What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

Ear­li­er this week we fea­tured the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s list of lan­guages ranked by how long they take to learn. Now that you have a sense of the rel­a­tive life invest­ment required to learn the tongue or tongues of your choice, how about a few words of advice on how to start? Or per­haps we’d do bet­ter, before the how, to con­sid­er the why. “A lot of us start with the wrong moti­va­tion to learn a lan­guage,” says Ben­ny Lewis in his TED Talk “Hack­ing Lan­guage Learn­ing.” Those moti­va­tions include “just to pass an exam, to improve our career prospects, or in my case for super­fi­cial rea­sons, to impress peo­ple.”

Real lan­guage learn­ing, on the oth­er hand, comes from pas­sion for a lan­guage, for “the lit­er­a­ture and the movies and being able to read in the lan­guage, and of course, to use it with peo­ple.” But Lewis, who now brands him­self as “The Irish Poly­glot,” says he got a late start on lan­guage-learn­ing, con­vinced up until his ear­ly twen­ties that he sim­ply could­n’t do it.

He cites five flim­sy defens­es he once used, and so many oth­ers still do, for their mono­lin­gual­ism: lack of a “lan­guage gene or tal­ent,” being “too old to learn a sec­ond lan­guage,” not hav­ing the resources to “trav­el to the coun­try right now,” and not want­i­ng to “frus­trate native speak­ers” by using the lan­guage before attain­ing flu­en­cy.

None of these, how­ev­er, seem to have occurred to Tim Don­er, who went viral at six­teen years with a video where­in he spoke twen­ty lan­guages that he taught him­self. He dis­cuss­es that expe­ri­ence, and the fas­ci­na­tions and tech­niques that got him to that point and now well past it, in his talk “Break­ing the Lan­guage Bar­ri­er.” At first put off by the drudgery of French class­es in school, he only began to grasp the nature of lan­guage itself, as a kind of sys­tem break­able into mas­ter­able rules, when he began study­ing Latin.

Want­i­ng to under­stand more about the con­flict between Israel and Pales­tine, Don­er decid­ed to find his way into the sub­ject through Hebrew, and specif­i­cal­ly through rap music record­ed in it. Using lan­guage study as a means of deal­ing with his insom­nia, he dis­cov­ered tech­niques to expand into oth­er lin­guis­tic realms, such as the method of loci (i.e., remem­ber­ing words by asso­ci­at­ing them with places), learn­ing vocab­u­lary in batch­es of sim­i­lar sounds rather than sim­i­lar mean­ings, and seek­ing out the for­eign-lan­guage learn­ers and speak­ers all around him — a rel­a­tive­ly easy task for a New York­er like Don­er, but applic­a­ble near­ly every­where.

In “How to Learn Any Lan­guage in Six Months,” Chris Lons­dale deliv­ers, and with a pas­sion bor­der­ing on fury, a set of use­ful prin­ci­ples like “Focus on lan­guage con­tent that is rel­e­vant to you,” “Use your new lan­guage as a tool to com­mu­ni­cate from day one,” “When you first under­stand the mes­sage, you will uncon­scious­ly acquire the lan­guage.” This res­onates with the advice offered by the much more laid-back Sid Efro­movich in “Five Tech­niques to Speak any Lan­guage,” includ­ing an encour­age­ment to “get things wrong and make mis­takes,” a sug­ges­tion to “find a stick­ler” to help you iden­ti­fy and cor­rect those mis­takes, and a strat­e­gy for over­com­ing the pro­nun­ci­a­tion-hin­der­ing lim­i­ta­tions of the “data­base” of sounds long estab­lished in your brain by your native lan­guage.

