Listen & Learn Blog

Thinking in a foreign language leads people to make more rational decisions, according to researchers at the University of Chicago.

Featured in the current issue of Psychological Science, the study found that people have less emotional ties to a foreign language, meaning they have a more rational thought process. Their emotional ties to their native language impedes logical thought, according to the study’s authors.

The study, titled “The Foreign Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases”, used previous research showing that people are naturally risk-averse. In one experiment, researchers asked college students to make their decision in (recently learned) Spanish; the test showed that the students were more likely to take a bet in Spanish than in English. This result has potential benefits:

“People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language might be less biased in their savings, investment and retirement decisions, as they show less myopic loss aversion,” the authors wrote. ”Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial.” (Source: Huffington Post)

Another reason to learn a second language!

Good news for tech-savvy language learners – you can now buy Kindle ebooks in Spanish!

Earlier this month Amazon launched eBooks Kindle en Espanol at amazon.com/tiendakindle. The shop currently has around 30,000 Spanish language titles, including bestsellers from Paolo Coehlo and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You can even buy the massively popular young adult series The Hunger Games.

“We’re excited to introduce Spanish language storefronts on all Kindles, as well as a dedicated store for our Spanish-speaking customers in the US,” said Kindle Content vice president Russ Grandinetti.

“We’re looking forward to continued expansion of our store for Spanish language readers around the world.” (Source: Yahoo News)

Now there’s no excuse for not doing some Spanish language reading!

Happy New Year everyone!

Hope you had some fun downtime and are now ready to get your language learning started again!

It’s a new year and that means resolutions. Some of mine are language related and I hope yours are too. I discovered an article at CBC News that may help us – it promises the secret to learning languages!

We can’t all be like Alexander Arguelles, an American polyglot who spends nine hours a day studying different languages. Most of us can only spare a little time each day or each week. But he may have one technique we can all use – exercising our brains as well as our bodies. When Arguelles goes running, he listens to an audio book in one of his target languages. Not all of us go running of course, but we can listen whilst doing other types of exercises – I sing along to Spanish words whilst doing Zumba, for example.

And there’s the technique mentioned in the article – shadowing.

The method is simple: go outside, put on headphones and play a bit of the language you’re trying to learn.

Then walk briskly, staying upright and, in a loud, clear voice, try to repeat what you hear, simultaneously. Hear, repeat, hear, repeat and march around.

Odd, yes, but effective.

Erard says shadowing has a number of things going for it. It gets you used to people looking at you when you’re doing something new, so it reduces the embarrassment factor.

It also hooks up kinetics to the language, so it engages those gross motor skills and makes you less focused on what’s going on with your mouth and tongue. Plus it exercises your working memory, which is key to learning a foreign language. (Source: CBC)

Sounds pretty simple! I realised my teacher also uses this technique in class – I used to feel pretty silly repeating the same phrase over and over with others, like I was a kid again, but it actually works!

Have you tried shadowing?

Despite the dire warnings, Hurricane Irene passed through New York City barely leaving any damage. But one lasting effect of the hurricane (or rather Mayor Bloomberg’s response to it) is a Twitter account that mocks the Mayor’s attempts at Spanish.

From an outsider’s point of view, Mayor Bloomberg’s willingness to learn a language spoken by many in his city and to try communicate with them better is an admirable thing. Given that his spoken Spanish sounds about as good as mine though, he has been criticised for not leaving important warnings up to someone with a better grasp of the language.

El Bloombito (aka Miguel Bloombito) is a parody of the Mayor’s Spanish skills. Examples of tweets include:

Los librariotequas del publico somos opening at el 12pm. Returno sus bookas! Que mucho fines!

Muchos trees esta falling downo. No stando under los trees. Que splat!

The Mayor was asked about the account in a press conference and seemed to take it well. Interestingly, from this article from the New York Times it seems that Bloomberg has been learning Spanish since around 2002 and has a personal tutor for conversation classes. He’s a busy man, but I would personally want my spoken skills to be much better after almost 10 years of practice! As I said before, Bloomberg sounds like I do when speaking Spanish, and I’ve been learning sporadically for around a year.

If you’re interested in who’s behind the account, take a look at this story from the New York Observer.

What do you think of Mayor Bloomberg’s language skills? Do you prefer El Bloombito?

