Listen & Learn Blog

A hospital in Florida is embracing multiculturalism in health care by developing culturally diverse patient services.

The Orlando Health Institute in Florida has developed a “cultural tool-kit” for staff to help them deliver appropriate care to patients of different cultural backgrounds. Florida’s population is increasingly diverse, with the third largest number of non-English speaking residents, according to the Census. In Central Florida, Spanish is the most spoken language after English, with Vietnamese, Creole and Portuguese following it.

In African American families, elders provide information and advice.

Muslim Arabs prefer dying patients be faced east towards Mecca, their holy city.

Among Haitians, weight loss is seen as a sign of illness.

In 2009, Florida Hospital came up with its “Guide to Religion and Culture,” which was given to all hospital employees “to enhance the delivery of pre-eminent care to our diverse patient community.” (Source: Orlando Sentinel)

This makes good sense for both cultural and business reasons – perhaps the example set by the hospital will catch on across the country.

I know a few people who have iPhones, and they seem to be massively addictive, and almost an extension of their arm for many.

A new app from the airline Emirates could make the phone an extension of their mouth instead!

The free app, iLingual, provides you with useful travel-related phrases in French, Arabic and German – and lets you use your own mouth to say them.

To use the app, you first take a picture of your mouth and adjust it to fit the screen. You can also personalise it with a male or female voice and alter the pitch to make it higher or deeper. Then you select a phrase and hold the phone in front of your mouth to make it look like you’re speaking in the chosen language.

The app is available in ‘lite’ (6Mb) or full size (80Mb+) versions, with the full version containing 400 phrases – a pretty decent size. You may look a little silly using it, but laughter is a great way to break down communication barriers!

To download the apps, follow the links on the Emirates page, or try the iTunes store.

Here’s a link to a fun video of a guy testing out the app in Paris. Has anyone else tried it out? What did you think?

An interesting article from the New York Times compares human translation to Google Translate. The conclusion of the article seems to be that Google Translate is useful, but not for translating ‘real’ writing – novels, for example.

It does provide an informative snapshot into how Google Translate works:

Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked. That’s how it simulates — but only simulates — what we suppose goes on in a translator’s head.

The article also appears to answer the question of whether translation machines can replace humans:

The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations. Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick. The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with.

Read the full article here.

With an estimated 6000+ languages spoken worldwide, how do you choose the right one for you to learn?

Many of us take language classes at school, based on the options that are offered –  this is mostly a choice between Spanish, French and German, although more options are becoming available. And many of us forget most of the language they have learned once they no longer are required to take classes.

So the first thing to consider is – what language(s) are you interested in?

You may choose Spanish because you enjoy Mexican telenovelas, or French because you’ve always dreamed of living in Paris – the most important thing is to have an interest in the language. If you don’t, then you will quickly lose motivation and have difficulty getting past the basics.

Consider also what language will be of use to you, both now and in the future. If you’re going on a long backpacking trip to South America, Spanish is a must. For a two week holiday in France, speaking some of the language is useful, but will perhaps not benefit you greatly in the long-term if you don’t plan to visit again. A long-term goal to emigrate to France, however, means that knowing the language is vital!

Linked to this is the availability of resources to learn your chosen language. Classes are a great way to kick-start your learning, so check if they’re available in your area. If you want to learn a more obscure language like Icelandic, then check to see what resources are available to you and if they’re going to be enough to get you started and continue your learning. Also see if there are native speakers in your area – talking to a real person is a great way to learn.

Whichever language you choose, enjoy it! With a new language comes opportunity to communicate and connect with more people.

Google has recently launched a cool new extension to their Goggles app which is very useful for language learners and travellers.

Previously you could take a picture with your cell phone’s built in camera and Goggle would recognise it and bring up relevant search results. So, for example, if you were in London and not quite sure which palace or castle you were looking at, you could take a picture of it and Goggle would identify it as say, Buckingham Palace.

Now the app goes one step further and can help translate text also. Looking at a menu and not quite sure what it says? Point your phone at it, press the shutter button and you’ll be given options to translate… if Goggles recognises the language, that is.

The catch is that the app can only recognise English, French, Italian, German and Spanish so far, although it can translate it to many other languages. Other Latin-based languages are in the works, and Google aims to eventually read non-Latin languages such as Chinese and Arabic also.