Your native lan­guage, in fact, will play the role of your most aggres­sive and per­sis­tent ene­my in the strug­gle to learn a for­eign one — espe­cial­ly if your native lan­guage is as wide­ly used, to one degree or anoth­er, as Eng­lish. And so Scott Young and Vat Jaisw­al, in their talk “One Sim­ple Method to Learn Any Lan­guage,” pro­pose an absolute “no-Eng­lish rule.” You can get results using it with a con­ver­sa­tion part­ner in your home­land, while trav­el­ing for the pur­pose of lan­guage-learn­ing, and espe­cial­ly if you’ve relo­cat­ed to anoth­er coun­try per­ma­nent­ly.

With the rule in place, you’ll avoid the sor­ry fate of one fel­low Young and Jaisw­al know, “an Amer­i­can busi­ness­man who went to Korea, mar­ried a Kore­an women, had chil­dren in Korea, lived in Korea for twen­ty years, and still could­n’t have a decent con­ver­sa­tion in Kore­an.” As an Amer­i­can liv­ing in Korea myself, I had to laugh at that: I could name at least three dozen long-term West­ern expa­tri­ates I’ve met in that very same sit­u­a­tion. In my case, I spent a few years devel­op­ing self-study habits for Kore­an and a cou­ple oth­er lan­guages while still in Amer­i­ca, and so did­n’t have to imple­ment them on the fly after mov­ing here.

Even so, I still must con­stant­ly refine my lan­guage-learn­ing strat­e­gy, incor­po­rat­ing rou­tines like those laid out by Eng­lish poly­glot Matthew Youlden in “How to Speak any Lan­guage Eas­i­ly”: seek­ing out exploitable sim­i­lar­i­ties between the lan­guages I know and the ones I want to know bet­ter, say, or find­ing sources of con­stant “pas­sive” lin­guis­tic input. Per­son­al­ly, I like to lis­ten to pod­casts not just in for­eign lan­guages, but that teach one for­eign lan­guage through anoth­er. And just as Eng­lish-learn­ers get good lis­ten­ing prac­tice out of TED Talks like these, I seek them out in oth­er lan­guages: Kore­an, Japan­ese, Span­ish, or wher­ev­er good old lin­guis­tic pas­sion leads me next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest

Do you want to speak more lan­guages? Sure, as Sal­ly Struthers used to say so often, we all do. But the require­ments of attain­ing pro­fi­cien­cy in any for­eign tongue, no doubt unlike those cor­re­spon­dence cours­es pitched by that All in the Fam­i­ly star turned day­time TV icon, can seem frus­trat­ing­ly demand­ing and unclear. But thanks to the research efforts of the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute, the cen­ter of for­eign-lan­guage train­ing for the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment for the past 70 years, you can get a sense of how much time it takes, as a native or native-lev­el Eng­lish speak­er, to mas­ter any of a host of lan­guages spo­ken all across the world.

The map above visu­al­izes the lan­guages of Europe (at least those deemed diplo­mat­i­cal­ly impor­tant enough to be taught at the FSI), col­or­ing them accord­ing the aver­age time com­mit­ment they require of an Eng­lish speak­er. In pink, we have the Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries. The red coun­tries speak Cat­e­go­ry I lan­guages, those most close­ly relat­ed to Eng­lish and thus learn­able in 575 to 600 hours of study: the tra­di­tion­al high-school for­eign lan­guages of Span­ish and French, for instance, or the less com­mon­ly taught but just about as eas­i­ly learn­able Por­tuguese and Ital­ian. If you’d like a lit­tle more chal­lenge, why not try your hand at Ger­man, whose 750 hours of study puts it in Cat­e­go­ry II — quite lit­er­al­ly, a cat­e­go­ry of its own?

In total, the FSI ranks lan­guages into six cat­e­gories of dif­fi­cul­ty, includ­ing Eng­lish’s Cat­e­go­ry 0. The high­er up the scale you go, the less rec­og­niz­able the lan­guages might look to an Eng­lish-speak­ing monoglot. Cat­e­go­ry III con­tains no Euro­pean lan­guages at all (though it does con­tain Indone­sian, wide­ly regard­ed as one of the objec­tive­ly eas­i­est lan­guages to learn). Cat­e­go­ry IV offers a huge vari­ety of lan­guages from Amhar­ic to Czech to Nepali to Taga­log, each demand­ing 44 weeks (or 1100 hours) of study. Then, at the very sum­mit of the lin­guis­tic moun­tain, we find the switched-up gram­mar, high­ly unfa­mil­iar scripts, and poten­tial­ly mys­ti­fy­ing cul­tur­al assump­tions of Cat­e­go­ry V, “lan­guages which are excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for native Eng­lish speak­ers.”

