REUNIÓN INFORMATIVA: BECAS DE MOVILIDAD ERASMUS MUNDUS PHOENIX

Mañana jueves 12 de Diciembre a las 12 tendrá lugar una reunión informativa sobre las becas de movilidad del Proyecto Erasmus Mundus Phoenix, coordinado por la Universidad de Almería. La charla tendrá lugar en la Sala de Conferencias del Edificio de Ciencias de la Salud.

El Proyecto Erasmus Mundus PHOENIX, financiado por la Comisión Europea, facilita la movilidad entre universidades europeas y de Oriente Medio. Para ello se ofertan becas para todos los niveles: grado, master, doctorado, post-doctorado y para personal académico y administrativo.

En total se adjudicarán 150 becas en dos convocatorias, de las cuales 20 plazas serán para candidatos europeos. Estas becas incluyen  gastos de viaje, matrícula si procede, seguro y una ayuda mensual para manutención y alojamiento en función del nivel de estudios:

Grado: 1.000 €/mes
Master: 1.000 €/mes
Doctorado: 1.500 €/mes
Post-Doctorado: 1.800 €/mes
Personal Académico y Administrativo: 2.500 €/mes

Por otro lado, la distribución de las movilidades para los candidatos europeos será la siguiente:

El plazo para solicitar estas becas estará abierto hasta el próximo 22 de Enero de 2014. Puedes encontrar toda la información sobre la convocatoria así como la solicitud on-line en la web del proyecto y en la web del Vicerrectorado de Internacionalización.

ABIERTA LA CONVOCATORIA DEL PROYECTO PHOENIX

Desde el lunes 2 de Diciembre y hasta el 15 de enero de 2014 estará abierta la convocatoria de movilidad para estudiantes dentro del proyecto PHOENIX. Este proyecto, coordinado por la Universidad de Almería, facilitará la movilidad de estudiantes, profesores y personal administrativo entre Europa y Oriente Medio con un total de 150 becas, de las cuales 20 corresponderán a participantes europeos.

Los destinos en Oriente Medio son Palestina, Jordania, Siria y Líbano. Estas becas están disponibles para estudiantes de grado, máster, doctorado y también para personal académico o administrativo. Las becas incluyen una ayuda mensual, además de cubrir desplazamientos, seguros y otros costes de participación. Para conocer más sobre el programa, puedes consultar su web y su página de facebook.

 

Expense calculator for the UK and International students Scholarships

If the thought of studying in the UK has crossed your mind at any moment in your life, there is a website which could help you to balance your income and expenses in order to know how much money, approximately, you could spend in the UK.

http://international.studentcalculator.org.uk/

You can find also important information related to International students Scholarships in:

http://www.educationuk.org/Article/scholarships-for-international-postgraduate-students

Good luck!

Languages of the world: 9. Japanese

Languages of the world:

Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language.

Japanese has no genealogical relationship with Chinese, but makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji (漢字), in its writing system and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Japanese was little studied by non-Japanese before the Japanese economic bubble of the 1980s. Since then, along with the spread of Japanese popular culture, the number of students of Japanese has reached the millions.

Japanese has no official status, but is the de facto national language.

Facts:

• Japanese word order is classified as subject–object–verb. Unlike many Indo-European languages, the only strict rule of word order is that the verb must be placed at the end of a sentence, other elements in the sentence may be in various orders for emphasis, or possibly omitted. This is because the Japanese sentence elements are marked with particles that identify their grammatical functions.
• There’s very little evidence of an indigenous writing system until the Chinese characters were brought over to Japan in the 5th century AD. Even after this, it wasn’t until around the 8th century that a truly distinct form of written Japanese was developed.
• In the old days of feudal Japan, a samurai warrior would shout:
  身の程を知れ！[Mi no hodo o shire!], Know your place! at anyone who dared to show insufficient respect.
• Take care not saying “chin chin” when making a toast in Japan, because it is the word children use to name the male organ.
• Even if you don’t have the language skills, a softening of the voice, a discreet awareness of the other person’s personal space and undemonstrative body language go a long way when it comes to courtesy and showing respect.
• The first novel, The Tale of Genji, was written in 1007 by a Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu.
• The term karaoke means “empty orchestra” in Japanese.
• Vocabulary can vary according to gender of the speaking person: women use other vocabulary than men.
• Most Japanese words end in vowels, which determine the structure and rhythm of Japanese language. Usually, all syllables carry equal stress.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Japanese courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

またね(matane) and do not forget to visit us on Facebook !!

