Lingo
Learning with the heardrum
“Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language” – that’s Paul Sulzburger’s main argument . The PhD graduate of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, taught Russian for several years to Kiwi students and watched them consistently drop out. What makes it so hard [...]
A few words about Obama’s language
Obama is a language master, not many would disagree. Even at the inauguration, when renowned grammatical stickler Chief Justice John Roberts spontaneously corrected a split-infinitive in a fixed constitutional text when swearing him in, Obama righted the snafu in the act not just for legal accuracy, but for flow. The speech that followed was rather [...]
The Big “1″: Babbel.com celebrates its first anniversary
Polyglot happy wishes to Babbel.com that hasn’t stopped talkin’ since it launched in January 15, 2008! (Pictured at a little birthday shindig from a hazy last night in Berlin above.) Have any multilingual birthday wishes? Comment away… and check out some of behind the scenes features below to see a bit more how the intuitive, [...]
Failed symbolism – perils for non-native speakers
Imagine the moment, when the responsible editor of the “Max Planck Research” magazine learned, that the chinese symbols on the cover of its latest issue were an advertisment for some kind of strip club. That was not intended by the publication of the old and respected German research institute - as can be read in [...]
Does code count as a language?
The following statement of Kristian over at web-translations made me wonder. He was writing about how much is too much in language learning, and ends with the following: “As for me, well, I speak 6 languages…English, French, small talk, MSN speak, some basic programming languages (do they count? They should as they have strict syntax [...]
Pirahã meet the crooked heads… and don’t care: Everett’s book challenges the Universal Grammar theory
Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, referred to it as “a bomb thrown into the party”. The bomb? The discovery by Christian-missionary-cum-Linguistics-chair Daniel Everett of a group, the Pirahã, deep in the Amazon, whose language seems to eschew the grammatical use of “recursions”. What kind of party is that then, you ask? It’s a academio-linguistic [...]
Some lists and it’s dialects again
They couldn’t find one, and so they simply made their own list of the “Top 100 Language Blogs” . That’s how the people over at LexioPhiles explained their motivation for searching through 300 blogs, sorting them by “three main categories: content, consistency and interactivity”. They also made some lists about language Podcasts, most spoken languages [...]
“The words should roll out of the mouth” – On the dubbing of “The Wire” in German
For the original interview in German click here. Frank Schröder is one of the two authors of the German dubbing of the acclaimed television series “the Wire”. In an interview with Babbel Blog, he speaks about the difficulties of translating the dialogue-rich series, which portrays the day to day goings-on of the police and drug [...]
“Die Worte sollen aus dem Mund purzeln” – Über die Synchronisation der Serie “The Wire” ins Deutsche
For the English translation click here. Frank Schröder ist einer der beiden Autoren der deutschen Synchronfassung der vielgelobten US-Serie „The Wire“. Im Interview mit dem Babbel-Blog spricht er über die Schwierigkeiten bei der Übersetzung der dialogreichen Serie, die den Alltag von Polizisten und dem Drogendealermilieu in Baltimore schildert. Sie läuft seit September im deutschen Pay-TV. [...]
Maps: 1,000 dialects and 6,912 living languages
Last week we had Mara interviewing the Dialect Doctor, who claims to cure accents and strengthen dialects. Well, now here is databank of roughly nearly 1,000 speech samples: Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph; the recordings are collected and listenable over at the speech accent archive. They have the [...]
