Nee's Language Blog

Have you heard about "word cloud"? Have you seen any visual representation for text data that shows tag label in different font sizes and forms like "cloud"? I have just found an interesting website called Wordle . It is very easy to use it. Click on "Create" in the menu bar, and then you can see whether you want to paste a bunch of text or paste URL of any website. Finally, leave the rest for the program and you may want to modify font type, color, or even play around with the "Randomize" button. 

I encountered a video that may boost your motivation in language learning. This one-hour video is awesome. I believe not only me but also those who are interested in languages may learn a lot from it. The video was broadcasted live on Saturday, December 15th, 2012 at 8 PM GMT. Eight polyglots from around the world met together to share their language learning strategies and their language learning experiences. 

This funny video comes from Taichung (台中) city in Central Taiwan. In the video, the driver speaks mostly two languages, Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese, which I believe to be his native languages. However, you can also listen to him saying names of places in foreign languages, such as German, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese. He also greets passengers in several languages, such as Japanese, Cantonese, and Thai.

It is an ugly truth to say that students can get bored in class, moreover, when it is Monday morning. I was sitting at the back doodling, until I got an idea, "I am going to write my name and a sentence in several languages." Thus, I searched online for foreign language sentences and I found that Omniglot has them. I limit the number of languages to those that I am familiar with, such as Russian, Korean, Chinese Mandarin, English, Spanish, Cantonese, Indonesian, and Latvian. What do you think about it?

我很喜歡中文  man patīk latviešu ik vind de Nederlandse erg leuk me gusta mucho Español Я люблю русский язык "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart." ~Nelson Mandela

Which is the easiest language? How many speakers of the language? How important is the language? Which is the most popular language? And the list goes on...

If you think that speaking two or three languages is awesome, you will not believe the person I am going to show. Ioannis Ikonomou, a polyglot (a person who knows several languages) comes from Greece, is a translator in the European Commission (EC) in Brussels. He began his language journey by learning English as a foreign language at the age of six. Then, it was continuing to German, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, and the list goes on. He currently speaks 32 languages! Among them is Chinese Mandarin . Thus, he has spent several months working in Beijing, China as the only in-house translator that EC trusts to translate classified Chinese documents.