Set in the first World War, a few prisoners of war try to escape from the German prison. The use of three languages (German, French and English) make the movie 'la Grande Illusion' (the big illusion) already interesting to watch. Including many language subtleties, a great sense of humor and sometimes interesting questions popping up, like the cow that doesn't care whether she's fed by a French or a German person.
Some other interesting details: one of the detainees is a jew, another one belongs to French aristocracy and discusses what aristocracy is going to become after the war with a German aristocrat. This somewhat predicts the end of the rule by unelected leaders in Europe after the first World War. Interestingly, there's not many prison escape movies from Germans escaping - unfortunately, since they went to war for more or less the same reasons, at least in the first World War.
The movie received a high rating on IMDb, the Internet's biggest movie database. There are some parts of the whole movie on YouTube, so make sure to check them out.
Movies: good to learn a new language?
Is watching movies a good way to learn a language? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If a movie is on with subtitles and we're not at all listening to what the persons are saying, the value is about zero. However, if we're watching a movie in a different language with subtitles in the different language, that's great, because it improves our vocabulary, our listening skills and our reading skills at the same time.
For beginners, it might not be a good idea: people speak too fast, there's no way of following the movie, so it becomes an embarrassment. For more advanced students, it's great. Especially with series, so we can adapt our ears to the characters' voices.
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.
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.
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:
Maltese (400 000)
Luxembourgish (400 000)
Basque (600 000)
Welsh (750 000)
Irish (1 000 000)
Estonian (1 200 000)
Russian (1 500 000)
Latvian (2 000 000)
Galician (2 400 000)
Slovenian (2 500 000)
Lithuanian (3 000 000)
Slovak (5 200 000)
Finnish (5 400 000)
Danish (5 500 000)
Croatian (7 000 000)
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.
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.
Facebook is a great way to learn French. The posts will appear in the timeline, so we'll automatically learn or see some French words. Especially those that are often on Facebook. There's many groups, where we can meet fellow students and talk about how we can learn French. Also: check the 'expat' page of the city you're living in.
And one additional tip: turn off the automatic translation off by clicking on automatically "translated from French" and then "never automatically translate French". You can do that for any language. Or follow the steps here.
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.
Recently, some newspapers have written that the accent circonflexe: the " ^ " will disappear. Many French language learners cheered, because it's the source of many learning difficulties that only exist in French. However, it's not going to disappear. But what's really the issue? And what really happened? First, the Académie française - that's the institute that makes the rules for French - announced the new spelling rules. Indeed, some words would lose their accent circonflexe - but that's just one of the changes. And it's only for the ones on the I and on the U, unless it changes the meaning of the word. For example, dû (past participle of devoir, to have to) and du (of, from, it's a combination of de + le). And even if we keep writing with an accent, it's still correct. So we have the choice now.
When?
Students and teachers are supposed to apply the rules in the school year 2016-2017, so in September 2016. Except from the accents circonflexes, some other words were simplified.
And, by the way, the Académie française also makes a dictionary, you can find it via their website. Funny thing: the website is not translated into any other language - chauvinism according to some, purism according to others.
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!
