쉐도잉 연습: Listening part four (The impact of digital technology on the Icelandic language) - 영상으로 영어 말하기 배우기

Part 4.

You will hear a lecturer on a languages course talking about the impact of digital technology on Icelandic,

the native language of Iceland.

First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

Right, everyone, let's make a start.

Over the past few sessions, we've been considering the reasons why some world languages are in decline,

and today I'm going to introduce another factor that affects languages, and the speakers of those languages,

and that's technology, and in particular, digital technology.

In order to illustrate its effect, I'm going to focus on the Icelandic language, which is spoken by around 321,000 people,

most of whom live in Iceland, an island in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The problem for this language is not the number of speakers, even though this number is small, nor is it about losing words to other languages, such as English.

In fact, the vocabulary of Icelandic is continually increasing, because when speakers need a new word for something,

they tend to create one, rather than borrowing from another language.

All this makes Icelandic quite a special language.

It's changed very little in the past millennium, yet it can handle 21st century concepts related to the use of computers and digital technology.

Take, for example, the word for web browser.

This is Vafri in Icelandic, which comes from the verb to wander.

I can't think of a more appropriate term because that's exactly what you do mentally when you browse the internet.

Then there's an Icelandic word for podcast, which is too hard to pronounce, and so on.

Icelandic, then, is alive and growing, but, and it's a big but, young Icelanders spend a great deal of time in the digital world,

and this world is predominantly English.

Think about smartphones.

They didn't even exist until comparatively recently, but today, young people use them all the time to read books,

watch TV or films, play games, listen to music and so on.

Obviously, this is a good thing in many respects because it promotes their bilingual skills,

but the extent of the influence of English in the virtual world is staggering, and it's all happening really fast.

For their parents and grandparents, the change is less concerning because they already have their native speaker skills in Icelandic, but for young speakers, well,

the outcome is a little troubling.

For example, teachers have found that playground conversations in Icelandic secondary schools can be conducted entirely in English,

while teachers of much younger children have reported situations where their

classes find it easier to say what is in a picture using English rather than Icelandic.

The very real and worrying consequence of all this is

that the young generation in Iceland is at risk of losing its mother tongue.

Of course, this is happening to other European languages too.

But while internet companies might be willing to offer, say, French options in their systems, it's much harder for them to justify the expense of doing the same for a language

that has a population the size of a French town, such as Nice.

The other drawback of Icelandic is the grammar, which is significantly more complex than in most languages.

At the moment, the tech giants are simply not interested in tackling this.

So what is the Icelandic government doing about this?

Well large sums of money are being allocated to a language technology fund

that it is hoped will lead to the development of Icelandic-sourced apps and other social media and digital systems.

But clearly this is going to be an uphill struggle.

On the positive side, they know that Icelandic is still the official language of education and government.

It has survived for well over a thousand years, and the experts predict that its future in this nation-state is sound and will continue to be so.

However, there's no doubt that it's becoming an inevitable second choice in young people's lives.

This raises important questions.

When you consider how much of the past is tied up in a language, will young Icelanders lose their sense of their own identity?

Another issue that concerns the government of Iceland is this.

If children are learning two languages through different routes, neither of which they are fully fluent in.

Will they be able to express themselves properly?

That is the end of part four.

You now have one minute to check your answers to part four.

쉐도잉이란? 영어 실력을 빠르게 키우는 과학적 방법

쉐도잉(Shadowing)은 원래 전문 통역사 훈련을 위해 개발된 언어 학습 기법으로, 다언어 학자인 Dr. Alexander Arguelles에 의해 대중화된 방법입니다. 핵심 원리는 간단하지만 매우 강력합니다: 원어민의 영어를 들으면서 1~2초의 짧은 지연으로 즉시 소리 내어 따라 말하는 것——마치 '그림자(shadow)'처럼 화자를 따라가는 것입니다. 문법 공부나 수동적인 청취와 달리, 쉐도잉은 뇌와 입 근육이 동시에 실시간으로 영어를 처리하고 재현하도록 훈련합니다. 연구에 따르면 이 방법은 발음 정확도, 억양, 리듬, 연음, 청취력, 말하기 유창성을 크게 향상시킵니다. IELTS 스피킹 준비와 자연스러운 영어 소통을 원하는 분들에게 특히 효과적입니다.

쉐도잉 연습: Listening part four (The impact of digital technology on the Icelandic language) - 영상으로 영어 말하기 배우기

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