Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

Product Information

Japanese learners will be impressed with the stunning drawings in “Yuko-chan and the Daruma Doll: The Adventures of a Blind Japanese Girl Who Saves Her Village” because they beautifully portray the sweet story. The tale is told in English with the Japanese kanji directly below the corresponding text. French Bilingual E-books You started your professional life writing for the underground press, and then books on the counterculture in the 1960s. How did you end up specialising in slang? For me, of course, Partridge is the great mentor. I may not agree with everything he did, and as his successor I have naturally tried to improve on his foundations. But without his example I would have never even considered that slang was something to which I could enthusiastically devote my professional life.

Gordon, D. (2018), Using dual language story books to foster biliteracy, EAL Journal Blog, 12 November 2018, https://ealjournal.org/2018/11/12/using-dual-language-story-books-to-foster-biliteracy/ (accessed 16 June 2019) There’s no shame in starting “small”—what I mean is, keep it basic to begin with. You don’t need to grab “War and Peace” for your first e-book—or even your twenty-first. Children’s books or comic books are solid reading materials and both are available for bilingual e-reading. Start with what you know It’s full of slang. There are 350 different uses of slang in it, which is a lot for a single book and that makes it exciting to me. It’s also slang that I haven’t come across before in many cases, and it’s slang of a certain culture. As a slang lexicographer one is an appalling voyeur. And there’s no doubt that if you’re white, middle class and live in England, then reading The Corner is a very voyeuristic experience. I have varied opinions at different moments about how I feel towards the voyeuristic side of what I do, but The Corner is a fascinating book because of the language that is used. There is no artificiality, there is no putting slang in for its own sake. This is how the characters are speaking. Are some languages worse than others? The question might sound silly, but in this entertaining exercise in “language tourism” (the book’s original Dutch title), the author isn’t frightened of making judgments. He thinks lenition – the habit in Welsh of “changing a word’s first letter for no apparent reason” – is just “mindboggling”, and generally that “Gaelic spelling is flawed … wasteful, arcane and outdated”. The “ludicrous” variety of cases in Slovak amounts to “chaos”, while Breton’s system of naming numbers makes mental arithmetic unnecessarily difficult.Because bilingual resources make stories in your target language way more accessible and hassle-free, they’re truly an ideal tool for language learners. Bilingual families and multilingual families, those teaching multilingual classes and learners, librarians with multilingual and bilingual collections and library users – all would benefit from having access to dual language books.

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Dual language books (or DLBs for short, as they are sometimes known) are books in which the whole book is written in two languages throughout, in as close a translation as possible. In many cases, the content of the dual language book or story is written in one language on one side of the open book, and the second language on the other side. The pictures allow you to see the language used in context, as well as breaking up the text. In recent years, however, improved computer technology means that electronic dual language books, or ebooks, have appeared, meaning language learners can dip into libraries on computer, tablet, and Smartphone. In some cases, the dual language book is also accompanied by sound files, so that not only can learners see the words, they can also hear the correct pronunciation. You could argue that dictionaries are dual language books, although in practice most dual language books tell a story or impart information. You may also sometimes hear them described as parallel texts although these are also sometimes used to transpose an older type of language into modern words, as with Chaucer or medieval French. Next up is Julie Coleman’s A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries. This is a substantial academic work published in four volumes by the Oxford University Press.A Whale Who Dreamt of a Snail” is the ideal beginning dual-text Portuguese story. The illustrations are charming, the story is encouraging for both children and adults and the text appears in both English and Portuguese. Chinese Bilingual E-books One of this book’s simplest but most reliable pleasures, by contrast, is the suggestion of one or more words in each language for which English doesn’t have an equivalent, but might benefit from. Dutch, for example, has uitwaaien, which means to “relax by visiting a windy place, often chilly and rainy”. Dorren adds, characteristically: “Since the British, like the Dutch, display this peculiar behaviour, the word would be useful.” The Cornish word henting, which means “raining hard”, is, the author gently suggests, “useful for a Cornish holiday”. We might also want to adopt omenie (“a Romanian word for the virtue of being fully human, that is: gentle, decent, respectful, hospitable, honest, polite”), or, from Channel Island Norman, the evocative Ûssel’lie, which names “the continual opening and closing of doors”. The running joke is capped by the one language in which the author can find nothing enviable: “No Gagauz words have been borrowed by English and none that I’ve come upon seem especially desirable.” Since many dual language books are picture books, you might think that they are mainly aimed at children, but that isn’t always the case. A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words, and dual language books have also been used in recent years to disseminate information on agricultural techniques in Papua New Guinea, for example. Many parts of the NHS also produce dual language resources to help patients access healthcare services in the UK. Dual language books are useful in all kinds of situations, including learning both native and target languages, settling into a new location, helping children gain literacy skills, and simply encouraging readers to understand the joy of language. They’re useful in the classroom or other language learning arena; they’re useful as an addition to a child’s bookcase (or an adult’s collection, come to that); and they’re useful as an aide-memoire. They’re an excellent next step up from a simple dictionary or vocabulary chart, and a great stepping stone to reading longer texts in the target language. Domke, L. M. (2018). Probing the Promise of Dual-Language Books. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 57 (3). https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol57/iss3/3 (accessed 16 June 2019)

This led us to choose the Alien Detective Agency series, with its appealing characters, suitable for both KS2 and KS3 (ages 8–14) as ideal books to support children to build fluency in reading English or just relax and enjoy a story in their own familiar script. Our authors Roger Hurn and Jane West were immediately keen to be on board and support the project further. Doppeltext is an excellent resource for bilingual e-books—particularly if you enjoy works by famous authors or well-known pieces of literature. Books are available in French, German, Russian and Spanish, and translated text fragments appear in English. Alice Hoffman was right that “books may well be the only true magic.” They transport and transfix—and they teach.And dual language books are no exception. Anyone who’s ever had to learn more than one language knows how much easier it is to remember new words, phrases and syntax when you can relate them to something you already know. So if you already know your own version of, say, Cinderella or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, it makes a lot of sense that a dual language edition can help you acquire new vocabulary in your new target language.

For language learners, anything that increases the potential for trouble-free reading is a resource that needs to be explored. You can even use the same bilingual approach for other types of media in your target language. The ODILO app lets you have easy to access multimedia content (eBooks, audiobooks, magazines, videos, podcasts, courses and more formats) on your smartphone and tablet. As a small educational publisher, we do have to charge for the new resources, but we will continue to offer the original six eBooks for free. We have used native Ukrainian translators and proofreaders to ensure that the text uses natural language and vocabulary along with utilising professional design and printing, so children have the best possible experience when reading them. Your next book is something quite different. Set in the 1990s, it’s a true account of a West Baltimore family destroyed by drugs, co-authored by David Simon who went on to create the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire. Why did you choose this book? The book is set in Baltimore. If you went to another American city where there are people selling drugs on corners, would the slang be radically different?His work was very much informed by his World War One experiences, and there is a lot of military slang in his book.