Я не работаю завтра, так я хочу говорить по–русски, по–немецки, по–японски, по–испански...
Не знаю, если это был хорошая идея... т.е. я не понимаю много языки, потему что, я учился их так кратко.
Essentially, this topic is for foreign languages. For practicing foreign languages, discussing them, getting help with them, etc. Foreign language meaning it's not English, since this is an English site. Even if non-English might happen to be your native language.
So how does this work?
Do I say "How to say X in language Y?"
Can I say "I think X means Y. Is that right?"
How about "What is the best way to learn [aspect of language X]?"
ANY DISCUSSION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES IS ALLOWED, EVEN REQUESTS FOR TRANSLATIONS, TUTORING, AND OTHER THINGS THAT YOU WOULD THINK NO ONE WOULD AGREE TO AND RIGHTFULLY SO
BY THE WAY PPA I HAD A QUESTION ABOUT GERMAN I JUST REMEMBERED
I remember asking my German teacher this, but I never pay attention to anything anyone says, so I forgot her explanation:
Ich bin langweilig.
I believe that means "I am boring," but how would one say "I am bored"? I think my German teacher said the sentence used a different case for the personal pronoun "ich" (like "mir" or something), but I can't remember.
I am a Japanese student. What is the best way to learn Japanese Kanji? I was looking at the http://nuthatch.com/java/kanjicards/ website focusing on English meanings. Are you supposed to try and learn all of the stuff (meaning, readings, and common words containing the kanji) all at once?
I was looking for printable flashcards to help with studying kanji. Are there any available for free (or for not too much)?
Any Kanji textbooks you can recommend?
Well, the best way to memorize anything is to associate as much information with it as you can. I know in my Japanese textbooks (I used Genki I for my class this past year, and downloaded Genki II) most of the kanji, well, you're long familiar with the pronunciations of the word, and have seen the book use the kanji (with furigana) before it ever introduces you to the kanji itself.
Then in the workbook you have to write it out two dozen times, do grammatical exercises using the kanji, etc.
Essentially, do these things to remember:
-Write it out a million times, and practice it as well in sentences.
-Associate it with as many things as you can (example, 話 usually written 話す and meaning "to speak", usually pronounced はなす, contains the same radical as 言 "to say" which has the same radical 口 "mouth"; you've got a shitton of information here, relating three kanji to the original one you wanted to memorize, and could add more; as a verb you could practice conjugations with it [something really necessary with irregular verbs in which the pronunciation hidden within the kanji can change with conjugation]).
-Attach it to visual imagery. The human mind is a visual mind, so if you can attach a picture to it, you can remember it much more easily (especially since it ends up stored in two different sections of the mind; this is how the Rosetta Stone software works, it shows you a picture of a cat with the text 猫; unfortunately the Rosetta Stone software really fails when it comes to teaching grammar).
Also, in all these things, how important you make the word changes how easily the word is remembered, because humans only remember things that matter. Hence why it's so easy for us to remember our own phone numbers - both because we repeat it over and over, and because it's something we usually need to remember.
You don't learn Chinese/kanji. You have to be born with it. Like anorexial cables.
Hey, will you guys translate my porn for me?
Hey, will you guys porn up my translating, please?
What does Spielchen mean? I saw it in a german game :o
What should I Do to learn German? I want to learn German and French :'(
I started with French though.
Я учусь испанский язык на работе.
Потому что, я мой работа не люблю.
Никто не понимает русский здесь? :(
ALRIGHT ROLL CALL
What languages do you know, and what languages are you/will you be studying in the upcoming school year?
Know: English, Russian, German, Japanese
Starting in the fall: Spanish, French
And "know" is not the same as "fluent in."
Languages I know: German, English, French (not so well yet)
Studying: French
I've lost almost all my french vocabulary since last year. :|
My mom is trying to teach me Cantonese.
I'm working on pronouncing the five elements (gold, wood, water, fire, earth), sun (day) , moon (month), up, down, and 1-10
one
I know: English, Cantonese (My Canto is quite bad though)
I'm learning: French
Damn I'm pathetic =(
Nope, you are not.
