Listen & Learn Blog

Time has flown by this month, my apologies for not posting earlier.

This raises an issue for all language learners though – how do you find the time to study?

Some people will have no problem with this, and block out a few hours of their week to sit down and get on with it. If you’re like me though, you’re easily distracted by television, a novel, something on the internet, seeing some friends… the list goes on.

To make progress in your target language, you really need to put the time in. I find that going to a regularly scheduled class helps – knowing every week there’s a set time for the language I’m studying makes me more focussed. I also commute to work by train so try and do my homework then. I’ve downloaded some podcasts in my target language and listen to them in spare moments – when I’m cleaning for example. But I still feel like I could be doing more.

What tips do you have for managing your language study time?

UC Berkeley is asking incoming freshmen to submit their voices before arrival in a project that has been described as “part linguistic experiment, part social science and part ice-breaker” by the LA Times.

Last year the school caused controversy by asking students to send in saliva samples for DNA testing, with concerns raised over privacy. The new project aims to map and compare the students’ accents to find differences and similarities across the world.

The resulting voice samples will be presented on an interactive world map with others able to play the samples. Students will also be matched with others who have similar pronunciation, using a voice recognition programme. So far around 300 students have participated and it is hoped that 1500 will in time for orientation in September.

This sounds like a great way to informally connect to your school and your peers whilst also thinking about the implications of such a diverse range of accents. Would you submit a recording if you were headed to Berkeley?

Now here’s a cheery bit of news for St. Patrick’s Day – a professor at the University of Notre Dame has said that the Irish language is gaining in popularity among students.

Brian O’Conchubhair, associate professor of Irish at Notre Dame’s Irish Language and Literature Department, says that some people saw the language as more glamorous when the Irish economy was doing well in the 1990s. Previously the language had been associated with poor and uneducated people , and many immigrants left it behind in order to learn English.

Students are learning the language for a variety of reasons, from interest in their cultural heritage to those looking for something “fun and different”. (Source: The Republic)

There’s constant debate about whether endangered languages are worth preserving, but it seems fairly rare that we hear directly from those who are studying languages.

The Economist’s Johnson blog has asked linguist K. David Harrison seven questions about what is lost when a language dies – his answers are pretty interesting. Take a look at the interview here.

Harrison asserts that:

We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.

What do you think of this comparison?

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)