Language Survival

Most important languages to learn (besides English)

John — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:02:06 +0000

A post by the Guardian revealed the most important languages to learn: French, Spanish, Swedish, German, Russian. Four languages I understand, but Swedish? Is it really necessary to understand what the name of your IKEA furniture stands for? The Guardian stresses the fact there is a strong IT industry in Sweden. All understood, but Swedish people speak excellent English (and German, and French, and Spanish). Sorry, Swedes, you are just too good with foreign languages!

Image credit: Powi/Flickr

ESL – or why English still is the No. 1 language

John — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:07:05 +0000

After my recent post on the Globish book I found some more evidence on why English will stay the number 1 language in the years to come. A study by the British Council suggests that there are up to 2 billion English learners worldwide. Now that’s a number compared to “just” 1 billion native Mandarin speakers. Add the ~500 million native English speakers to that and you have roughly a third of the world population speaking English. So, time to start practicing your English skills, folks! There are many free good websites to learning English out there. Just search for terms like ESL or ESOL (English as a Second Language), EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ELL (English Language Learners/Learning). You’ll find tons of material out there. And if you are too lazy, here’s one good list of ESL resources from Anthony Halderman to get you started. Happy learning!

Image credit: British Council.

How many languages are there world-wide?

John — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:00:59 +0000

Well, according to Ethnologue there are currently 6,909 languages world-wide. But let’s be honest, how many languages are really spoken by a majority of people in a country? As I am watching the world cup right now I checked out how many member associations the FIFA has – the teams need to communicate in one language, right? There are 208 members, more than the 192 UN member states. That’s quite cool. So my educated guess is that there are about 150-200 “major” languages in the world (yes, I know, some countries speak the same language, but other countries have multiple official languages so I guess it levels out somehow).
So, most of us speak at least one foreign language and we’ve heard of many others some of which we probably even can distinguish from others when we hear them. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to understand all those languages we’ve never even heard of? I found a website called Worldlingo which offer free and professional translation in 141 languages! Now, how cool is that? Amharic, Assamese, Baluchi, Bashkir, Dinka, Dogri… to name just a few from the top of a very long list.

Image credit: SXC.hu

How not to pay for overweight luggage

John — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:48:43 +0000

I came across a post by Benny, an Irish guy travelling the world to learn languages. Apparently his whole life fits into 40 kg of luggage. Besides being amazed on how you can reduce your whole belongings to 40 kg he shows his fellow readers how you can sneak in an additional 15 kg of luggage without paying a dime. Now, that’s what I consider cool. Watch the video yourself to find out. And remember: you should pack the maximum allowed luggage into your suitcase and your carry-on luggage (don’t forget to check out a previous post of mine: my tipp on how to measure the exact weight).

Image credit: Noel Zia Lee, Flickr.

Life as a translator can be h(e)ard

John — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:49:33 +0000

This week just a quick pick from Failblog.org. Life as a translator can be hard – just watch the video:

Image Credit: Failblog.org/Dailymotion

Icelandic pronunciation

John — Wed, 12 May 2010 09:55:11 +0000

Google just announced on their translate blog that they have added pronunciation to a couple of languages – including Icelandic. Cool, finally we can pronounce our most favorite volcano Eyjafjalla the correct way. Sounds kind of funny but it’s the next step to their babel phone. Just wondering when they add more animal languages to their speech output. Oh, that reminds me of an ad that I just saw the other day – TomTom has just released a Darth Vader voice for their navigation system. Here’s the video:

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Teaching kids advertising language

John — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:14:33 +0000

Just stumbled across a website called admongo.gov. It’s an American intiative helping kids understand what ads really mean. As ads are part of our everday life (in fact when I look around my computer right now I can see three different ads) it is important for children to understand the ad lingo. So teaching them how advertising works, what advertising is trying you to do etc. will help them make better judgements. They have quite a cool flash-based game that goes through ads (where they are placed, what they try you to do, who is behind the ad). As a player you can collect points. A quite nice idea, I think we adults could probably learn a thing or two as well. Since I am never influenced by advertising I obviously got the perfect score. So: Read my blog or you’ll die (shock ad). Or in nicer words: Read my blog and show me how intelligent you are. And even better (the lynx effect): Read my blog and you’ll become the sexiest man/woman alive.