Languages of the world: 8. Mandarin Chinese

Languages of the world:

Mandarin is a group of related dialects or varieties spoken the Northern and Southwestern of China. It has more native speakers than any other language in the world (nearly one billion speakers). The term “Mandarin” is borrowed from Portuguese (“mandarim”), this word means counselor or minister.

In the early 20^th century the “Standard Chinese” was adopted as the national language. It was based on the Beijing (phonology) and other Mandarin dialects (vocabulary), thus this “Standard Chinese” is also known as Mandarin (Pǔtōnghuà).It is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore.

The phonology of Mandarin Chinese consists of two dozen consonants and about half a dozen vowels, some of which form diphthongs and four tones.

The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written logograms that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. While it is possible to invent new characters, Chinese usually borrows old ones that have fallen into disuse. Chinese characters were traditionally read from top to bottom, right to left but in modern usage it is more common to read from left to right.

Although Standard Chinese is the lingua franca of China, it differs from dialects, even in the Mandarin group, to the point of being to some extent unintelligible. The linguistic diversity is so large that neighboring city dwellers may have difficulties communicating with each other without a lingua franca.

Chinese facts:

• Chinese grammar is surprisingly straightforward, with none of the tenses, plurals, cases or genders that can make learning European languages difficult.
• The hard part about Chinese is mastering the tones. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation in which a sound is spoken affects the meaning.
• For reading Chinese without using Latin alphabet it is necessary to memorize a large quantity of Chinese characters. If you want to read a newspaper you will have to learn around 2.000 Chinese Characters.
• Intonation is very important in Chinese. For example wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ, means I want to ask you. But if you say it with a different intonation you may end up saying I want to kiss you.
• Chinese people place great emphasis on titles. If the name of your teacher is for example Mrs Wang, you should call her Wang Lǎoshī, meaning Teacher Wang. For doctors it is used Yīshēng. Xiānsheng for Mr. and  Nǚshì for Ms.
• Keep in mind that in China there are different dialects, and they are hardly understood among them, so you could end up listening to two Chinese people talking in English because their dialects are completely different from one to another and they find it easier to talk in English language if they both know it.
• Knowing how to read and write Chinese characters will help you pick up Writtern Japanese quicker, because Japanese langue uses a large amount of characters with exactly the same meaning than in Chinese but pronunciation and grammar is completely different between these two languages.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Chinese courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

 

再见 (Zàijiàn) and visit us on Facebook !!

Ampliación Becas Naura II

Se informa a la comunidad Universitaria que se ha ampliado el plazo de presentación de solicitudes de las Becas NAURA II del ceiA3 hasta el 13 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012 (incluído). Si todavía no la habéis pedido, aún estáis a tiempo! Más info: http://goo.gl/4aiDk

 

Languages of the world: 7. Arabic

Languages of the world:

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD.  It includes the literary language and the spoken Arabic varieties.

The literary language is called Modern Standard Arabic. It is the only official form of Arabic.The spoken Arabic varieties are spoken in a wide territory stretching across the Middle East and North Africa.Arabic languages are Central Semitic languages, most closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic and Phoenician.

It is official in 26 states and it is also the liturgical language of Islam. Despite of its different dialects, the modern standard Arabic is widely taught in schools, universities, and used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media.

This language is the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group. It is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although some spoken varieties use Latin alphabet.

Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, like Persian, Turkish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malay and Hausa. We can appreciate Arabic influence in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Sicilian. Arabic language has also borrowed words from languages, for example Hebrew, Greek, Persian, Syriac, Turkish and English and French in recent times.

The major dialects groups are:

Egyptian (Spoken by 80 million people), Maghrebi (75 million people speak this dialect), Mesopotamian (Spoken by 36 million), Levantine (35 million speakers), Sudanese (30 million people), Yemeni (25 million speakers) and Najdi (10 million people).

The Arabic alphabet can be divided into two groups order.

• The original ’abjadī order (أَبْجَدِي):

غ

ظ

ض

ذ

خ

ث

ت

ش

ر

ق

ص

ف

ع

س

ن

م

ل

ك

ي

ط

ح

ز

و

ه

د

ج

ب

أ

gh

ẓ

ḍ

dh

kh

th

t

sh

r

q

ṣ

f

‘

s

n

m

l

k

y

ṭ

ḥ

z

w

h

d

j

b

’

• the newer hijā’ī order (with letters partially grouped together by similarity of shape, used where lists of names and words are sorted):

ي

و

ه

ن

م

ل

ك

ق

ف

غ

ع

ظ

ط

ض

ص

ش

س

ز

ر

ذ

د

خ

ح

ج

ث

ت

ب

أ

y

w

h

n

m

l

k

q

f

gh

‘

ẓ

ṭ

ḍ

ṣ

sh

s

z

r

dh

d

kh

ḥ

zh

th

t

b

’

Arabic is a language which lies far from English but still you may find some false friends such as:

• If you hear the word “when”(وين) in Arabic they are talking about where something is.
• If your name is Anna, you would be saying in Arabic “I” (أنا).