And the extra exciting bit? The app is totally free, downloadable onto your Android phone as long as it’s running Android 1.6 or higher. Can’t wait to give it a go!

There’s currently a lot of controversy in Arizona over the removal of teachers with accents from classes with English language learners.

The reasoning behind the removal is that English-learners should have a good model of how to speak the language, and heavily accented and/or ungrammatical teachers do not provide this. This has attracted heavy criticism from many angles, including the question of how to determine who has the ‘right’ accent.

It seems that officials may need to review their stance. A new research study from Israel shows that “it may be easier to learn a foreign language from someone who teaches it in the same accent as your own”. Published recently in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, the study was conducted by professors from the University of Haifa who all had an interest in the effects of accent on language acquisition.

The sample size of students at the University of Haifa was adequate and similar enough in composition to test the accent hypothesis. Sixty participants were chosen, aged 18 to 26. Twenty were native Hebrew speakers; 20 were from the FSU; and 20 were Israeli Arabs who had started learning Hebrew at around seven years of age.

In the study, the researchers made recordings of Hebrew phrases where the last word was recorded with one of four different accents: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or English. The students were then tested to see how long it took for them to recognize the Hebrew word in one of the four accents.

They found that the Hebrew speakers could decipher Hebrew words adequately regardless of the accent in which they were spoken, while the Russian and Arabic speakers needed more time to understand the Hebrew words presented in an accent foreign to their own.

The researchers feel that additional research is needed to determine just how much extra effort is involved in the attempt to process both an unfamiliar accent as well as new material.

“This research lays emphasis on the importance of continuing investigation into the cognitive perspectives of accent in order to gain a better understanding of how we learn languages other than our native tongue. In Israel and in other countries where the population is made up of many different language groups, this understanding holds great significance,” they write.

While many foreign language programs pride themselves on teaching students a second language in its true and native accent, this new study suggests that English taught to Mexican students as a second language, for example, can be taught just as well by a Mexican teacher speaking English, as by a native American who’s been speaking English since birth. (Source: Israel 21c)

After yesterday’s post on New York’s linguistic diversity, I was pointed to a follow-up post on the New York Times’ City Room blog. This post wondered what the least-spoken languages are in New York.

As they point out, no data is available for the city itself, but the census’ American Community Survey has statewide figures for the question “what languages other than English do you speak at home?” These were the least common answers:

1. Cayuga: 6 speakers.
2. Eskimo languages: 7.
3. Delaware: 9.
4. Iroquois: 10.
5. Kusaiean (spoken on Kosrae Island, Micronesia): 10.
6. Mohave: 13.
7. Algonquin: 13.
8. Kachin (spoken in northeast Myanmar) : 22.
9. Pangasinan (spoken in northwest Philippines): 22.
10. Pidgin: 22.
11. Zuni: 24.
12. Kazakh: 26.
13. Faroese (spoken on the Faroe islands off Denmark): 27.
14. Inupik (an Eskimo language): 29.
15. Cajun: 31.
16. Achinese (spoken in Aceh, western Sumatra): 32.
17. Mayan: 35.
18. Tungus (spoken in Siberia and northeastern China): 36.
19. Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in parts of Switzerland): 39.
20. Ponapean (spoken on Pohnpei Island, Micronesia): 40.
21. Muskogee: 40.

It’s interesting that Native American languages such as Iroquois and Algonquin are just as scarce as Kusaiean, a language spoken in Micronesia, a place most people would struggle to point out on a map (it’s north of Papua New Guinea and east of the Philippines, if you’re looking). And they are more scarce than Pangasinan, spoken in the northwest Philippines, and Kazakh, possibly only recognisable from the fictional character (and movie) Borat.

Should there be more of a focus on indigenous languages in America?

New York City has always been an incredibly diverse place – people have been attracted to its charms and promise since the 19^th Century. Ellis Island saw people from all over the world pass through it, and their descendents now make New York a cultural melting pot.

This interesting article in the New York Times explores the linguistic side of the city, with an estimated 800 languages spoken there. The 2000 Census revealed that residents of Queens were listed as speaking 138 different languages.  It is described as the “capital of language density in the world”.  Many of these languages are dying out in other parts of the world, but continue to be spoken somewhere in New York.

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.” (Source: New York Times)