How's your Japanese?

It’s a busy month for anyone involved in international trade. On the one hand, the prospects of a trade war between the USA and China appear to be increasing and business relations between the USA and the EU may be under pressure. On the other hand, relations between the EU and Japan just got better with the agreement of a new trade deal. So, are you ready to take advantage of this new opportunity? How’s your Japanese?

I’m guessing that you may know how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Japanese but probably little more. Of course, there are Europeans who speak Japanese but for the majority of us it probably isn’t our strongest second language and that isn’t...

Patterns and accents

Learning a language involves recognising a lot of patterns or configurations that are repeatedly used in a certain way in order to express an idea. This is done in writing and with sounds. For example, in English when we see the word ‘wanted’ we learn to recognise the ‘ed’ to indicate that the word can be expressing something from the past.

We can also learn to recognise the sound of the word based on the accents that we hear when we are learning. This can include the ‘standard English’ pronunciation which sounds like the word is spelled with an ‘-id’ ending or an American version which may sound like there is no ’t’ in the middle of the word. Then...

Patterns in stress

There are many words in English that can be used both as nouns and as verbs and the majority sound the same no matter how you use them. When we are talking about certain business topics there are a few words that change their pronunciation depending on whether we are using them as a noun or a verb. For example, I might ask for an increase in my salary - an increase is a noun - or I might ask my boss to increase my salary - to increase is a verb. Similarly, I might want to renew my contract with a supplier or I might prefer to contract a new supplier. If I receive some faulty goods I...

The long and the short

There are lots of things that we don’t notice about our own languages until we come to teach them. We are happy to talk and write without too much effort and with little thought for what a language learner may have to cope with. One such aspect, in English, is the length of vowel sounds. We have short sounds and long sounds. The sound is almost the same, it’s just elongated in some words. Now, much will depend on regional variations in accent and even dialect, of course, but if we look at ‘standard English’ then we can see the long and short sounds more easily.

For example, if we listen to the words ‘good’ and ‘food’ we can hear...