand culture as an outsider. You only learn how people treat you, someone who doesn't belong to the group.
Sometimes learning an indigenous or minority language can allow you to get a more inside view, just as it can when you learn a more widely spoken, but culturally distant language.
6. Work Becomes More Meaningful - and You’ll Open Yourself Up to New Opportunities
In late January, I received an email from a former dietetic internship director informing me of a research fellowship in Kigali, Rwanda. Three weeks later I was flying out of Logan Airport on Ethiopian Airlines headed for the land of a thousand hills (an underestimate by my count). On the plane, I wrote out my main objectives for the year. The two big ones were: pour my heart into the fellowship and learn to speak Kinyarwanda fluently.
The non-government organization that I work for, which promotes nutrition-sensitive agriculture as a long-term sustainable solution to malnutrition, is comprised of 90% local Rwandese. The majority of them do not speak much English. The key people that I work with on a day-to-day basis are fluent in English, but without knowing some Kinyarwanda, I would be effectively cut off from a large proportion of our staff. Through my efforts learning Kinyarwanda, I'm able to communicate with everyone in the organization, from kitchen staff to farm workers to field educators to the mothers who utilize our program. In this way, I feel much more connected to what we do, and the work is also a lot more fun.
Over to You
Now, tell me what you think.
Is learning a minority or indigenous language worth it to you? Would you do it if you were going to stay in a place for only one year, maybe never to return? Do you think there is a significant difference in how people see the world based on the language they speak? Are these types of endeavours enriching or a waste of time? What are some other reasons to learn lesser-spoken languages?
Leave your comments below.
The post Minority Languages: The Bliss of Learning Languages Less Spoken appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 22, 2017
Learning Two Languages at Once: Can You Learn Multiple Languages at the Same Time?
Yes! Learning two languages at once is certainly possible. That said, it’s not a mission I’d recommend taking on lightly.
I’ve been learning languages for over 10 years. In that time, I studied over seventeen languages and became fluent in 10. And I’ve never tried to learn two new languages at the same time.
Studying two languages from scratch at the same time is a lot trickier than studying one after the other.
So, if you’re serious about reaching fluency in two target languages rather than just studying them for the fun of it, I recommend you don’t study them both at the same time. Get a solid foundation in one, and then start studying the next one while gradually improving the first.
What if you don’t have a choice? Maybe you need to learn two languages for work, or because you’re traveling to multiple countries. Or maybe you’re just really keen to take on the challenge of two languages at once.
If this is you, I’ll tell you how I would approach this mission if I was in the same situation. It’s an ambitious project, and I like ambition!
My Tips for Learning Two Languages at Once
Although I’ve never personally tried learning more than one new language at the same time, I do know several accomplished polyglots and less experienced language students who have.
Those who have succeeded in reaching fluency this way have told me similar things about the best way to approach it.
1. Choose Languages that are Really Different
Passion for the language you choose is always going to be the most important factor of your success in that language. When learning two new languages, there’s another factor to consider: How similar the two languages are.
If you study two languages that are similar, you run the risk of mixing up both languages and failing to get a solid foundation in either one.
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are Romance languages with similar grammar and vocabulary. I can speak these languages without mixing them up in conversation, mainly because I always reached a level of intermediate or better in one Romance language before starting to learn the next.
In my view, I’d have found it really tricky if I had tried to learn two of them at the same time.
For this reason, you should pick two languages from different families to study at once. Don’t pick Spanish and Portuguese or your phrases will come out in muddled “Portuñol”. It will be very hard to remember which words are from which language. Instead, choose Portuguese and, say, Welsh or Mandarin, and save Spanish until your Portuguese is at least intermediate.
2. Study Both Languages Each Day
Studying both languages daily will make sure you maintain momentum in each one.
If you study one language for the first week, then another for the second week, you’ll find that when you return to the first language, you’ll have forgotten a lot of what you picked up. You’ll constantly be playing “catch up” in both your languages.
It’s always better to study for a shorter period of time every day rather than do longer study sessions less often. You might not feel like you’re making such fast progress this way, because it will be less noticeable. But ultimately, you’ll reach your end goal faster.
How should you divide your daily study time between the two languages? That part is your call. You don’t have to study each one exactly half of the time if you don’t want to. If you find one language harder than the other, devote more time to it than to the easier one.
On the other hand, if you simply enjoy studying one language more than the other, feel free to spend more time studying it. It doesn’t matter, as long as you study them both, even for a short time, every day.
3. Avoid Multi-tasking
Research shows that doing two (or more) things at once is the opposite of productive. This is especially true when it comes to learning two languages.
What I mean here is combining both languages into a single study session. For example, watching a Chinese soap opera while doing French flashcard drills.
When you try to do two things at the same time, you end up doing neither one of them well. Just ask anyone who’s had a near miss while trying to text and drive.
That said, once you get a solid foundation in both languages, there are a few ways that you can combine both languages into one lesson. You could watch a movie in one target language which displays subtitles in the other. Or watch a language instruction video that teaches speakers of one language how to say words and phrases in another.
This is known as “laddering” and it’s actually a really popular way of learning languages in the polyglot community. I’ve done it a lot myself on my language missions.
4. Give Each Language a Unique Study Routine
Another way to avoid mixing up your two languages is to follow a different study routine for each language.
You can do this any way you want. Pick a different place in your house to study each language. Study one language only in the morning, and the other only at night. Or colour code your notes so one language is written in blue ink, and the other red.
Choosing different habits for each language will not only keep you from mixing them up before you reach intermediate level, but developing this regular routine will also ensure that you study consistently. This makes it more likely that you’ll reach your language goal.
5. Don’t Rush!
Studying two languages at once means you won’t learn either one as quickly as you would when studying a single language.
So don’t beat yourself up if you feel progress is slow. Take it at a pace that’s right for you.
Learning Two Languages at Once Is Possible
It might take longer for two languages than one, and you might need to get a little creative about how you approach it. But if you’re committed, consistent, and passionate about studying both languages, then you will succeed.
Have you studied two new languages at once? How did you do it? Let me know in the comments!
The post Learning Two Languages at Once: Can You Learn Multiple Languages at the Same Time? appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 18, 2017
How to Learn Swedish: 37 Lessons from My 6 Months Living in Sweden
I decided I needed to learn Swedish.
Towards the end of my time in Sweden, I went to Norway for the Starmus Science Festival. Stephen Hawking, moonwalkers and other astronauts, Nobel Prize winners and other intellectual stars lit up the stage in Trondheim, but I was struck linguistically by Norwegian. I knew it was similar to Swedish, but now I really 'got it'. It truly hit home that I'd learned some Viking.
So, let’s dive in. Here’s a crash course in how to speak Swedish -- or as it could well be called: “how to learn Viking”.
I went into this mission speaking English and German - and as Swedish is a Germanic language, I found this background knowledge really useful.
Here are the 34 lessons I picked up in my time learning Swedish. Some of them are specific to Swedish, some of them will be useful for learning any language.
Here goes:
How to Learn Swedish: The First Steps
Before you start learning a language, it’s best to find out about some of its features. This is so you can size up the challenge ahead, decide on a good strategy and jump in with some ‘feel’ for where you are headed.
Lesson 1: Context is everything in language learning. Oddly, I was thrown in at the deep end but quite enjoyed it. One of the things with beginner language learning is that it’s well, so simple. That’s of course where you need to begin if you want to speak, but the meaty stuff comes farther along. My first exposure to Swedish was very advanced: emails from my University Department. The downside was that I couldn’t read hardly any of it, but the upside was that it was meaningful. I needed to understand these emails for my job.
Lesson 2: Google Translate is your friend. I set about translating with Google Translate. I found it works pretty well but still makes some gaffs that you just have to look past. So, I knew I could rely on it as a tool, but only when taken with a grain of salt.