I only know English and Spanish.
I know English and French, and once the school year starts up again I'll be taking my second course of French.
I don't know why, but I enjoy French slightly more than I enjoy English, but I find English much more practical since it's native to me.
Я думаю что я очень люблю русский. Я не знаю почему, а я всегда говорить по–русски, но не по–немецки или по–японски...
でも、僕は日本語で書くのが大好きです。分かりますか。とてもきれいだよ。
I'm planning on writing a book that uses several different languages - not in the same way as House of Leaves, but, well, I don't want to give it away. Needless to say, it will be near unreadable to most.
Wow, everyone knows so many languages...!
I've been thinking about immersion once i'm old enough, but I feel like I won't know enough of the language to go there. I also worry about cost )':. (It's French btw.)
Also, any suggestions for learning French over the summer?
! and.. I know English and I can speak/understand Cantonese. Can't read or write it though. )':
I know English, a bare minimum of Japanese (there was that fluency period back at age three, but then I learned English... :/ ), and some French.
I'm taking another French class when school starts, but I'm really tired of French. I wish I could take Latin instead. Or German. :/
I have decided to vote for Obama largely based on the fact that he wants everyone in America to be bilingual or even trilingual.
And I can't believe anyone has used that against him.
Sturm, you might find this useful,
http://caminobrowser.org/download/releases/1.6.3-MultiLang/
I'll assume that means you can change the text so that it comes out as the language you've selected.
You can also change things like that on OS X/Leopard, but I think you already know how to do that.
I can speak Vietnamese, can't read or write it though >_>
I know English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and the um... that Fujian-Chinese dialect. Ugh I wish my family would stick to ONE dialect of Chinese rather than having some parts of the family speak Mandarin, some Cantonese, and then others Fujian. My ability to read/write Chinese isn't wonderful, though.
My Fujian is really choppy though. My Spanish isn't that great either, but I can carry a conversation.
I can't speak Fuking at all. Apparently my grandmother and I communicated with gestures. I always thought she understood Cantonese.
У русских очень другое мнение о Войне в Южной Осетии. Ну, у новост, но я не знаю, как русские люди думаю. Я должен спрашивать мои русские друзья на vkontakte.
Salut francophones, ça va?
I think (at least so far) I like French more than Spanish, but in Spanish we're moving so much more quickly - we were learning how to conjugate verbs day one, but in French we've only kind of briefly touched on it, saving the full discussion for a later, undisclosed date.
But maybe French and Spanish weren't the best to start at the same time, since they share something like 80% of their vocabulary (with exact spellings), they're just pronounced differently.
Я наверно проваливался на моём французкем тесте. Может не быть. Но я ещё делал же плохо. Я знал мало о материале на контрольной, так я мог бы получать F.
Qui étudies français?
I would like some help reading some kanji.
I am having trouble with:
The first two kanji in the yellow text.
The second, fourth, and fifth kanji from last in the white text.
The problem with video games is that they'll often neglect strokes for clarity, making it hard to read for anyone not fluent.
The yellow, the first kanji is 鎧, I can't make out the second but I'm assuming it more-or-less means "Armor-plated" or "Armor-wearing" or whatever.
And I'm not totally sure what you meant, your last sentence was incredibly unclear, but I think these were the kanji you wanted: (maybe?)
情報を, 場所です
J'étudie le français!!! Il y a trop de verbes que je dois memoriser. C'est très difficile. Les accents sont terribles aussi parce que je les oublie toujours!
Je dois pratiquer plus! ):<
I'm not sure if I should have used trop. D: Halp..
edit: Qui is just like il/elle right? so there wouldn't be a s after étudie? \(o_O)/
Verbes français sont trop pas mal. Mais, j'étudie les langues étrangère...
See, this is the kind of practice I want. Not this stupid workbook that I'm plowing through since I have forty pages due tomorrow and only started on an hour ago. >_>
As for whether you should have used trop, I have no idea. You actually just taught me the word. Do you know if I should have used it where I did (or at all)? <_< Actually I'm unsure about that sentence altogether. I wanted to say "French verbs aren't too bad." Should I have negated the verb? So, like "Verbes français ne sont pas trop mal"? Google Translate comes up with the same translation for both.