To that most for­mi­da­ble group belong Ara­bic, Chi­nese both Man­darin and Can­tonese, Kore­an, and — this with an aster­isk mean­ing “usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry” — Japan­ese. Now if, like me, you con­sid­er study­ing for­eign lan­guages one of your main pur­suits, you know that pos­sess­ing a gen­uine inter­est in a lan­guage — in its mechan­ics, in its ongo­ing evo­lu­tion, in the cul­tures that cre­at­ed it and the cul­tures it in turn cre­ates — can do won­ders to get you through even the most aggra­vat­ing dif­fi­cul­ties on the long jour­ney to com­mand­ing it. Then again, I’m also a native Eng­lish speak­er who chose to move to Korea, where I study not just the Category‑V Kore­an but the Category‑V* Japan­ese through Kore­an; you might want to take with a grain of salt the words, in any lan­guage, of so obvi­ous a masochist.

You’ll find the full For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute lan­guage dif­fi­cul­ty rank­ing list below. No mat­ter which cat­e­go­ry you’d like to take on, you can get a start at our Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons col­lec­tion, many of whose mate­ri­als come pro­duced by the FSI itself.

Cat­e­go­ry I: 23–24 weeks (575–600 hours)
Lan­guages close­ly relat­ed to Eng­lish
Afrikaans
Dan­ish
Dutch
French
Ital­ian
Nor­we­gian
Por­tuguese
Roman­ian
Span­ish
Swedish
Cat­e­go­ry II: 30 weeks (750 hours)
Lan­guages sim­i­lar to Eng­lish
Ger­man
Cat­e­go­ry III: 36 weeks (900 hours)
Lan­guages with lin­guis­tic and/or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences from Eng­lish
Indone­sian
Malaysian
Swahili
Cat­e­go­ry IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours)
Lan­guages with sig­nif­i­cant lin­guis­tic and/or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences from Eng­lish
Alban­ian
Amhar­ic
Armen­ian
Azer­bai­jani
Ben­gali
Bosn­ian
Bul­gar­i­an
Burmese
Croa­t­ian
Czech
*Eston­ian
*Finnish
*Geor­gian
Greek
Hebrew
Hin­di
*Hun­gar­i­an
Ice­landic
Khmer
Lao
Lat­vian
Lithuan­ian
Mace­don­ian
*Mon­go­lian
Nepali
Pash­to
Per­sian (Dari, Far­si, Tajik)
Pol­ish
Russ­ian
Ser­bian
Sin­hala
Slo­vak
Sloven­ian
Taga­log
*Thai
Turk­ish
Ukrain­ian
Urdu
Uzbek
*Viet­namese
Xhosa
Zulu
Cat­e­go­ry V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)
Lan­guages which are excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for native Eng­lish speak­ers
Ara­bic
Can­tonese (Chi­nese)
Man­darin (Chi­nese)
*Japan­ese
Kore­an
* Usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

It took 90 years to com­plete. But, in 2011, schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go final­ly pub­lished a 21-vol­ume dic­tio­nary of Akka­di­an, the lan­guage used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspo­ken for 2,000 years, Akka­di­an was pre­served on clay tablets and in stone inscrip­tions until schol­ars deci­phered it dur­ing the last two cen­turies.

