19 languages 15 minutes

Hello, everyone, 

I went to an event this May called the Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2015 and, in order to prepare for it, I practiced almost all the languages I’ve studied in my life. After the conference was over, I realized that I would probably never speak all these languages this well at the same time again and wanted to make a video to remember it.

Obviously, I did prepare for this video in the sense that I didn't just sit down in front of the camera and started speaking. I had a script in my mind for most of the languages and, as I say many times throughout the video, with the languages I don't speak that well, I asked for my friends' help.

In the video I speak: English, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Serbian, Farsi, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Dutch, Taiwanese, Japanese and Cantonese. 

Feel free to leave comments with your opinions or corrections. Any input is well appreciated.

Vladimir

P.S. If you like, you can follow me by email and receive notifications about new post on this blog. You can do that by subscribing to my mailing list via the 'Follow by email' field on the right.

Guest post: Chinese four-character idioms 成語 - Chengyu.

By Yang Yang.

Chengyu (“Chinese idioms” or “Four-Character Idioms”) are a special form of Chinese idioms, consisting of exactly 4 characters, which are derived from ancient literature. They are quite extensively used in the Chinese langauge and in a way can be compared to morale messages in Aesoph’s fables. 

If you are a beginner of Mandarin, Chengyu can be a little hard to understand. It’s natural, because characters used in them are often very rare and the grammar of Chengyu is Classical Chinese grammar.  It is not necessary for a beginner to know any Chengyu, but they are used quite frequently by native speakers both in writing and speaking and knowing a few later will be very helpful.

The stories behind the two Chengyu we picked for this article are quite interesting we think, and are happy to share them with you.

Old man loses a horse

塞翁失马

English equivalent: Blessing in disguise

塞 sài - border 

翁 wēng - old man

失 shī - to lose
马 mǎ - horse      

Note: Since Chengyu are written in a very old language, some characters have different meanings than they have today. 

An old man lived with his only son at the border of the country. They kept horses but, one day, a horse went missing, having crossed over the border.

The old man was not bothered by the loss and, a few months later, however, not only did the missing horse return home safely, but it also brought back another horse from the neighboring country.

Топ-5 правил для успешного изучения иностранных языков

 «Важность мотивации в изучении иностранных языков», «Топ-10 основных причин, по которым стоит изучать иностранные языки», «Топ-10 способов быть успешным в изучении языков» - на эти и другие подобные темы, связанные с эффективным изучением иностранных языков, уже написано немало популярных книг и статей. На своем блоге я обычно пишу специализированные статьи, часто нацеленные на достаточно узкую аудиторию. Зачастую эти материалы касаются различных аспектов китайского и других экзотических языков и вряд ли заинтересуют широкую публику, поэтому на этот раз я решил немного разнообразить содержание блога и осветить более универсальную тему.

Рассуждая об эффективности в изучении языков, я пытался как можно более упростить свою задачу и свести ее к вопросу: «Если бы мне нужно было выбрать пять основных пунктов, которые суммировали бы мои стратегии в изучении языков, пять пунктов, которыми бы я постоянно руководствовался, изучая языки, какие бы я назвал?». Разумеется, вопрос оказался непростым, и даже после долгих размышлений я пришел к выводу, что выделить лишь пять пунктов совсем непросто.

Тогда я решил немного переформулировать исходный вопрос. В результате я пришел к выводу, что на моей памяти все сложности в изучении языков возникали тогда, когда я пренебрегал каким-либо из следующих пунктов:

Мотивация

Инпут (входящая информация)

Аутпут (исходящая информация)

Последовательность

Повторение

Мотивация

Независимо от того, почему вы учите языки, мотивация является, пожалуй, важнейшим фактором, который позволит вам достичь высоких результатов за достаточно короткий период времени. Самый простой способ выучить что-либо – это по-настоящему увлечься. Полностью согласен с известным мнением, согласно которому, если вы занимаетесь любимым делом, то:

Érzések kifejezése különböző nyelveken

Miért kezdtél el nyelveket tanulni? 

Igazából nem is tudom. Többnyelvű környezetben nőttem fel, ahol a legtöbben körülöttem több nyelvet is beszéltek, így természetes volt, hogy megtanultam legalább egyet vagy kettőt közülük. Több nyelvet is megtanultam még gyerekkoromban, aztán felnőve is folytattam, mert jó érzés volt igazán jónak lenni valamiben, és ez olyasvalami volt, amivel kitűnhettem egy kicsit a többek közül.

Hány nyelven beszélsz folyékonyan?

