Wow – if this space isn’t more deserted than a desert (pun intended), I don’t know what is!

With many new assignments and interesting new projects going on lately here at Carel, I hadn’t even realized a whole month has surreptitiously slipped by since my last post on here! Well, time to rectify that – with yet another piece of our Practical tips for learning a language series.

Read lots of books (in the foreign language): I cannot stress enough how important this is for learning a foreign language. Because learning a foreign language is not just about knowing lots of words and understanding its grammar – it is so much more than that. Books help you develop your “sense” for the language in an astounding number of ways – it enriches your speech, improves the way you express yourself in the foreign language, helps you click into the language with a greater ease, to name just a few.  Some might say – OK, but surely I can only start reading books after I’ve gotten to an advanced level? That’s the beauty of it – you do NOT have to wait until you are proficient at a language in order to start reading books in it. In fact, the sooner you start reading, the faster you will get to that proficiency level you are after.

I remember trying to read my first books in English back in Foreign language school – I was nowhere near advanced, let alone proficient at the time, but I somehow felt this would be a great help. And it was – no matter how annoying it would get, what with all the flipping through dictionaries every now and then, looking up yet another unknown word! And mind you, that was back in the days when there were no computers yet – imagine the amount of time you could spend on a single page of the book, having to stop and open the dictionary every now and then like mad! Eventually though the amount of unknown words will decrease to a point you will no longer need to look anything up, so be patient and just read and read and read. It will pay off big time.

Watch subtitled movies (and listen to the original foreign-language speech).

I loved doing that in my school days – I even sometimes used to turn my back to the TV screen so that I don’t unwittingly look at the Bulgarian subtitles while listening to the English speech. My mom would smile at me in amusement, probably wondering about me and my learning ways.

To date I still prefer watching subtitled movies over such dubbed in Bulgarian.

Practice speaking any chance you get: Now, I realize that this might not be that feasible when you have a full-time job that does not require you to speak the language, and then there are also family and other social commitments in your life that additionally squeeze your free time down to zero. But speaking is the most important of all activities that language learning entails – so you have to make time for practicing if you’re really bent on learning that language.

Be creative, use any moment you can to speak – for example in the morning, while sipping your coffee and thinking about all the things on your to-do list for the day – think about them out loud and in the foreign language. Yes, that means talking to yourself, I know – a notion not everyone might appear to be comfortable with – but it’s the next best thing when you have no one to speak to.

It’s a well-known fact that speaking a language is a lot harder than simply understanding it – and can only be accomplished by practicing speaking as much and as often as possible.

- The Saturday before Easter is called “Lazarovden” (St. Lazar’s day) in Bulgaria and is named after St. Lazar who is believed to have been resurrected by Jesus 4 days after his death. The name Lazar is a symbol of health and longevity.

- Palm Sunday in Bulgaria is called Tsvetnitsa or Vrabnitsa and is one of the most beautiful Bulgarian holidays. А “holiday of flowers and trees”, Tsvetnitsa heralds the arrival of spring and is also one of the biggest name days in Bulgaria as quite a few Bulgarians carry names that are derived from flowers and trees. On Tsvetnisa all Bulgarian churches hand out willow branches that people take home and hang on doors or icons for health and prosperity.

- According to Bulgarian tradition, if you have missed the chance to do some egg-painting on Holy Thursday, you can still have a shot at it on Saturday. Quite convenient for all of us Mon-Fri workers out there!

- Pre-Easter fast (Lent) in Bulgaria begins on a certain day called Zagovezni, which is always the Sunday six weeks before Easter. For the duration of these 46 days, whoever has chosen to fast (mainly the more devout ones) abstains from all kinds of meat and animal products. On Tsvetnisa/Vrabnitsa though you are allowed to eat fish.

- Apart from lamb, typical Easter food also include sweet bread and dyed eggs. In Bulgaria, the traditional sweet bread is called Kozunak and is a must at any Bulgarian table on Easter.

- As per Bulgarian tradition, a table representing Christ’s coffin is set up in churches on Good Friday and people climb underneath for health and fertility.

- A curious Bulgarian folkloric belief maintains that if you hear a cuckoo halfway through fasting period, it means spring is on its way. If you happen to have money in your pocket at the sound of the cuckoo, you will be rich in the coming year; if you have no money though or are hungry, you are likely to stay that way throughout the year.

- This year’s Good Friday (today) in Bulgaria falls on the much feared and referred to by many as “fatal” – Fri 13th. The day of Jesus’s crucifixion coinciding with the “fatal” Fri 13th – an extremely rare event according to astrologists, surely must be causing many superstitious hearts to skip a beat or two today in anticipation of all sorts of apocalyptic events. Personally I prefer to look at it as an extremely lucky day – and let’s hope I am right!