Lesson 3: Look for cognates - the words you already know. Reading emails was a quick way of sizing up the types and numbers of cognates. Speaking both English and German, I had a good head start on Swedish, but was surprised how much of it looked ‘very different’.
Lesson 4: Guess where you can - but take good note of when you guess wrong - and why. Often, when I compared my guesses to translations, I saw a lot of fuzz. Cognates I missed, especially because of the spelling and cognates I got wrong because they aren’t what they look like. My estimation of the challenge rose.
Lesson 5: Use Google Translate’s audio feature. I used Google Translate to listen to my emails. My estimation of the difficulties of learning Swedish rose higher. What I was reading wasn’t looking a lot like what I was hearing. I was longing for good old German – where what you see is what you get.
Lesson 6: Understand how well (or not) the spoken and written versions of your language match. I would learn much later that this in German what you see is what you get because the language was written down for the first time much later than Swedish. This means Swedish sounded one way when it was first written and is quite different today.
Lesson 7: Keep note of all the words you’ve learned or want to learn. From Day 1, I took time to keep a digital record of the words I wanted to learn. I started a Google spreadsheet.
Lesson 8: Focus on learning the words that matter to you - not what the phrasebooks tell you to learn. I built up a small and very specialist vocabulary specific to emails and my field. I learned to recognize words like nyheter (news), brev (letter), vidarebefordrat brev (forwarded email) Inbjudan (invitation), studenter (students) and phrases like Till alla medarbetare (to all employees).
Lesson 9: Make a special effort to learn the “glue words.” I started to learn ‘the little words’. These ‘glue words’ occur so frequently, it’s best to learn straight off the bat. Three important glue words in Swedish are och (and), men (but) and “eller” (or). The sooner you conquer them, the better.
Lesson 10: Two more essential glue words are en and ett. En is for animate and ett is for the inanimate definite article (a, an). Swedish condensed male and female a while back, which makes Swedish easier than German which retains the male, female, neuter (der, die, das) triumvirate.
Lesson 11: Go with “en” when you’re unsure. I was told when in doubt go with en because it fits with some 85% of words. If people look at you funny, switch to ett.
Lesson 12: There’s lots of romance in Swedish. Interestingly, I noted Swedish has a lot more romance language cognates than German. For example, “ice-cream” is glass, like the Italian glace, and “to write” is skriva. This makes Swedish an intriguing mix. I found out later this is due to an early influx from Latin and later from French. If you don’t already know a lot of French, this helps put into context unexpected letter combinations like fåtölj, from the French fauteuil, “armchair”.
Lesson 13: Swedish word order is more akin to English than German. In fact, because of this, some say Norwegian is the easiest foreign language for an English speaker to learn. This is aided by the fact that Swedish is a subject-verb-object (SVO) like English, while German is SOV.
Lesson 14: Adjectives come before nouns and are modified according to noun type (en or ett).
Lesson 15: You’ll spend a lot of time on prepositions to get speaking idiomatic Swedish. Prepositions come before their nouns. This unlike a language such as Hindi, where they come after the noun. However, prepositions can be quite different in usage from their seeming equivalents in English.
Lesson 16: While German capitalizes nouns, Swedish does not. In fact, it even drops caps from words we capitalize like nationalities, days of the week or months of the year. For example, on Sunday is på söndagen.
Lesson 17: Immerse yourself as much as possible. With a dusting of recognition vocabulary, I hit the ground for a one-week visit. It confirmed just how widespread and beautifully spoken English is in Sweden. It can be hard to learn a new language in a country that speaks so much English, so well.
Lesson 18: The first word to learn in any language is “thank you”. Then come the greetings “hello” and “goodbye”. I had long been saying ‘hey’ when I met friends, and I suddenly realized I fit into Sweden perfectly – hej is the primary greeting in Sweden. I felt more Swedish when I got to using hej hej and the same for thank you (tack). I now generally use tack tack.
Lesson 19: Look for “cultural tokens” - words that you see all around you Along with the greetings, I managed to compile a list of the first 20 cultural tokens I encountered, like the famous köttbullar (meatballs) and kanelbullar (cinnamon rolls).
Learn to Speak Swedish: Living in Sweden
Lesson 20: Listen to all the words around you. Moving there, meant really trying to listen to Swedish, even though I only understood a little bit of what was being said. It was hard to escape the “English-bubble”, as most Swedish people speak fluent English, and would offer to speak with me in English.
Lesson 21: Use what you know from other languages… to decipher as many cognates as possible. I decided to focus first on cracking the cognate patterns that would help me pick up the similarities to German as it would result in the quickest growth in my vocabulary and listening comprehension. For example, I saw betala in stores (on the cash register) and it took a bit to realize is it like bezahlen in German – to pay. Many of the cognates are shortened versions of the German (e.g. dropping of the ge- prefix). As I previously mentioned, there is also a lot of Latin in Swedish, so any knowledge you have of romance languages will come in useful too.
Lesson 22: Don’t stick in your comfort zone of cognates forever. A huge turning point came being forced to do laundry in a communal room – I had to decipher the instructions for booking a time to use the machines: Ah! Those Norse words! The neighbour caught me using the wrong machine. Ah! Tvätt! My eyes missed the stickers on the washers saying tvätt 1 and tvätt 2. In typical Swedish fashion, he was incredibly nice and helpful and explained it means laundry. It was a eureka moment. I had to stop skipping those Viking words in favour of the more comfort-inducing German and French cognates.
Lesson 23: Relish the unfamiliar. The Norse words became my favorites. Norse sticks out a mile for the wonderful letter combinations like: snygg (good looking), sjö (lake), kvinna (woman), pojke (boy). These are clearly north Germanic and not anything like the words you find in modern German.
Lesson 24: Focus on a particular type of vocabulary you want to learn and build your specialist vocabulary. My second ‘breakthrough’ was to not try to be a vocabulary jack-of-all-trades. I went where it was natural to go: food. My practical exposure to Swedish was shopping for food, menus in cafes and my search for Swedish recipes. When you love something, it’s infinitely easier to stay motivated.
Lesson 25: Enjoy the buzz when you’ve learned enough to recognize words in the real world. The first recipe I followed in Swedish was for a classic Swedish cheese pie! Because of this I got my first ‘word reward’, being able to read a sign for hot chocolate with cream in my favorite café. I’d just learned the word from cream (grädde). Things were starting to ‘add up’ – an excellent sign.
Lesson 26: Make your phone support your learning. I invested in downloading the core Swedish vocabulary for Google Translate so I could use the image recognition feature to decode labels and recipes: as a treat, I would occasionally buy the glossy magazine Mat and Vin (Food and Wine), which I loved.
My Two Month Swedish Crash Course
After 8 weeks living in Sweden, I decided to take Swedish seriously and do my own “Swedish crash course”.
Lesson 27: Set yourself a goal. I set myself a goal of two months to be able to ‘read Swedish’. For me, this meant understanding the ‘easy-Swedish’ on the news site 8sidor.se. This clear focus really helped. At first, I could read hardly anything on 8sidor.se. By week 6 I could read 75% of the content of stories and by week 7, I could do 100% on some. Today, for example, reading an article on Elton John, I only needed to look up hedrade (honoured), drabbas (suffer) and grindarna (gates) and I have gained a sense of familiarity with the language that is comforting even if I have a long way to go.
Lesson 28: Give yourself a set amount of time per day. Short, intense bursts of focused concentration can prove invaluable, as long as you’re really able to concentrate. The crash course approach was my best phase of learning Swedish. I spent at least an hour a day, often more. Working intensively proved exponentially helpful as I saw words in many contexts in a short period of time. Intensive bursts of learning really help with reinforcement if you are consuming a wide range of materials.
Lesson 29: Go for the top 1,000 words in your new language. I crammed vocabulary. Like an athletic boot camp, I conquered 1,000 of the easiest, highest frequency words. I used Quizlet flashcards. I’d listen and watch while commuting. It helps hugely to learn the high frequency words first: never waste your time on low frequency words until you’re ready for them.
