Source: NPR

Since its earliest days, the Internet filled us with the hope of uniting all of humanity. With information traveling at the speed of light, we thought, geographic location wouldn’t matter and anyone who shared our interests would be within reach.

But there’s an age-old problem working against our utopian dreams of the web uniting the world: the language barrier. After all, it doesn’t matter what you have access to if you can’t read it.

In the first couple decades of the Internet, we had a simple, if unsustainable, solution. Most people used English — even if it wasn’t their native language.

Click here to read more.

Source: Memeburn

"The overwhelming power of the English-speaking media would have you believe that social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are the only web spaces where people are connecting. But when you consider that the vast majority of people using the internet are non-English speakers, then you start to realise that there are huge, successful social networks in the world that are under-reported by major global news organisations."

A list of 11 world-wide social networking sites that are popular outside the United States and among non-English speakers can be found here.

As China swiftly expands its reach across Latin America, a pilot program in Aguascalientes aims to introduce students to the Mandarin language and make them more competitive in the job market.

State authorities launched the pilot language program in Aguascalientes, a working-class city, in hopes of jumping on the Chinese bandwagon. As China swiftly expands its reach across Latin America, Mexico is experiencing a flurry of new Chinese investments in traditional targets like nickel mines and in newer areas like car-part factories and electronics.

Chinese was introduced this school year for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, a total of 126 students, and will be continued every year.

Since 2001, students at Pedro Garcia have been immersed in English from first grade. In hopes of maintaining the English, the students are taught Mandarin in English. In other words, the translation goes from English to Chinese, not Spanish to Chinese.

They take five hours a week of Mandarin, four hours a week of English.

 

You can read the complete article in the LA Times.

What do you do when you are tired of using the same word over and over, or when you just can't find the right word?

I just found a fabulous free tool that gives you more than a traditional dictionary or thesaurus.  Visuwords™ shows you how words are connected in a diagram that looks like a neural net (great for visual learners).  The information is delivered in a series of nodes; if you hover over the node you'll see synonyms for that word and its definition.

Some of the results may surprise you.  When I typed in "translation", "pony" and "crib" came up as associated words.  At first, that made no sense to me, but when I followed the path back to my original query, I saw the connection.   Have fun!

Have you ever wondered how to pronounce a word or a phrase in a language that you don't speak?  It happened to me recently when I went on Facebook to wish a friend a happy birthday. I saw that he had responded to earlier messages with "go raibth maith agat". I guessed that it meant thank you in Irish, but I knew I could never figure out how to pronounce it on my own. Trying to pronounce Irish, for those who have no familiarity with it, is like trying to guess how a word in Basque sounds.

Forvo is a pronunciation guide with words in 236 languages spoken by native speakers.  The coolest feature of all is that if the word you are looking for is not on the site, you can request that someone add the pronunciation.  You can also help other language learners by recording pronunciations in your native language.

Listen to "go raibth maith agat" here.

Image by runran under Creative Commons license.