17-years old polyglot shares his language learning tips!

In need of inspiration? Why not check out this interview with a teenage polyglot. He shares some of his tips to learn his new languages.

Don't get demotivated though! You can learn any language anytime, it only takes some effort and a right state of mind! No need to start as early as this talented teenager.

Teenage hyperpolyglot
Timothy Doner, an enormously accomplished language learner at age 17, talks with us in French, Mandarin and Russian, explains how each language "feels" to him, and shares some of his tips
Posted by The Economist on Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Language jobs in Europe - update

Which countries in the European Union (EU) need foreign languages? That's the key question the European Commission asked in a report published on 26 February 2016.

Not surprisingly, the different countries have different needs. But the main conclusions were quite surprising. The needs are very high: about one quarter of our jobs need a good level of knowledge of a foreign language. The higher the position, the higher the need.

English is not necessarily the most needed second language. Languages spoken by neighbour countries and non-English trading partners are needed as well. Business doing international trade are more demanding for foreign language skills, as well as the manufacturing sector and in the industry.

However, public services seem not to be needing languages. Strange, since the globalisation certainly has an effect on local governments. Businesses do not seem to find foreign language skills essential for new employees, compared to other skills.

And lastly, persons speaking several languages definitely have an advantage over those who only speak one language, since it is believed export will grow if the number of multilingual persons at a company increases.

Great findings! It should encourage you to study some more languages!

Executive summary
Report
Picture's public domain

European Parliament: what do they do for languages?

It's quite difficult to find out what the European Parliament does for improving multilingualism throughout the European Union (EU). It's easier to discover how many official languages there are: 24. The latest addition is Croatian, thanks to the latest country that became a member of the EU.

 © European Union 2015 - source:EP

A quick check on the Parliament's audiovisual library on the word 'language' results in a few videos and loads of pictures of conferences, meetings and so on. Anyway, one can argue that removing taxes on trade between Japan and the EU is good for language exchange. So is the Erasmus programme, as well as the Schengen agreement, so Europeans can move freely to another EU country.

One very interesting initiative though, is the so-called European Parliament Intergroup for Minorities, National Communities and Languages. Which is a very long title for some Parliamentarians joining NGO's to promote the issues of minorities. It exists since 1983, meets every month and has even a Facebook page. Check out the interview below with the chair of that group. According to him, one third of European citizens speak a minority language. Mind as well his Spanish accent in English - I personally love Spanish speaking English.

Interview with Jordi Sebastià. Chair of the European Parliament Intergroup for Minorities, National Communities and Languages from Centre Maurits Coppieters on Vimeo.

Another interesting point is the official EU languages: some non-official languages are more spoken than some official languages. Check them out (numbers are approximate speakers in the EU, not necessarily native ones, Turkish, Arabic and Tamil not included, source):

Bold ones are official EU languages:

1. Maltese (400 000) 
2. Luxembourgish (400 000)
3. Basque (600 000)
4. Welsh (750 000)
5. Irish (1 000 000) 
6. Estonian (1 200 000)
7. Russian (1 500 000)
8. Latvian (2 000 000) 
9. Galician (2 400 000)
10. Slovenian (2 500 000) 
11. Lithuanian (3 000 000)
12. Slovak (5 200 000)
13. Finnish (5 400 000) 
14. Danish (5 500 000)
15. Croatian (7 000 000) 
16. Catalan (9 000 000)

Very strange that Catalan is not an official language. That can only fuel the Catalans' hunger for independence. And the Maltese made quite a good deal with Europe, they managed to make their language official while there's 6 other languages with more speakers that didn't manage!

Also check out this study - a lot of data about Europeans and their languages.

Untranslatable words: interesting

A great discussion topic in multilingual environments: untranslatable words. If you're feeling a bit uncomfortable, it's a great icebreaker, especially if there's lots of people around from all over the world.

