Clearing Up the Blogroll

Hi everyone,

I’m back from my brief hiatus. I had a fantastic time with my friend, even though she had to cut her visit short due to her grandmother passing away.

Since it’s already quite late and I need to return to the text I’m translating, I just wanted to say that I’ve spent some time today clearing up my blogroll. I’ve removed links to blogs which have not been updated in the last 4 months and have added links to some new ones. I’ve decided to categorize the blogs according to the language(s) that the authors are learning. Blogs which deal with more than one language or focus on general language learning techniques are listed under “General”.

That’s all for today. Have a good start to the new week, wherever you are.

A Crazy Week..

Anyone who has been following my blogs this week will have seen that it’s been a bit of a crazy week for me. My partner had to fly out to South Korea last Sunday at very short notice, which was a bit of a dampener on our weekend and left me feeling just a little jealous (ok, VERY jealous) that he would get to visit South Korea without me.

To top things off, I had to finish off an essay for my Late Prehistory course and deal with a lost kitten that turned up in my back garden. The kitten has now been taken by the folks from the dierenambulance (lit. animal ambulance) who will try to find its owner or, failing that, find a new home for it. I have to say, I fell in love with the tiny creature and would have adopted it if I didn’t already have two cats of my own. Needless to say, my two cats felt a little jealous that they weren’t getting my undivided attention.

Now that I’m free of essays and lost animals, I’ll be posting on the blog (or rather, all my blogs) more frequently. A few quick updates are in order :

• My Chinese>English translation blog, Kelly Translates, has been moved to Blogger and has undergone a radical facelift. I’ve renamed it China on My Mind and the blog will focus on much more than just translation skills and resources. It will also cover topics on Chinese culture, history, food and language.
• John Biesnecker interviewed me for his new blog, Global Maverick. Click here to read the interview and feel free to check out the rest of his blog as it’s jam-packed with useful ideas on creating an ideal language environment, SRS techniques and tips for starting out with a new language. He has also interviewed AJATT’s Khatzumoto and Steve Kaufmann. You can read their interviews here and here.

That’s all from me for now. I’m off to enjoy the warm, sunny weather outside!

Kelly Translates

A short post today as I don’t have the time or energy to write the second part of my Twitter series. I wanted to let you all know that I have revived my translation blog, Kelly Translates. Most of you probably don’t remember the original blog but it’s a blog devoted to Chinese>English translation. The revised blog is in its infancy (only two posts so far) but I will be working on some new posts for the blog over the weekend.

That’s all for today. お休みなさい.

MyLangBlog is Back

Another short and sweet post for today…

I wanted to let you all know that Cathy (also known as Cisa) has revived her language blog, My Language Learning Blog. The blog was offline for a few months but is now back with a vengeance. Feel free to check out her blog and read about her adventures in learning Mandarin, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. A true polyglot in the making…she makes me seem lazy.

Llanito

I found  a fantastic blog at the weekend that’s devoted to llanito, the local dialect of Gibraltar. Llanito is written by a fellow Gibraltarian and is packed with llanito words and sayings.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the dialect (and I imagine the vast majority of you have never heard of it, much less know much about it! ), it is an interesting blend of English, Spanish, Genoese, Maltese and Hebrew and is the everyday language of the average Gibraltarian. Those of you who have learnt Spanish will see that some of the Spanish-sounding words in the llanito vocabulary are very different to standard Castilian. For example, “marbles” are called “mebli” in llanito but are known as “canicas” in standard Castilian. Sweets/candy are called “caramelos” in Castilian but are known as “bolillas” in llanito. While I enjoy speaking llanito with friends and family, I find that it interferes with my Spanish as I tend to forget that the words we use in Gibraltar for certain items are often very different to the standard Castilian. I know that this is a pitfall of any dialect but it does mean I need to think twice before having a conversation with a native Spanish speaker!

More information about this interesting and unique dialect can be found on the Wikipedia page. You might also want to have a look at the online Yanito Dictionary or the searchable database at Llanito.Com.

Essay Woes

I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth. I’m just busy writing (and re-writing) an essay which I have to send off by Friday. Expect plenty of updates once I’ve finished piecing together my academic masterpiece.

Since I need to keep this short, I thought I’d forego a proper post and just share a few sites and articles that I bookmarked over the weekend.

• How I Learned Chinese in Only 2 Years – How one language learner was able to learn Mandarin in only two years. His tips for learning Mandarin can easily be applied to other languages so it’s worth a read, even if you have no plans to learn Mandarin.
• Sushi & Sumo - A language learner’s quest to learn Japanese by watching Japanese TV series.
• Laoshu505000’s Youtube Channel - This guy is simply amazing. He seems to have a real gift for languages and has a language learning collection which makes mine pale in comparison (and I thought I was the only person who collected random phrasebooks).

That’s all for now. Back to my essay…

Links, Links, Links…

I’m still working on a post about the importance of learning Dutch so today I’m going to take the easy way out and share some links that I think are worth checking out.

• How Difficult is Chinese? -Liz has posted a great post about the challenges faced by people learning Chinese on her blog Pocket Cultures. Thoughts on learning Chinese were submitted by John Biesnecker, Ivy, a Singaporean blogger, and your’s truly.
• Mountain Songs - A fantastic website with hundreds of Chinese poems. The poems are mostly written in Classical Chinese and are accompanied by English translations and beautiful photos of the places they describe.
• Extreme Mandarin – A Chinese vocabulary blog with a difference. Yersi’s blog covers a wide range of topics, including Dungeons and Dragons, koala bears and cash.
• Chinese Sans 汉字 – John, author of Chinese Quest, has written a post about the limitations of learning Chinese (or Japanese) without learning the written language. I agree with what he has to say…I cannot make sense of anything written exclusively in pinyin.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for some original content later this week.