Lesson 30: Use online resources and videos. I learned off the web, especially YouTube, and focused on active listening: I looked for resources to help my listening, reading, and comprehension all at once.
Lesson 31: ABBA! I found out that ABBA recorded in Swedish. In particular, I listened to “En av oss” over and over again watching with English subtitles. The vocabulary of the song “One of us” is helpfully simple and straightforward. For fun, I looked at a lot of lyrics in translation – they are different. I found they were quite different. Good to bear in mind if you know the English lyrics and expect to hear them verbatim in Swedish – you won’t.
Lesson 32: The Swedish alphabet is different to English I learned there are 3 extra letters – it’s not an umlaut like in German (for a missing “e”) but three real letters at the end of the alphabet. The vowels are really complex in Swedish – and there are hard and soft versions. Swedish is what’s called a pitch language. This explains the unique second upturn in many words and gives the language its musical lilt
Lesson 33: Knowing some grammar helps you make a lot more sense of what you’re reading. Learning grammar rules helped me distinguish words by their endings and thus significantly help with reading comprehension: One tricky aspect of Swedish is the lack of a word ‘the’, rather the definite article is appended to the end of each noun and is different in singular and plural. This takes some getting used to. Verbs are actually easier than English: there is no equivalent of ‘ing’, there are only five tenses, and verbs stay the same for all the pronouns. Passives ends in ‘s’ as do possessive forms of nouns. Adjectives have endings that match their nouns (based on en or ett). Adverbs never change – thank goodness something is static. Later I learned that many adverbs end in ‘t’.
Lesson 34: Bring it all together with dialogue. Pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary all come together when listening to simple dialogues. I decided to focus to this video, Useful everyday phrases - Super Easy Swedish 1, subtitled in Swedish and English, to so some ‘deep learning’. This means comprehending to the point that you can hear the sentences in your head and recreate them, including with substitute words. This is the life-blood of speaking.
Learning to Speak Swedish: Lessons with a Teacher
My crash course over, I felt ready to start speaking with a Swedish teacher. I had gotten inside reading, but I wanted to pop the English-bubble in terms of speaking. Here’s what I learned with my teacher.
Lesson 35: Read aloud to force yourself to speak… and improve your pronunciation. With my teacher’s help, I read aloud from books to work on pronunciation. This series of videos, “Träna att tala”, shows just how ‘red’ Swedish text can be when you mark up the differences between written and spoken Swedish. There was a lot to learn, but it helped immensely with my listening comprehension.
Lesson 36: Learn basic sentences structures. I did this with both English and German sentences to see the extent of the difference - and the differences are numerous! Swedish really is a mix of German, English and a lot of its own stuff too (that Viking!). This exercise proved how different Swedish is to German and English, and created interesting challenges triangulating between English, German and novice spoken Swedish.
Lesson 37: Make yourself a cheat sheet. During the last lesson, I created myself a ‘cheat sheet’ full of basic conversational statements and questions. The devil is in the details. In many ways, I ended where I should have started. Many people dispense with grammar and jump right to basic conversation but I would have been too curious about the “why’s” to sit still. And it left the best for last -- conversation.
My Next Step in Speaking Swedish: Towards ‘Talking to Learn’
Now that I’ve left Sweden, I would love to go back.
I’m still trying to read the news in Swedish, and I’ve taken to watching Swedish movies with English subtitles. I can’t recommend “En man som heter Ove” highly enough.
My next step is to pick up with my list of basic statements and questions and go from there, building up a core set of phrases and sentences I can say with confidence.
I now have a vocabulary that far exceeds what I would have attained if I’d spent my time learning to speak basic touristic Swedish. I was just too keen to read ‘real world Swedish’ not to invest my time being a bookworm. After this long and enjoyable ‘prequel’, I’m prepped to get to my end goal of “talking to learn”.
Are you learning Swedish? I’d love to hear about that. Tell me why you’re learning Swedish, and the steps you’re taking to learn in the comments.
The post How to Learn Swedish: 37 Lessons from My 6 Months Living in Sweden appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 15, 2017
French Idioms Crash Course: How to Sound Like a Native French Speaker
You can sound like a French speaker even though you're a complete beginner in the language.
It's possible. I've done it in Portuguese.
My knowledge of Portuguese is extremely limited. I only know how to say a few dozen words.
Admittedly, I already know French and Spanish, which helps a lot for guessing Portuguese words since so many of them are similar across these languages.
But when it comes to native-like pronunciation, no guesswork will do the trick.
If I come up with a sentence made up of guessed words, people typically understand me. But it's obvious to them I'm a visitor. A tourist. The same goes if I use words I've only learned through reading: I sound like a visitor.
How to Sound French: Imitate
Here's the deal: the only way you'll ever stand a chance of sounding like a local, albeit one with a foreign accent, is by listening to and imitating the locals.
And by imitating, I mean learning complete phrases, like a parrot. Not just repeating the words, but copying the exact sounds, the tone, the music.
But imitation goes even further than that. You also need to mimic body language. The movements of the hands, head, arms. Body posture.
Our brain detects all these things when evaluating whether a person is a local or not.
The funny thing is, your accent - or lack thereof - is not that important.
If you've ever spent time in New York, you may know what I mean. Many New Yorkers have foreign accents. Yet no one can question their New Yorker status. It's about the words and phrases they use. Their intonations. Their body gestures. More generally speaking, their attitude.
Typically, only people who have lived in a place for long enough have integrated these things.
Can you fool people in a country into thinking you've been living there for a while? I believe so.
In the following section, I'm going to show you some examples of phrases French locals use every day.
And I really mean "show". You're going to watch a few very short video clips with animated dialogues that use some common phrases and expressions. Try to watch, listen, and imitate. If you can reproduce the sounds and gestures of these characters, you'll be on your way to localdom!
Ready? Let's get rolling.
How to Make a Suggestion Like a French Native
https://vimeo.com/220142566
Ça te dirait de sortir ?
Ah ouais, génial !
Native French speakers use the expression "ça te dirait de ..." very frequently to suggest an activity.
The equivalent in English would be "what do you say we ..."
Other examples :
"Ça te dirait d'aller au cinéma ?"
"Ça te dirait de dîner à la maison ?"
“Ah ouais !" shows an enthusiastic reaction. "Génial !" is a common way to say "great", "awesome". A common alternative is "super !”
How to Arouse Suspicion in French
https://vimeo.com/220142581
Dis donc Christine ! C'est toi qui a pris mon biscuit sur la table ?
Moi ? Non ! Je lisais mon bouquin !
The phrase "dis donc !" is very commonly used in French to get someone's attention and let them know we're about to say something important. What follows may be something good or bad. In this case, the boy is making an accusation.
Other examples of using "dis donc":
"Dis donc ! tu as vu cet éléphant !
"Dis donc, tu es très forte toi !"
The boy asks "c'est toi qui a pris ... ?" That's a common way of expressing suspicion of someone, accusing someone.
"C'est toi qui a cassé cette assiette ?"
"C'est toi qui a utilisé mon téléphone ?"
The girl replies by denying: "Moi ? Non !" and gives her alibi: "Je lisais mon bouquin !" "Bouquin" means "livre" in informal spoken French.
What to Say When Someone Sneezes
https://vimeo.com/220447944
Atchoum !
A tes souhaits !
Merci !
When someone sneezes, you say to them "A tes souhaits !" That's somewhat equivalent to the English "bless you". If you don't know the person, you'll use "à vos souhaits" instead, a more formal variant.
The person who sneezed will respond with "merci !"
If you know the person well, you may alternatively say "à tes amours !" which is a humorous equivalent.
If the person sneezes several times, you may chain the following - after each sneeze: "à tes souhaits !", "à tes amours !", "qu'ils durent toujours !"