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Arabic courses in our “Centro de Lenguas”

مع السلامة. (Ma’a salama) and do not forget to like us on Facebook !!!

Languages of the world: 6. Russian

Languages of the world:

Russian is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is not an official language in Moldova, Latvia, Estonia but is widely spoken in these countries.

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian.

The standard well-known form of Russian is generally called the “Modern Russian Literary Language”. It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state by Peter the Great.

In the 20th century, Russian was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. In particular, these countries include Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, former East Germany and Cuba.

The language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds.

Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (кириллица) alphabet. It consists of 33 letters:

А /a/	Б /b/	В /v/	Г /ɡ/	Д /d/	Е /je/	Ё /jo/	Ж /ʐ/	З /z/	И /i/	Й /j/
К /k/	Л /l/	М /m/	Н /n/	О /o/	П /p/	Р /r/	С /s/	Т /t/	У /u/	Ф /f/
Х /x/	Ц /ts/	Ч /tɕ/	Ш /ʂ/	Щ /ɕɕ/	Ъ /-/	Ы /ɨ/	Ь /ʲ/	Э /e/	Ю /ju/	Я /ja/

Russian Facts:

• It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.
• There are around 155 million native speakers in the world, being the 8^th most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers.
• There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral
• There is no article.
• Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without.
• TheNovgorod Codex is considered to be the most ancient Russian book which dates back to the beginning of the 11th century.
• Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.

False Friends:

• In Russian language, the word магазин (magazin) does refer to a shop and not to a magazine, which is said журнал(zhurnal).
• If you overhear the word  kабинет (kabinet) you need to know that they are referring to an office.
• There are more words similar to English like лук(Luk) that sounds similar to the name Luke, but the meaning is actually onion.
• Декорация, sounds like decoration but it is a setting, while to say decoration you need to use the word украшение.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Russian courses in our “Centro de Lenguas”

do vstrechi and visit us on Facebook !!!

Convocatoria del CEIA3 de 30 becas para prácticas en el extranjero

El ceiA3 convoca 30 becas de movilidad para prácticas profesionales del ámbito de la Agroalimentación en empresas de prestigio de la Unión Europea. Plazo de presentación de solicitudes hasta el 30 de noviembre de 2012. Para más información, haga click en el siguiente enlace.

5. Languages of the world: Polish

Languages of the world:

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries.

The Polish alphabet consists of the basic latin scripts and certain letters with diacritics (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż, ą, ę, ł) and the letters q, v and x, which are used only in foreign words, are not considered part of the Polish alphabet.

Apart from Poland, other countries with important Polish communities are The United States, Germany, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Belarus, Canada Lithuania and Russia.

The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country and population transfers that followed World War II.

Polish grammar is similar in most respects to that of Russian, and those who have studied Russian will find its grammar much easier to grasp. Polish is a highly inflected language, with relatively free word order. There are no articles, and subject pronouns are often dropped. Nouns may belong to three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Adjectives agree with nouns in terms of gender, case and number.

It is said that Polish is one of the more difficult languages to learn because of its tongue-bending pronunciation, complex gender system, seven cases, aspect as a grammatical category of the verb and a tendency to avoid internationalism for “real” Polish words. At least consonants sound almost like they do in English and the stress of a word is always in the penultimate syllable.

If you learn Polish, you are half way closer to learn other languages such as Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian. Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Russian, Slovene, Serbianand Ukrainian would be also easier to learn.

Facts:

• There are around 600.000 Native Polish speakers in The USA.
• Polish is made up of a few dialects including Little Polish & Silesian.
• Polish is the 29th most spoken language in the world, and is one of the most widely spoken Slavic languages.
• In 1475, the first Polish language book to be printed in Poland was issued in Wroclaw.

Some false friends in Polish are:

• Komunikacja could sound like Communication, but it means public transport in Polish.
• Aktualny refers to something valid or topical, while actual is said faktyczny.
• A knot in Polish is a kid or wick. If you actually want to say knot you shoud use the word węzeł.
• The English word complement is said uzupełnienie in Polish and komplement means compliment.
• Lot can mean in Polish either dużo (many) or parcela (piece of land). If you actually say lot, then you are referring to a flight.
• Something eventual in Polish is ostateczny and ewentualny is possible or potential.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Polish courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

Do zobaczenia and visit us on Facebook !!