Image credit: admongo.gov

How to get the exact weight of your suitcase

John — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:24:18 +0000

I just came back from a couple of days of air travel. Every time I have the same problem: Overweight. I dread the check-in counter as my suitcase feels overweight but I am not entirely sure. I have oftetimes tried to weigh my suitcase on a pair of scales but either I can’t see the weight display or half the suitcase touches the ground. And yes, I have had to repack in front of a super long line-up. Nice to let people see your underwear. So, before you have to go through the same experience here’s one simple trick:
1. Take out a pair of scales.
2. Get on the scales and look at your weight.
3. Get on the scales again – this time holding the suitcase – and look at your weight.
4. Subtract your weight with suitcase (no. 3) from your weight without suitcase (no. 2).
I guess now you say: That’s so simple, I could have thought of that myself. I know. That’s exactly what I said when a friend of mine told me this trick.

Image credit: Noel Zia Lee, Flickr.

The longest gliding flight ever

John — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:58:26 +0000

While half of Europe is covered in ashes (OK, it is just a big ash cloud but nonetheless) air traffic has basically broken down. Apparently airplanes shouldn’t fly through the ashes as the engines might get destroyed. That got me curious of how the engineers know this. As (almost) always, it’s a proven fact: One of the most famous flights through volcano ashes was British Airways flight 9. Within minutes, all four engines stopped working, forcing the pilot to start a gliding flight. While he was trying to restart the engines with one of the probably most famous quotes of understatement:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

Now, how cool is that? Basically on the verge of crash, surival mode kicks in and he says “I trust you are not in too much distress”. That deserves the survival medal of the month. The crew managed to get the engines started again and kept the record of the longest gliding flight ever. This record was later broken by Air Transat flight 236, managing 19 minutes of gliding flight time – doing an emergency landing on the Azores without any fuel left. That’s what I call fuel efficient.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Globish: how English rules the globe

John — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:50:54 +0000

Just stumbled across a book review of a book called Globish which will be released in the next few days. It states that English has become the world language. Let me cogitate that (ha, I do use my new favorite word from time to time). After a little bit of deep thinking I have to agree. Much of the way we communicate today or what we use on a regular basis is dominated by “English-speaking” companies, products, services or similar. Let’s take the computer for example: Windows’ market share is currently around 90% and the rest is probably split up between Apple and Linux. All English-speaking. The world’s largest information ressource Wikipedia is multilingual, most of the articles are still in English (over 3 million compared to 2nd place German with about 1 million). The world’s top browsers are “English-based”: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and a few others. The most common language on the Internet is English, with close to 500 million Internet users. The world’s largest social network? Facebook – also English. The world’s largest search engine? Google – also English. The world’s largest telephone manufacturer? Nokia – Finnish. But I bet that they wouldn’t have this market share if they had stuck to a Finnish interface.

Now, if the world was ruled by cars we would probably talk German. But Germans love to use English words because it makes it sound more sophisticated. Probably the only non-English word when it comes to cars is Fahrvergnügen… and maybe Michael Schumacher, although he is not a word, strictly speaking. If the world would concentrate around drinking wines we would all be talking French. And we now that once you have a glass or two your French improves to a level where you (think you) can speak it fluently.

In the end, things that you use at work are probably the most influential when it comes down to deciding about a global language. Obviously, there are some local heroes like Baidu for search in China or Alibaba or e-commerce, but learning Chinese is such a difficult task that it will take a couple of generations. In addition, China has been good at copying stuff from the rest of the world and adapting it to the Chinese market. But what China really needs to do is come up with really innovative stuff so that others start copying their ideas / products / services. And at that point we can start talking about Chinese as the global language and we’ll start seeing long queues in front of a Chinese hardware manufacturer flagship store waiting to buy the latest technological gadget.