I usually avoid literal translation since it's important to learn phrases directly in French with the supporting visual context. I'll make an exception for these because I think they're quite funny: the above sneezing phrases literally mean: "to your wishes", "to your loves", "may they last forever".
How to Finish a French Conversation
https://vimeo.com/220142631
Euh excuse-moi, il faut que j'y aille !
Mais ça m'a fait vraiment plaisir de te voir.
"Excuse-moi" is a common way of apologizing in French - although the French have been increasingly using "désolé(e)", probably from the growing influence of the English language. But "excuse-moi" or "excusez-moi" remains a proper way to apologize, including in informal French.
"Il faut que j'y aille" means the person has to leave, she has to go somewhere, as the "y" suggests (in this case it means "there").
It's an informal, everyday expression we use to express the fact we need to leave because we have a commitment.
"Ça m'a fait plaisir de te voir" is a polite phrase to say when leaving someone, similar to what we would say in English.
In this excerpt, the girl is actually eager to end the conversation which she finds boring. She adds the last phrase to soften the fact that she's "bailing out".
However, you may use that same phrase sequence when ending a pleasant conversation with a person you were happy to see again.
How to Talk About Your New Boyfriend or Girlfriend
https://vimeo.com/220142558
J'ai rencontré quelqu'un !
Oh mais c'est une super nouvelle, ça !
The expression "j'ai rencontré quelqu'un" in spoken French typically applies to the romantic realm.
It means we've found a new boyfriend / girlfriend.
In everyday life, we may of course say "j'ai rencontré quelqu'un" to mean we've run into someone.But generally we provide additional details about the person we've run into.
By contrast, "j'ai rencontré quelqu'un !" as a standalone phrase typically refers to a romantic encounter.
The boy replies saying "c'est une super nouvelle !" , a very common way of expressing joy when hearing good news.
Notice the "oh mais" that precedes the phrase. This is typically used to accentuate the exclamation that follows.
For example, if someone asks you "tu aimes le poisson ?" You may answer "j'adore le poisson !" But if you're really enthusiastic about eating fish, you may say "oh mais j'adore le poisson !" which makes your response more forceful.
Another way of emphasizing exclamation is to append "ça !" as is the case in "Oh mais c'est une super nouvelle, ça ! It's much like saying "now that is great news !"
How to Introduce People in French
https://vimeo.com/220142670
Alors : Roger voici Anne, Anne voici Roger !
This is a very typical way to introduce people : [person1] voici [person2], [person2] voici [person1].
An alternative to "voici" is to say "je te présente", or if you don't know the person well, "je vous présente".
Note the word "Alors :" at the start of the sentence : it serves to prepare the people involved for what's coming, getting their attention before making the introduction.
In some cases you may need to introduce one person to another but not the other way around, for example if the second person is well known. In that case you may just say [person2] voici / je vous présente [person1].
How to Sell Things in French
https://vimeo.com/220142610
Bon, alors vous en voulez combien ?
Euh, j'en demande 4000 euros...
A typical way to ask for the selling price in a person-to-person type transaction is to say "combien en voulez-vous ?" or, a more informal variant, "vous en voulez combien ?"
For example, if you see an advertisement for a car for sale and call the seller, you may ask them "vous en voulez combien ?"
An alternative is "vous en demandez combien ?", substituting "demander" for "vouloir". The two can be used interchangeably in this common expression.
As a reply, the seller says "j'en demande 4000 euros". It means, "je demande 4000 euros pour cet objet", or "j'en veux 4000 euros".
Note that in a retail setting, such as a store, you typically don't ask "vous en voulez combien ?". Instead you may say "combien coûte ce [object]" or "quel est le prix de cet [object]". Or even "c'est combien ?"
How to Finish Your Order in a French Restaurant
https://vimeo.com/220142648
Autre chose ?
Euh, voyons voir ... Non, ce sera tout.
Typically, after you order something, the clerk or salesperson will ask "autre chose ?" which means "Voulez-vous autre chose ?" That's for checking whether your order is complete.
You may hesitate about adding other items to your order, and take a few seconds to think about it. If that's the case you can say "voyons voir ..." which is a way to say "let me think ...", "let's see ..." If you don't want to add anything to your order, you can say "ce sera tout". The clerk will then process your order and generate the bill so you can pay.
For example, in a store you order a few items. Then the salesperson asks "autre chose ?". You answer "non, ce sera tout" or "non c'est tout". He/she then wraps your items and tells you the total price you need to pay.
How to Thank Someone for Nothing
https://vimeo.com/220142618
Ah OK, je vois ... Bon, merci quand même ...
In spoken, informal French, we often say "ah OK, je vois !" when we figure out something.
For example, you ask a person for an explanation about what's going on in the street. After hearing the explanation, things are now clear to you, and you may say "ah OK, je vois".
However, the expression is also used in situations where you find out things are not what they appear to be. In such cases "ah OK, je vois ..." indicates disillusionment, frustration.
For example, it suddenly becomes clear to you the person you're talking to is not what she appears to be, or is trying to get something from you.
In this clip, the phrase is followed by "bon, merci quand même ..." It's a polite way of thanking someone even though you feel they haven't helped you in any way.
For example, you ask someone for directions, but the person replies with useless information because they clearly don't know anything. You may say "merci quand même" before leaving, and ask someone else.
In some cases, "merci quand même" is meant to send the person a message that they have not been helpful. It's a bit like saying "thanks for nothing". In this clip, for example, it's clear the man is quite annoyed and frustrated by whatever the other person said.
There are also situations, however, in which the person has done their best to help, albeit unsuccessfully. You may say "merci quand même" to show appreciation for their efforts.
How to Say You Don’t Have Enough Money
https://vimeo.com/220142600
Et toi, tu en as ?
Euh, j'en ai pas beaucoup ...
In this clip, the girl asks the boy if he has any money - the word "money" is not heard in this clip, it was mentioned in an earlier section of the full video. She says "tu en as ?" meaning, in this context, "tu as de l'argent ?"
The boy replies with "j'en ai pas beaucoup". It's an informal, colloquial way of saying "je n'en ai pas beaucoup" which is the grammatically correct form of the phrase. It's also the form we'd use in writing.
In spoken French, we often use this phrase to say we have little, or none, of something. It's sometimes used to turn down a share request. For example, if someone asks you "tu peux me donner un peu de frites ?", you may reply "ah j'en ai pas beaucoup ...", meaning "sorry but no".
Another example : "tu crois qu'il a des amis ?" "Non, il en a pas beaucoup ..." which may in fact mean he does not have any friends.
Use These Phrases, and You Will Sound More French
So there you have it. You now have a few keys to start sounding like a French speaking local. Watch and practise the short clips until you imitate the characters to perfection.
Of course, these are just a few phrases and expressions for use in given situations. But if you get the hang of it, you can easily find many more. Make sure to always look for video for context and body language.
Armed with such a solid idiomatic and pronunciation foundation, you'll be ready to dive into a real-life immersion in a French speaking country. You'll be amazed to watch your listening and speaking skills skyrocket.
Take my word for it, I've been there!
The post French Idioms Crash Course: How to Sound Like a Native French Speaker appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 11, 2017
How I Learnt Spanish, Italian and Portuguese for the Price of a Beer
A few months previously, I would stutter on even the simplest Spanish phrases, having studied the language for years but never really practiced with native speakers.
After Years of Spanish Study, I Still Mixed Up “Gracias” and “Hola”
Before moving to Spain I had been learning Spanish on and off for around six years.
I decided that this would be the year I finally became fluent.
From my studies, I’d worked up to a B1 level in Spanish. But my Spanish skills had receded, after having lived in Rome for one year and learning Italian.
My Spanish conversational level was still a strong A2, functional but basic. That said, at the start of my trip, I walked into a bakery and said "gracias" instead of "hola"!