In the past, we’ve pub­lished audio that lets you hear the recon­struct­ed sounds of Akka­di­an (Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia). Now, should you wish, you can down­load down­load PDFs of U. Chicago’s Akka­di­an dic­tio­nary for free. All 21 vol­umes would cost well over $1,000 if pur­chased in hard copy. But the PDFs, they won’t run you a dime.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

The The­ater Dic­tio­nary: A Free Video Guide to The­atre Lin­go

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

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A Lecture About the History of the Scots Language … in Scots: How Much Can You Comprehend?

Dau­vit Hors­broch has served as the Lan­guage and Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer of the Scots Lan­guage Cen­tre since 2007, and has spent con­sid­er­able time liv­ing in North East Scot­land. Above, watch him give a 19-minute lec­ture on the his­to­ry of the Scots lan­guage … in Scots. For the first 20 sec­onds, you might think, no sweat, I can hang with it. Then sud­den­ly your com­pre­hen­sions fades out, only to return moments lat­er, before dis­ap­pear­ing again. And on it goes.

As you lis­ten, you can enter­tain the long-sim­mer­ing debate: Is Scots a dis­tant dialect of Eng­lish? Or is it its own dis­tinct Ger­man­ic lan­guage? Writes Slate: “Both mod­ern Eng­lish and Scots descend­ed from Old Eng­lish in the 1100s, and devel­oped sep­a­rate­ly for hun­dreds of years. When Scot­land and Eng­land joined to form the Unit­ed King­dom of Great Britain in 1707, Scots was wide­ly regard­ed as its own lan­guage, dis­tinct from Eng­lish. It is still one of Scot­land’s three offi­cial lan­guages (the oth­er two are Eng­lish and Scot­tish Gael­ic), but because it is most­ly mutu­al­ly intel­li­gi­ble with Eng­lish, it’s some­times regard­ed as a dialect of Eng­lish or slang.” If you’d like to see Scots writ­ten, as opposed to just spo­ken, spend time over at the Wikipedia Scots page.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize? 

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Neil Young Busk­ing in Glas­gow, 1976: The Sto­ry Behind the Footage

The Theater Dictionary: A Free Video Guide to Theatre Lingo

It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your show­stop­pers are? Or, more to the point, do you know why a musi­cal-com­e­dy writ­ing team seeks to ori­ent its show­stop­ping num­ber at “eleven o’clock”?

The The­ater Devel­op­ment Fund’s The­atre Dic­tio­nary is an ongo­ing attempt to define and doc­u­ment the­ater terms for both the rab­ble and any bud­ding prac­ti­tion­ers who’ve yet to mas­ter the lin­go.

Each term is accom­pa­nied by a loopy slap­dash skit. Not all of the per­form­ers exhib­it the pedi­gree Veron­i­ca J. Kuehn and Nick Kohn of Avenue Q bring to “Eleven O’Clock Num­ber,” above, but cast­ing admin­is­tra­tors and tick­et booth reps in star­ring roles lend a homey egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, such as when stu­dents from the Yale School of Drama’s Depart­ment of Dra­matur­gy and Dra­mat­ic Crit­i­cism are giv­en free license to explore the ori­gins of “vom.”

(This loosey goosey approach also allows for uncred­it­ed appear­ances by oth­er the­atri­cal tropes—the marathon rehearsals where pop­corn con­sti­tutes lunch and one actor repeat­ed­ly com­plains that his work has been insuf­fi­cient­ly acknowl­edged.)

A “What Does This Word Mean” tab for each term anchors the video silli­ness, pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal and anec­do­tal con­text. It’s in keep­ing with the Dictionary’s greater goal of bring­ing the­ater to the peo­ple, let­ting every­one play with the toys.

Some of the def­i­n­i­tions are prac­ti­cal short­hand…

Oth­ers are couched in long­time, pos­si­bly archa­ic the­ater lore…

I’d exer­cise cau­tion with some of this lin­go. Even though many of these terms are born of prac­ti­cal­i­ty, overus­ing them may cause oth­ers to view you as the most obnox­ious of self-declared Triple Threats, the kid in the com­e­dy-tragedy mask sweat­shirt, prone to belt­ing out the entire sound­track of CATS at the slight­est provo­ca­tion. (“Thanks, 5!!!”)

