All posts tagged: languages

Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing, scientists say | Languages

Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing, scientists say | Languages

Published by Sam Flores

Learning another language could slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years, according to research. People who speak more than one language seem to have younger brains and the more languages you speak and the earlier you speak them, the better, according to findings from a study being presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference in Barcelona. The study found that those who spoke two languages had brains that appeared around six years younger than those who spoke only one language. People who spoke three languages had brains that appeared around seven years younger, and for those who spoke four languages, their brains appeared about 13 years younger. Our brains are made up of billions of nerve cells that communicate with one another. But as we get older, the connectivity in our brains often deteriorates, causing memory and speed of thought to decline. While previous research had observed that people from European countries with greater language proficiency tended to age more slowly, this study measured the impact of speaking languages on …

The Cherokee Bible, one of the language’s first books, is a window between worldviews

The Cherokee Bible, one of the language’s first books, is a window between worldviews

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — If you wanted to learn the Cherokee language in the 1990s, there weren’t many written resources: three dissertations from the 1970s and ’80s, one textbook and a handful of college classes in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Even on most Cherokee land, it was unusual to see street or building signs in this endangered Indigenous language. There are nearly 500,000 enrolled members in the three federally recognized Cherokee Tribes: the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band, both based in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based in North Carolina. Only about 2,000 of those members speak Cherokee as a first language. But over the past few decades, opportunities for learners of all ages have exploded. One of the authors of this article, Thomas Belt – a first-language speaker from Oklahoma – has been honored to play a role in that resurgence, working as a teacher, curriculum developer and language consultant. Today there is bilingual signage throughout the Eastern Cherokee reservation, in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and on tribal …

How Handheld Translators Work and Why They’re Handy for Travel

How Handheld Translators Work and Why They’re Handy for Travel

Published by skeptic

Earbud-based translators are the next game changer. These are over-ear devices that come in a pair—one for you, one for your conversation partner. Each of you wears one earbud, and the software on your phone handles the translation, both ways, behind the scenes. The best earbud translators make for the most natural way to communicate with someone in a foreign language that I’ve found to date, though handhelds tend to have more capabilities. (Earbud-based designs seem to be the direction the industry is heading.) When shopping for a handheld translator, watch out for expensive subscription plans. Many devices come with free service, but only for a time, and re-upping after the trial period ends can be pricey. Check the fine print before you buy. Also, make sure the translator you’re considering covers all the languages you need. Note that while some translators support hundreds of languages, they may be limited in the language pairs they can translate between. Who Really Needs a Handheld Language Translator? Again, if you only need casual translation for occasional or …

ChatGPT Has ‘Goblin’ Mania in the US. In China It Will ‘Catch You Steadily’

ChatGPT Has ‘Goblin’ Mania in the US. In China It Will ‘Catch You Steadily’

Published by skeptic

Are you even online in 2026 if you haven’t experienced the verbal tics of ChatGPT? It loves goblins, em dashes, and “it’s not A; it’s B” sentence constructions. But what you might not know is that the chatbot also has plenty of strange phrases it loves to say in Chinese, and they are driving Chinese users crazy. ChatGPT does a decent job answering questions in Chinese, which is why it’s widely used in China despite being blocked by the government. But when users make a request, be it a math problem or an image-generation prompt, the chatbot loves to answer: 我会稳稳地接住你, which literally translates to “I will catch you steadily [when you fall].” Catch … what? A more generous translation could be, “I’ll hold you steadily through whatever comes.” But to any native Chinese speaker, the expression is annoyingly affectionate and out of place. Sometimes, the model gets more effusive and says in Chinese: “I’m right here: not hiding, not withdrawing, not deflecting, not running. I’ll be steady enough to catch you.” Yes, the sound …

‘The air resounds with a Babel’s Tower of languages’: why I wrote a novel based in Victoria Square, Athens | Athens holidays

‘The air resounds with a Babel’s Tower of languages’: why I wrote a novel based in Victoria Square, Athens | Athens holidays

Published by Sam Flores

After my father’s will banned me and my siblings from his funeral, I wrote a novel about some brothers and sisters stealing their dad in his coffin. The emotions were drawn from my painful experiences, but I invented the characters and the tragi-comic narrative in Stealing Dad. Despite growing up in England, I’ve lived in and written about Athens for 25 years, and it came naturally to create several Greek characters. Alekos is a wild sculptor who dies in London, and his daughter Iris (one of seven dispersed half-siblings) lives off Victoria Square – one of Athens’ most fascinating corners. In the 1960s, Plateia Viktorias was a fashionable neighbourhood with the fanciest restaurants, shops and theatres. Townhouses from the interwar period were being demolished and Athenians were occupying the new six-storey apartment blocks so fast that construction dust and the constant drilling were the main problem. Today, through wrought-iron and glass doors, elegant, marble-lined halls reveal concierges’ desks and traces of a vanished bourgeois life. After the 1980s, middle-class families started leaving the polluted centre …

This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?

This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?

Published by skeptic

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: Children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults. McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube. McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations. What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching 10 children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to …

EBacc withdrawal ‘squeezes languages out of the picture’

EBacc withdrawal ‘squeezes languages out of the picture’

Published by skeptic

Schools began to scale back their language provision after plans to withdraw the EBacc were announced, sparking fears that the change is “squeezing languages out of the picture”. The government said last November it would scrap the EBacc as part of its response to the curriculum and assessment review. Some leaders welcomed the news, arguing the measure stifled creative subjects, but others are concerned it will leave languages in a vulnerable position. Source link

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Published by skeptic

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world. Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney. Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now …

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

Published by skeptic

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims. Trouble was, few of the state’s employees knew how to do that. And the crisis went beyond New Jersey, just one of many states that depended on these unwieldy systems. By one rough calculation, COBOL’s inefficiencies cost the US GDP $105 billion in 2020. You might think New Jersey would have replaced its system after this—and that Covid was COBOL’s last gasp. Not quite. The state’s new unemployment system came with a number of quality-of-life improvements, but on the backend, it was still made possible by a mainframe running the ancient language. COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It’s …

Why are languages spoken at different speeds?

Why are languages spoken at different speeds?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Have you ever switched audio language halfway through a movie? Although foreign languages always sound rapid-fire to untrained ears, as you swap between Thai, Japanese, and English, you’re listening to languages spoken at wildly different speeds.  In this article, we explore why languages vary in speed and how invisible aspects of how we communicate mean we all get our point across roughly at the same time.  Which language is the fastest?  A 2011 study measured the speech rate of seven languages, with Japanese topping the list. Researchers found Japanese speakers fired out at an average of 7.84 syllables per second, while ambling English speakers only hit 6.19 syllables per second. This makes sense if we think about how these languages are spoken. English has many syllables that contain lots of sounds. Try saying “Smart frogs jumped twelve quick sticks,” as fast as you can. This short sentence contains 29 different phonemes—the basic units of sound in a language—while using …