Though I had a solid base in Spanish, I still found it difficult to hold conversations with native speakers. What’s more, I was living in Andalusia, a region renowned for having one of the hardest Spanish accents for learners.
As I sat chatting with my friend in the cafe, listening to my friend speak Spanish, I realised my Spanish was getting better and stronger.
Even my friend had noticed. "Wow! You speak a lot better than last time," he said sounding quite perplexed. I had only been in Seville a few weeks; how could I be more fluent than I was last week? Wasn't learning a language supposed to take years instead of weeks?
My Language Learning “Formula”: Beer and Facebook
I used the same formula to learn Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
With each language I learned, the time it took to reach fluency decreased. This was partly because I recycled the techniques that worked and partly because they're all Latin languages, so a lot of the vocabulary and grammar is shared.
In fact, after becoming fluent in Spanish and Italian, all it took was a language-learning CD and a few weeks in Porto, Portugal to get to a conversational level of Portuguese.
I had the same routine for each language I learned: meeting up with native speakers in cafes for a “language exchange” arranged on Facebook. Each exchange only cost me the price of the beer, coffee or sangria from the cafe and a few hours of my time. The language exchanges I organised were always free for both of us, as we would spend half the time speaking Spanish and half the time speaking English, so we both benefitted.
Any free time I had was devoted to improving my Spanish. Some of my friends balked at this, saying that it must be exhausting doing so many language exchanges per day, but what's exhausting about meeting new people, learning, eating tapas and going for drinks?
It was incredible fun and in six months living in Barcelona, Cadiz, Granada and Seville, I had done over one hundred language exchanges, made new friends and memories and of course, significantly improved my Spanish.
It’s Easier than You Might Think to Find Work Overseas
Facebook and beer were my main tools for improving my Spanish, that and a willingness to make mistakes all day long and meet new people everyday.
But to make the most of these tools, I needed to move to the country whose language I planned to learn.
Now, it's true that you don't need to move to the country to learn a language, for me, immersion has always been a fun way of learning a language. You get to live in a new culture, travel, make new friends and learn the language in context.
How did I manage to live and work overseas? Using Workaway, I searched for work-exchanges in hostels.
Hostels are a great way of moving to a country to learn a language: you have an instant social life with the other workers, access to staff who are probably from the area, free rent, an awesome central location, a flexible work schedule and sometimes food and pocket money are included.
As an alternative, au pairing can work well, but your schedule will be more restricted, your hours longer and sometimes you will be employed only to speak English to the children. That said, you will likely earn more as an au pair compared to doing a work-exchange in a hostel.
I worked around twenty hours per week in hostels and relied on savings as the placements were not all paid. But with beer as cheap as €0.33 for a caña (a very petite Spanish beer) and food included, I barely had any expenses. And I made some extra money by teaching English on the side, which helped keep me afloat financially.
This was my foundation from which I learned a language and organised language exchanges for myself.
Here’s How I Used Facebook to Arrange Language Exchanges
As soon as I settled into my hostel, I used Facebook to find native Spanish/Italian/Portuguese speakers. Using Facebook's search bar, I would type:
[Name of city] + [Language exchange]
And:
[Name of city in target language] + [translation of the word for "exchange" in target language]
So, for example, when I lived in Granada I would search:
Granada Language Exchange
Granada Learn English
Granada Intercambios (translation: Granada Exchanges)
Granada English
Granada Inglés (translation: Granada English)
Granada idiomas (translation: Granada Languages)
It's important to use lots of different combinations in both English and your target language because you want to find as many groups as possible.
Make sure to include the name of your city in English and your target language and to type the above search terms in both languages, with as many relevant words as you can think of. Add yourself to every single group you find. I normally added myself to at least ten groups per city.
In each group would post the same message. Here’s the exact script I used:
Hola! Soy una chica Inglesa y estoy buscando españoles para hacer intercambios de idioma. Si alguien quiere mejorar su Ingles y tomar algo, estaría encantada! Cualquier cosa, hablame por privado. Muchas gracias.
Translation: "Hi! I'm English and looking for Spanish people to do language exchanges with. If anyone wants to improve their English and grab a coffee or beer then send me a private message, thank you."
I always wrote this message in the target language and would copy and paste this onto the wall of all the Facebook groups I joined.
Most language groups had hundreds, if not thousands of people on the page, so the post would get a lot of traction and I sometimes got as many as sixty requests in one city. One by one I would respond to each message inviting them for a coffee or a caña and arranging a day to meet through private messages.
I tested a few different approaches and found that it's better if you ask people to message you in private as they tend to tell you more about who they are and where they're from, rather than just letting people comment on the post, as the most they'll say is "I'm interested!" People are also more likely to respond to a private message than a long trail of comments on a single post.
I always tried to make plans quickly with the other person - ideally in the next couple of days. Otherwise it's too easy to lose momentum. Some people would be a bit surprised and asked if I wanted to chat a bit online first, but you can't really waste time getting bogged down in endless online chat. I often needed to learn the language in a few months, so met up with every single person who responded!
More Hints and Tips on Arranging Language Exchanges
Tip 1: Speaking English Gives You a Big Advantage
If you’re a native English speaker you will be at an advantage, as in countries like Spain and Italy the level of English is low and many youngsters are keen to learn it for work and potentially moving abroad, so you will be flooded with requests for an exchange. On the flip side, my approach doesn’t work as well in countries where the level of English is high. In Portugal, for example, the level of English is high and more on par with Germany than Spain and Italy, so the only responses to my language exchange requests came from a few Brazilians living in Portugal.
Tip 2: Keep it Local: Small Cities are Better than Big Cities (Smaller cities are better than bigger cities?)
Living in smaller cities accelerated my language learning and I recommend places like Cadiz over bigger cities like Barcelona. Though I only spent three weeks in Cadiz, I met so many people and made a lot of friends. In Barcelona, it was harder to meet people and the logistics of doing language exchanges were a nightmare, simply because it took a lot of time (and money) to get from one side of the city to the other.
Tip 3: Connect with International Students
Smaller cities with a university typically have a strong Erasmus community, which can be a boon if you want to practice other European languages. As I spoke Italian and Spanish, Erasmus and other international student groups were fantastic exposure and Erasmus students are a friendly bunch.
Tip 4: Carry a Notebook to All Your Language Exchanges
As you are doing so many language exchanges, it's important to establish best practices, as you don't want to waste those hours. I always carried a notebook with me and got my language exchange partners to jot down useful words and phrases, which I would then upload as flashcards on my phone, using Anki. I then tried to ensure that I used them in conversation in the next few days.
Tip 5: You Don’t Have to Drink Beer!
My method also works for non-drinkers! I only drank beer in the language exchanges because at €0.33 for a caña it ended up being cheaper than coffee and even water. I would try and ensure that my language exchanges were at least one hour in English and one hour in Spanish, so that even if I had three in one day, I would spend around €0.99 for three drinks, six hours of socialising and meeting Spanish people and three hours of actually speaking Spanish. So, this ended up being far cheaper than doing classes and a much more effective way of getting speaking practice.
What Level Did I Reach in Spanish?
I ended up with so much speaking practice that I reached a strong B2 level after 3 months.
I probably could have reached this goal sooner, but all my friends working in the hostel with me were Italian, so I spoke Italian inside the hostel and Spanish outside of it. Initially it was hard switching between the two languages, but it ended up being fantastic practice because by the end, each language was a separate beast and my Italian went from B2 to C1. Incidentally, the same thing happened in Portugal, where everyone working in my hostel was Spanish and a lot of our guests were Italian, so I got to practice those while also doing Portuguese language exchanges.
The hundreds of language exchanges I did in Spain, Portugal, Italy were amazing and the best memories I have of living abroad and learning a new language. So, if you want to live abroad, get to know a new culture and learn a language cheaply (or for free) whilst making new friends, make sure to organise your own one-on-one language exchanges, it'll be the most fun you have abroad!
