Freelang’s blog

I’ve just read an article in the Nation yesterday, which says that Thai people, as an average, only read 2 books a year. As a comparison, they say in Vietnam the average is 60 books a year! I was quite surprised by these figures, as I have never seen Thai people read anything but the occasional newspaper. And 60 in Vietnam, such a high figure! Surely there can’t be such a big difference between the two countries, even if they are, indeed, quite different in many aspects. Unfortunately the Nation only mentioned “survey data”, without any further precision (great journalistic work).

So I browsed the web and tried to find some statistics about France. I found very different estimations, ranking from one book per year, up to 20 books per year. But nothing around 60. So I don’t know how the surveys are conducted, I don’t know what exactly they define as a ‘book’ (does it include magazines? comic books? school books?) but one thing is for sure, the journalists can’t just say “according to survey data”, if they want to make sense they have to explain where, when and how exactly the survey was conducted. Without any reference or methodology, the data are totally unreliable.

However, if you have a better source of information and if you know of a serious survey, with data that can be trusted, whether it is about Thailand or any other country, please share it with us. Or what about a quick survey here and now: how many books do you read per year, as an average?

We received a very nice email today from a user named Manuel S., who said he submitted our Spanish-English dictionary to Softpedia, a website where you can download free software. Our dictionary was reviewed and accepted, and we even got an award! Actually it is more like a certification, which says that they have thorouglly tested the product and that it doesn’t contain any trojan, virus or spyware. It is 100% clean.

This kind of award is very important to us, because our downloadable archives are self-extractible Winzip files, and some stupid anti-virus like Avast sometimes give false alerts when analyzing the files. That get us some nasty emails from angry users, and it’s very hard to convince them that our files are clean and that it is a false alert produced by their paranaoid anti-virus software. Some users even refuse to leave their email address, as they don’t trust us, so it’s even more frustrating because they think there is a trojan in our files, and I can’t even reply to them to tell them it’s not true.

Freelang will always remain spyware-free and virus-free, and to the best of our knowledge all the files you download from our site are 100% clean. If you’re still not sure of a file, please have it analysed by different anti-virus software, as it is possible on virustotal.com, for instance.

We had a bit of a debate yesterday with a Freelang user who played one of our quizzes about English language (on the French website of Freelang). One of the question was about the verb “give in” meaning “hand in”, like hand in a paper after an exam. The person took the quiz and then sent me an email saying that I had made a mistake and that you couldn’t use “give in” as a synonym of “hand in”. English is not my mother tongue, but I had checked in a dictionary before making the quiz, so I just told the person that I had found the verb in a dictionary. I said maybe it was just less used than hand in. She replied and said that “give in” meant surrender, or yield, but that it was not a transitive verb and you couldn’t “give in something”. She also said I should trust her, as she was American and a native speaker of English.

So I checked again in different dictionaries, and I found this:
give in, a. to acknowledge defeat; yield.
b. to hand in; deliver:
Please give in your timecards.

And this:
give in
* vi insep[relent, yield]
to give in to sthg
the country
refused to give in to terrorist threats
* vt sep[hand in - book,
exam paper]
[- found object, parcel]
[- application, name]

Then I used Google to find some examples with a context, and I found this:
I completely lost my concentration with the teachers trying to calm people down, in the end I was the only person left in the hall believe it or not, so I gave in my paper which still had a question unanswered.

And this:
On an entirely unrelated note, I have a paper due tomorrow for my freshman seminar, Family History in the US and Europe. I just took it to the Writing Center and the guy really liked it! The Writing Center is my new fave place. You take them an idea, an outline, a draft, or a whole paper and they will read it and help you out. I gave in my paper (minus a conclusion) and we talked about some stylistic/grammar changes as well as what my conclusion should focus on.

Eventually, the person who had wrote to me admitted that “give in” could mean “hand in”, but she said it was probably British English, as it didn’t make any sense in American English. Which I thought was a bit strange, as the last example was found in the blog of an American student, born in NYC. However I didn’t want to push the contradiction further. My point was not to tell her that I was right and she was wrong. My point was rather to show that it’s not possible to know everything about a language, even if it’s your mother tongue. French is my mother tongue but I’m far from knowing all the words in the dictionary, or the different usages in various French provinces, or in Québec, Belgium or Africa!

Anyway, if English is your mother tongue, whether you’re from England, America or elsewhere, do you have any opinion on the verb give in meaning to hand in? Is it really British English, or is it simply a verb hardly used with this meaning?

Our new blog is up and running! We posted the first two pieces of information yesterday, and there will be more to come when we read some news that are related to languages, or anything we feel like sharing with you.

This blog will also keep you informed about Freelang’s website: what’s new on the site, and what we are up to. The updates and new dictionaries will still appear on the what’s new page of the site though.

Your contributions are most welcomed, please feel free to comment on the articles, or submit new articles (we will open an account for regular posters, along with a free email address @freelang.net or @freelang.com).

More good news for Asia (and others) is the new possibility of creating domain names made up completely of non Latin characters. As mentioned on the ICANN website:
Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

At first, there was only .com, .net, .org and a few others, like .gov or .edu. Each country also had its own TLD (top level domain), .fr for france or .it for Italy. Some small countries like Tonga or Laos even sold their TLD to make smart domain names (come.to/whatever, california.la). Then there were the .biz, .tv, .info extensions, along with a few others. Europe also created the .eu extension, the first regional TLD. Now Asia is catching up, and is proud to announce the creation of .asia, a new TLD which will be run by a non profit-making company based in Hong Kong. It will be set up in three phases, first for government websites, then for registered trademarks, and then for private companies.