Accents are easy to remember if you get your pronunciation down, because they (usually) are pronounced different when they have an accent of some kind...
And yes, qui is singular third, so it should have been "qui étudie..."
I haven't really learned much about shortening negatives and stuff, but I think it should go something like
les verbes français ne sont pas trop mauvais
I think i'll ask my French teacher tomorrow. :/
Sturrrrm, how long have you been learning French? O: And did you finish those fourty pages on time..
There are French exchange students in my school. I want to talk to them, but I'm afraid of insulting them by screwing up when speaking French (or destroying the accent stuff). Speaking at the front of the mouth is hard. )':
Like four weeks. And there are students in our class that are fluent in French, too.
Estoy aprediendo Espanol.
Not fluent, oh no, not too close at all, but I know the language fairly well. Of course I can conjugate (one of the first things you have to learn), and all that good stuff; wish I could learn more language, but unless I hire a tutor I'll have to wait a few years.
You don't like Spanish as much as French, Sturm? What are your criteria?
There is no criteria. It's personal preference. Why do I like Japanese and Russian better than German, despite the fact that my German is far better than either? Just because.
Hm, language judgment. Well, who am I to understand you anyway?
Which language is the best? Hm... I don't know. I know only one language though.
I don't like Japanese because they have too many letters. 46 in the "alphabetic like" part and 2000 extra characters. It makes reading unnecessarily difficult. Thanks to Dr. Sturm for the help earlier with this. An alphabetic language with few letters seems better to me. Then again, I can dictate a passage in Spanish perfectly and still have no idea what I'm saying.
Will there ever be a time when Americans, British, and Australians cannot understand each other because their language is too different?
I think I like syllabic alphabets far more than "phonetic" alphabets. At least in the one I've encountered, there's little exception regarding pronunciation, spelling, etc.
French, English, Russian, Spanish, Irish and German all have letters whose sound is dependent upon its location in a word, or even in a sentence. Hence why the "a" in "cat" is pronounced differently from the "a" in "father", and why the "c" in "cat" is pronounced as a "k" whereas it is pronounced as an "s" in words such as "cease". In Russian, "vodka" (водка) is pronounced "votka" (вотка), simply because of the "d"'s location relative to the "k".
I thought Spanish wasn't so bad in that.
Spanish and German aren't nearly as bad as the others.
Rai is right.
Not in Spanish.
LL, RR, and N-tilde don't count - they're considered different letters than regular R, regular L, and regular N.
I thought about Spanish words I know, and I can't think of a single example of two syllables spelled the same but pronounced differently.
No, in Spanish it certainly does happen. B, V, C and X all have pronunciations that vary (and with X they're historical; no way to know without hearing the word).
Salut!
Je m'appelle Neon the Chao.
Ca va?
(French for:
Hello!
My name is Neon the Chao.
How are you?)
Comme ci comme ça, mais je suis trés fatigué.
Lol, fatigué. I used to make fun of that in grade 7. :/
Isn't Spanish the easiest language to learn because you pronounce every letter?
Je suis malade parce que j'ai un rhume (did I spell that right), mais il y a beaucoup de personnes qui l'ont aussi.
C'est octobre!! Je ne peux pas attentre pour l'hallowe'en! Cette année, je veux être une personnage de "Soul Eater" ou "Phoenix Wright"! Je veux manger des bonbons..
I want to take German, but is it already too late to start?! D: Should have signed up for it this year. ;O;?
It's never too late to start. Unless you mean at your school, in which case, possibly.
Another problem is that i'm not sure if it'll even be useful or not. :/
Who cares if it doesn't turn out to be useful? If you want to do something, do it.
There have been several studies making a link between active multilingualism and a delay of the offset of Alzheimer's.
That's cool, though, Sturm. I didn't know you knew French.
I know English (duh), French, some Italian and Spanish, and miniscule Chinese and Japanese (words only, characters are confusing. @_@)
Oui, je parle français, allemand, le japonais et le russe.