The post How I Learnt Spanish, Italian and Portuguese for the Price of a Beer appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 8, 2017
How to Use the Teach Yourself Language Hacking Community
Several months ago, I published four Teach Yourself Language Hacking Courses: French, Spanish, Italian and German.
Many people don’t know that my Language Hacking courses Teach Yourself come with free access to the italki Language Hacking community.
As you work through a Language Hacking course, you’ll complete mini-missions to help you start speaking your new language right away.
Many of these mini-missions involve creating videos of yourself speaking the language, and to share these videos in the Language Hacking community.
Recording yourself may seem daunting, or maybe not very useful. Well, trust me, it’s definitely useful! I can tell you that from personal experience. As for daunting, I can promise you that it gets easier with every video you record.
And the Language Hacking Community is nothing but supportive and encouraging to all language learners. Give it a try!
Here’s how you can access the community:
OK, so Where is the Language Hacking Community?
You’ll find the Language Hacking community in the Language Hacking section of the italki website. To access it you’ll need an account and a profile which I’ll talk you through in a moment.
Before you go ahead and try to access the community though, there are two things you’ll need:
To own a Language Hacking Spanish, Italian, French or German book
Have the access code from the inside of the front page of your Language Hacking Book
If you have both of these, then you’re ready to become a part of the Language Hacking Community!
If you don’t yet have an italki account, click here to visit the italki site, where you’ll see a home screen that looks a little like this:
In the top right hand corner you’ll see a button that says ‘sign up’. Go ahead and click that button which will take you to a sign up screen. Just fill out your personal information, or sign up with Facebook, like so:
On the next page you’ll be asked what languages you want to learn and to fill out some basic information like your timezone and what you’re going to be using italki for.
You can worry about setting up a shiny profile later. First let’s get to the page where the actual community is.
On your homescreen, if you look to the top of the page you’ll see a dropdown list that says ‘Community’. Click that and follow the list down until you see Language Hacking. Then, click on it:
That will bring you to a page which has all the information about the language hacking community. If you’ve bought the book already you don’t need to worry about this page. Instead just select the language you’re learning from the coloured buttons found here:
You may be asked to enter the code from your book or to verify your email at this point. Don’t worry, just follow the steps provided and you’ll be able to access the community with no problems.
And, voilà! Here you are. On this page you’ll find all of the language hacking missions and uploads from other language hackers all over the world. Cool, right?
Take a moment to have a look around and get a feel for the community section before you jump into the next section.
How Does the Video Feature Work?
I’ve already mentioned one of my favourite parts of the Language Hacking courses: you can record videos for each of your missions. That way you can see your progress from start to finish, get feedback from other language learners, and begin to live the language that you’re speaking.
At the end of every chapter in your book you’ll find a prompt about what video you need to record and how to structure a script of what to say. There are also my instructional videos at the start of each mission on the language hacking page that you can watch before you record, too:
What’s really cool here is that because the language used is specific to you there will be no two videos that are exactly the same!
Recording a video is super easy, too. If your smartphone has a camera you’ve already got all of the tools that you need. Just take the camera, point it at your face and start reading from your script. The same also applies if you have a newer computer with a webcam and microphone built in.
For example, here’s a video that James Johnson, one of the Fluent in 3 Months team members, recorded for his German language mission using the webcam on his laptop:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkJQGX-Jlrw&a...
OK, once you’ve recorded your video it’s time to upload it to the community.
Brilliant! Now, How do I Upload a Video?
To upload your video you’re going to need a YouTube account. This is so you can host the video online and then share it with community.
If you don’t have an account already you can go to the YouTube Homepage, click the ‘sign in’ button and then sign in with your Google account. (Alternatively you can create an account on the next page).
Once you’re all signed up, just look for the upload image in the top right hand corner. You can see it in the image below:
From there, select the file from your computer and upload it to YouTube on the next screen. While it’s uploading, you can also go ahead and fill out the title and description and anything else you want to add to it.
Don’t worry if you want your video to remain private. In the drop down menu on this screen you can select ‘unlisted’ and make sure that only members of the Language Hacking Community see it.
When it’s done uploading, hit publish and your video will now be on YouTube! All you need to do now is copy and paste the URL (link) to the video because you’re going to need it in a minute.
The next step is to go back to Language Hacking community page on the italki website. Select the mission you want to upload a video for and click the ‘start mission’ button. That’ll take you to a screen where you can add your video link and a little bit of information.
Take the YouTube video URL and paste it into the correct box (highlighted below) and fill out any other information you’d like to add. Bonus points if you add a description in your target language ;)
Once you’re done, hit the submit button and you’re ready to go! It’ll look a little like this when it’s live:
All you have to do now is follow this process whenever you upload a video to the Language Hacking community. Simple, right? And it’ll be simpler next time since you’ll already have all of the accounts created.
Other Stuff to Know About the Language Hacking Community
You can consider this page your community space. It’s a safe haven for language hackers to come together, share their experiences and help each other out along the way. There’s no judgement, worry or fear here. Just good, clean, language learning fun.
You’re also encouraged to comment on other people’s videos and give feedback (or encouragement) to your fellow Language Hackers.
Let’s say you’re learning Spanish and you want to see how other people are doing with the Introducing Yourself mission. You can go ahead and click the first mission video and look at all the submissions beneath it:
If you click on any of the submissions you can see their attempt at the challenge. This is great to watch because it’s extra exposure to hearing the language and you may learn some new words along the way.
Taking a look at the comments you can see that people are adding comments to the video to tell him he’s doing a great job and encourage him:
And you can even go ahead and add your own comments by clicking the add comment button beneath the video.
Why don’t you try watching a few videos and adding some comments right now? The best way to become a part of the community is to start speaking and interacting with people.
What Else Can You Use the Community For?
The Language Hacking community isn’t just for uploading videos. You can really start to make progress in your language by finding friends and connecting with other people who want to practise the language too.
For example, if you go looking through the list of comments and see who’s been active in the community, you can find people to add as friends - a little like Facebook - and connect with.
You’re then able to find conversation partners who are learning at the same time, and you can practise specific elements of the course together.
Good Luck, Language Hacker!
That’s an overview of how you can use the Language Hacking community to help you speak a new language.
Wishing you all the best as you complete the missions in your Language Hacking course. Good luck!
The post How to Use the Teach Yourself Language Hacking Community appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 4, 2017
How to Get Over the Fear of Rejection
Let me tell you a story about one time I was rejected. It seems small, but it really hurt.
While doing my fieldwork for my Master’s degree, I traveled through France quite extensively on my own. I was studying Breton music and I bounced around from city to city in the Western Peninsula attending events called fest noz.
At the train station in Rennes, I walked up to the counter to purchase my ticket. I made my request in French, but the clerk replied to me in English. I felt my eyes narrow in determination, and I pushed, continuing to use French. She was just as persistent. It continued this way for the entire transaction.
I walked away with a bad feeling, she had completely rejected my efforts to speak French and it was a huge blow to my confidence. Especially since I was trying to do my fieldwork in the language. What if I wasn’t really understanding? What if I was doing a good job at my research? What if my French wasn’t as good as I thought it was?
It was an enormous blow to my confidence.
After experiencing rejection, it can be a huge undertaking to build yourself up again enough to put yourself out there.
Most advice articles will tell you, “hey, just pick yourself up and try again.” But that’s not really all that helpful.
Rejection can hurt and it isn’t always as easy as just dusting yourself off.
Why Rejection Hurts: The Spotlight Effect
Tell me if this experience sounds familiar. You’re walking down the street and someone up ahead of you waves. You squint and think, “do I know that person?” They smile, so you smile back, nod your head and wave. As you get closer, they walk past you and hug the person who was walking right behind you. Your face burns with embarrassment and you look around to make sure no one noticed your error.