Here’s to a great Easter weekend!

Today we’ll focus again on some more practical tips for learning a foreign language – in continuation of our first post of this series.

1. Time management: yes, the constant lack of time is a chronic issue for most of us in today’s hectic world. When you’re pressed for time due to a plethora of factors in your everyday life, try finding alternative ways of studying and be creative in terms of finding time. You’ll be surprised how much you can get out of, for example, your daily commute:

• Public transport: Whether it’s the bus, train, subway or whatever you are using to get to and back from work, this daily commute can be very useful in many ways. After all, you can’t do much while sitting and waiting to get to your destination – so why not make time pass by faster by, say, learning a few more words?
This is something I’ve practiced many times when I was a student at the University of Economics here in Varna. I am not originally from Varna so each time I’d travel to my hometown to visit my parents, I’d bring a stack of those word-notes I mentioned in the previous post with me (very handy as it’s neither heavy nor space-consuming), and go through them several times during my two-hour trip.
Another option is to bring a book (in the respective foreign language) with you on your daily travels.

• Use your car as a learning center: this one’s for all of you drivers – bring a language-learning tape or CD with you, and play it in your car while driving to/back from work.

2. Practice writing any chance you get, as much as you can.
I realize that in the highly technological time that we live in, writing things down by hand is increasingly being replaced by typing on the computer keyboard. Having had the chance to grow up and graduate from high school in the pre-computer years though, I know just how invaluable handwriting is when learning a language.

I remember back in my days at Foreign language school, some of the homework our teacher would give us would be writing words repetitively, or the so called “copywork” – after school, we had to write each word we had learned that day for a certain number of times (usually about 2-3 lines) in our notebooks. Back then I considered it somewhat tedious and boring a task, often mumbling to myself “oh is this really necessary”, nevertheless still painstakingly writing each word down line after line; but later on I came to realize how powerful these hand-written repetitions are for keeping the word firmly imprinted into your memory. Because the more you write it, the more your hand “memorizes” the way it is spelt, and next time you’re wondering if that word was spelt with a single or double “s”, etc, you just get a piece of paper and start writing it – your hand will remember and write the word down correctly.

Even now, when typing has taken over most of our writing, not to mention Google and all the online dictionaries out there, I still sometimes practice this when in doubt as to how a certain word is spelt – I take a pen and paper and write the word down. This technique just never fails to produce the correct answer – even years after you have first sat down to exercise writing that particular word.

A good read related to the above which I came across while writing this post, is Softpedia’s Writing Helps Memory More Than Typing.

No wonder Guinness is currently attempting to get St Patrick’s Day officially recognized by GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ as ‘The Friendliest Day of the Year’ – I mean, does anyone know of another country’s national holiday that is so widely observed and celebrated around the world? It’s a rhetorical question, of course – we all know the answer is no. Each year on March 17th everyone becomes Irish – and we’re certainly joining in!

Here’s a selection of some brilliant Irish quotes and toasts that we’ve put together for you.
Let’s enjoy some Irish wit and wisdom!

Famous Irish quotes

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
Oscar Wilde

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.”
Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)

“I am a drinker with writing problems.”
Brendan Behan

“There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”
Brendan Behan

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”
William Butler Yeats

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Oliver Goldsmith

“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversations.”
George Bernard Shaw

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
George Bernard Shaw

“A life making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing at all.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.”
Samuel Johnson

———————————————————-
Irish Toasts

Health and a long life to you.
Land without rent to you.
A child every year to you.
And if you can’t go to heaven,
May you at least die in Ireland.

*********************
May the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past.

*********************
May the face of every good news and the back of every bad news be towards us.
*********************
May the leprechauns be near you,
To spread luck along your way.
And may all the Irish angels,
Smile upon you on St Patrick’s Day.
*********************

Happy St. Patrick’s day, everyone! May the luck of the Irish be with you!

In honor of March 8th – International Women’s day, today’s post is of course dedicated to all the ladies.

Being a woman myself, I couldn’t help but mark the occasion by putting together a piece on some fun and perhaps not that well known facts about us – mixed with other stuff about us that is quite well known and pretty obvious to the whole world but still fun to read.

True to our blog’s (predominantly) linguistic nature, I’ll start off with an interesting fact about the difference between men and women when it comes to languages:

Languages: Two sections of the brain responsible for language have been found to be larger in women than in men, indicating one reason that women typically excel in language-based subjects and in language-associated thinking. Additionally, men typically only process language in their dominant hemisphere, whereas women process language in both hemispheres. This difference offers a bit of protection in case of a stroke. Women may be able to recover more fully from a stroke affecting the language areas in the brain while men may not have this same advantage.