Wow! You do? Sweet! And your French is so good! I'm still learning.
Are you as proficient in the other languages as you are in French?
French is my weakest language. Well. My weakest language that I've actually studied. I've only been working on it for About a month and a half now. Sort of. I skip a lot of my French classes (like today!) because the teacher is terrible.
Я очень хорошо же говорю по–русски. Но... Мой русский профессор ещё сказат, что я глупый. :/ Тот сука.
It's time for swear words.
How many swear words (or words you don't use in polite speech, at least) do you know in other languages? And I know there are books for almost every language dedicated to this kind of thing, but don't use them. Go off of what you actually know.
Russian:
-ебать (YEbat'): to make love (probably more approximately translated as "to fuck like animals")
-хуй (khuy): dick, cock (often used in the phrase иди на хуй, meaning more or less "go to hell" [I have a jacket with this Russian phrase on it!])
-пизда (pizDA): cunt
-французская любовь (frantsusskaya lyubof'): oral sex (noun, literally "French Love" [hence why I remember it; it's so damn funny])
-сиськи (SIS'ki): tits (singular: сиська)
That's all I know. :/
Mein Mitbewohner und ich möchten mit einander Deutsch sprechen.
FIX IT PPA, AND GIVE ME NOTES ON WORD ORDER AND CHOICE
Assuming your room-mate is male, the only error here would be "mit einander", which should be one word, so "miteinander". But that's a rather unimportant flaw.
Would you word it differently? Ordering or otherwise?
Hm, "Ich würde gerne mit meinem Mitbewohner Deutsch sprechen." or "Mein Mitbewohner würde gerne mit mir Deutsch sprechen." would work too. But since it seems the initiative is from both of you, what you said is perfectly fine. It doesn't really sound awkward either.
You could replace "sprechen" mit "reden" but it wouldn't really make that much of a difference.
"Mein Mitbewohner und ich möchten uns in Deutsch unterhalten." would work too, but none of these is really better or worse than the others.
Damn it, I just realized I don't know a single Spanish swear word.
You do now.
*pointing to my reply ^ *
Neteca, an insult and a swear word are not the same thing. Baka isn't a swear.
Last time I checked, "you're an idiot" is an insult. Maybe not one of the worse ones though, I don't know.
I know how to say loco (crazy) but again, saying "you're crazy" is only a light insult.
They won't teach you swear words in school. That's a problem. Because you need to learn all the words, not simply the convenient ones.
On JapanesePod101.com in one lesson they said "We'll teach you how to say 'I'm feeling BAD' a little later" - argh, annoying, why not teach "I'm good" (genki) and "I'm bad" (warui?) at the same time.
In my Japanese class yesterday the teacher ACTUALLY DID tell us the word for "ugly" (opposite of kirei / pretty). Unbelievable. It's not in the textbook vocab list though. Teach did tell us "the word is too strong" though.
Next: Japanese learners can check out http://hiragana.jp/ - will add the furigana to all kanji on the page. Doesn't work with flash sites like the Knights in the Knightmare site but will work with sting.co.jp. There's a firefox extension called http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ that helps with reading Japanese websites.
Okay I have a question:
When I am drilling vocab using flash cards, is it better:
1) Look at the English side of the card, say the Japanese word, then flip to the Japanese side to see if I'm right.
2) Look at the Japanese side of the card, say the English word, then flip to the English side to see if I'm right.
3) Drill both ways.
Both ways, but translating from your native language to the other languages is definitely better for you.
However, the best possible way to do it is to write in your target language everyday, using your vocab over and over in actual sentences.
C'est ne peut pas être mort!
I'm reviving this thread. I've started using word frequency lists to study languages. Eg, studying the most used words in the language to make it easier to understand a large amount of general stuff.
I did something like this for Japanese.
http://thejapanesepage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=13198&start=0 is full of fail (like my work usually is) but maybe you will get something out of it. Long story short: Particles are really common in Japanese. It's the big post about halfway down.
What do you mean "really common"? Particles pretty much define Japanese grammar outside of verbal and adjectival conjugations and declensions. A sentence can be constructed without them, but you can say very little (perhaps nothing useful) without particles.
