Another challenge has ended and I was 46th equal out of 3902. That’s not terrible!
Category: English
iTalki Challenge Results
Review: Learn ANY Language by Janina Klimas
Full disclosure:I got a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This is that review.
Guides to how to acquire languages seem to be quite in vogue at the moment, and I daresay if you’ve read one you’ll probably not want to spend time reading another. I must admit to only having filleted this one for tips rather than read it cover to cover. It’s short and dense with information so that wasn’t hard. Like most books of its type it starts by reassuring you that learning a language – while it takes time and effort – is not out of the reach of the average mortal; that nobody is “bad” at languages (although we all have days where we bloody well feel like it!) and that acquiring one doesn’t necessarily mean going back to reciting verb tables by rote. All standard stuff.
So why pick it over – say – Benny Lewis’s book, or Gabriel Wyner’s or… (insert polyglot guru of choice)? I think a large part of your reason for choosing a text is likely to be governed by the personality of the writer and whether you feel like you can spend a few hours in their company. Some are blokish, some self-absorbed, some cerebral. This one seems to be very practical in its focus and aimed at conveying tips rather than bigging up the author. Obviously she tells her own story at the start (a vital part of the formula of a polyglot book: I’m an ordinary person like you) but I didn’t get the sense of this being a vanity project or anything – she just gets on with it.
OK, so to come back to those practical examples I mentioned: there are a lot of pictures in the book showing lists and diagrams. This is really useful if you want to be able to bootstrap your way into a language without having to make it all up yourself or jumping in at the deep end with a language exchange on day 1. Many polyglot guides will be careful to avoid references to specific languages as a way of showing how universally-applicable the ideas are, but I think most newbies will appreciate something more concrete. This book has that in spades. I guess the only drawback is that the examples, of necessity, are of a specific language. If you happen to be studying one of the languages chosen (Korean, Spanish and French all feature heavily) that’ll be a blessing but I can imagine if not you might feel they weren’t speaking to you in quite the same way. At the end, there are tons of links and books mentioned but again only for specific languages. One of those languages is “Brazilian Portuguese”. Boo hiss.
So, getting right down to it, this is a good, practical guide for the new learner, more user-friendly than most, not flashy, and maybe not as “windswept and interesting” as some of the more fashionable ones either but well worth a look if you just want to get started quickly and with as little fuss as possible.
Obrigado
I haven’t been as careful as I should be lately about giving credit for the corrections on my Portuguese texts. I get a few corrections on each notebook entry on iTalki but the person doing most of the work on providing actual, proper Portuguese grammar to counteract all the Brazilian opinions is still professional Portuguese teacher Sophia who I pay for an hour of text-corrections per week. She has her blog here and he iTalki profile here if you would like to ask her to do the same for you.
Thanks Sophia for all your hard work. I’ll get the hang of it one day.
And while I’m on the subject…
….of translated lyrics, you could do a lot worse than have a listen to “Tu Gostavas de Mim” which is by Ana Moura and is sung in a duet with Miguel Araújo on his live album. Araújo is one of the singers in As Azeitonas who I mentioned in the last post and by the way, also the guy singing in “Bitter Portuguese Guy Sings” a few weeks back. I really like the simplicity and the dry humour of it. The whole live album is good, actually.
In the Cartoons
I couldn’t find a translation of “Nos Desenhados Animados” (“in the Cartoons”) by As Azeitonas so I made one on LyricsTranslate. I like it. It’s soppy and nostalgic and has an overwrought widdly-widdly sax solo near the end but that doesn’t make me like it less.