And here’s a selection of some well-known fun facts about us ladies:

• If a man goes on a seven-day trip, he’ll pack five days worth of clothes and will wear some things twice; if a woman goes on a seven-day trip she’ll pack 21 outfits because she doesn’t know what she’ll feel like wearing each day.

• Women are never wrong. Apologizing is the man’s responsibility

• Women do NOT want an honest answer to the question, ‘Is that girl good looking?’

• Women never have anything to wear. Don’t question the racks of clothes in the closet; you “just don’t understand”. (Couldn’t agree more with this one!)

• Women hate to be ignored, especially by their significant others. Even if you are out with your friends or a group, you better be paying attention to your woman, or you may just pay for it when you get home. Also, if you start talking to someone you know and we have never met them, you better introduce us right away or you are going to have one angry woman at your hand.

• And one of my personal favourites comes from an episode of Friends, where Chandler asks Rachel and Ross for advice about tricky questions asked by women. Chandler explains how, after being asked “Do I look fat in this?” by Monica, he looked at her first – and this is where Ross interrupts with “Oh no. You NEVER look. You just automatically say NO.”

I’d also recommend 1000 Things You Don’t Know About Women – quite a fun read I stumbled upon today – although it might take you a while to go through each single one of that one thousand…

Happy International Women’s day!

Sources:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/funny-facts-about-women.html

http://www.mastersofhealthcare.com/blog/2009/10-big-differences-between-mens-and-womens-brains/

The International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in November 1999 (30C/62), and has been celebrated across the world since Feb 2000.

This year’s Feb 21st marks the thirteenth International Mother Language Day.

The date represents the day in 1952 when students demonstrating for recognition of their language, Bangla, as one of the two national languages of the then Pakistan, were shot and killed by police in Dhaka, the capital of what is now Bangladesh.

The theme of this year’s International Mother Language day is “Mother tongue instruction and inclusive education”. UNESCO highlights the importance of mother tongue as part of the right to education and encourages its member states to promote instruction and education in the mother tongue.

Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. The objective of the International Mother Language Day is to promote linguistic diversity and multilingual education, and to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.

Sources:
International Mother Language Day – UNESCO
International Mother Language Day – United Nations Observance Page

The fierce winter that has come upon us in the past few weeks has inevitably left our thoughts more or less preoccupied with the weather and the plummeting temperatures outside, blizzards and disasterous events, to name a few.

I am sure most of us keep an eye on the weather forecast all the time, desperately hoping for those first warmer days to appear soon – I know I do for sure.

There’s a certain area high up north though, whose inhabitants would be less than impressed with the recent display of winter madness here in Bulgaria – simply because they are generally quite used to a much harsher weather, or in other words, winter at its very worst – Alaska.

Here are some interesting facts about Alaska and its culture that we’ve put together for you:

Did you know that…

• There has been a widespread misconception circulating around for many years, claiming the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. To date though this claim remains subject of many debates and in fact, many online sources point another northern language as the one having a lot more words for snow – the Saami language (belonging to an indigenous circumpolar group), which apparently has an astounding 300 snow-related words (yes, three hundred, you read it right).

• Alaska is home to at least twenty distinct indigenous languages, which reflect the diverse cultural heritage of Alaska’s Native peoples.

• A very popular belief about Alaska maintains that the whole state goes dark in the winter and has endless sunlight in the summer – but it turns out it depends on where you are in Alaska, as the distribution of daylight and darkness is different throughout the state. For example Barrow, at the very top of the state, does indeed have a two-month period of complete darkness during the winter (no daylight for 64 days), while Anchorage has at least 4-5 hours of daylight even on the shortest day of the year.

• In certain Alaskan areas it’s possible to read a newspaper outdoors at 2 a.m. (two hours after sunset) in the days around the summer solstice, due to the long dawns and dusks that make the day appear longer than it actually is.

• Barrow has an average low temperature barely above zero even in July.

• Alaska is the U.S.’s largest state, over twice the size of Texas.

• Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867 for under 2 cents an acre.

• Alaska is the U.S.’s largest state, over twice the size of Texas.

• There is more than three million lakes in Alaska.

• The capital of Alaska, Juneau (population of about 31,262) , can only be reached by air or sea – it’s the only state capital in the US with no road access.

Sources:

http://alaskaconservation.org/experience-alaska/did-you-know/

http://www.alaskasbest.com/facts.htm

http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/languages/

http://www.alaska.com/about/weather/

So you’ve decided to learn a foreign language – good for you! You’ve just done yourself (and your future) a favour that you will without a shadow of a doubt find to be priceless and even capable of turning your life around (for the better).
Much as I’d love to, I won’t delve into the benefits of learning a foreign language today though – for one thing, it would have to be a novel-size post (yes, that’s how many they are!), and for another – it would steer me away from the main topic of today’s post, namely practical tips for learning a foreign language.