Some of these terms have unex­pect­ed crossover appeal, most recent­ly Ghost Light, above. Know­ing the mean­ing of the term will help you bet­ter appre­ci­ate the pow­er of the Ghost­light Project, a post-elec­tion com­ing togeth­er of the­ater artists and audi­ences in defense and sup­port of vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties.

You can browse the The­ater Dic­tio­nary com­plete glos­sary here or watch the videos on TDF’s Youtube chan­nel.

The The­ater Dictionary’s FAQ con­tains infor­ma­tion on how pro­fes­sion­al the­atre com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions and col­lege-lev­el the­atre pro­grams can apply to con­tribute a video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

Take a “Breath” and Watch Samuel Beckett’s One-Minute Play

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Learn What Old Norse Sounded Like, with UC Berkeley’s “Cowboy Professor, Dr. Jackson Crawford

If you want to study anoth­er lan­guage, by all means feel free to study such wide­ly spo­ken ones as Eng­lish, Span­ish, and Chi­nese. But obscu­ri­ty, as we all learn at one point or anoth­er grow­ing up, also has an appeal, though we often need some­one cool to give us a hint as to which obscu­ri­ties to pur­sue. One “cow­boy pro­fes­sor” has, since the videos he posts to Youtube have begun to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty, emerged as the cool guy who may well turn a gen­er­a­tion of schol­ars-to-be on to the study of Old Norse. Though he holds an aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, “Wyoming’s Dr. Jack­son Craw­ford,” as he refers to him­self, seems to spend at least part of his time in what he describes as “the Wilder­ness of the Amer­i­can West.”

He also shoots his videos out there, an appro­pri­ate­ly sub­lime back­drop for the dis­cus­sion of the mechan­ics of the Old Norse lan­guage, orig­i­nal­ly spo­ken by the Scan­di­na­vians of the 9th through the 13h cen­turies, and the myth and poet­ry com­posed in it.

Here we have three of Craw­ford’s videos meant to address ques­tions of gen­er­al curios­i­ty about Old Norse: what the lan­guage sound­ed like, and, in two parts, how best to pro­nounce the names of the var­i­ous gods, places, and oth­er ele­ments of its mythol­o­gy, from Óðinn (whom you might have seen referred to as Odin) to Val­hǫll (Val­hal­la) to Ásgarðr (Asgard).

Jack­son also gives read­ings from the 13th-cen­tu­ry Poet­ic Edda, arguably the most influ­en­tial piece of Scan­di­na­vian lit­er­a­ture ever writ­ten, and one which he recent­ly trans­lat­ed into mod­ern Eng­lish. Per­haps a sam­ple:

Þagalt ok hugalt
skyli þjóðans barn,
ok vígd­jarft vera.
Glaðr ok reifr
skyli gum­na hverr,
unz sinn bíðr bana.

A noble man should
be silent, thought­ful,
and bold in bat­tle.
But every man should also
be cheer­ful and hap­py,
till the inevitable day of death.

In addi­tion to that and oth­er impres­sive CV items, he also came up with the runes and Old Norse dia­logue for the hit Dis­ney movie Frozen — just in case you had any con­cerns as to the lan­guage’s pro­fes­sion­al prac­ti­cal­i­ty. Explore his Youtube chan­nel here.

via Digg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larg­er for­mat.

I’ve inter­act­ed with many enter­tain­ing lan­guage-learn­ing resources in var­i­ous classes—from minis­eries in Span­ish to com­ic books in French—all geared toward mak­ing the unfa­mil­iar lan­guage rel­e­vant to dai­ly life. Learn­ing coun­ter­in­tu­itive pro­nun­ci­a­tions, pars­ing a new sys­tem of gram­mar, or mem­o­riz­ing the gen­ders of word after word can be labo­ri­ous and intim­i­dat­ing in the class­room. Doing so in every­day pop cul­tur­al set­tings, not as much.

