Language

In about 5 minutes, Mars lander Phoenix is going to attempt to land on the surface of Mars.
The event is being broadcast live at a number of museum events and at NASA TV here.

Here is a live blog from mission control (also following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter).

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Image via Wikipedia

I’ve just received another newsletter from Transparent Language advertising their Video Immersion Software and it got me thinking.

I’ve always been very interested in language learning and finding new ways of doing it more effectively. What I currently see as the main issues of this increasingly important process are:

• Time consumption – it takes considerable time to make significant process in learning grammar, scripts, pronunciation and building a solid vocabulary
• Context switching – learning a new language usually means stopping whatever you are doing, sitting down and starting to think about things largely disconnected from your everyday activities – in my opinion, this is a significant »barrier to entry« for most people

The entire process often consists of the following steps (in this or a slightly modified order):

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Image via Wikipedia

A while ago, when I was beginning my struggle with Finnish, I found it quite difficult to find translations online, since Finnish is a highly inflected language and word roots are not easy to identify for a beginner.

After having googled enough Finnish words, I was starting to see a possibility - almost every search yielded an excerpt from a specific source.

I had never read more than a few pages of it before, but I soon saw that the Bible is the perfect language resource:

• It’s available in almost all languages
• Text is highly consistent across most languages
• It’s very well structured
• The smallest unit of text in many parts is 1-3 sentences long

The last point is very important as it makes the book ideal for being used as a text corpus.

Let’s take the word kansalle, for example.

If you google for the search term “kansalle finnish bible”, the first result gives you Kings, Chapter 12.

12:6 Kuningas Rehabeam neuvotteli vanhain kanssa, jotka olivat palvelleet hänen isäänsä Salomoa, kun tämä vielä eli, ja kysyi: “Kuinka te neuvotte vastaamaan tälle kansalle?”

And the English version:

12:6 And king Rehoboam consulted with the old men, that stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye advise that I may answer this people?

So, kansalle clearly means to (the) people, the suffix -lle being an indication of the allative case.

I am currently working on a system that would automate this.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Bible phrase in both languages pop up whenever you searched for a word? What do you think?

Links:

Biblija.net - a magnificent corpus of Slovenian, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan and Euskara (Basque) bible versions

A list of Finnish cases - the best explanation of the cases I could find

Finnish Bible

I’ve always been fascinated with this sleek and elegant language.

Luckily, there is an abundance of resources online to fast-forward a learner’s acquisition process.

As with any other language, I’d promote the following steps:

1. Start with an introductory course and get to know the basic grammar and pronunciation
2. Next, get a Swedish children’s book (e.g. this) and read it a couple of times using a dictionary
3. Get some Swedish friends online and practice your conversation skills
4. Watch a good Swedish film (e.g. Ondskan) - start slowly, Swedish pronunciation is the tricky part
5. Spend some time in Sweden
6. Get free Swedish books online and read them side-by-side with their English counterparts
7. Listen to Swedish podcasts, watch Swedish news, watch Swedish TV channels

A quick list of resources:

• Lexin - Swedish Dictionary (English, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, Finnish, Greek, Kumandji, Russian, Serbian, Somalian, Sorani, Spanish, Turkish) - a perfect learning aid, I even use it to learn Finnish
• Project Runeberg - a Swedish version of Project Gutenberg (includes texts in Norwegian, Danish and English)
• BeelineTV - watch TV channels from various countries online
• Online courses: link1, link2, link3, link4

Anyway, låt mig veta hur det går!