I have decided to share some of the learning techniques and methods I have used myself back in the days when I first started studying English, hence the title “experience-derived” tips.

1) Studying new words:
I had a vocabulary-learning system back when I was at Foreign Language school that I must say was extremely efficient and useful for memorizing new words – especially in the first (and most intense) year of studying English, when our homework assignments would regularly include learning 50 to 100 new words daily (all taught in class beforehand). It was nothing I had invented for sure – I just “borrowed” it from somewhere, although I can’t remember exactly how I came to discover this method. Anyway, here is the gist of it:

First you take a sheet of paper and cut it into little rectangular pieces/notes – one for each word you’re planning to learn. Then you write a word (in the foreign language) on one note, and on the back of it you write the meaning of the word in your native language. That’s all. Oh and, of course, the hours of cutting tiny pieces of paper and writing words down. When you’ve prepared these word notes, you can then stack them into separate piles containing a certain number of notes. For example, I’d stack them into 50 or 100-word piles, neatly wrapped with rubber bands.

At first, you look at the word, then look at its meaning on the back, and move on to the next word in the pile. The second time you go through that particular stack of words, try to recall the meaning of the word first before flipping the note around to see if you’re correct. And remember that repetition is the key here – i.e. you will need to go through each stack repeatedly every once in a while, if you want to keep the words in your mind. And, where possible, try to use as many of them in your speech.

I realize this is a very old-school type of a learning technique and that most probably very few of you beginner learners would contemplate doing it, let alone actually sit down and get on it. And it’s totally your call, of course – you’re free to choose any learning technique you want. For me though it did wonders – wherever I went (travelling, etc), I’d always carry with me a few of those stacks, and refresh my memory on as many words as time would allow me to.

It does require quite a bit of patience though to prepare all the little notes – what with all the cutting and writing. Looking back, I’m quite stunned myself that I have actually had the patience to prepare hundreds – no, thousands of these – back in my high-school years (as a typical Sagittarius, I seem to have an innate lack of patience). But my passion for languages and my ambition to become as good as I can possibly get at this language apparently proved stronger than anything else I lacked. And besides, patience can be cultivated – even if you don’t have it in you

That’ll be it for this week, folks – but keep watching this space for more tested and proven learning techniques – I promise the next ones (or at least some of them), will be less trying your patience and more fun!

1. You have a passion for languages. This one’s a must, it goes without saying really. You can never enjoy translating if you don’t have a passion for languages.

2. You love learning and constant self-development. I realize this one in particular is a prerequisite to success in just about any profession in today’s competitive world. When it comes to languages though, you just never, I mean really never stop learning. Why? Well, for one thing, the abundance of words in any language makes it impossible to ever learn all of them. Unless, of course, you’ve decided to learn Taki Taki (also called Sranan), a 340-word language spoken in Suriname, also known as the language with the fewest words.

3. You love challenges: I promise to elaborate a bit more on the challenges in the translator’s job in a next post, so for the time being you’ll just have to take my word for it (trust me though, you do need to be a challenge-lover!).

4. You enjoy doing research of virtually any kind: from researching a particularly tricky term in dictionaries, to wider research on related topics for the purposes of getting a clearer grasp on a subject or idea.

5. You are well-organized: Being organized is one of the things you have to be, if you want to get as much as possible done in as little as possible time. A very valuable skill in today’s fast-paced environment, what with all the strict deadlines relentlessly closing in on us all the time!

6. You are capable of working long hours and under pressure – with urgent and/or high-volume projects, sometimes workloads can seem quite impossible to handle. Therefore, being able to focus and concentrate on the job despite having already spent too many hours on it, is essential.

7. You have a strong attention to detail – this is a skill of a paramount importance in the translation field, especially with regard to proofreading, which is an integral part of the translation process.

While this list is certainly not exhaustive, it still clearly indicates you might want to consider pursuing a career in translation – if you possess the above personal traits and skills.

Instead of New Year wishes, here is a selection of three memorable quotes that we consider well worth starting the New year with:

“Be at war with your vices; at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
Benjamin Franklin

“Christmas gift suggestions:
To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, your heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To yourself, respect.”
~Oren Arnold

“We come this way but once. We can either tiptoe through life and hope we get to death without being badly bruised or we can live a full, complete life achieving our goals and realizing our wildest dreams.“
Bob Proctor

Have a glorious and prosperous New Year from all of us here at Carel Translations!