Foreign Dispatches

Test Your Vocabulary

How many words do you know? Take this test and you'll receive an estimate, the value of which will be directly proportional to how honest you're willing to be with yourself about the limits of your knowledge ...

My own results are visible here - not surprising in the least, and certainly a decent indicator that the test isn't entirely without merit. Still, there's a legitimate question as to whether the percentile estimates provided with the test results really are on the mark, as the discussion here makes clear. I imagine most of the survey respondents would actually rank in the top 30% or so of the general population, vocabulary-wise.

Issues of ranking aside, I think that the primary point to take away from this test is just how vital reading - and, to be specific, reading "high literature" -  is to vocabulary acquisition. Most of the rarer and more obscure words are of the sort one would never be exposed to in a verbal or everyday literary context, and my experience is that much the same sort of thing is true in other languages, including German and Japanese. To illustrate, although I am able to handle German TV shows and newspaper articles just fine, I find my assumptions of fluency completely undermined by reading Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg", whose pages I cannot manage to get through without frequent consultation of a dictionary.

PS: I've actually touched on this language/vocabulary issue before - 5 years ago, in fact ...

When in Germany, Speak German

I've just discovered on Der Spiegel's English-language pages that there's currently some sort of controversy taking place due to the insistence of Guido Westerwelle, Germany's new Foreign Minister, on answering a press conference question in German. Below is the video of said incident.

Supposedly the events shown above have unleashed a wave of sarcasm and derision at Mr. Westerwelle's expense, but I really can't see what is problematic about his statements: on the contrary, I think the opposite is true, and it is the British journalist who ought to be ashamed for arrogantly expecting Germany's Foreign Minister, speaking in Germany, to cater to the journalist's linguistic ignorance, as if Westerwelle were a local tribal chief reporting to a colonial overlord. Furthermore, there are genuine reasons of statecraft which justify Westerwelle's position; international politics is a field in which even small misunderstandings can lead to severe consequences, and however skilled in English a German politicians or diplomats may be, they will almost always be more fluent in their own language. As such, to conduct any dealings of state in a foreign language is usually a mistake, unless one happens to be an ambassador or a statesman uttering a few words just for rhetorical effect (e.g. "Ich bin ein Berliner").

I can understand to a certain extent why so many Germans should think there's something odd about what Westerwelle said: part of it has to do with the pride many Germans take in their English-language abilities, and another aspect is that semi-instinctive opposition to any form of national self-assertion stemming from Germany's 20th century history. Still, historical issues notwithstanding, I imagine that most Germans would like their Foreign Minister to conduct his duties to Germany's benefit in as far as possible, and that is best done by speaking the language he knows best, not by pandering to a dumb foreign journalist (and on the journalistic side, one has to wonder who was dumb enough to send to such an important country a representative without the linguistic skills or basic modicum of sensitivity to do his job in the native language). Deutsche! Dr. Westerwelle war völlig korrekt!

Going by the evidence of the following clip, Westerwelle's English seems perfectly fine. He does pause quite a bit to think, but then again, he's no worse in this respect than a certain recent former US President, and unlike said (supposedly native English-speaking) President, Westerwelle's response actually makes complete sense.

As Easy as Norwegian

As one or two long-standing readers of this blog may know, I have more than a passing interest in learning new languages, particularly those of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. As it so happens, I've had the opportunity over the last year to put my studies to some use in situ, and no such experience has been more interesting than the one I underwent in Denmark, where all I had to do was switch on the TV to see not just Danish programming, but shows in Swedish, Norwegian and even German as well.

Ich Müss Mein Deutsch Verbessern!

Something funny happened yesterday evening: for the first time in going on two years I was actually put in a position where I could apply my knowledge of German on a face-to-face basis, only to find myself frequntly scratching my head trying to summon up all that vocabulary I hadn't used in ages. Worse yet was that I kept responding to German questions in Japanese, saying "Hai" where I ought to have been saying "Ja"!

It's no mystery why things turned out as they did for me last night: I've been so focused on getting my Japanese up to speed over the last 18 months that a lot of my usage of the language has become essentially automatic, without my having to go through the slow process of deliberate cogitation that one uses as a beginner, but the side effect of this has been that the time I have to devote to German has been crowded out, while the simplistic schema has taken root in my head according to which "Foreign language means I'm speaking Japanese". I'm not about to quit studying Japanese now that I'm finally close to real fluency, but clearly it's time for a mid-course correction. これから、一生懸命にドイツも勉強します！(Oops, did it again, didn't I? Entschuldigen Sie.) Time to dig up the old "Duden" ...