In the Cartoons
I want to be lucky like a cartoon
in the morning on RTP1
You’re my Tom Sawyer
And my Huckleberry Finn
And you come in a mask and a cape
Up there, there are planets without end
You are my super-hero
Without a cowboy hat
With a galleon and a bottle of rum
I was yours and nothing more
One for all and all for one
In the cartoons
I already know the end
The good pioneer
The swordsmen seizing power
and Prince Charming
Always returns to me
I am Jane and you Tarzan
The Juliet of my Dartagnan
If your horse fails you
I have so much to tell
Of the ghost beneath my sheets
Of the treasures we hide from the Spaniards
In the cartoons
I already know the end
The good pioneer
The swordsmen seizing power
and Prince Charming
Always returns to me
When the ending comes
We can change the channel
In the cartoons
It rarely rains and never – almost never – ends badly
[By the power of Greyskull!]
Back to London
We were up at the crack of dawn today to get home. I went all the way back with my knuckles clenched white as the plane juddered and shook and banked and the stewards disappeared behind a curtain and made noises like they were battling against a group of armed terrorists.
When I got home I found this bundle of goodies from iTalki waiting for me, as prizes for the Olympic challenge yonks ago. Now I’m just fondling my new books and going through the corrections from the texts I wrote while I was away. Ugh! No matter how many lessons I take, I never seem to learn.
Buns, Coques and Pompoms
Question from iTalki:
Como se chama este tipo de penteado? Em inglês, chama-se “man bun” (pãozinho de homem), mas em português…?
According to Zico, it’s called “um coque” but that’s in Brazil, and in Portugal that means exactly what you think it would mean. In Portugal it would be “um carrapito” or “um pompom”. Oh and in case you’re wondering, a straightforward ponytail is called “um rabo de cavalo” which is a nice, literal translation = > easy!
Salvador Martinha
Much to my excitement, I’ve just found the first Portuguese Portuguese stand-up show on Netflix, “Tip of the Tongue” by Salvador Martinha. Excitedly I bookmarked it for later then had a quick peep at the reviews. The first one read: “Caros senhores, a razão pela qual subscrevemos o vosso serviço é exactamente para fugir este tipo de aberração”.
Oh dear.
Oh well, it’s great that they’re starting to make this kind of thing available even if it turns out to be a bit shonky. I’m looking forward to more in the future.
Language Love and a Colourful Map
I was interested to see the reaction to “Don’t Blame Benny” a few days ago, both from the author of Loving Language, Richard Benton, and from the subject of the original post, Benny Lewis, via twitter. The debate of which it is a tiny part is still going on and I think it’s well worth a look if you are in the mood for a new perspective on languages. The latest post is here, but you can track back to earlier instalments.
I’m not planning to say anything more on the subject because I feel like I’ve had my say already. I find myself drawn to his core idea of learning languages spoken widely in your own community (see the second video on the about page for a good intro) despite already-expressed reservations about some of the specific arguments advanced in support of it.
Anyway, in case you’re interested, here’s a map that did the rounds a year or two back of the languages most spoken in my home town of London, other than English of course. I live in LB Richmond where the second language is Polish. To be honest, I wouldn’t have guessed this as it’s so diverse around here that there isn’t one dominant group. Just thinking of children in my daughter’s class at primary school and their parents (maybe 40 kids in total over the years): Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, America, Canada, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Iceland, um…. Oh Lordy, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few… she shared a class with three times as many children with Portuguese language ties as Polish, for what it’s worth.
There’s a breakdown of the numbers on randomlylondon, which I basically agree with: that it’s surprising to see Portuguese Spanish and French as dominant languages in some boroughs, and interesting that if Southwark were a bit bigger, it and Lambeth would look like a tiny map of the Iberian Peninsula. Portuguese around Streatham, Clapham, Vauxhall sounds about right though, so if you want to know where to get a decent cup of coffee or a custard tart, now you know.
What surprised me most is that Greenwich seems to be Little Kathmandu! If you’d asked me to guess I would have said that you’d need to move the entire population of Nepal to London to make an appreciable dent in the demographics, but… well, that’s what the numbers say, apparently. 26 million people live in Nepal, 50,000 in the UK and 19,000 in London. I should have been more surprised by the fact that Lithuania (population less than 3 million) seems to have so many of its citizens based out in the Essex fringes.
Luso 