Ukulele & Languages

Different countries,
Different cultures
one common language... the ukulele.

Posts Tagged ‘fun’

10 2010

Language Fun : Phonetic French in Dutch shop names

In the series of Funny Shop Names(funny from a French perspective), a Dutch friend of mine sent me a couple of pictures which are rather amusing and which I’d like to share.

If you are a Dutch shop owner and you wish to use a French name for your shop (to benefit from the classy image French seems to have), you need to  be sure that your fellow countrymen will pronounce your shop name correctly even if they don’t speak French.

Francophile Dutch shop owners have used cunning phonetic spelling of their shop names to ensure that they would be pronounced correctly.

Here is the Dutchified version of Déjà-Vu

Another creative approach is to use

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19 2010

Mind Your Language : Language Fun

In my search for language-related videos, I came across Mind Your Language, a British comedy TV series from 1977 which I had never seen before and which I found rather hilarious.

Mr Brown, played by the late British actor Barry Evans, is a young teacher hired in a school for adults to teach English as a Foreign Language to a crowd of students from various horizons and very diverse levels of English.

The series Mind Your Language focuses on stereotypes from different countries as seen from a British perspective, explores multi-cultural interactions between students, which often are a great source of funny misunderstandings.

Student nationalities represented in the season 1 of the series are :
Italy, Germany, China, Japan, India, Greece, Spain, Pakistan and France.

Here is the very first episode of Mind Your Language

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10 2010

Funny shop names in Norway

One thing I like doing when travelling abroad is looking at signs, shop names, leaflets etc… which usually are a great source of language fun.

When the biting cold wind and the snow blizzard forces you to seek refuge in shopping malls while travelling in Norway, just look around at shop names to seek comfort. Some of them are rather funny. Here are a couple of examples I found in Norway this Christmas.

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17 2009

Ukulele and Machine translation

While searching for ukulele videos in various languages, I stumbled upon this page. As stated at the top of the page, “This page is a simplified edition of an original Japanese page and has been translated by machine”.

As a lover of languages, I have always been wary of machine translation. But I must say, it certainly keeps me entertained.

Here are some quotes taken from the page :

“Rakuten has many shops with many different kinds of products. Usually, the shops will ship your purchases directly to you. “

Does this mean that they sometimes ship your purchases to somebody else instead ?

Ukulele

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30 2009

Funny language videos

English with a German twist can sometimes cause disaster. For once the French accent is not the target of mockery :

And another video showing people pretending not to understand each other

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Language Fun

A place for language lovers where I’m trying to demonstrate how fun it is to learn other languages and how much of a culture you understand through its language.
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