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The New York Times on Bilingual Babies

By , 10/13/2011 at 8:25 am

The New York Times published an interesting overview of research on bilingual vs. monolingual infants this week. You might remember that bilingualism, and the cognitive advantages of bilingualism are topics that we are very interested in on this blog. The NYTimes article presents research on what’s happening in the development of infants who are brought up in either mono- or bilingual environments. The results are actually very interesting.

You can find the article here, but I will say that researches have found that bilingual babies are “more cognitively flexible,” which I think is a great phrase!

 

 

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Even More Tongue Twisters

By , 10/6/2011 at 7:56 am

If last week’s Tongue Twister videos left you wanting more, don’t worry! We have MANY more tongue twisters to share with you. We’ve put together a total of 17 videos, all featuring Brainscape’s loyal (and shameless) team members. Click below for a sampling, or head over to the Tongue Twisters Playlist for them all! (more…)

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Language Learning Tool: TED Talks

By , 10/5/2011 at 8:18 am

We’ve listed our top youtube channels to learn Spanish and French, but what about other video sites where you can learn a foreign language? What about a site where you can potentially learn 80 different languages?

TED’s website provides great language tools including subtitles and interactive transcripts for 1000s of videos. Freelanguage.org recently published a great guide to how to learn a language using TED talks. Below the cut you’ll find the FreeLanguage.org article. (more…)

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Travel guidebooks as language instructors

By , 10/4/2011 at 8:00 am

When people voyage to foreign countries, many times they bring guidebooks with them not only to get an idea of what to see, but also for the little section that’s always present at the back of the book. Vocabulary in the country’s language. I recently found an Italian guidebook that my parents had bought over ten years ago, and, perusing it, I started thinking about what exactly the point was of having a language section. (more…)

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Learning Spanish through yoga

By , 9/13/2011 at 8:27 am

If you love languages, you are always looking for new ways to keep learning more and more. Study books, interactive websites, conversation cafés, and immersion in a foreign country are only a few of the many ways that one can learn a language. Within these methods is another strategy that I recently “re-found”, a strategy whose effectiveness, I realized, is seriously downplayed. What is that strategy? Movement.

I recently stumbled upon an article in the Orange County Register news of an interview with yoga instructor Claire Nightingale. Nightingale, who has had experience as a high school English and Spanish teacher, talked about how she has seen many of her students get frustrated with their inability to understand certain aspects of the language. It was from that frustration that she conceived of the idea of teaching Spanish through yoga. (more…)

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Dyslexia and Voices

By , 9/12/2011 at 8:14 am

Dyslexia has always been thought of as a learning disability having to do with literacy impairment. Many people who have it are unable to read properly when they are younger, or read a lot slower than a non-dyslexic reader. They may also have trouble spelling or reading things like nonsense words. In short, dyslexia is a learning disability in which people have trouble translating visual language into language that the brain can understand. It happens to be one of the most common learning disabilities among children, affect anywhere from 10% – 15% of our population, according to various sources.

Until recently it has been thought of mostly as a learning disability that specifically affects the ability to read and understand writing. However, research recently completed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds another dimension to dyslexia that helps us understand exactly what it is. (more…)

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What’s in an Idiom?

By , 9/7/2011 at 7:29 am

One of the greatest challenges that many people face when learning a new language is that of learning idioms. What often happens is that we literally translate a phrase from our first language to the new language in an effort to stay true to the structure provided by our native language, which generally does not mean what we want it to.

For example, after a particularly long day playing volleyball, I told my French host family that I was feeling very sore. However since I did not know at the time how to say “sore”, I ended up saying something that in English translated to “my body is very hurt”, or “I have a tired body”. They understood what I was saying after a while and laughed, but kindly informed me that there was an idiom that more accurately conveyed what I was trying to say.

That being said, in English we have so many idiomatic expressions that we are not even aware of using simply because they are idiomatic, and thus very natural to our English language. Taken literally, many of these idioms do not make sense at all; however we know what they mean because we’ve grown up using them!

In a blog post adapted from How-to-study.com, the author lists some of the idioms very commonly used in the English language. Take a look at the list below! (more…)

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How Phonology is like High School

By , 8/22/2011 at 11:45 am

As adapted from a post by the Lingusitic Mystic.

To people just approaching the field of linguistics, the subcategory of phonology might seem a little daunting. The phonology of a language is that which defines whether it’s ‘fishes’ or ‘fishs.’ It’s the part of a language that takes care of all the audible awkwardness. Officially, it’s the “study of how sounds pattern and interact within words and sentences in different languages,”1 which sounds vague unless you have a great way to make it more understandable. Lucky for us, the Mystic did all the hard work and we don’t have to lift a finger, we just have to scroll down. He explains that phonology is a field where there isn’t a whole lot of information, or at least good information, out there. The complex interrelationships of sounds are hard to describe, much like the unspoken rules, raging hormones and drama that plagued our lives for four grueling years.
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The Power of Making Your Own Vlog

By , 8/15/2011 at 8:39 am

If you have been keeping up with the Brainscape blog for a while or have rifled through old blog posts, you may have noticed that a member of the Brainscape team, Amanda Moritz, used to have a video blog of herself trying to learn Spanish. Although she only has two videos up, the point is that she took action and decided to share her learning experience with other people.

Many language learners try to learn languages by themselves without any guidance or input from others. While that could work in the early learning stages, you will eventually have to come in contact with other people so that you can speak the language and put it into use in order to make sure that you are on the right track. (more…)

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15 Foreign Words we use every day in English

By , 8/8/2011 at 9:10 am
English, just like any other language, is riddled with foreign words stolen from other tongues. Most of them are anglicized, but some have stuck to the original. Many of these phrases are common in literature and everyday speech–understanding these phrases is necessary for understanding what you read! Here are a 15 examples of those commonly found in conversation (that will also make you sound, like, totally smart), with language of origin and sample sentence, courtesy of How To Learn.

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