Nehéz megmondani, mi számít folyékonynak, de talán 8-10 nyelvet mondanék, az anyanyelvemmel együtt. Folyékony alatt pedig azt értem, hogy legalább 85%-ban olyan jól, mint amennyire angolul tudok.

Hány országban éltél eddig?

Interview for Kosice Today about language learning

Polyglot Vladimir Skultety: Motivation is the key

He listens to news broadcasts in foreign languages daily and simultaneously translates them into Slovak or other languages for practice.

He is 31 years old, was born and grew up in Kosice, Slovakia, has lived in several countries and for the last five years in Taiwan. Vladimir Skultety has a Master’s degree in International relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies. He currently works as a translator and interpreter of Chinese, English and Slovak. Czech not included, he can speak 10-11 foreign languages. Polyglot (Greek polys – many, a lot; glotta – language) – a person speaking several languages.

‘It is difficult to express the number of languages I speak with a number, because I speak some of them better and some of them not so well. If you are familiar with the A1-C2 language proficiency scale (A1 basic conversational abilities – C2 near native speaker abilities), in my life I have spoken about 8 – 9 languages at a C1-C2 level’ says Vladimir Skultety.

When it comes to individual languages he can speak, he has provided us with a list starting with the ones he speaks best: Slovak (Czech), English, Chinese (Mandarin), German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese and Farsi (Iranian, Persian).

Derived characters

While I was still at the Chinese department, during our lectures on Chinese writing, our professors taught us about 6 Chinese character types: pictograms (象形字), simple indicatives (指事字), semantic compounds (會意字), phono-semantic compounds (形聲字), phonetic loans (假借字) and derived characters (轉注字). (For further reading on Chinese character types see this post).

While they explained the first 5 quite in detail, when talking about the last sixth category, we were told that these still require further research and that no one really understands them well. Or so they said.

望 wang4 'hope, expect' is a derived character. Let's look at its definition from the 說文解字 (100 CE) dictionary first:

Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series

First lecture in the hopefully longer series on Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series. In this lecture I try to explain what phono-semantic compound characters (形聲字) are, explain the 才 phonetic series and etymology of all characters in it.

Characters in this video:

才 cai2 - talent, material. Leading phonetic character of the group.

財 cai2 - money, wealth
材 cai2 - material
在 zai4 - to be located at
載 zai4 - to give someone a ride
裁 cai2 - to cut
戴 dai4 - to wear (clothes), to put on

Understanding Chinese Characters

Introduction

Chinese characters are a very complex system of recording the Chinese language into writing. Most of what seems to be a mix of illegible symbols is part of a logical but complex writing system that has been gradually developed around 2300 - 3000 years ago, with oldest confirmed characters dating back to around 1200 - 1050 BC. In this article I will try to briefly explain what one needs to know in order to understand Chinese characters and what you should know before you start studying them

Some basic facts:

• The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions on oracle bones (cattle bones and turtle shells used in divination and fortune telling ceremonies) from the late Shang dynasty (1200-1050 BC) - Wikipedia
• According to some studies (including my own), you need to know only about 2500 characters to read the newspaper.
• About 80% of all characters are made up of two elements - one telling you how to read it and the other one telling you what it means. This is good news, because based on these two elements you should know how to pronounce and understand the meaning of 4 out of 5 Chinese characters. 80% is a huge number and if you learn how to read this type of characters and understand their system, your learning progress will be much faster. 

Benchmarks in character evolution

Oracle bone script

Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast. My guest today is a very special person. I’m sure a lot of you know him from his presence online, he was born in Sierra Leone, spent most of his life in London and currently lives in Spain. He is a lover of knowledge and a very knowledgable person, has his own website and a youtube channel, is the awe inspiring, the super positive, the one and only David Mansaray.

Some of you might  know, that a couple of months ago, David interviewed me for his website and I've always had the thought of interviewing him for my blog in the back of my mind as well, I just couldn't come up with a suitable topic.

There were several things that I was considering, but because David is a fantastic, talented learner in many different fields and it so happens that he has decided to start learning foreign languages, I thought we could discuss something related to language learning in general.

David has read lots and lots of materials on the subject and talked to a lot of people and I always wanted to ask him what his own personal observations and opinions were, so I thought it would be great if he could share some of that wealth of knowledge with us. Hope you enjoy.

Vladimir

Download

Chinese character frequency list - news articles, interview articles

Chinese word frequency list - news articles

Chinese character frequency list - interview articles only

English Italian verb list