By that I mean pretty much ALL particles appear in the 100 most common newspaper words. The folks over at TJP.com (the link) said they don't think particles are words though.
You can get a raw word list by frequency over at the WWWJDIC FTP site.
I think I am starting to learn Dutch. I visit the Netherlands every year and it's very easy to learn, so not doing that someday would be sort of a waste.
Swearing in Japanese.
Well THAT didn't take long. Reading Inuyasha (a children's comic book!) will teach you fun words like ちくしょう (dammit) and てめえ (impolite "you"). It would probably be awhile if you tried learning that using a textbook.
Am I wrong? Is ちくしょう not a swear?
Hey, I was wondering if anyone has tried Bing translator. Is it any good?
So next spring I'll be able to take some language classes again. Taking my fourth semester of Russian and second of French. And this December I'm taking the JLPT 4.
Currently reviewing for that.
Je suis trés impatient.
Something I wondered is if learning Tajik—a dialect of Persian—first would make it easier. Tajik is written in Cyrillic, which is certainly easier to read for a Westerner than Iran's variant of the Arabic alphabet. You could thus learn the language without having to struggle with squiggly lines for letters (or save that for when you're already familiar with the grammar and know a good number of words).
Orthography is probably one of the stupidest reasons to rule out a language. Maybe it's some combination of my skills, interests and training, but a new orthography takes me about a few hours to become proficient enough in to recognize all the letters quickly. The biggest impediment to me right now with the orthography is that most sources print the squiggles in what looks like a 5pt font.
As for Tajik, it split off from other Persian dialects a long time ago, and reflects a purer Persian, whereas the Farsi and (though to a lesser degree) Dari dialects' lexicon reflect the influence of Arabic conquerors and Islam. Learning it wouldn't make for a significantly simple transition to those Persians using Arabic alphabets.
Learning Arabic first would probably make Iranian Persian easier than Tajik would. Additionally, though I don't know the status for Tajik, my teacher has made a point of the fact that spoken Farsi and written Farsi are completely different entities, a distinction made without regard to literary Persian and slang, which only add more levels of linguistic variety in terms of grammar, pronunciation and available lexical entities.
Hm, I simply imagine that learning Arabic is much more difficult than learning Cyrillic, which—just like our native Latin script—is based on the Greek alphabet (both of which only took me a few hours to learn). Arabic/Persian on the other hand, with their up to four often radically different looking variants of each character, depending on its position in a word, and the frequent use of cursive script are very intimidating. Though as I have never actually tried to learn these scripts, I don't know how troublesome it is in practise…
I see, though. I did not know the differences between Tajik Persian and Iranian Persian to be this great, though little else is to be expected after two centuries of Arab occupation, the prevalence of Arabic as a literary language, and as of recent an Arabophile Islamist dictatorship…
(All the more reason for me to look at Tajik first, as a Persian free of Semitic taints; but I can see how it would be impractical.)
They're stupidly easy to learn. Most characters belong to a group which dictates their shape in initial, medial, final and stand alone positions. For example, the characters representing the sounds /b/, /p/, /s/ and /t/ all have this bowl shape: ببب ب
(And here you can see the initial, medial, final and stand alone shapes thereof)
But only /b/ has the single dot on bottom. /p/ has three dots below, /s/ three above and /t/ two above (/n/ with one dot above and /y/ with two below have the same bowl shape in initial and medial but different ones in final and stand alone). So you learn one character's four forms and then the meanings of the four dot configurations. In a way it's similar to learning Hiragana/Katakana in that you learn a shape, and then add two small dots or a circle and the sound changes.
In Persian there are fifteen character groups like this comprising 32 letters. Many of the characters are standalone or only connect on a particular side, or have the same shape in some contexts as another group (as with /n/ and /y/ above), so that also cuts down on what you have to learn.
The only real issue with learning the alphabet is that because Persian doesn't have as many distinct sounds as Arabic but borrows words with exact spellings, there are something like four /s/'s, three /h/'s and two /z/'s, and a word can differ on a single shape with the same sound but have entirely different meanings.