You worry that everyone around you was watching your embarrassing encounter.
The same was probably true of my experience in Rennes. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with my French. Maybe the clerk just wanted to test out her English. I was making the situation about me when there was a really good chance that it wasn’t.
This is called the "Spotlight Effect” and it’s our tendency to think that more people notice us or things about us than they really do.
The same is true of the mistakes we make in our target languages. We think that native speakers are paying more attention to us and our errors than they really are when in fact, they’re more concerned with their own mistakes in their target language.
Why does this happen?
It happens because we experience everything from our own perspective. That means we have a tendency to believe other people are focused on the same things that we are - our awkward wave moment, or our mistakes when we speak - when they’re actually focused on other things.
This is, in part, what makes rejection so hard. Because of the “spotlight effect” you feel like the rejection is about you. It’s personal. But really, there are so many more things that play into the decision on the other person’s end and it’s not about you, it’s about them.
Knowing this, however, doesn’t always take away the sting of rejection or the embarrassment you may feel. It’s impossible to avoid rejection altogether. It’s something we’re forced to face pretty regularly. Rather than going into situations where you feel afraid of rejection, I want to help you build habits that will empower you. I know that you can handle them, and I’ll show you several ways to become more confident in your ability to handle rejection in this post.
How to Deal with Embarrassment
Many people equate rejection with embarrassment. You want to feel accepted and a part of things, but feel crushed when a rejection makes you feel otherwise. If this is you, then you equate rejection with social shaming. Of course it hurts!
When you’re embarrassed by a rejection, it stays with you. Such rejections leave big wounds that fester for years, or even decades. No wonder people feel stuck with their fear of rejection.
I’m sure you can think back a few months or years and call up an experience where you were embarrassed by a rejection.
The thing is, that embarrassed feeling is you focusing on the negative of the experience.
Instead, focus on the positive. How did you move forward after that particular rejection?
If you’re like me, you probably vowed to never to that again. But what exactly is that? In the moment, it’s easy to exaggerate things and think that means the situation as a whole.
But once a few days have passed, you’re able to pinpoint the specific thing or moment where things turned south. It’s that thing you don’t want to do again.
So you move forward, aiming to do better next time. Turn that into a positive. Instead of thinking it as a personal rejection, think of it as information. A tool you can use to improve.
Think of Rejection as a Learning Experience
Here’s how you can take the idea of focusing on the positive one step further: see your rejection as an opportunity to grow.
Rejections give you the chance to become a better language learner, a better speaker of your target language, and in some cases, a better person. You just need to look for where the lesson is.
I’ll share an example. When I first started doing language exchanges in Chinese, I was only a few weeks into studying. Most of the phrases I had picked up were from a series I watched on CNTV because I had yet to purchase a coursebook.
In a recent episode, I had learned a phrase that roughly approximated to “see you later” or “goodbye”, and I was excited to use it. Towards the end of the conversation, my moment came and I blurted it out proudly only to have my exchange partner start giggling.
“雅娜,” she said, calling me by my Chinese name. “Only shopkeepers say that to someone leaving their store!”
My use of the new phrase was rejected.
Admittedly, I was red from the neck up. Here I was, thinking I had done my homework, armed with all sorts of useful phrases.
They were useful, but for the wrong context.
I could have been discouraged by the laughter or the rejection, thinking my studying was all for naught.
But then in that very moment I realized something. She had just taught me something very important. I not only learned the correct phrase for saying farewell, but I also learned that Chinese greetings and farewells could be very situational. It made me look closely at the things I picked up later on down the road. I became a more observational learner and it made my Chinese all the stronger for it.
This all happened because a phrase I tried to use was rejected as inappropriate for the context, and it has helped me reframe how I think about rejection and making mistakes.
How can you reframe how you think about mistakes?
There’s a strategy that fiction writers use to help them progress their stories. It’s called “Yes, but… No, and…”
In fiction writing, it’s used to make the conditions worse for the protagonist, but instead, you’ll use it to make them better for you.
Here’s a few examples:
You used the wrong phrase to say farewell in Chinese. Yes, but it provided you with the opportunity to learn the correct one and become a more aware learner.
You sent a language exchange request to someone who didn’t answer. No, they didn’t and that’s okay because you sent three others and all of those learners replied.
You tried to order in Italian at a local restaurant, but the waiter just replied in English. Yes, but they understood you and you got to practice speaking.
When you shift your attention away from the negative and focus on the positive, those rejections suddenly don’t seem so bad. Why not try the “Yes, but… No, and…” exercise the next time you’re feeling down about a rejection?
How to Deal with Fear: Plan for the “No”
Rejection feels especially bad when it’s the opposite of what you expected to happen.
Of course it’s disappointing when things don’t turn out the way you expect. So, change your expectations. Being a pessimist can be helpful here. If you go in expecting a no, you’ll get to be pleasantly surprised when you get a yes.
This is a really powerful skill to have. When you’re reached a position when you expect to be rejected, and yet you still go ahead and try anyway, then nothing can stop you. And that’s not just in language learning, but in the whole of life.
And there’s a simple technique you can use to develop this skill...
The “Meaningless No” Strategy
How can you develop a thicker skin? Go out and get rejected.
Start with low stakes, so you have less emotional investment. Instead of asking for things you actually want, instead, ask for things that you don’t really need or want.
Later, start to ask for things that are a little outrageous just so you can get comfortable with hearing “no”.
This is what I call the Meaningless No Strategy. Because even if people say “no” to your requests, you’ve not lost anything. You don’t experience the frustration of not getting what you want.
And if people surprise you with a “yes” (and this will happen more often than you expect), you’ll still be developing the ability to make the ask.
Need some inspiration? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Can I borrow $100?
Could we take a selfie? (to a total stranger)
Could I have a bit of your bagel/sandwich/chips/etc.? (to a stranger or a friend who doesn’t share their food)
Do you mind if I borrow your phone?
Give Yourself Perspective
In the context of language learning, really think about the worst that could happen if your efforts are rejected. What will your life look like after that rejection?
Your family will still love you. Your ability in your target language is still the same (and it will only get better). The sky isn’t falling. Your friends still enjoy spending time with you.
The only thing that might be a little different is how confident you feel in your language. And even that will build back up.
After you face rejection, take a moment to focus on what’s still the same in your life. Everything will still be okay. And you never know what new opportunities will come your way because of the rejection.
When you take time time to get perspective, you’ll find that you significantly reduce your fear of rejection.
No Pain, No Gain: Embrace the Burn and Answer Back
Rejection can be a terrible feeling when you focus on the negative or take it personally. It’s easy to overanalyze a rejection, to think that it’s all about something you’re doing wrong or that you’re falling short of something. It grows from this nervousness about making a mistake or looking foolish, to a terrible fear.
And because it’s terrifying, you try to avoid the pain altogether. But remember: What you flee from chases you.
So, rather than trying to escape the pain, sit with it. Listen to what’s going on in your mind. And once you’ve listened, start to answer back.
Start a counter argument with yourself. Let your kind self speak to your more negative self.
Yes, this internal discussion can be difficult and painful to watch. And it can even feel a bit silly. But you’ll get much further than by avoiding it altogether.
Here’s how this works. When you notice yourself thinking things like: “I suck at speaking in my language” reply with: “I can get better at speaking my language and I just took a huge step towards doing that by speaking today.”
When you notice: “I’ll never be able to pronounce the words right.” Think: “It’s probably time that I sit down and focus on my pronunciation.”
When you notice: “I just don’t have time to learn a language and that’s why they switched over to English. I don’t have enough practice.” Respond with: “How can I add just 30 more seconds of language study to my schedule per day?”
Beyond the Fear of Rejection: You Can Be Rejected and Be Okay With It
Rejection stirs up emotions. It’s okay to feel embarrassed or sad or ashamed. Allow yourself that moment and then decide to keep moving. Don’t avoid working on your language because of the negative feelings you felt after a rejection. Instead, look for the positive - the opportunity to learn - and use it.