Colombia is probably better known for civil war and the drug trade than being a prosperous country. But that’s changing. Latin America’s fifth-biggest economy is rated as having one of the best business environments in the region by the World Bank, and the Colombian people are taking advantage of this by learning the English language.

The capital, Bogota, may not yet have the infrastructure, but the human resources are described as ‘top notch’. Free conversational English classes run by the city government are encouraging people to connect with international businesses and encourage investment in the country.

The Talk the World programme is already becoming a success, with several international businesses recruiting at a recent graduation ceremony. Bilingual staff mean companies can expand and employ more Colombians, hopefully improving quality of life.

One 49 year old businessman is already seeing the benefits, with his software company landing contracts with multinationals that are setting up in Bogota. Mr Escobar aims to improve his English to get more business for his company.

Let’s hope English (and other languages!) can help the Colombian people prosper.

(Source: CTV)

One of the most frequently heard reasons for not learning a new language is “I haven’t got the time”.

That’s something I’ve been saying recently, as the combination of work, work-related activities, personal life and keeping up with family and friends has left me with little free time. But then I started thinking about how I use my time and realised that I can fit in language learning after all.

For example, many of us commute to and from work. My commute can take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic. I used to spend this time on a bus doing nothing. Then I noticed a man on the bus studying a notebook that had Arabic writing next to English words. I realised he was revising vocabulary on his commute, and thought I could do the same.

So, the next day I started listening to a Spanish podcast on my MP3 player. The podcast is around 20 minutes long, so I can easily fit it in during my bus ride, and get to work a little bit smarter!

It’s not just on your commute that you can study though – how about while you’re at the gym? Or during your lunch break? You could even put on a podcast while you’re doing the washing up!

Do you have any tips for using your language-learning time more effectively?

I was alerted to this film over at the Omniglot blog, and it looks really interesting.

Speaking in Tongues follows four children as they attend immersion school in San Francisco. The children are native English speakers but learn to communicate in Mandarin and Spanish, two of the most spoken languages in the world.

There’s a commitment in America to remain an “English only” nation, with opinions on both sides of the fence. Some say bilingualism is essential to America’s economic development and national security; others warn that national identity is at risk. According to the makers, the answers are in the movie – the children find that learning a second language “transforms their sense of self, their families, and their communities”. The opportunity to become ‘global citizens’.

It sounds like a really engaging film, I hope to get to see it soon!

Are you always getting in to fights about which word is more popular? Then there are a couple of websites for you!

The first is Googlefight, where you put in two words and stick people have a short fight, before one is announced the winner. A graph then appears showing how many hits each word has. You can do this with any set of words – listen and learn for example (learn wins!). The site is also offered in French and Romanian. So if you’re learning either of those two languages and are wondering which word is more popular, then try Googlefight. Amusing and educational!

Another site that’s similar is Twitter Tussle. Instead of stick people, Twitter Tussle has two birds tussling it out to show which word has the most TPM (tweets per minute). Listen is the winner here! As Twitter is used in many different languages, it is more wide-ranging than Googlefight – I put in “hablo” and “espanol” for example.

Although I can’t see too much benefit of these sites in terms of language learning, they are certainly an amusing distraction!

One of the things I love about Christmas is the songs that get played which can’t be played at any other time of the year.

My favourite is Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, and I also have a soft spot for Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You. However, this year I have discovered a whole new batch of Christmas songs that I never would have known if I hadn’t started learning Spanish!

In Spain, carols are called villancicos. As well as many songs that have been translated from English, traditional Spanish villancicos include Campana Sobre Campana. Another more modern popular song is Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano (see below).

Songs are a great way to pick up new vocabulary, and this is a great way to get into the festive spirit as well as learning more about cultural aspects of your chosen language! What’s your favourite Christmas song in your target language?

I’ve just discovered these podcasts called The World in Words from PRI (Public Radio International) and I can’t believe I haven’t heard of them before!

The description of the series is:

The World in Words focuses on language. We cover everything from bilingual education to the globalization of English to untranslatable foreign phrases. You’ll learn how to insult someone in Icelandic, among other things.

If that doesn’t hook you in, I’m not sure what will.

In the most recent podcast the host Patrick Cox explores what happens to a ‘heritage’ language like Italian when languages like Chinese and Spanish dominate the curriculum and why Latin America is mad at the Royal Spanish Academy. Definitely worth a listen.