Google Shares its Corpus

All who are interested in computational linguists will be cheering this Google Research announcement.

... we have been harnessing the vast power of Google's datacenters and distributed processing infrastructure to process larger and larger training corpora. We found that there's no data like more data, and scaled up the size of our data by one order of magnitude, and then another, and then one more - resulting in a training corpus of one trillion words from public Web pages.

We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data [...] We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

And to think it wasn't so long ago that the British National Corpus seemed large. At any rate, while this is obviously very good news, the true measure of the usefulness of all this data will lie in the quality of the annotation; given the sheer size of Google's corpus, I doubt the quality of the tagging will be such as to make the BNC or even the Brown Corpus irrelevent any time soon.

A Personal Linguistic Landmark

As one or two people may recall, it was only a few months ago when I estimated that I was still perhaps 4,000 terms short of where I needed to be to truly be comfortable with the Japanese language, and as I've tried to write down every sufficiently important new word I've encountered during the intervening months, my records indicate that I more or less crossed that 4,000 new words barrier sometime in the course of the past few days. As such, this seems like a good time to reflect on how accurate my earlier estimate was, and what it implies for anyone looking to pick up the language from scratch.

A Common Fallacy in Computational Linguistics

If you want a paper which shows the importance of careful, rigorous reasoning even about "obvious" matters, this one by Mehryar Mohri and Richard Sproat ought to do the trick. From the abstract comes the following:

Amusing False Friends

I have no idea whether this particular story is true or just another urban legend, but at least it gets the Japanese side of the tale right.

"Chin-chin" is an italian toast, (actually Cin-Cin) which I believe means the equivalent of "to your health". One of our Japanese engineers had once told us a story about this. Apparently, a Japanese business man goes to a dinner event. During the course of the dinner, an Italian raises his glass and toasts "Chin-chin!" to the Japanese man. At first, the Japanese looks stunned. He looks at the Italian, and apparently detecting that the Italian meant no harm, he raises his glass and sips his drink sharing in the toast. He smiles broadly.

Later in the evening, someone who noticed his facial expressions during the toast, goes to the Japanese man and asks him about his reaction. He smiles and explains:

"I had not heard this particular toast before. In Japanese, the word 'chin' means penis. So when he said 'chin-chin' to me, I thought at first he was insulting me. Then I thought about it, and decided if this man wants to toast my penis, who am I to argue? So I accepted the toast gladly."

ちんちん is indeed a colloquial reference to what is the primary reasoning organ of many a male, but what makes this story even more amusing from my angle is that "chin chin" has yet a third meaning in Nigeria: it refers to a particular kind of very popular pastry. Just imagine what would have happened if this Japanese engineer had been in the presence of a Nigerian expressing his desire to eat some chin-chin - between this word and the very different meanings of the term "slut" in English and Swedish, it's hard to say which provides more of an opportunity for unintentional humor - though given the margin by which Nigerians and Japanese outnumber Scandinavians, I think I'll give the edge to the chinny-chin-chin (sorry, couldn't help myself!)

Nice Theory, Shame About the Facts

I was all geared up to learn just why it was that the English-speaking world was mistaken about the German sense of humor, but as I was reading the supposedly revelatory article by a certain Stewart Lee, I ran aground on the following passage.

But German will not always allow you to shunt the key word to the end of the sentence to achieve this failsafe laugh. After spending weeks struggling with the rigours of the German language's far less flexible sentence structures to achieve the endless succession of "pull back and reveals" that constitute much English language humour, the idea of our comedic superiority soon begins to fade.

Slang Term of the Day

Tramp Stamp:

A derogatory term for a tattoo on a woman's lower back.

See here for alternative definitions.

Personally, I hate tattoos, and can't figure out why people would voluntarily mutilate themselves to make a fashion statement. The associations which first spring to mind when I see tattoos on a person are to do with criminality, stupidity and vulgarity: tattoos are the fleshbound equivalent of hoodies, punch perms and saggy pants. Don't even get me started on the idiots who choose to brand themselves with Chinese characters they can't read ...