Quelle Semaine!

What a week it has been! My mother was in hospital on Monday (discharged on Tuesday, thank God), I spent 3 hours travelling home on Tuesday, work was insanely chaotic on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and yesterday a pleasant evening with some friends was cut short when their cat started hissing and running around their house as if possessed. I do hope their cat is alright as I have two of my own and would be worried sick if they started acting like their’s did…

So needless to say, there was little time left in the day to devote to language study or updating this blog! Hopefully things will be back to normal this coming week.

I’m taking a month’s break from my “One Foreign-Language Book a Month” challenge as I need to work on an essay for the archaeology course I’m taking (the current module focuses on classical archaeology).  Lately, reading time seems to be limited to the two hours I spend commuting to and from work each day so I think it makes sense for me to spend that time doing the necessary background reading for my course and essay. I’ll find other ways to fit in some language practice into my busy work days…

I have a few links to blogs, websites and news articles that might be of interest to fellow language learners :

• Button Gaffe Embarrasses Clinton - An example of how a mistranslation could lead to a potential political catastrophe. I wonder if anyone proofread the gift before it was given to Hillary.
• Les Tribulations d’une Caissière - I stumbled upon this blog via an article on the TimesOnline website. The blog’s author, Anna Sam, is a French university graduate who has recently published a book about her experiences as an undervalued and frustrated supermarket clerk. The blog is written in French but you can read a translation of an extract from her book by clicking on the TimesOnline link above (it can be found towards the end of the article). I’m sure there are many university graduates – in France and elsewhere – who can sympathise with her situation.
• Chinese Cultural Heritage Net - Entirely in Chinese but a great source of reading material for those who are interested in China’s cultural heritage and archaeological sites.
• Kanji Clinic – A fantastic resource for anyone struggling with Japanese kanji and vocabulary. Most of the articles are centred around a particular theme (e.g. colours, animals, medical terms) and include mini quizzes at the end of most articles to test your knowledge of the kanji discussed. Many of the articles explain Japanese cultural and social issues, such as the origins of Japanese festivals and the meanings behind some of the most common Japanese surnames.

That’s all from me for now. I have a few “word-building” posts in the pipeline and may have a few more language learning interviews to share with you all in the very near future.

それでは、じゃまたね！

日本語を勉強する

I thought I’d share some links to some Japanese learning resources I discovered recently. I’ve been studying Japanese on and off for the past two years so I’m always on the look-out for new resources.

Here are some of the websites and blogs I’ve stumbled upon :

Surasura : A Text for Intermediate Japanese – An online reader and grammar text for intermediate students. I find the grammar notes particularly useful, though I haven’t been able to get the audio files to work..

Learn Japanese Online : Intermediate Japanese Grammar List – Not a learning resource per se but it’s a good way to see what grammar points I still need to cover.

Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words - A great resource for anyone wishing to read or write haiku. It’s a shame that the site only uses romaji..

U-Biq Online Japanese Study – A fairly good beginners course. A lot of grammar points and sentence structures are covered and hiragana/katakana are used throughout the course. My only complaint is that kanji are not used in the example sentences, though you can find the kanji for most of the new vocabulary along the side of the page.

The Daily Yo-ji - A bit of a misnomer but this blog is a good resource for learning advanced Japanese grammar and expressions. It seems to be aimed mostly at people working towards the JLPT levels 1 and 2 so it might not be of much use to anyone who’s just started learning Japanese.

Japanite - Another blog for advanced learners. The author makes use of articles to teach grammar and vocabulary and you can find some useful posts on conversational Japanese.

The JapanesePod101 Blog - I’m not a big fan of the JapanesePod101 podcast lessons but I think its blog is one of the most useful resources around for learning the Japanese language. I really enjoy the Kanji Curiosity articles as they’re jam-packed with new vocabulary.

Happy New Year, 新年快乐, 明けましておめでとうございます…

Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope 2009 has gotten off to a good start for everyone. 2008 was a rather bad year for my partner and I (we had several deaths in the family) so here’s hoping that 2009 is a much more pleasant and happy year. So far so good…

We had a great Christmas and New Year and really enjoyed our time off from work. My mother was here until early this morning and I’m glad I was able to take off so many days from work and do things with her (lots of shopping and sightseeing!). She’s now back in Gibraltar so I guess I can get back to blogging and looking forward to her next visit, whenever that may be.

Some news/update/thoughts :

• iKnow! has added some Mandarin courses to its ever-growing selection of language courses. The courses are aimed at intermediate/upper-intermediate students and seem to be only available in traditional Chinese. Nevertheless, they look pretty good and jam-packed with useful vocabulary and example sentences. A special thanks to unzum for bringing these new courses to my attention!
• I watched the film adaptation of The Kite Runner during the Christmas break and enjoyed listening to spoken Dari (which is closely related to Persian). I don’t have any immediate plans to learn the language but I did do a little research and came across this fantastic Dari resource : LearnDari.Net. You can find video lessons (with transcripts) here.
• I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions yet though I have been giving some thought to my language learning objectives and wishes for 2009. I find it very hard to set myself concrete goals so I’ll probably settle for general goals, like my fellow language blogger Geoffrey Barto.
• I’ve added a few more language blogs to my blogroll, including Street-Smart Language Learning and John Biesnecker’s blog. If there are any language learning blogs you feel I’ve overlooked and should add to my blogroll, then feel free to leave a comment with links to them!
• A silly observation but I think the warning slips inside Kinder Surprise eggs are fantastic for language nerds such as myself. Not only do they give warnings about the small parts in every major European language, they also give warnings in Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Arabic!

That’s all for now. It’s time for me to go and give some real thought to my language learning resolutions for 2009.