Have you ever had this feeling/thought?

It is one that comes almost exclusively when someone is trying to learn a new language.

Other than to get your high school diploma, why would you want to learn a second language anyway?

Well, for starters, how about some statistics about second languages. There are many places that use more than one language to communicate with each other. You, given that you may want to be more adventurous, you can help to preserve dying languages. If so, you can use some of these principles to learn the language.

Even here in America, and Puerto Rico, a second language is starting to become a necessity for communication:

http://io9.com/the-most-common-language-in-each-us-state-besides-engli-1575909143

http://www.topuertorico.org/culture/language.shtml

http://wfpl.org/post/what-jcps-doing-accommodate-explosive-growth-english-second-language-students

If you can learn that second language, it will be very beneficial. If you don’t think so, just ask them:

For a long time, I have been interested in Korean culture and language. I wanted to learn Korean when I was in high school, but it was not offered at my school. I was planning to start learning Korean in college, but I became impatient, and I started self-teaching myself. I wanted not only to become fluent in the language, but to also learn about the culture of people in Korea.

Approximately, 50.2 people live in Korea. Worldwide, Korean is spoken by about 80 million people.

As I was starting to learn Korean, I needed to learn the Korean alphabet, because the characters used in the Korean language are very different than those used in English.

http://www.linguanaut.com/korean_alphabet.htm

There were  many things that helped me learn grammar, expressions, and vocabulary, such as websites like these:

http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/fluentkorean

https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos

It also helped to watch Korean dramas and movies from websites such as these:

http://www.viki.com/

http://www.dramafever.com/

By watching famous Korean dramas, I was able to learn a bit about the Korean culture and pick up some words and phrases including slang while having fun. The same could be said for listening to Kpop, or Korean Pop. By listening to many common phrases in pop songs, I was able to pick up a few things. I also sang along while looking at the Korean lyrics to help me read Korean faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SwiSpudKWI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjnEeYAn4SQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prurE5jKrBg

In addition, I went to a convention last year called “Kcon” which included not only a Kpop concert, but a Korean culture festival as well.

http://kconusa.com/program#program-list

Many booths were set up that taught attendees about Korean food and culture.

Additionally, I am interested in learning how to make Korean food, and this youtube channel helped me out a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/user/aeriskitchen

I hope that someday, I will be able to be fully immersed in the Korean culture by studying abroad at Yonsei University in Seoul. After all, the best way to learn a language and learn about a different culture is to be surrounded by it.

http://www.yonsei.ac.kr/eng/

Linkguistics!

Accents and Dialects:

Is there such a thing as a “gay accent?”  I wouldn’t even touch this question were there not a decent amount of scholarly research about it.  The notion of “talking gay,” after all, is a staple of homophobic parody.   So before going further, let me state that I believe gay men speak with as wide an array of voices as heterosexual men.  I don’t give credence to the idea of a universal “gay voice.”  Read more

Here’s another interesting perspective on GayDialect:

http://www.macleans.ca/society/of-lisps-and-linguistics-the-power-of-the-gay-voice/

More on accents and dialects:

http://media.her.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tumblr_m9ujoh5EF11qcazydo3_500.gif

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mf6s5s8Xbw1rol1w1.gif

http://www.redding.com/news/wire-news/in-stanford-linguistics-study-the-accent-is-on-how-californians-speak_64552086

Abbrevs and Misplelings:

When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They probably weren’t thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. But seven years later, the “cheezpeep” community is still active online, chattering away in lolspeak, its own distinctive variety of English.  Read more

Imitation Theory:

Check out this article on children recognizing the language of the country they were born (but not raised) in:

http://www.columbiachronicle.com/health_and_tech/article_1765d862-797f-11e4-968f-27ec0ff6f1cd.html

Creoles:

From our very own Professor Bigham on universal linguistics:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/09/08/one_planet_one_language_science_fiction_versus_earth_linguistic_diversity.html

The Fulani have not only lost many herds to rustlers, they may be losing their language as well. But the language is rising in Europe and the USA, where it is studied in a total of 14 universities.  Read more

Animals and Language:

Animals communicate with each other, and sometimes with us. But that’s where the similarity between animals and us ends, as Jason Goldman explains: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121016-is-language-unique-to-humans

Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University has done some of the most amazing studies in animal communication and cognition. Using sonograms to analyze the distress calls of Gunnison’s prairie dog, one of five species of prairie dogs found in the U.S. and Mexico, he has found that prairie dog colonies have a communication system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They can tell one another what kind of predator is approaching — man, hawk, coyote, dog (noun) — and they can tell each other how fast it’s moving (verb). They can say whether a human is carrying a gun or not.  Read more

                                                           Tian’ao Wang’s linguistic blog

• Language Change

  The appearance of a new word marks only the beginning of its existence. Once generally adopted as part of the language, the meanings and applications it has for speakers can shift dramatically, to the point of causing misunderstandings. For example, “villain” once meant a peasant or farmhand, but has come to imply a criminal individual in modern English.Read more

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• Animal Communication

  Language is a cognition that truly makes us human. Whereas other species do communicate with an innate ability to produce a limited number of meaningful vocalizations (e.g. bonobos), or even with partially learned systems (e.g. bird songs), there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words).Read more

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• • Semantics

    Syntax highlighting and indent style are often used to aid programmers in recognizing elements of source code. Color coded highlighting is used in this piece of code written in Python.Read more。

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  • Linguistics

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the field of study. For the journal, see Linguistics (journal). “Linguist” redirects here. For other uses, see Linguist (disambiguation) Read more

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  • Indian Languages

    Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families, as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages.Read more

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  • Language and Culture

    The power of language to reflect culture and influence thinking was first proposed by an American linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and his student, Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941).Read more

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  • • Phonetics VS Phonology

      Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc.Read more

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    What is Morphology？

    Webster’s New World Dictionary offers several most frequently used senses of the word”language”,namely,human speech;the ability to communicate by this means;a system of vocal sounds and combinations of such sounds to which meaning is attributed,used for the expression or communication of thought and feelings;the written representation of such a system;any means of expressing or communicating,as gestures,signs,or animal sounds;Read more

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    Language Acquisition

    Semantics is een groep van gelijkgestemde individuen met een enorme passie voor talen, communicatie en coaching. Wij garanderen dynamische en begeesterende opleidingen met uitstekende resultaten, en putten hierbij uit een rijke pedagogische ervaring en business knowhow. Wij komen al uw behoeften tegemoet, helpen u uw doelstellingen te verwezenlijken en bouwen mee uw toekomst op.Read more

    

  • Syntax

    Language storage and access studies how language is stored in our brain and how do we access it when we need it.The ability of human to speak and to understand speech requires an enormous amount of brain resources.Read more

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    Language Storage and Access

    A recent advertisement for Lockheed products claimed that if William the Conqueror had not had technological superiority when he invaded England in 1066, “this very ad might have been written in Anglo-Saxon”. What’s wrong with this picture? Two things: First, all living languages are always changing, so the Old English spoken by William’s adversaries would be greatly different from Modern English even if there had been no Norman conquest.Read more

  • Language Variation

    In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis, and description of the structure of a given language’s morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphological typology is the classification of languages according to their use of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language’s wordstock. Read more

     

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Language Acquisition (English)

As a non-native speaker, who did not grow up in an environment surrounded by English speakers, learning English has been incomparably difficult.

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20130729000452

However, it is also true that there are still many people who do not give up learning because of their age. They always encourage me and keep me motivated.

http://education.kera.org/its-never-too-late-to-learn-says-85-year-old-student-learning-english/

In my university in Japan, I was taking a lot of English courses including writing, reading, listening and speaking. One of my professors suggested us to read news in English online and every class, we had to summarize the article and present in front of the class.

BBC Learning English    http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/

Voice of America English News http://www.voanews.com/

Breaking News English http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/mini_lessons.html

CNN Student News http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/

To improve our listening skill, we also used internet sites to play English games. It made it easier for us to keep learning because we could have fun and study at the same time.

Lyrics Training http://lyricstraining.com/

Games to learn English http://gamestolearnenglish.com/

Even though we study and practice hard, one thing which I would say the hardest to acquire is the native accent. I have been told by many friends that I have some Japanese accent when I speak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECJRMBjX4PE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hO9V_gAs0M

The difference between British English and American English always confuses us as well. In Japan, since we’ve been taught American English in school, most students are not familiar with British accent and spelling. It takes a lot of practice for us to learn and to be able to understand British English because I sometimes sounds like a completely different language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsdhOKZv0uo

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/dialectsofenglish.html