When it comes to the teach­ing of dead lan­guages, the resources can seem less approach­able. I cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate the lit­er­ary and rhetor­i­cal genius of Vir­gil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Julius Cae­sar. But dur­ing my high school years, I did not always find their work easy to read in Eng­lish, much less in for­mal clas­si­cal Latin. The ela­tion I felt after suc­cess­ful­ly trans­lat­ing a pas­sage was some­times damp­ened as I puz­zled over his­tor­i­cal notes and gloss­es that often left me with more ques­tions than answers.

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larg­er for­mat.

That’s not at all to say that stu­dents of Latin shouldn’t be exposed to cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal con­text or read the finest exem­plars of the writ­ten lan­guage. Only that a break from the heavy stuff now and then goes a long way. Might I sub­mit to Latin instruc­tors one inge­nious tool from Eddie O’Hara, for­mer British Labour Par­ty MP and clas­sics teacher? O’Hara passed away in May of last year, and just this past week, his son Ter­ry O’Hara tweet­ed these trans­la­tions of Bea­t­les songs (includ­ing two Christ­mas tunes) his father made in the 60s for his stu­dents. At the time, these were the height of pop cul­ture rel­e­vance, and, while a far cry from the com­plex­i­ties of the Aeneid, a fun way for Latin learn­ers to relate to a lan­guage that can seem cold and impos­ing.

I will admit, my Latin has fall­en into such a state that I can’t imme­di­ate­ly vouch for the accu­ra­cy or ele­gance of these trans­la­tions (“cue fierce argu­ments among Latin gram­mar­i­ans,” replies one Twit­ter user), but there’s no rea­son to doubt Mr. O’Hara knew his stuff. ““He was a born edu­ca­tor,” his son remem­bers, “He was a teacher and clas­si­cist by back­ground and he had a strong inter­est in edu­ca­tion­al mat­ters and Greek cul­tur­al her­itage.” Edu­cat­ed him­self at Mag­dalen Col­lege, Oxford, O’Hara taught at Perse School, Cam­bridge, Birken­head School, and in the ear­ly 70s, C.F. Mott Col­lege in the Bea­t­les’ own Liv­er­pool.

Click here (and then click the image) to view in a larg­er for­mat.

In addi­tion to his role as a states­man, the Liv­er­pool Echo remem­bers O’Hara’s many decades as “a pop­u­lar teacher who brought class­es to life trans­lat­ing Bea­t­les lyrics into Latin.” We do not have any indi­ca­tion of whether he actu­al­ly tried to sing the lyrics, though his stu­dents sure­ly must have attempt­ed it. What must the cho­rus of “All My Lov­ing” sound like as “Ita totum amorem dabo, Tibi totum, numquam cess­a­ba”? Or “She Loves You” as “Amat te, mehercle”? Singing them to myself, I can see that O’Hara was sen­si­tive to the meter of the orig­i­nal Eng­lish in his Latin ren­der­ings. But I’d real­ly love to see some­one set these to music and make a video. Any of our read­ers up to the chal­lenge?

Final­ly, since ear­ly six­ties Bea­t­les lyrics aren’t as like­ly to engage stu­dents in 2017, what pop cul­tur­al mate­r­i­al would you trans­late today—classics teach­ers out there—to reach the bemused, bewil­dered, and the bored? If you’re already hard at work using hip resources in the class­room, please do share them with us in the com­ments!

Note: To view the images in a larg­er for­mat, please click on the links to these indi­vid­u­als images: Image 1 - Image 2Image 3. When the image opens, click on it again to zoom in.

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became the Stan­dard For Type­set­ters Every­where

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Discover Lincos, the Language a Dutch Mathematician Invented Just to Talk to Extraterrestrials (1960)

lincos

The recent hit film Arrival took on a ques­tion that has, in recent decades, deeply con­cerned those involved in the search for intel­li­gent life else­where in the uni­verse. Say we locate that intel­li­gent life. Say we decide what we want to say. On what basis, then, do we fig­ure out how to say it? Aliens, while they may well have evolved cer­tain qual­i­ties in com­mon with us humans, prob­a­bly haven’t hap­pened to come up with any of the same spo­ken or writ­ten lan­guages we have.

