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Showing posts with label learning languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning languages. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 January 2010

Miami Ghosts

During a recent stop in Miami, I had the chance to spend some quality time with my lovely friend and song writer/singer Juliet Dibenedetto, whom I’ve known since I was 14! We met up in a local dive bar/restaurant in Coconut Grove and we found ourselves talking to the charming bartender who began to tell us about the ghosts in the place. Yes, indeed he proceeded to tell us about the ghosts, whom he had managed to befriend by leaving them glasses of rum every night. Apparently, there had been a murder on site. A woman was having an affair and her husband had intended to kill her lover but in the midst of their argument he shot his wife instead. Distraught he then killed himself. Its said the couple’s spirits still reside there and they make their presence known by turning lights and music off and on, flushing the toilets and breaking glasses. As he was telling me this story mostly in English with a dash of Spanish and the occasional "Spanglish", I wondered if the ghosts were listening in on our conversation. But more importantly I began to ask myself if they could understand us. As a ghost perk do you get unlimited linguistics abilities? :)

Enjoy the SNEAK (sssh) Juliet Sample.... Copyright Juliet Dibenedetto. All rights reserved.

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Chinglish




We have started our around-the-world journey to live in Brazil… first stop: Hong Kong. A melting pot of people with differing languages, cultures, colours and religion - sandwiched into tiny apartments, busy restaurants, glass covered offices - means that effective communication is very important. Cantonese, Mandarin and English are the most abundant of the dozens of languages and dialects spoken here.

English…or Chinglish… is one of my favourite past times here. As you walk around this city you can’t miss advertising hoardings, signs, notices and shop names that can make you laugh outright or are completely inappropriate or just plain wrong! I’ll collect some examples to post here by the end of our stay in Hong Kong. Check out some other examples here.
JAM English Flashcards: Fruit and Vegetables available online at jam.shop now!

Monday, 19 October 2009

Kenya - Mombasa & Swahili














Mombasa is Kenya’s vibrant coastal city on the Indian Ocean. Home to the Swahili tribe in Kenya, one can visually see the influences left behind by more than twelve centuries of contact with Arab traders;  the mosques, the calling sound to player and the parade of Kaftans and Hijabs.

Swahili comes from the plural sawāḥil (سواحل) of the Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل), meaning "boundary" or "coast".  Swahili is a language adapted from Bantu and enriched with vocabulary from the Arabic (35%), Portuguese and Hindi Languages.  Swahili is the national language of both Kenya and Tanzania and is also spoken widely across other Eastern and Central African countries. From the Comoros islands, Zanzibar, Burundi, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and southern coastal Somalia.

The Swahili tribe are coastal people with very rich historical and cultural heritage.  Some of the earliest inhabitants of the East African coast were their ancestors, Cushitic herdsmen. The Cushitic people were joined by Bantu speaking tribes.  Other groups later migrated to this coastline, including Arab, Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian traders. They, too, intermarried with the indigenous people, giving rise to a new culture, people and language.

The Arabic culture though has had the greatest influence in shaping Swahili traditions. One major legacy of the Arab culture is the prevalence of the Islamic religion among the Swahili people. Swahili children, for example, must attend Madrassa - religious classes in which they study the Koran and learn the Arabic language -from an early age.

JAM ...SHARE IT & SPREAD IT!

JAM English Flashcards: Fruit & Vegetables

Friday, 2 October 2009

JAM.HOW FOR EVERYONE


Language Lovers & Survivors


1. Learn: a new word a day on the go 
2. Quiz yourself:  memory recall
3. Take with you while you wait...doctor's office, airport, bank, post office, bus stop, tube stop...
4. Take JAM with you everywhere, even to private places ...we'll leave it to your imagination :)
5. Leave laptop & instead take some JAM on holiday
6. Play with friends (memory and snap with 2 JAM packs)  


The creativity with jam is endless.  Share it & Spread it!
JAM English Flashcards: Fruit & Vegetables