Get your free poster of world languages

The nice folk at translation website bab.la have created a "world languages map", showing the most-spoken first languages on each continent.

Here's the map in its online, interactive form. Zoom in or out using your mouse wheel:



If you would like a free copy of the map in poster form, visit the 'world languages' page of the bab.la website.

Should you have any problems requesting your poster from bab.la, let me know (via email) as I have a spare copy and am more than happy to send it on to anyone who wants it.

Bab.la also has a blog, Lexiophiles, which is worth checking out.

So iTunes thinks Turkish is 'easy listening'...

Whenever I have a foreign holiday coming up, I try to learn a little of the language of the country I'll be visiting. Last year I persevered with Portuguese; the year before, I struggled with Spanish.

This year, partly thanks to the strong euro, I'm heading out of the eurozone to Turkey - so I'm to tackle Turkish.

In fact, my 'Teach Yourself Beginner's Turkish' book and CD set arrived in the post this weekend, and I've just copied the contents of the CDs over to my iPod so I can listen during my daily commute.

Which leads me to the point of this post: I was highly amused to see that iTunes identified the tracks as falling into the genre of 'easy listening'. I really hope that's accurate...

Daily Mail: 'British Babel'

I'd like to write briefly about the lead story that the Daily Mail ran on its front page today. Here's the web version:

English is a second language for one in seven school pupils

The article seems to use the terms 'foreign language' and 'second language' almost interchangeably. This leads me to wonder how many school pupils there are in the United Kingdom who speak Welsh as a first language, for example, or Scottish Gaelic. After all, these aren't foreign languages to the UK.

I also spotted that one of the captions in the article distorts what is said in the body copy. The caption in question reads:

Schools Minister Jim Knight acknowledges there can be problems with high numbers of students whose English is not up to scratch

Whereas the body copy reads:

Schools minister Jim Knight has admitted that 'undoubtedly there can be problems' for schools with large numbers of non-English speakers.

There is, I should think, a great difference between being a non-English speaker and speaking English that is "not up to scratch".

Oh, and this made me smile:

Nelson Primary in East London faces daunting problems.

Only a quarter of its pupils are native English speakers and the rest use some 56 different languages.

I think that any student who can use 56 languages would be an asset to his or her school.

Finally, do read the comments that follow the Daily Mail's web version of the story. Scary, or what?

JD gets by in Portuguese – with added melon

Long-time readers of this blog may recall my adventures learning Spanish last year with the misleadingly named 'Instant Spanish' book and CD set. This year, as I am off to the island of Madeira next week, I have been learning some Portuguese phrases from the rather less ambitiously titled 'Get by in Portuguese' book and CD set.

So far, I've learnt the first 30 phrases featured in 'Get By In Portuguese' (a poor performance, I know, but I've been busy with other things!). You may be surprised to learn that among those 30 phrases are:

• What is the exchange rate for the pound?

• I would like a melon.

• Is there a lift?

These three phrases might appear to be useful for any scenario in which I exchange some pounds for euros in order to buy a melon and then need to take that melon up a tall building.

However as numbers have not figured (sorry!) in the first 30 phrases, except for the Portuguese for 'twenty', it is highly unlikely that I would understand any answer to the question 'what is the exchange rate for a pound?'. Unless, of course, the exchange rate is twenty euros to the pound, in which case I would be able to afford many, many melons.

There is also the fact that lifts are, as a whole, well signposted and easy to spot. I can't recall any instance when I have needed to ask 'is there a lift?' in English, let alone Portuguese.

But I do like melons, so it's not all bad news. (The phrase 'I'd like one of those' might have a wider application than 'I'd like a melon', however.)

Hablo español!

Keen to learn a little Spanish before my holiday in several weeks, I recently bought an 'Instant Spanish' book and CD set.

"Study for thirty-five minutes a day for six weeks and you'll speak Spanish," it promises. Doesn't seem very instant to me - not compared to, say, instant mashed potato.

"Stir your flakes for thirty-five minutes a day for six weeks and you'll have mashed potato..."

I'm also amused by some of the strange sentences that language learning sets teach you as a beginner. Along with the Spanish for 'my name is James', 'good evening', and 'how are you?' I've learnt 'I have a large house and it costs a lot of money. And I have a Mercedes'. This is likely to get me mugged if nothing else.

I can also say (in Spanish) 'I worked for the Bank of Spain for three years' - which is neither useful nor true. And it might make people wonder why my Spanish isn't better - although perhaps it could explain the Mercedes...

Tengo un Mercedes...