In 1960, the Dutch math­e­mati­cian Hans Freuden­thal came up with a solu­tion: why not cre­ate a lan­guage they could learn? The efforts came pub­lished in the book Lin­cos: Design of a Lan­guage for Cos­mic Inter­course. In it, writes The Atlantic’s Daniel Ober­haus, “Freuden­thal announced that his pri­ma­ry pur­pose ‘is to design a lan­guage that can be under­stood by a per­son not acquaint­ed with any of our nat­ur­al lan­guages, or even their syn­tac­tic struc­tures … The mes­sages com­mu­ni­cat­ed by means of this lan­guage [con­tain] not only math­e­mat­ics, but in prin­ci­ple the whole bulk of our knowl­edge.’ ”

Freuden­thal cre­at­ed Lin­cos as a kind of spo­ken lan­guage “made up of unmod­u­lat­ed radio waves of vary­ing length and dura­tion, encod­ed with a hodge­podge of sym­bols bor­rowed from math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, sym­bol­ic log­ic, and Latin. In their var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions, these waves can be used to com­mu­ni­cate any­thing from basic math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions to expla­na­tions for abstract con­cepts like death and love.” You can read Lin­cos: Design of a Lan­guage for Cos­mic Inter­course (PDF), over at Mono­skop, and even though it con­sti­tutes only the first of a planned series of books Freuden­thal nev­er fin­ished, you can still learn the basics of Lin­cos from it.

Be warned, how­ev­er, of the intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge ahead: Freuden­thal just plows ahead with­out even defin­ing many of the con­cepts, which read­ers with­out a back­ground in math­e­mat­ics or log­ic will like­ly need explained, and Ober­haus quotes even one astro­physi­cist as call­ing Freuden­thal’s book “the most bor­ing I have ever read. Log­a­rithm tables are cool com­pared to it.” Still, 56 years on from its cre­ation, this inter­galac­tic Esperan­to has had a kind of influ­ence: Freuden­thal demon­strat­ed the idea of includ­ing an intu­itive­ly under­stand­able dic­tio­nary in the space­ward-sent mes­sage itself, an idea Carl Sagan went on to use in his nov­el Con­tact, in which extrater­res­tri­al intel­li­gence-seek­ing astronomers receive a sig­nal from else­where that con­sid­er­ate­ly does the same.

Con­tact became a major motion pic­ture, some­thing of the Arrival of its day, in 1997. Two years lat­er, a cou­ple of Cana­di­an Defense Research Estab­lish­ment astro­physi­cists used a radio tele­scope to beam out a Lin­cos-encod­ed mes­sage toward a few close stars. Like any enthu­si­as­tic mem­ber of their pro­fes­sion would, they sent out infor­ma­tion about math, physics, and astron­o­my. They have yet to hear back from any res­i­dents, fel­low astro­physi­cists or oth­er­wise, of those dis­tant neigh­bor­hoods. But if any extrater­res­tri­als did hear the mes­sage, and even if they have yet to ful­ly grasp Lin­cos, I have to believe they feel at least a lit­tle grate­ful that, unlike some humans attempt­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers unlike them here on Earth, we did­n’t just start yam­mer­ing in Eng­lish and hope for the best.

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free NASA eBook The­o­rizes How We Will Com­mu­ni­cate with Aliens

An Ani­mat­ed Carl Sagan Talks with Studs Terkel About Find­ing Extrater­res­tri­al Life (1985)

Ani­mat­ed Video Explores the Invent­ed Lan­guages of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones & Star Trek

Klin­gon for Eng­lish Speak­ers: Sign Up for a Free Course Com­ing Soon

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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