Why Japanese is such a fun language to learn

Let me share with you a few fun facts about Japanese language after a 30-hour intensive Japanese summer class.

Foreign language MOOCs: kill two birds with one stone

If you are interested in languages and continuing education, why not kill two birds with one stone?
Many online courses are offered around the world in a very wide variety of areas and many languages. Even though English still predominates, you can practice many foreign languages and get used to many accents, improve your understanding and expand your vocabulary while learning specific knowledges.
Here is a selection of a few courses to make you learn and travel.

What are the hardest languages to learn for an English-speaking student?

This infographic compares the learning difficulty of many languages depending on the minimal time to achieve language proficiency for native English speakers. If languages like Spanish, French or Dutch should need about 600 hours to reach that level, Hindi, Russian, Thai or Greek would need about the double time to get there, and Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese would double agin this time with 2,200 hours of class hours.

Count in Patxohã

The Patxôhã language, also known as Pataxó Hã-Ha-Hãe, Patashó or Pataxi, means tongue of the Pataxó warrior. It is spoken by the Pataxó people in the states of Bahía and Minas Gerais, Brazil. The very harsh history of this people is an illustration of Brazilian colonization, as it is still practiced today.

English numerical idiomatic expressions

Idiomatic expressions are interesting in the fact they convey a full imagination in a ready-made formula native speakers use without even thinking about it. To memorize them during the early stages of language learning helps lifting the veil on both differences and similarities between languages.

Where is French spoken?

This infographic shows a map of the world that highlights the places where French language is spoken. If French is nowadays mostly spoken in Europe, but also in Canada and Africa, a lot of less known places are spotted on the map.

Languages families map

This map shows language families distribution around the globe with number of speakers (primary and secondary) for the top ten languages, and dying languages distribution.

Readability formulas for the Portuguese language

There seems to be no readability formula for the Portuguese language developped in the litterature, as most of them have been developped for the English language. However, these formulas can be used for the Portuguese language to a certain extent, either by using a translated text, or by directly applying them, or even by applying a formula based on a closely-related language.
Let's have a look on these three different approaches.

Star Wars languages

© Dark Lens, by Cédric Delsaux

The Star Wars linguistic universe counts many languages, either original or pidgins, most of them developed by Ben Burtt, sound designer for the Star Wars movies, from real languages recordings (English, Quechua, Tibetan, Zulu). Thus we find Bocce, Ewokese, Gunganese, Huttese, Jawaese, Neimoidian, and Shyriiwook. Mandalorian, or Mando’a, is an exception as it has a real grammar developed by the author Karen Traviss, as well as a writing system.

Code-switching between English and Spanish

Bilinguals, and multilinguals alike, often tend to switch between languages when the opportunity arises. While sometimes this phenomenon comes from an uneasiness in a specific situation when one language better fits the needs, it is always a sheer pleasure to speak in that intermingling mode with someone else who knows the involved languages. You can directly translate idiomatics which would not make any sense in the word-by-word translation but are a genuine word game you have to decipher in real-time. Most of the time, otherwise, multilinguals have to put strict barriers between each language, thus they kill this way that freedom of speaking in tongues which can be so joyful.

Star Trek languages

The linguistic richness of the Star Trek universe is particularly important, with three main languages: Klingon (designed by the linguist Marc Okrand), Romulan (or Rihannsu invented by the author Diane Duane), and Vulcan (developped by Mark R. Gardner). Those three artlangs have their own writing system, combining beauty and strangeness.

Multilingual text alignment with Linguee

Multilingual text alignment consists in putting face to face two texts in different languages. By text, we mean here any equivalent unity like a paragraph, a sentence, an expression or a word. This technique is used for automatic translation and gives its best results when the corpus is wide (to cover the maximum number of use cases, as it is a statistical approach) and the vocabulary reduced. 

Counting in Salishan languages

Spoken in southern British Columbia (Canada) and in the north of Washington, in Oregon, Idaho and Montana states in the U.S., the Salishan languages form a continuum of about thirty languages. If the situation is worrying for many of them, others are supported by their communities and are at different levels of use, education and revitalization.

Among them, we find the Comox (400 speakers), Halkomelem (200 speakers), Saanich (about twenty speakers), Squamish (about fifteen speakers) and Klallam (about ten speakers) languages.

Counting in Kanak languages

Spoken in the New-Caledonia archipelago, the 28 Kanak languages belong to the Austronesian languages family. Among them, we find Nengone, Paicî and Nêlêmwa, which respectively count 9,000, 7,000 and 1,000 speakers older than 14 years.