My favourite: Fingerspitzengefühl. That's in German, and it means literally: the great feeling in the finger. But the actual meaning is that general feeling that you know something is wrong, or something should be done. It's like intuition, but somehow different.

Every language has its own, and The Book of Life made an interesting compilation:
http://www.thebookoflife.org/untranslatable-words/

Make sure to check them out!

Multilingual countries in Europe: who has the most official languages?

There's a difference between multilingual countries and multilingual persons. Some countries have more than one official language, but that doesn't mean that all the inhabitants speak all those languages. Multilingual persons are those that speak more than one language. There's many benefits to that, for example a better capacity to memorise.

Let's see which countries in Europe have more than one official language:

• In the north of Serbia, there's 'only' 7 official languages. Yes, 7. Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Ruthanian, Hungarian, Slovak and Czech. One advantage: they're quite similar. No wonder so many Serbians are multilingual.

• Switzerland has 4 official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. However, the use depends on the different parts of Switzerland called cantons.

• Belgium, one of Europe's strangest countries when it comes to language arrangements, has three official languages: Dutch, French and surprisingly German. Dutch is mostly spoken in the north of the country and French in the south. German is spoken in the east region near Germany.

Official languages in Europe, copyright: public domain

• Luxembourg, the small country in between Belgium, Germany and France combines French, German and Luxembourgish. Many Luxembourgians are multilingual, and the three languages are official nation-wide, unlike Belgium.

• Belarus, Europe's last dictatorship, has two official languages: Russian and Belarusian.
• Cyprus, divided in two, has surprisingly both Turkish and Greek as official languages. That's because there were many Turkish living there before Turkey's invasion of 1974. However, in the Turkish part only Turkish is an official language.
• Finland's official languages are Finnish and Swedish, since there's quite a minority of Swedish persons living there.
• Ireland also has two official languages: Irish and English. Irish or Gaelic is also an official language of the European Union.
• Kosovo has Albanian and Serbian as official languages.
• Maltese nationals usually speak Maltese at home and English when studying at the University. They're both official languages, so it's easy for tourists to go there.
• The Netherlands have Dutch and Frisian as official languages. Frisian is spoken by half a million persons, and is one of the closest languages to English.

Interested? There's many more countries in Europe that grant certain rights to certain languages. Check them all out on Wikipedia.

Bilingualism vs second-language acquisition

Academics have a different vocabulary than people who just teach or learn languages. That's not only for languages, it's as well part of any scientific field. For example, economists argue about 'rational choice' where people say 'common sense' to make economic decisions. It's called the 'jargon', meaning the language spoken by experts in a certain domain, that normal persons don't understand.

So in the language field, there's a difference between 'bilingualism' and 'second-language acquisition'. Bilingualism refers to people who know two languages and use them. Whereas second-language acquisition is about people learning a second language. Do you find that an important difference, and do these terms and the linguistics jargon interest you? Then you'll find the lecture below extremely interesting!

Multilingual jobs - where to start?

So you speak a few languages, and you want to make the most out of them on the job market? Here's some websites to begin with:

Eures
Over 1 million jobs last I checked. Only for the EU and one or two other countries. They recently improved their search engine. Some countries only list jobs for foreigners, so give it a go. Maybe you have to look for a while to find your dream job, but it's certainly worth it. Trick is to find the right keyword, if you're a wordpress expert just type in 'wordpress' and select the country! There's also loads of information on working abroad.

Multilingual vacancies
Loads of jobs from all kinds. Mostly for the United Kingdom.

Top Language Jobs
1000s of jobs, very handy because you can select which industry, which country,... and so on in the search engine. If you have a good idea of what you want, this is a great website!

Multilingual careers
There's some jobs, and some search parameters. Good to check it out.

If you're looking for jobs that have something to do with the European Union, check out Eurobrussels and Euractiv, subscribe to their newsletter!

Omniglot
Has another list! Mostly for the United Kingdom but some other vacancies as well!

Of course, check the websites of the countries you want to work in!

Spotted another website? Leave a comment!