I had a mentor in the music industry that told me there are three things that are guaranteed to drive you forward if you approach them with the right mindset. They are fear, embarrassment, and frustration. Rejection can cause you to feel all three. Depending on how you look at them, they can either be a reason to quit or huge drivers to get better so that you don’t have to feel those negative emotions.
It’s time to make a decision: Which will rejection be for you?
The post How to Get Over the Fear of Rejection appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
September 1, 2017
15 “So Bad They’re Amazing” Hilarious Spanish Puns
Why bother? Well, the fact that Spanish puns are hard to understand is precisely what makes them so useful to learn! If you don’t get the punchline, the solution is to expand your vocabulary until you can spot the double meaning. That's why learning some Spanish puns can improve your Spanish as well as make you laugh.
Well, maybe they won’t make you laugh that hard. Most puns are more cringeworthy than laugh-inducing. The Spanish “jokes” below are no exception. Consider yourself warned!
1. The Lazy Fish
¿Qué hace el pez perezoso?
¡Nada!
Translation:
What does the lazy fish do?
Nothing!
or
He swims!
Nada, in this context, has two meanings: it could mean "nothing", i.e. the fish does nothing, because he's lazy. However, nada is also the third-person present singular form of the verb nadar, "to swim". So a lazy fish does nada! Get it?
2. The Laughing Orange
¿Cuál es la fruta que más se ríe?
La naranja, ja, ja, ja, ja...
Translation:
Which fruit laughs the most?
The orange, ha ha ha ha...
In Spanish, laughter is normally written as "ja ja ja ja". It’s like “ha ha ha ha” in English; the Spanish "j" sounds roughly similar to the English "h".
The word for "orange" is naranja, which ends with a "ja". So oranges must laugh a lot, because they have a ja ("ha") in their name.
3. The Ruined Ruana
¿Cómo se llama una ruana estropeada?
¡Una ruina!
Translation:
What do you call a ruined/damaged/broken ruana?
A ruin!
A ruana is a type of poncho that's worn in some parts of South America. Its name sounds like the word ruina, which means a ruin or a wreck. So when a ruana is badly damaged, it becomes a ruina. Obviously.
4. The Nightmare Hotel
¿Cómo se llama un hotel muy desagradable?
¡Una posadilla!
Translation:
What do you call a very bad hotel?
A "posadilla"
Posadilla can't be directly translated because it's not a real word. It's a combination of posada, meaning a hotel or inn and pesadilla, which means "nightmare". So a nightmarish posada is a posadilla. Hilarious.
5. The Angry Bear
¿Cómo se llama un oso enfadado?
¡Furioso!
Translation:
What do you call an angry bear?
Furious!
I like this one. A bear is an oso (a cognate of the uncommon English word ursine, which means "relating to or resembling bears"), and furious is translated to furioso. Geddit? A furi-oso!
6. A Pessimistic Fish.
¿Cómo se llama el pez más negativo?
¡Pesimista!
Translation:
What do you call the most negative fish?
A pessimist!
This pun comes from the fact that word pez, "fish", sounds the same as the first syllable of pesimista, a pessimist (Disclaimer: it only works in Latin American accents). Because the pez is so negative, he's a pez-imista.
7. The Lonely Roof
¿Qué le dijo un techo a otro techo?
Techo de menos.
Translation:
The first line means "what did one roof say to the other roof?"
The second line has a double meaning. "Te echo de menos" makes no sense if you translate it word-for-word, but it’s a common way of saying "I miss you" in Spanish.
The punchline here is that te echo, when said fast, sounds like techo, i.e. "roof". So it's only natural that a techo would say techo (te echo) de menos!
8. Talkative Bread
¿Cómo haces para que un pan hable?
Lo pones en agua toda la noche y al día siguiente ya está blando.
Translation:
How do you get bread to talk?
Put it in water all night, and on the next day it will be soft.
or
Put it in water all night, and on the next day it will be talking.
The pun here is on está blando, which means "it's soft", but which sounds like está hablando, i.e. "it's talking." So if you soak some bread in water, it will become blando - but it may also be hablando.
9. A Mathematical Pun
¿Que dijo el número 1 al número 10 ?
Para ser como yo debes ser sincero.
Translation:
What did the 1 say to the 10?
To be like me you have to be sincere.
Sincero, "sincere", sounds just like sin cero, "without zero". A one is just a ten without the zero, so if ten becomes a bit more sincero than maybe it will turn into a one.
Here's a similar joke, which plays on the similarity between "vente" (come) and "veinte" (twenty):
¿Que dijo el número 18 al número dos?
Vente conmigo!
Translation:
What did the 18 say to the 2?
Come with me!
“Come with me!” sounds like "Twenty with me!" in Spanish. And of course eighteen plus two equals twenty.
10. The Last Animal on Noah's ark.
¿Cuál fue el último animal en entrar al arca de Noé?
El del-fín
Translation:
What was the last animal to enter Noah's ark?
The dolphin.
"Dolphin" in Spanish is delfín, which sounds just like del fín, meaning "from/of/at the end". Because delfines are del fin, they'd obviously be the last animal to get on board.
Although there’s an obvious problem with this joke: dolphins can swim, so it's not clear why they'd need to get on Noah's ark in the first place...
11. Arachno-cat
¿Cuál es el animal que es dos animales?
El gato, porque es gato y araña
Translation:
What animal is two animals?
The cat, because it's a cat and a spider.
or
The cat, because it's a cat and it scratches.
Araña means spider, but it's also the third-person singular of the verb arañar, which means "to scratch". The double meaning is obvious: es gato y araña could mean "it's a cat and it scratches", but it could also mean "it's a cat and a spider".
Spanish cats have nine lives, but do they also have eight legs?
12. Help!
El policía buscaba el ladrón de las gallinas. Cuando le veí él llama con su radio y dijo "¡Apoyo, apoyo!".
Translation:
The police officer was searching for the chicken thief. When he saw him, he got on his radio and said "help, help!"
This is a pun because the thief has been stealing chickens, and apoyo, "help", sounds like pollo, "chicken". Is the policeman asking for help, or is he describing what he sees?
13. Where did the Wine Come From?
¿Vino de la casa, señor?
¿Y a usted por qué le importa de dónde vengo?
Translation:
House wine, sir?
Why does it matter to you where I’m from?
Oops - the waiter has asked an innocuous question, but it sounds like he’s offended the guest. This is because vino means “wine”, but it’s also a form of the verb venir, “to come”. Vino de la casa means “house wine”, but it can also mean “did you come from the house?” - hence the misunderstanding.
14. What Brand of Clock?
La semana pasada me compré un reloj.
¿Qué marca?
¡La hora!
Translation:
Last week I bought myself a watch.
What brand?
The time!
Another misunderstanding. ¿Qué marca? could mean “what brand?” - a Rolex, maybe? - or it could mean “what does it show/tell/indicate?”, from the verb marcar. What does the watch tell? The time, duh! What a stupid question.
15. Smelling Salts
Cual es la sal que más mal huele?
La sal pargatas.
Translation:
What type of salt smells the worst?
The “pargatas” salt.
“Pargatas” isn’t a real word, but la sal pargatas sounds like las alpargatas. An alpargata is a type of sandal, and I suppose it might get sweaty and stinky after being worn all day. So sal pargatas must be a foul-smelling type of salt.
Did You Find These Spanish Puns Funny?
Like I said, these "jokes" aren't likely to make you fall out of your chair laughing, but I hope they've taught you a thing or two about Spanish.
Were there any Spanish puns that you understood without my explanation? And do you know any other good Spanish puns - preferably ones that are funnier than the ones I've given? Let me know in the comments.
The post 15 “So Bad They’re Amazing” Hilarious Spanish Puns appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
